Unlike Eisenhower, who had contemplated other possibilities when he graduated from West Point, Second Lieutenant Bernard Montgomery, fresh out of Sandhurst Royal Military College, could imagine only a military career. The British Army offered greater opportunities than did its American equivalent to an ambitious young man. Rivalries among the European powers were considered to require the maintenance of permanently combat-ready armed forces. In addition, the far-flung British Empire had to be patrolled and policed. There would still not have been room for impecunious farmboys in the country's intensely class-conscious officer corps, but the offspring of a bishop had sufficient status to be eligible for a place in its ranks.
However, Montgomery was the proverbial square peg in a round hole. Most officers had substantial private incomes to supplement their meager pay. Montgomery had none and received no further allowance from his family once he was commissioned. It didn't matter as much as it would have for a different sort of young man. Montgomery had no interest in the social obligations, the gambling and boozing, that were a
Customary part of an officer's life in peacetime. He was in the army because he was interested in war as a profession. He regularly irritated or bored his fellow officers by talking shop in the officers' mess, a practice still frowned upon in the British Army. He in turn had low regard for many of the men with whom he served. To him, "A great number of these officers— and the older officers at the top—were useless, quite useless."
When Montgomery left Sandhurst in 1908, his first posting had been to a battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Almost immediately, the battalion was, as he had hoped, dispatched to British-ruled India, to Peshawar, on the Northwest Frontier. Aside from dealing with occasional unrest among the local population, there was little real soldiering to be done there. Life for an officer on the Northwest Frontier could be profoundly tedious, especially for someone who, like Montgomery, had no fondness for alcoholic beverages or the usual officers'-mess fun and games. But it wasn't tedious for him. He was incapable of engaging in anything with less than zeal and determination to have things done in ways he considered proper.
He spent far more time than was usual for a British officer with the platoon of Indian soldiers under his command. He quickly mastered their Hindustani language enough to be able to issue commands they would immediately understand and respond to. He drilled them rigorously, but they came to esteem the officer who treated them as professional soldiers, "as good material as anyone could want," rather than as just another assortment of wogs, the way most other officers appeared to do.
Many of the officers frowned upon the unconventional behavior and persistent fractiousness of this undersized subaltern. But some admired or at least were impressed by his enthusiasms and dedication. That he excelled at sports, notably cricket and field hockey, in a place where sports were a prime distraction, enhanced the image of eagerness he projected. In sports as in everything else, he was determined to come out on top.
Though he was not an accomplished horseman and not solvent enough to afford a decent mount, the first point-to-point
Race he entered not long after his arrival in Peshawar was a triumph for him. He fell off at the start, a humiliation that would have driven most other men out of the race and possibly into hiding. But Montgomery hastily remounted and drove the swaybacked creature he had acquired so hard that it carried him first over the finish line, whereupon he tumbled from the saddle again. It was hardly the most graceful of performances, but his spunk drew cheers from the onlookers. It is myth that Britons believe that how you play the game is more important than winning.
After two years on the Northwest Frontier, Montgomery, now a first lieutenant, was transferred southward with his battalion to the steamy environs of Bombay. There he was soon again demonstrating a readiness to act far more zealously than others in pursuit of his objectives. When the regimental quartermaster went home to Britain on extended leave, Montgomery applied to take on the man's job although, by prevailing standards, he was too junior and too young for it. He might have done his image serious damage by being more pushy than was deemed proper for a young officer. But his reputation for hard work already having been established, he received the appointment and brought to it the drive that was ingrained in his character.
Though some officers were content to have this energetic workhorse relieve them of tedious chores, others considered Montgomery boorishly over-assertive and thought he was conducting himself not quite the way a British officer should. But criticism didn't bother Montgomery or influence how he went about things. If some locally based British military and civilian mandarins looked askance and muttered disapprovingly when he chugged his way through the crowded streets of Bombay on the secondhand motorcycle he had acquired, he considered it (if their disapprobation registered on him at all) their problem, not his. He found concern for what he considered useless proprieties absurd, as was demonstrated in an incident involving the crew of the German battleship Gneisenau which visited Bombay during his service there.
As was often done in such circumstances, the British chal-
Lenged the visitors to a friendly soccer game. The British Army team was highly skilled and Montgomery, who was officer in charge of sports, was advised by his commander to field only his second-string squad against the German sailors who, spending most of their time at sea, were unlikely to be very good at the game. To take advantage of the Germans' inferior skill on the soccer field would be embarrassing to both British and German officers and to other dignitaries who would be watching the match. But Montgomery chose to ignore the advice and fielded his best players. In a game where final scores rarely rise above single digits, the result was a 40-0 victory for the British. Asked to explain his perverse behavior, Montgomery explained, "1 was not taking any risks with Germans." It was an attitude for which he would be reproached for other reasons during the Second World War when he was fighting them.
