Vast crowds lined the streets of the City of London on June 12, 1945, to give Eisenhower the warmest reception any American had ever received in the British capital. He had gone there en route home to be granted the Freedom of London, only the fifth American ever to receive such an honor. He was received in private audience by the king and queen, another special honor, and was decorated by the king with the Order of Merit, an award restricted by tradition to a mere dozen living individuals.
No American had ever received as triumphant a welcome home as Eisenhower did a few days later. The transport plane that carried him across the Atlantic from Britain was met and escorted to National Airport in Washington by formations of fighter and bomber aircraft. Thousands of people had jammed the airport grounds to cheer as he came down the steps from the plane, and tens of thousands more lined the streets as he rode in procession to the Capitol building to address a joint session of Congress, the first general ever to do so. He told the assembled legislators of his pride in the role he had been
Permitted to play and paid tribute to the men and women who had served under him in the war.
The following morning, he flew to New York for the city's traditional ticker-tape parade. Three days later, it was the turn of Abilene to pay its respects with the greatest parade in its history; Eisenhower's mother and brothers in attendance. In July he was back in Germany to continue as military governor of the American Zone of the conquered country, the role he had assumed after the surrender.
Like Eisenhower, Montgomery was awarded countless honors in the euphoric postwar days. He was elevated to the peerage, taking the title Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, and was made a Knight of the Garter. In addition to also being made a Freeman of the City of London, he received a similar honor from Edinburgh and almost a score of other British cities. Eisenhower personally presented him with the American Distinguished Service Medal and he was made a Chief Commander of the U. S. Legion of Merit. The French made him a member of their Legion of Honor, as they had Eisenhower. There were awards and honors for him as well from Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, and other countries that had been liberated from the Germans in the war. He was awarded doctorates of law at Oxford and .. There were speeches galore and countless visits to be made, both at home and abroad.
In the immediate postwar period, Montgomery served as governor of the British Occupation Zone of Germany. At the time, both he and Eisenhower were members of the Allied Control Commission for Germany. They met from time to time, amicably and at ease, mutually respectful, no longer feeling at odds, though the views of their governments on occupation policy differed in some important respects. Indeed, Montgomery generously wrote to Eisenhower, "what a privilege and an honor it has been to serve under you. I owe much to your wise guidance and kindly forebearance. I know my own faults very well and I do not suppose I am an easy subordinate; I like to go my own way. But you have kept me on the rails in difficult and stormy times, and have taught me much. ... I thank you for all you have done for me."
There can be no doubt that Montgomery was an extraordinary military leader. But to what effect? In Britain he is still popularly believed to have been one of the great soldiers of modem times. Flashback television documentaries on the war continue to portray him in heroic terms. When the British 7th Armoured Division was sent off on a United Nations peacekeeping mission not long ago, news reports pointed out that the division had been the Desert Rats who had gloriously thrashed Rommel under Montgomery's command in the deserts of North Africa.
He was unquestionably an extraordinary leader of men, especially during his Eighth Army desert days when he led a "broth-erhoood in arms." One American general recalled, "Anybody in the British 8th Army, officer or enlisted man... if they heard any slur about 'Monty' in a bar or wherever it might be, there was a fist fight right there and then. His troops supported him a thousand percent."
His men had faith in him personally in a way that soldiers rarely trusted their generals. One, who had been a junior officer under his command during the war, recalled him on a dusty road "leaping from his staff car... to greet a group of officers or a platoon of soldiers with disarming informality, to tell us his intentions in clear and simple language, make us laugh with some absurd turn of speech, and speed us on our way with fresh hope and assurance of victory."
Montgomery was also unquestionably a supremely well-versed student of logistics and tactics. Not many generals in the war—perhaps none—were more learned than he in the procedures and mechanics of combat. He often demonstrated as much on the field of battle. When things went wrong (or right), he knew almost instinctively how and why. Eisenhower said, "In the study of enemy positions and situations and in the combining of his own armor, artillery, air, and infantry to secure tactical success against the enemy, he is careful, meticulous and certain."
