Montgomery and the Eighth Army

"He certainly didn’t have a good PR man. Montgomery of Alamein is a good general, he wins whilst keeping casualties relatively low in his battles. He’s a good, careful, interesting, winning general. His problem is that he’s an appalling human being. He’s an egotist. All generals are egotists but he doesn’t have the charm to disguise that egotism. It’s all about him. Most people who meet Montgomery and spend any time with him, loathe him. “You can’t beat Montgomery in his own words. Nobody can love Montgomery as much as Montgomery can.” As a historian, if you start reading Montgomery’s papers, it’s very hard not to loathe him as well. He writes almost wholly about himself, and he does so in unsophisticated self-aggrandising terms. He is never generous to anybody else and he writes like a seven-year old child. It’s awful but actually quite legible. The trouble is that people have elided Montgomery’s lack of charm with their understanding of the battles he fought. People will do anything they can to admire the other people because they seem–‘nicer’ is the wrong word for war–but more interesting, more charming, more rounded, more sophisticated than Montgomery. But Montgomery is good at one thing. He’s a specialist at being a general and fighting battles and he does that very well. And, by and large, that’s what you want. It’s easy to write a biography knocking Montgomery, and many people have done it—but to write an uplifting biography of Montgomery is very hard and hasn’t been done. Yes. Montgomery kept voluminous papers—he kept a diary and he wrote letters and people wrote to him. There is a huge collection of his papers in the Imperial War Museum and the Army Records Society published a fantastic collection of the key documents in edited form. “You see the words, ‘He’s no good,’ peppered through his papers.” You can’t beat Montgomery in his own words. Nobody can love Montgomery as much as Montgomery can. But you can also see his genius. There’s a clarity of thought that you find in very few other military figures. When you just read what he wrote about himself, you see him in the round. The trouble with the biographies about him is that they’re either too hostile or too eager to defend him. You never really get the complexity of the man. And he’s not actually complex—unless he’s fighting wars. He’s a complex and interesting general and a really tedious human being. So you don’t want to read all the run up and the afterwards, you just want to read about 1942-3 when he is a world historical figure. My favourites are his views of other generals. Not long after taking command of the Eighth Army, he writes about his predecessor—a man called Auchinleck—and he writes, ‘Auchinleck is incompetent, he should never be employed in the army again.’ He doesn’t say, ‘Well—things didn’t go too well for the old Auk, but he’s left me with a fantastic position and I hope to make the best of it and he’s always been a great bloke.’ Instead, he says he’s an idiot, sack him and never employ him again. (I should say he is employed again). Montgomery is utterly unforgiving. You see the words ‘He’s no good’ peppered through his papers. He’ll take a view on someone and then they’re dead to him. He’ll sack them and try and wreck their careers. At the same time, you see this beautiful clarity of how to fight a war. In his reflective moments, he really lays it out. My favourite bit is where they’re in Tripoli and they have a post-mortem of the campaign. Lots of people come and Montgomery explains exactly what happened, what went well and what went wrong. He boils it down for other people so they can understand it. This is how you fight, this is how you’re going to beat the Germans. That’s why I admire it, as much as I sometimes wince from the lack of generosity."