Montgomery's four years in India were greatly instructive. In the rarefied air of the Raj, he mastered the patterns and routines of active army service. But not until his battalion was rotated back to England in 1912, shortly before the eruption of World War I, did Montgomery, by then twenty-five years old, begin to go about grasping the finer points of the martial profession he had chosen.
Captain B. P. Lefroy, an officer who had been seconded to the British Army's Staff College for two years, returned to the Royal Warwickshire Regiment at that time. He and Montgomery had long talks "about the Army and what was wrong with it, and especially how one could get to real grips with the military art." They discussed strategic and tactical concepts, past battles, and future military prospects. For the first time, Montgomery's smoldering energy, assertiveness, and blossoming ambition were given a rational underpinning and direction. He concluded that something was fundamentally out of kilter in the British Army and decided that he would try to do what he could to put it right.
On June 28, 1914, when the fatal bullet fired at Austrian Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo proved to be the opening shot of the First World War, Montgomery's battalion was based at Shorncliffe in Kent. Within weeks it was shipped to France
And was quickly thrown into combat against German troops. Montgomery was appalled that the battle was being fought by the British without prior reconnaissance, plan of attack, or covering fire. Dealing with the enemy that way made no sense.
The British Expeditionary Force was outnumbered by the German forces it faced. Its experience during the following months was largely of retreat and desperate, ultimately successful efforts to stabilize a defensive line. But the conflict amounted to slaughter on both sides. Men were cut down in horrific numbers contending for a few yards of barren ground between muddy trenches. The ''ghosts of the Somme," as one English general later called them, would haunt British perceptions for a long time afterward and would strongly influence Montgomery's thinking when he became a senior commander in France in World War II.
He himself emerged a decorated hero from his early participation in battle. Armed only with his officer's sword during an attack, he spotted an enemy soldier aiming his rifle at him. Montgomery dropped the sword, leaped at the German, and kicked "as hard as I could in the lower part of the stomach." But he was soon one of the casualties of the Battle of the Somme. While bracing his troops for an attack, he was shot by a German sniper, the bullet lodging in his lung. A soldier who rushed to help him was shot also and fell dead on top of him. The soldier's body shielded him from several other enemy bullets, but one did hit him in the knee. He lay there slowly dying, unattended for three hours until nightfall, when troops could venture out and carry him back to have his wounds treated. By then he was considered so close to death that a grave was dug for him outside the makeshift casualty station to which he had been taken. However, the medics managed to save his life and he was sent back to England to recover—and learn that he had been promoted to the rank of captain and awarded the Distinguished Service Order for conspicuous gallantry.
It is tempting to suggest that this personal brush with death had a pronounced influence on Montgomery's personality and way of thinking. He was of course physically affected. The wounded lung would always trouble him. Yet he seemed to
48 have grown harder. There was an added sharpness to his attitude, voice, and gaze. His character appeared to have taken on a severe, no-nonsense edge.
But he had long been developing along those lines. As a boy, a youth, and a young man, Montgomery had rarely doubted that he was right about the things that mattered to him. Now, instead of mellowing under the impact of his near-death experience, he grew even more certain of himself, even more intolerant of ideas and judgments he did not share. At twenty-eight. Captain Montgomery was older than his age.
By 1916, Montgomery, his wounds healed, was back in France, promoted to major with a temporary rank of lieutenant colonel, serving as a senior brigade staff officer. This was a different kind of soldiering from what he had experienced before. This was plotting and planning and passing word along to others remote from him to act upon. There was now little opportunity for him to satisfy his undiminished craving for direct leadership. But he was able to fill an important gap in his military training and understanding. Like everything connected with war, it was all absorbed greedily by him, analyzed, and judged.
It struck him as idiotic that so much staff planning was left to chance. He was dismayed by procedures that denied rear headquarters word of what was transpiring at the battlefront quickly enough for effective use to be made of such intelligence. He knew something was distinctly unsound with an army in which the men doing the fighting never saw or directly heard from their senior commanders. He was left with the impression that, according to prevailing rear-area doctrine, the troops existed for the benefit of the higher staff when it should have been the other way around.
He found it intolerable that senior officers had no idea of the conditions under which their troops lived, fought, and died. He was sharply critical of tactics responsible for the horrendous level of casualties and contemptuous of officers who could have done something about it. But he was neither a pacifist nor greatly sensitive to human agony. Unlike many British officers.
His experiences in France did not make him recoil in horror from the thought of war. Combat was his element. His objections were directed instead at how battlefield objectives could be more efficiently achieved.