Ironically, that was a big part of his problem as a commander. On the defensive, he was masterful. The enemy had the initia-
Tive but was impeccably met with whatever resources Montgomery had at his disposal. However, when he had the initiative and was planning an offensive, he was unable to appreciate how his comprehensive grasp of tactics imposed stifling constraints upon his imagination. Knowing how many troops, guns, and tanks were theoretically required to win a battle and how they should be deployed, he was almost always reluctant to engage the enemy until everything was on hand and in proper order. It was at times a wasteful exercise and often damagingly time-consuming.
The British officer and historian R. W. Thompson believed, "Few men were more enslaved by logistics" than Montgomery. He did not have to be. Had he been subject to the firm orders of a stronger, more experienced commander, his formidable tactical expertise coupled with his grasp of logistics could have been employed to far greater effect.
Much can be said for a general determined not to engage the enemy until the balance of forces is so greatly in his favor that victory is certain. In the last analysis, winning is all that matters in a battle. But for a commander to win when the odds are heavily stacked in his favor is not evidence of unrivaled expertise. Montgomery's military erudition and proficiency were repeatedly nullified by his obsessive caution and because he "lacked the instinct for surprise."
It was a failing that was transmitted to the officers who served under him. Required to act according to his standards and not risk reverses, they sometimes found their own initiative curbed and were thereby denied battlefield opportunities of the kind that many American commanders seized. They were also thereby denied a greater share of recognition and acclaim. Few people even knew the name of Miles Dempsey, though the job he held under Montgomery was equivalent to that held by the famous George Patton under Bradley.
The British historian Basil Liddell Hart believed "allowances must be made for the psychological effect on [Montgomery] of the jealousy aroused by his success, and still more by the extent to which he absorbed the limelight."
He could [said Lidddl Hart] hardly fail to be aware of the biting comments of his fellows and seniors upon what they termed his conceit, self-advertisement, and undignified ways of winning popularity among the troops. He must have known that they were waiting to pounce on any tactical slip he made. If he had suffered a serious defeat he would have had a poor chance of survival. In his circumstances he could afford to miss tactical opportunities but not to make a bad mistake.
The American historian Martin Blumenson was less charitable. Though calling Montgomery adequate and competent, he said he was ''the most overrated general in the war." In view of how his achievements contrasted with the adulation he received, this cannot be denied. That this eccentric figure would be so ecstatically acclaimed was inevitable when he strode forcefully and boastfully into the limelight in the Egyptian desert at a time when Britain was in desperate need of a victory and of a military hero. Later, when America's might among the Allies predominated overwhelmingly in the field, it became all the more important for British pride and British interests to maintain Montgomery as something he never was and to guard the idolized image into which he had been molded, with no little help from himself.
His victories at Alamein and afterward in North Africa were greatly welcomed. But they were hardly the magnificent combat triumphs they were cracked up to be. Given the much superior forces he could field against Rommel at the time, notably in air power and armor, only an incompetent general could have done much less. A more aggressive general probably would have done more by following up the Alamein victory more energetically. And nothing that he achieved in Sicily or Italy testified to Montgomery's genius on the battlefield. Up to that point, only the role he had played in closing the gap in the line of defense during the Dunkirk evacuation at the beginning of the war might be said to have served that purpose.
However, the Overlord invasion and campaign in Normandy, which he commanded, told a different story. There, despite
Foolishly ruining his rapport with Eisenhower by issuing a string of misleading reports, his self-defeating cockiness finally had some solid grounding. That battle did not proceed along the lines he had forecast, but in Normandy Allied troops under his direction produced the most significant single victory in the war for the Western Allies. He deserves an exalted place in the annals of modern combat for it, not only for winning, but also for stubbornly holding to his plan despite enormous pressure to deviate from it.
Montgomery's proposal for a subsequent "pencil-line" thrust northeastward while the enemy was still in disarray had much to recommend it. It was bold and imaginative and might have succeeded had he been able to persuade Eisenhower, who no longer trusted him, to allow him to proceed with it. His thwarted intention to drive on to Berlin after he had crossed the Rhine certainly would have succeeded.
