Flair and insight
MONTGOMERY:
D-Day Commander
By Nigel Hamilton
142 pp. Potomac Books $13.95
Reviewed by William A. Percy and Aidan Flax-Clark
“A big book is a bad book!” Taking to heart the quip of the Alexandrian librarian Callimachus, Nigel Hamilton summarizes in this small volume Field-Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery’s role in some of World War II’s greatest events. Focusing on Monty’s victories at El Alamein, the D-Day invasion, and the Battle of the Bulge, he distills the most exhilarating moments of the Viscount’s career, which he covered in its entirety in a mammoth three-volume biography published in the 1980s and another book in 2001. Hamilton is a masterful biographer.
More like Patton, his sometimes ally and more often bitter rival, than any other World War II general, Monty dared to face down even Churchill, when that old aristocrat tried to interfere with his carefully laid plans to invade Normandy. Monty even forbade the Prime Minister straight out during D-Day planning stages to address his staff, and threatened to resign if he did. Under Eisenhower, the supreme commander, Monty had total control of ground operations in what would be the greatest amphibious invasion in history. Eisenhower and Churchill, who preferred aristocratic field-marshals, realized that Monty, son of an Anglican bishop from Ireland, was the man for the job because he had proved himself when he had turned the tide against Rommel at el Alamein. In his deliberate, meticulously planned and rehearsed way he had driven Rommel from Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia and then distinguished himself again in the campaigns in Sicily and Italy.
Monty surrounded himself with young, handsome staff officers and created a system of rapid, continuous, and accurate communication from all areas of battle and command. He used them to micromanage every detail of his operations and became so close to all under him that he could personally address each one, inspiring them all. Obsessed with logical, strategic successes and avoiding the unnecessary sacrifice of soldiers’ lives, he was brash, difficult, insubordinate, and downright rude to his superiors when he had to be. Churchill, the unhappy recipient of such rudeness, maintained a cautious friendship with Monty after the war, but he lamented once the fate of a captured German general at El Alamein, moaning, “Poor von Thoma, I too, have dined with Montgomery.”
In what could have been a dry military profile simply of battle lines, maps, flank positions, reserve supplies, and tank formations, Hamilton also focuses on Monty’s character and on the struggles and machinations for and against him within Allied command circles. D-Day Commander delves deeply yet concisely into the process of D-Day, stressing Monty’s unparalleled, almost religious, fervor for planning, preparation and rehearsal, claiming that “no other battle of such a scale in human history was planned and rehearsed with such precision.” Hamilton depicts the apprehension and consternation that Eisenhower and Churchill felt after the landings failed to bring immediate success, despite the fact that Montgomery had predicted 90 days for the entire operation. He analyzes Monty’s strange relationship with Patton, fraught with difficulty and interference from the American and British higher-ups. They “could have formed a perfect duo,” he says, “but harnessing two such thoroughbreds would have required the presence in the field of a kind of commander-in-chief the allies did not have.”
Unlike many commanders of that day, Monty mastered the need for simplicity in the face of massively powerful machinery and artillery. And just as important, he was able to penetrate his soldiers’ psychology, not only mastering the art of inspiring all under his command, but divining what it was that made them fight and win. “Montgomery’s genius was to recognize that, in a modern democracy, the largely civilian soldiery—whether volunteer or conscripted—made poor killers unless their backs were to the wall.”
In contrast to the usual tedious biography written by academics, Hamilton never bores, never equivocates, never obscures. Like Stephen Ambrose, a strong supporter of Ike rather than Monty, he writes with flair and insight, never hesitating to criticize—when he should—even Churchill or Eisenhower, while appreciating their magnanimous and dignified personalities, as well as the distinctly political problems they were forced to contend with, something Monty was never forced to give a thought to. And though he is wont to give the Field-Marshal the benefit of the doubt in most situations, Hamilton is not above criticizing him, particularly for some of the childish and selfish behavior he engaged in after ground command was stripped from him following his D-Day successes.
The strong-willed soldier finally married at 40, but was left a widower with two sons when his wife died ten years later. The only other “union” in his life was to a 12-year-old Swiss boy named Lucian Trueb, whom he met in 1946 when he was 59 years old, though Hamilton claims Monty only washed and toweled off with the boy. He was thus, as they say in the trade, virtually a non-contact pedophile. Hamilton fails to mention the Swiss boy in his little book, or that Monty so loved his troops that he would personally wash their feet—facts that he did mention in the three-volume biography.
Hamilton’s father, Monty’s favorite officer, introduced him to the general when he was twelve years old. He perhaps goes rather far in idealizing Monty, who presented him to Churchill. But Hamilton has given the reader a unique peek into well known events, providing us with a perspective and giving us the benefit of research that many historians of the period seem to have neglected. As his excellent bibliographic note section at the end makes clear, Monty has been a divisive figure among historiographers, and the implication of this book is that because of these arguments his role in World War II has never been clearly portrayed. Hamilton, while avoiding the tendentiousness of revisionist history, manages to give Monty a fair shake and special credit heretofore lacking.
Hamilton also has written Biography: A Brief History, and his theoretical How to do Biography: A Primer, will appear in April 2008. He is currently under contract to depict the last twelve American presidents, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt. Such a series brings to mind the Lives of the Caesars, and completing it will make him something of an American Suetonius—he has already done books on two American presidents, JFK and Clinton, and a volume on Thomas and Heinrich Mann. Having met every British prrime minister from Churchill to the present, Hamilton may eventually be in a position to rival Plutarch. Like Suetonius, Hamilton is not limited to the worlds of soldiers and statesmen; he has the versatility to treat intellectual and literary history as well as political and military.
William Armstrong Percy, III is a senior history professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where he has taught Medieval and European History for over forty years. He has written on a variety of subjects from ancient Greece and Rome to gay studies, and co-edited the "Encyclopedia of Homosexuality."
Aidan Flax-Clark graduated summa cum laude from the University of Massachusetts, Boston, in August 2007 with a degree in Russian and Classical Languages. He currently lives in Los Angeles.
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