To his superiors, Montgomery's intelligence, efficiency, and resourcefulness compensated for his increasing abrasiveness. He was put in ever more responsible positions. When the war ended, Montgomery, though only thirty-one years old, was chief of staff to the 47th (London) Division. The next step in his career should have been attendance at the army's Staff College, through which young officers destined for high command were expected to pass. He found, however, that he was not among those selected for a place there.
Though disappointed, he did not react as officers so spurned normally did. He refused to accept his rejection as the workings of fate. He presumed to take the matter up with General Sir William Robertson, commander-in-chief of the British Army of Occupation in Germany, with which Montgomery was then serving. The general, with whom Montgomery also took the opportunity to discuss some of the opinions he had form. ed during the war, was one of the few officers in the British Army ever to have advanced through the ranks to so senior a position exclusively on the basis of merit and without the benefit of high social standing or wealth. Robertson was impressed with the plucky young officer, and Montgomery's name was soon added to the list that had already been issued of students accepted for the next Staff College intake.
Montgomery's gratitude for such a dispensation did not curb his assertiveness. Having seen the face of war, he scorned the "nonsense" that, he maintained, made up the curriculum at the college. He aroused much displeasure with his criticism of much of what was being taught. He was not alone in his judgments. Other students at the Staff College, like Montgomery veterans of the recent First World War slaughter, also were dismayed that many of their instructors had not absorbed the lessons that had been painfully taught on the battlefields of France and Belgium. But none of the others was as openly
Critical and relentlessly argumentative. He was thought of as "a bit of a bolshevik," not so much an ideologue as a nuisance and a troublemaker.
He did not do badly in his studies, and upon his graduation from Staff College in 1920 he was posted to the 17th Infantry Brigade, garrisoned in Cork, Ireland, as brigade major. Ireland was then still part of the United Kingdom, but would not be much longer if the Irish Republican Army had its way. Though the Easter uprising of the Irish in 1916 had been crushed, the revolutionaries had been led to believe their country would be awarded Home Rule by the British government as soon as the details could be worked out. But as the years passed with Home Rule still being debated in Parliament, frustration produced an explosion of IRA violence. Bombs were exploded, people were shot, policemen were kidnapped, property was destroyed, and large parts of Ireland were racked by mayhem and insecurity.
Though urban terrorism was not nearly as common then as it was later to become, it was anathema to any military officer assigned to deal with it. It meant coping with an enemy who did not stand up and fight, wore no uniform, might appear anywhere at any time and blend back into the surrounding environment just as quickly, and did not confine his attacks to military targets. Montgomery had to put aside his ideas about how battles should be fought. He turned his attention to a different dimension of combat, involving roadblocks against civilians, house-to-house searches, and swoops in the night on suspected IRA arms and explosives caches. He found such a war "thoroughly bad for officers and men." It was "degrading for us soldiers." He was relieved when Eire received its independence in 1922, the uprising came to an end (to be followed by the Irish Civil War), and his tour of duty in Ireland was completed.
During the next four years, Montgomery had various staff postings in England, with the 3rd Division in Plymouth, the 49th Division in Yorkshire, and then back to the Royal Warwicks. As in the United States, these were not the best of times for professional soldiers. After the slaughter of the previous war, their role aroused much general cynicism. Pacifism was
Popular. A Peace Pledge Union drew the support of countless Britons. Military budgets were cut. Units were retrenched. Many officers found themselves facing the unfamiliar, harsh realities of civilian life. For those remaining in uniform and not posted to restive imperial outposts around the world, army life could seem to be no more than time-serving. There was nothing but drilling and parading and the persistent worry about being next for the chop, with no guarantee of an adequate pension.
Constitutionally incapable of stumbling into that sort of demoralizing rut, the hyperactive Montgomery personally took to organizing and holding classes in tactics for junior officers. Though officers often informally established teacher-student relationships with subordinate officers, as was the case between Fox Connor and Eisenhower, doing such a thing in such a methodical way was unprecedented in the British Army. Montgomery, who didn't drink, wasn't married, and did not much socialize with officers who were his equal in rank, was already considered odd. Summoning junior officers to his lectures was deemed another of his eccentricities.
But those attending them were exhilarated by his zeal and by what he taught them. General Sir Frederick Morgan, who was exposed to Montgomery's special instructions when he was a young officer and who would later encounter him under different circumstances, recalled that he and others privileged to receive such attention were held "entranced. . . .Every minute of it was of the utmost value as we were instructed in every conceivable aspect of the whole art of war. It was inspiring beyond words to meet this single-minded zealot."
Like radical military thinkers in other countries, Montgomery was trying to get his country's army to break free of the dead hand of outdated battlefield tactics. During World War I set-piece battles were all of a kind. Heavy artillery barrages would be followed by frontal-assault surges of great numbers of men to seize defended, usually entrenched fixed positions. If an assault was repelled it would be repeated until it was successful or the level of casualties ruled out further attack.
World History