Against those must be put his failure to open the port of Antwerp more quickly, as he could have done, so that the Allied drive along the northern route into Germany that he promoted so vigorously could be accelerated. Nor did his hastily conceived and executed plan for the assault at Arnhem, whatever the reasons for its defeat, bestow credit upon him. He performed with great competence during the Battle of the Bulge when the Americans lost control of the situation. But after Normandy, his claim to mastery of the battlefield had more to do with aspiration, theory, and braggadocio than prodigious achievement.
His inability to understand the need to cultivate Eisenhower's respect and friendship was a disastrous failing. Brooke's charge that the Supreme Commander was often "swayed by the last man he talked to" was not without a germ of truth, as Alexander demonstrated in North Africa and Sicily. But Montgomery's determination to confer personally with him as rarely as possible, and often haranguing him with lectures and criticism when they did meet, and in the messages he sent, was insulting and ultimately just plain boring. It made it virtually impossible for him to exercise much influence in the formulation of Allied strategy.
The clarity of his vision sometimes impressed Eisenhower. That might have produced important results for him (and the Allies) at a time when the Supreme Commander was growing ever more confident in his own role and felt increasingly empowered to act decisively without clearing his decisions higher up. But by then, whatever opportunity there had been for Montgomery to retain credibility with Eisenhower had been forfeited, despite the fact that he was best poised to strike the enemy a quick terminal blow. Toward the end, he was no longer even consulted by the Supreme Commander, only informed of what it was thought necessary for him to know.
The same was true with regard to Montgomery's relations with Supreme Allied Headquarters. By virtue of the United States' greater manpower and material contribution to the war effort, SHAEF was dominated by the Americans. But Britain had important strategic and national interests at stake, and Montgomery complained that British officers there "must realize that, in addition to being good Allied chaps, they have definite loyalties to their own side of the house." He expected them to support him in his arguments with "the Yanks." But one British officer protested, "True we were anti-Monty at SHAEF, but he created the situation. No one could get at him. . . . [W]e were appalled by his actions. . . . Used everyone he could against someone else."
If Montgomery had raised fewer hackles and had been able to persuade Eisenhower to give him the wherewithal to build a mightier head of steam when the Germans were in disarray, as their generals later confirmed, he might have proved unstoppable. As it was, Eisenhower was wise not to permit him to remain Allied ground-forces commander after Normandy, and not only because of political factors, important though those were. The field marshal's caution fetish would have made it impossible for the American commanders, conditioned by U. S. Army doctrine always to be on the attack, to serve under him for any length of time. His reluctance to consult with them in a straightforward manner would have had the same effect.
Bradley, who had praised Montgomery for his Normandy strategy, was quickly offended by his conceit and his demands
And came to hate him by the end of the war, dismissing him as "a third-rate general" who "never did anything or won any battle that any other general could not have won as well or better." And Bedell Smith, who thought that "for certain types of operations he is without an equal," said Montgomery "always planned a frontal attack and it always bogged down." Smith believed finally that he could not hold a sensible conversation with him.
It is hard to imagine two more contrasting personalities than those of Montgomery and Eisenhower. Everyone, including those who considered Montgomery a superb commander, knew the field marshal was a difficult person who often treated others abominably. But everyone, including Eisenhower's critics, considered "Ike" to be an extremely likable, decent, and honorable man. Even Montgomery called him "a very great human being" who had "the power of drawing the hearts of men towards him as a magnet attracts the bits of metal."
He was emotionally highly strung and often in physical discomfort, but his fiery temper was usually under control. Knowing that "I blaze for an hour" when he got angry, he had "made it a religion never to indulge myself." Only his intimates were aware of his aches and anxieties. He generally respected views that differed from his own and was prepared to examine them without prejudice and often to be influenced by them. Partly for that reason, Brooke and Montgomery held him to be dangerously irresolute and inconsistent.
