Books: Monty Remembers

THE MEMOIRS OF FIELD-MARSHAL MONTGOMERY (508 pp.)—Bernard Law Montgomery—World ($6).

“Monkey” (his schoolboy name) Montgomery, who understandably likes to sign himself Montgomery of Alamein, has the same virtues as a writer that he had as a soldier: he says what he means and he means what he says. He could not have been any different if he had tried. Like many a famous soldier, he lost his early engagements: “My early life was a series of fierce battles, from which my mother invariably emerged the victor.” Her approach to the problem posed by Bernard Law Montgomery was simple: “Go and find out what Bernard is doing and tell him to stop it.” Field-Marshal Rommel did not find matters so easy.

Monty was one of nine children of an Anglican bishop, and he learned early that mamma gave daddy 10s. a week with which to maintain his prestige. On the evidence of his Memoirs, it would seem that Montgomery never allowed himself much more. Having received the surrender of German forces at the end of World War II, he received the envoy of Marshal Rokossovsky, who wished to know his tastes before giving him a post-victory lunch? Which wines did he prefer? Montgomery was addicted to water. Cigars? He did not smoke. The Russian murmured that they had some women at headquarters available for VIPs. Monty was not interested: women were not his line.

Viscount Montgomery’s line was war. Sandhurst. 3½ years with the regular Army, and active service in France in World War I were more than prep schools on the way to promotion. In marching infantry prose, his book makes it plain that when he took command of the British Eighth Army in Africa in World War II, he was ready. According to him, and to history, he made Desert Fox Rommel fight Montgomery’s kind of fight, and Monty won. Was he too tidy? Did all the pieces on his chess board have to be perfectly placed before he made his move? Perhaps. But no one reading his book against the background of the battle can find much to quarrel with. All generals rationalize, and so does Monty, but he has one massive fact in his favor: he won.

Much of what Montgomery tells has been told before. But he writes with the authority, the dignity and the candor of the man for whom no one else can possibly speak. His big difference is with one of his warmest friends: Eisenhower—”a very great human being.” Monty insists that after the breakthrough in Normandy he could have won the war with a smashing left hook to the Ruhr. Ike preferred a long front along which the enemy would be smashed at all points. It is this difference and Monty’s argument for his point of view that make his Memoirs historically important. Certainly no one can now quarrel with his insistence that the British and U.S. armies could have, and should have taken Berlin, Vienna and Prague. For Monty and for the West, matters would now seem much tidier.

Monty is short with politicians, blunt with those who differed with him. But he shows a sense of humor even about war’s more annoying cufuffles, i.e., flaps. And his reflections are diverting, whether he praises female nurses over male, defines the qualities of a good commander (including “an inner conviction which at times will transcend reason”), or sets down what a nation needs to survive the cufuffles of history (“a religion and an educated elite”).