Books: Victorian Warrior

MONTGOMERY (255 pp.)—Alan Moore-head—Coward-McCann ($4).

On the morning of Aug. 12, 1942, “a general on probation, a thin and unimposing little figure in battledress and a peaked cap ringed with red, a man unknown to the public and the world,” stepped out of a Liberator on the desert outside Cairo. His new command: the demoralized mixture of Britons, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Canadians, Greeks, Czechs, French and Poles who made up Britain’s Eighth Army. His mission: “Go down to the desert and defeat Rommel.” Six months later, General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery had chased Rommel’s Afrika Korps nearly 2,000 miles across the desert.

Australian-born Alan Moorehead, best-known British correspondent in World War II, had a lot to do with spreading the word of Montgomery’s achievements. He reported the desert war and Montgomery’s subsequent campaigns for Lord Beaverbrook’s London Daily Express in a way that was just short of adulation. In Montgomery he has largely succeeded in the tougher job of explaining the cocky, unmanageable little man who rose from obscurity to Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Biographer Moorehead is least persuasive when he gives Montgomery all the best of it in discussing the controversies that accompanied the Normandy landings and the campaigns that followed. Winston Churchill, for one, doesn’t support Moorehead’s claim that the Prime Minister tried to interfere with Monty’s invasion plans. And most U.S. top brass in the European Theater will strongly contest the notion that only Montgomery was consistently right from D-day to V-E day. But most readers will feel that Moorehead has told them pretty accurately what it is that makes Monty tick.

“Bit of a Cad.” It was Montgomery himself who often said: “One has to be a bit of a cad to succeed in the Army. I am a bit of a cad.” Early in his career at Sandhurst (the British West Point) he joined a gang who thought it funny to beat up people they didn’t like. In an army largely officered by the least promising sons of wealthy families, he was a standout taskmaster and a social flop. Things had to be done his way or he’d sulk. From the first, he was convinced that he always had the right answers, tried to run the private lives of his men, did not hesitate to disobey orders when he disagreed with them.

Says Moorehead: “He attracted trouble as other men attracted indifference.” His intellectual range was early set at zero and remained there. Soldiering he knew as his Anglican Bishop father knew his Bible, but he never cared to learn anything else. Said a Sandhurst contemporary: “Imagine a horse with blinkers staring straight ahead with searchlights instead of eyes. There you have Montgomery.”

All through his young manhood, Montgomery lived a Spartan life from which women, whiskey and tobacco were excluded. Then, at 40, he married a widow with two small sons. The next ten years were the happiest of his life; he even accepted his wife’s artist and writer friends. But after she died, no woman was ever permitted to enter the house. Meanwhile he had been going ahead in the Army, steadily but not spectacularly. In World War I he had been seriously wounded in action, went from lieutenant to lieutenant-colonel. He was 53 and a general in 1940 when he led his retreating 3rd Division to the beach at Dunkirk.

“Unromantic Logic.” His victory in the desert made Montgomery a hero in the ranks and in the streets. Sicily and Italy confirmed both his reputation for success and for eccentricity. In England, his popularity frightened the politicians, who thought they saw a postwar political rival. Public reports of his speeches were censored, says Moorehead, and newspapers were encouraged to “go slow” on him. (Moorehead never did.) But Moorehead is convinced that it never crossed Montgomery’s mind to use his field successes politically. He was “married” to the Army. Biographer Moorehead’s summation of Montgomery: “The outward appearance was showy and dramatic; the core was unromantic logic . . . a simple philosophy of life, a thesis that was a compound of boy scoutery, of Victorian discipline and Bishop Montgomery’s absolute faith.”