But there can be no doubt that he performed with great proficiency as managing director of the momentous Allied effort. Horrocks, who called him "a superb coordinator," said, "I do not believe that anyone else in the world could have succeeded in driving that [American-British] team to the end of the road." From an uncertain and apprehensive start, he developed gradually, despite his occasional waverings, into a truly commanding, resolute figure. General Morgan said, "He grew almost as one watched him."
He had to. In a matter of months he had been transformed from an obscure staff officer into someone authorized to make
Decisions of great historical consequence. He had been required to make important political decisions ever since Algeria, within days of his taking command of troops in combat for the first time in his life. Inexperience, poor guidance by advisers, and the pressures of the moment were responsible for his clumsy handling of the Darlan affair. Mistakes were made in negotiating the Italian surrender but the situation was so complicated, so urgent, and so confused by Washington that they were unavoidable. Nevertheless, he performed better in that episode than might have been expected. Though sometimes humbled by De Gaulle, Eisenhower's dealings with the imperious Free French leader probably produced more satisfactory results than if he had adhered strictly to the stream of instructions issued by the White House and the State Department. But the decision he made not to capture Berlin was a serious mistake, as he later acknowledged.
As for Eisenhower's qualities as a military commander, Brooke said "his greatest asset was a greater share of luck than most of us receive in life." No doubt good fortune did attend him, but certainly his greatest asset was something else—having at his disposal, like Montgomery at Alamein, overwhelmingly greater material resources than the enemy could muster.
However, he was too often distracted from the main task of defeating the Germans in the field by the non-military aspects of his job. All the campaigns in which he was commanding general—in French North Africa, Sicily, southern Italy, and Europe—would have benefitted from closer control and a firmer hand. With regard to the chance of winning the war quickly after Overlord and Normandy, Montgomery was right to complain in anguish that despite "a very good start. . . the Allies. . . got themselves into a most frightful muddle." Most of the responsibility for that has to fall to the Supreme Commander.
After the Normandy breakout, Eisenhower was primarily to blame for allowing his relations with Montgomery to grow complicated and confused. He was advised at SHAEF to "Give him orders instead of arguing; never get into an argument with Monty because you are likely to lose it." He neither argued
With Montgomery nor gave him firm orders until the closing phase of the war, when it was too late for them to employ their respective skills dynamically in tandem.
A commander of George Marshall's character and experience would have been more likely to keep his mind focused on the main task. An ideal team at SHAEF would have been Marshall as Supreme Commander and Eisenhower as his chief of staff, a job his experience and qualities would have permitted him to do more effectively. Though Marshall insisted that the Americans not be upstaged by the British on the field of battle, if he himself had been Supreme Commander, Montgomery's considerable talents as a military scientist might have been far better harnessed for an earlier victory over Germany than was finally achieved.
After victory in Europe, Eisenhower served as military governor of the American Zone of occupied Germany for a mere six months. In November 1945, he returned to Washington to succeed Marshall as U. S. Army Chief of Staff. He had dreaded taking on that job, and his forebodings proved justified. He no longer was under the nerve-racking pressures he had endured as Supreme Commander, but it was largely a disagreeable time for him. The United States, the only major combatant nation to emerge from the war stronger than before, was anxiously seeking to adjust to a peacetime existence. The military was peripheral to that task.
Eisenhower's prime task was to superintend the orderly dismemberment of the largest army in American history at a time when the public and Congress demanded that the process be vastly accelerated despite the opening skirmishes of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. His experience of interservice rivalry led him to press for far greater coordination among the army, navy, and air force, but vested interests in the three services frustrated his efforts. After a little more than two years of battling in vain to streamline the American armed forces, he'd had enough.
In February 1948, he resigned as U. S. Chief of Staff to accept one of the many offers he received of prominent positions in
Civilian life—to become < president of Columbia University in New York City. After assuming that role, he was disappointed to discover that he was expected to lend his considerable reputation to the task of fund-raising for the university. Indeed, some of those responsible for his appointment had assumed that this would be his major function as university president. He himself had believed that the job would be largely a sinecure in which he would be able to relax after the years of pressure. He was not comfortable in academia and spent a good deal of time away from the university, playing golf, visiting friends, and just vacationing. He remained a popular public figure and was invited to address audiences across the country.
In 1950, he took a leave of absence from Columbia to become Supreme Commander of the recently formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with headquarters in Paris. His task, which he performed with characteristic chairman-of-the-board efficiency, was to mold the member countries into a military alliance capable of withstanding the Soviet threat in Europe. It was not an easy job. Upon his arrival in Paris, he found, "The confusion and the irritations. . . multiplied by the hazy, almost chimerical character of the organization to which I am officially responsible. . . . [TJhere is no budget, not even for housekeeping, and there is no clear line to follow in getting. . . things accomplished."
But his ability to get people of divergent interests and different personalities to work together proved extremely useful. He was greatly aided by the intense dread of Soviet Communism and military might among the NATO member nations, and the organization was soon forged into a credible instrument with which to fight the Cold War.
To growing doubts, he continued to deny that he entertained political ambitions. In 1948, while at Columbia University, he had rejected suggestions that he stand as the Republican candidate for president. Nevertheless, some of the officers who had served under him suspected that he could easily be lured onto the political stage. Several prominent businessmen and industrialists who had become his friends considered that he would be eminently qualified to be the next occupant of the White
House after Harry Truman. Many eminent figures in the Republican Party felt the same way. His continuing high-profile popularity was seen as guaranteeing the presidential electoral victory the Republicans had not enjoyed for almost twenty-five years.
While he was fashioning NATO into shape in Europe, the groundwork was laid for his nomination as Republican candidate, which he accepted in 1952 when it was formally offered to him. The United States was again at war, this time in Korea. Eisenhower's Democratic Party opponent, Adlai Stevenson, a man of considerable intelligence and wit, stood no chance against America's most prominent Second World War hero and was easily defeated by the man from Abilene, as he was again four years later.
Like Eisenhower, Montgomery went on to greater rewards after serving as commander of British occupation forces in Germany. When Brooke retired as Chief of the Imperial General Staff a year after the end of the war, Montgomery was chosen to succeed him despite the opposition of some in the War Office who did not hold him in high regard or objected to his eccentricities.
It was not a successful appointment. The new CIGS was not accustomed to holding lengthy give-and-take conferences, being subjected to the views of others, and humoring politicians. He had little enthusiasm for contemplating long-range, politically charged strategy rather than the deployment of divisions and armor and set-piece battles in which armies clashed and one side won and the other side lost. He could no longer be cushioned from disagreeable aspects of the outside world by a cadre of handpicked, reverential junior officers.
Britain was a much different place from what it had been before. The war and its devastations had taken their toll, as had historical evolution. The British Empire that had nurtured Montgomery as a young soldier was in decline. Bits of it had already begun splintering off. The United States and the Soviet Union were now the superpowers. It was difficult for Montgomery to accept the realities of his country's diminished status and role.
Like almost everyone, else he did not like the arrival of the nuclear age, but for reasons of his own. As the Cold War intensified, and mutual atomic destruction appeared to be a genuine threat, he chose to insist that atomic weapons were overrated. They did not fit his rules of battle, which involved the deployment of infantry, the thrust of armor, and the support of artillery and air cover. As a general who had always insisted that preparation for battle be reduced to ''essentials," he found the essentials of combat in the atomic age nothing like he had ever imagined they could be. He was, however, right and most others were wrong when he maintained that despite fears in the West and his own insistence on maintaining strong defenses in western Europe, the Soviets were too weak to risk going to war again.
He still was unable to deal harmoniously with equals on military matters. As Chief of the Imperial General Staff, he attempted to lord it over Tedder, who now was RAF Chief of Staff, and Cunningham, now head of the Royal Navy. Without bothering to consult them, he sometimes made statements or took actions with regard to matters that should have been the province of all the chiefs of staff. He chose to meet with them as rarely as possible, and sometimes deliberately absented himself from scheduled chiefs of staff meetings.
The new Labour government that had replaced Churchill and his Conservatives at war's end contained figures who had feared that the popular Montgomery might turn into a Napoleonic demagogue. But the British were not susceptible to the clarion call of military leaders, and in any case, Montgomery was issuing none. But he regularly clashed with ministers on military matters and on the policing of the Empire. He was unable to accept that terrorists and troublemakers might now sometimes be considered part of national liberation movements and that a methodical crackdown by British forces might no longer suffice in dealing with them. But aside from participating in occasional House of Lords debates, he pointedly shunned a political role for himself.
In 1948, Britain, France, and the Benelux nations had formed the West European Union, a defensive alliance designed to
Meet the challenge of Soviet pressure in the east. As the most distinguished soldier in the alliance, Montgomery was appointed chairman of its Commanders-in-Chief Committee. That was preliminary to the formation of the wider and more powerful North Atlantic Treaty Organization to which Montgomery was appointed Deputy Supreme Commander, again serving under Eisenhower though convinced that Eisenhower once more was out of his depth in devising strategy on how to defend Europe if the Cold War turned hot.
But the relationship between them was totally different from what it had been during the war. Eisenhower was now ''up in the stratosphere" in a way that Brooke could not have imagined when he first thought of isolating him there during the Tunisia campaign. Not only did he represent the nation through whose generous Marshall Plan subsidies the economies of Western Europe had been saved from collapse, and whose support shielded them from the threat of Soviet domination, but it was no secret at the time that the new NATO commander was likely soon to be a candidate for president of the United States and it was generally believed that he would be elected.
Eisenhower conferred with prime ministers and presidents, employing his influence and organizational skills to weld together the Western military alliance and to ease the process of accepting defeated Germany into it. Montgomery, back closer to the essentials of the science of war, was content to be the planner, studying how the comparative handful of divisions that the NATO nations were prepared to commit to Western defenses could best be deployed against the larger number the Soviets could put in the field. He toured, wrote, lectured, and badgered, pressing for greater military commitment from the NATO countries. He reviewed strategy, training procedures, and combat-readiness with all concerned. To his regret, he came to accept that the West would have to rely on nuclear weapons rather than his precious battlefield tactics if it came to a showdown.
Between 1951 and 1958, Mongomery served under three NATO Supreme Commanders who succeeded Eisenhower. In recognition of the superior military might of the United States in
The alliance, all of them Avere American—Matthew Ridgway, Alfred Gruenther, and Lauris Norstadt. He got along passably well with all except Ridgway, with whom his relations were severely strained.
He remained his arrogant self, to be counted on for occasional, seemingly deliberate tactlessness. After retiring from public office as one of his country's most distinguished figures, he became a self-appointed British ambassador, visiting Russia, China, South Africa, and other countries, conferring with foreign leaders and making sometimes controversial public statements about them to the annoyance and embarrassment of the Foreign Office. However, he remained a greatly honored, highly respected figure. He still drew a crowd whenever he appeared in public. He had written and continued to write extensively about his wartime commands. His comments on a wide range of military and political subjects were solicited and he was often invited to appear on radio and television programs. He was much sought after in distinguished circles and developed a coterie of politically and socially distinguished acquaintances and even developed some friendships among them, though he remained very much a loner, preferring his own company to that of others.
Criticism of some pf his comments, and also of his generalship in the war, began to surface in public, particularly in America. He chose not to notice it. Eisenhower did the same. But he did not shun controversy; it was still not in his character to do so. Still trying to convince his former Supreme Commander that the war in Europe should have been fought differently, Montgomery sent him a copy of a lecture he had given on the subject. Eisenhower apparently did not read it—"I will finish it as soon as I get an opportunity," he wrote—but he sent his thanks for the courtesy, adding, "My blood-pressure went up very considerably the other day to read in an American magazine that I 'disliked' you. My first reaction was to write to the editor and tell him what a skunk and a liar he is, but on second thought it seemed to me that to take notice of such a silly falsehood would be simply playing into the hands of some newspaper gossip."
At times Montgomery appeared to have mellowed with age. The cheers of the crowd, the attentions of celebrities, the gratitude of the nation, and the countless honors made him less obsessed with mounting aggressive guard over his own status and reputation. But one of his biographers, an admirer of his wartime achievements, said he retained "a malicious desire to deride, diminish, downgrade the achievements of others." And his conceit remained undiluted. Asked to name the three geatest generals in history, he said, "The other two were Alexander the Great and Napoleon."
Even those who thought highly of Montgomery were astonished by his shabby treatment of General De Guingand. The field marshal generously allowed that he "could not possibly have handled the gigantic task" with which he had been entrusted in the war without the support of his highly efficient, overworked chief of staff. "Freddie" had served him loyally and capably in the desert and Europe. He had saved Montgomery from disgrace when Eisenhower was about to have him relieved of command after the Battle of the Bulge. On several other occasions, he had eased friction between the field marshal and SHAFT. It therefore seemed strange when, at the end of the war, for no apparent reason he barred De Guingand from the surrender-signing ceremony on Liineburg Heath, the "historic moment" toward which they had striven together ever since Alam Haifa in North Africa, and then failed to make provision for him to be on the reviewing platform for the victory parade in London, though arrangements were made for others to be there.
Worse was to come for De Guingand. He was not well. He had long been of fragile health. Serving under Montgomery had not contributed to his well-being. But when he took sick leave after the war, Montgomery urged him to return to duty. He said he wanted him to become the British Army's Director of Military Intelligence. It was to be preliminary to his becoming Vice Chief of the Imperial General Staff when Montgomery formally assumed the position of CIGS. Because of his poor health, De Guingand was disinclined to take the job. But the offer, which would include the rank of lieutenant general, "a
Tremendous jump for a 'junior Major-General, whose permanent rank at that time was only that of a Colonel," was too attractive to turn down. However, when Montgomery did become CIGS, he told De Guingand that he had changed his mind and that another general was to be his deputy.
De Guingand then left the army, but not only did the influential Montgomery offer him no assistance in finding a suitable civilian job with which he could earn a living, he made no effort to have his temporary general's rank made permanent. Instead, De Guingand was to be reduced to his permanent rank of colonel, a matter affecting both his status and his pension. The War Office permitted him to retain the rank of major general only after the outraged Bedell Smith and Eisenhower intervened on his behalf, apparently a matter that Montgomery viewed with total indifference. Still later, he humiliated De Guingand by failing to invite him to a twenty-fifth anniversary commemoration of the battle at Alarnein in which his shamefully slighted chief of staff had played a key role.
Why the field marshal treated a man who had served him well and faithfully so abominably is difficult to understand. However badly he might behave with others, he had always been considerate where his own officers and troops were concerned. Many of them testified to his kindness and solicitude. It may be that, by saving Montgomery from possible disgrace when Eisenhower was about to have him relieved of his command in Europe, De Guingand had to be punished. He was a living reminder of a humiliation the field marshal preferred to have wiped from memory.
Montgomery never lost his capacity to offend. In May 1957, he was a guest, at his own request, at President Eisenhower's Gettysburg farm. During that visit, Eisenhower took him on a tour of the nearby battlefields where armies of the Union and the Confederacy had clashed bloodily during the American Civil War a century earlier. On the tour, Montgomery suggested that General Robert E. Lee should have been fired for the way the forces of the Confederacy had been commanded during the battle of Gettysburg, and he urged Eisenhower to agree with
Him. Never shy of the limelight, he did it so loudly that reporters trailing them would be certain to hear. In view of the high regard and profound affection with which Lee was held in the South, it was ungracious behavior, especially for a foreign visitor, and it was impudent to put the president of the United States in so awkward a position.
Eisenhower was miffed and refused to argue with Montgomery on the subject or say anything at all about it. That was taken as the president's courteous reluctance to take issue with his distinguished guest, especially since Montgomery had extracted from him an invitation to spend the next three days at the White House. It appeared as though he and Montgomery had weathered their wartime differences and that the two old soldiers liked each other personally.
But not for long. A little more than eighteen months later, on January 1, 1959, Eisenhower, who had by then been president for seven years, issued a strange instruction. He wanted letters sent to Bradley and several other American and British generals who had served under him in the war, inviting them to gather at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland.
The object of the gathering would be to discuss what really happened in the liberation of Europe and the conquest of Germany fifteen years earlier. It could not be said that the president had so much time on his hands that he wanted to devote more than a week to chewing over battle tales with a handful of old comrades. Eisenhower wanted the meeting (which, upon reflection, he decided against) because he was once more furious with Montgomery.
The field marshal's memoirs had just been published and had provoked much controversy. The Italians were outraged by the suggestion in the book that their troops were cowards and their generals unreliable. Montgomery was pressured by the British government to offer an "explanation" to the Italian prime minister through the British Foreign Office. The memoirs also included the derisive claim that General Auchinleck, when Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, had planned to retreat in Egypt rather than face Rommel down at Alamein, as Montgomery proceeded to do after Auchinleck was relieved of his com-
Mand. Auchinleck angrily denied this publicly, and it touched off a heated debate that threatened to find its way into a court of law. Montgomery's publishers felt obliged ultimately to insert a note retracting the disputed claim, though Montgomery himself said he could not see what the fuss was about.
What triggered Eisenhower's fury was Montgomery's public disclosure in his memoirs of how little the field marshal had thought of him as his commander during the war. In contrasting the decisions that were made with what he thought should have been done, it was obvious that he considered the Supreme Commander to have been incompetent as a strategist and responsible for avoidable mistakes that had made prolongation of the war inevitable. He said Eisenhower had pursued a strategy that was "expensive in life," implying thereby that many more American, British, and other Allied troops had been killed than had been necessary to achieve victory.
The book containing those charges had been in the works when Montgomery had enjoyed the president's hospitality at Gettysburg and Washington. He had said nothing about them at the time. But with a display of his extraordinary insensitivity, he sent the White House a copy of the book when it appeared and was surprised by what seemed to him a discourteous lack of response to this friendly gesture. He received not so much as an acknowledgment of the book's receipt. He drew his own conclusion about that. He gloatingly wrote to a former aide, "Apparently Ike has come to realise that he will not go down in history as a great President; he accepts that. But he reckoned his place in history as a 'Captain of War' was secure. My book has demolished that."
Nor was Montgomery content to convey such sentiments in private, or let his writings speak for themselves. During a CBS television interview shortly afterward, he claimed that Eisenhower, though Allied Supreme Commander in the invasion of France, had never been able to understand his plan for defeating the German armies in Normandy, the most crucial battle in the war. He also again criticized Eisenhower's strategy for defeating the Germans and once more suggested that it had
Been responsible for the needless deaths of thousands of ''American boys."
Eisenhower made no public rebuttal, but no secret was made by the White House of the fact that he was incensed. He abandoned his long-held decision to keep to himself what he thought of Montgomery as a soldier. In a letter to Lord Ismay, he wrote of his low regard for his generalship during the war, of his impatience with the Eighth Army's slow advance in Sicily, of Montgomery's failure to fulfill the "great promises that he made during the planning for Overlord about moving quickly . . . beyond Caen," and of "his preposterous proposal to drive on a single pencil-line thrust straight on to Berlin. ... I cannot forget," Eisenhower told Ismay, "his readiness to belittle associates in those critical moments when the cooperation of all of us was needed."
Among those distressed by the falling out between the two famous warrior chiefs was the ever-tolerant De Guingand, who had always gotten on well with Eisenhower. De Guingand wrote to the president suggesting that the field marshal, who was about to visit Canada, should be invited to visit Eisenhower again for a reconciliation. The president replied that it was not a good idea. To Cornelius Ryan, Eisenhower said, "Montgomery had become so personal in his efforts to make sure that the Americans—and me, in particular—got no credit, that, in fact, we hardly had anything to do with the war, that I finally stopped talking to him."
There was a cool, brief meeting between them at the American embassy in London when President Eisenhower threw a party for his old British comrades in arms. But aside from brief separate appearances on the same television program on the war, the two most famous soldiers of the Western Allies never had anything more to do with each other.
World History
