Bernard Montgomery

Bernard Law Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, , nicknamed "Monty", was a senior British Army officer who served in the First World War, the Irish War of Independence and the Second World War.
Montgomery first saw action in the First World War as a junior officer of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. At Méteren, near the Belgian border at Bailleul, he was shot through the right lung by a sniper during the First Battle of Ypres. On returning to the Western Front as a general staff officer, he took part in the Battle of Arras in AprilMay 1917. He also took part in the Battle of Passchendaele in late 1917 before finishing the war as chief of staff of the 47th Division. In the inter-war years he commanded the 17th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers and, later, the 1st Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment before becoming commander of the 9th Infantry Brigade and then general officer commanding, 8th Infantry Division.
During the Western Desert campaign of the Second World War, Montgomery commanded the Eighth Army from August 1942. He subsequently commanded the Eighth Army during the Allied invasion of Sicily and the Allied invasion of Italy. During the Normandy campaign, he was in command of all Allied ground forces from 6 June 1944 until 1 September 1944. He then continued in command of the 21st Army Group for the rest of the North West Europe campaign, including the failed attempt to cross the Rhine during Operation Market Garden.
When German armoured forces broke through the US lines in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge, Montgomery received command of the northern shoulder of the Bulge. Montgomery's 21st Army Group, including the US Ninth Army and the First Allied Airborne Army, crossed the Rhine in Operation Plunder in March 1945. By the end of the war, troops under Montgomery's command had taken part in the encirclement of the Ruhr Pocket, liberated the Netherlands, and captured much of north-west Germany. On 4 May 1945, Montgomery accepted the surrender of the German forces in north-western Europe at Lüneburg Heath, south of Hamburg, after the surrender of Berlin to the USSR on 2 May.
After the war he became Commander-in-Chief of the British Army of the Rhine in Germany and then Chief of the Imperial General Staff. From 1948 to 1951, he served as Chairman of the Commanders-in-Chief Committee of the Western Union. He then served as NATO's Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe until his retirement in 1958.

Early life

Montgomery was born in Kennington, Surrey, in 1887, the fourth child of nine, to a Church of Ireland priest, Henry Montgomery, and his wife Maud. The Montgomerys, an Ulster Scots 'Ascendancy' gentry family, were the County Donegal branch of the Clan Montgomery. Henry Montgomery, at that time Vicar of St Mark's Church, Kennington, was the second son of Sir Robert Montgomery, a native of Inishowen in County Donegal in the north-west of Ulster, and a noted colonial administrator in British India. Sir Robert died a month after his grandson's birth. He was probably a descendant of Colonel Alexander Montgomery. Bernard's mother, Maud, was the daughter of Frederic William Farrar, the famous children's novelist and preacher, and was 18 years younger than her husband.
After the death of Sir Robert Montgomery, Henry inherited the Montgomery ancestral estate of New Park in Moville, a small town in Inishowen in the north of County Donegal in Ulster, the northern province in Ireland. There was still £13,000 to pay on a mortgage, a large debt in the 1880s, and Henry was at the time still only an Anglican vicar. Despite selling off all the farms that were in the townland of Ballynally, on the north-western shores of Lough Foyle, "there was barely enough to keep up New Park and pay for the blasted summer holiday".
It was a financial relief of some magnitude when, in 1889, Henry was made Bishop of Tasmania, then still a British colony, and Bernard spent his formative years there. Bishop Montgomery considered it his duty to spend as much time as possible in the rural areas of Tasmania and was away for up to six months at a time. While he was away, his wife, still in her mid-20s, gave her children "constant" beatings, then ignored them most of the time. Of Bernard's siblings, Sibyl died prematurely in Tasmania, and Harold, Donald and Una all emigrated. Maud Montgomery took little active interest in the education of her young children other than to have them taught by tutors brought from Britain, although Bernard briefly attended the then coeducational St Michael's Collegiate School. The loveless environment made Bernard something of a bully, as he himself recalled: "I was a dreadful little boy. I don't suppose anybody would put up with my sort of behaviour these days." Later in life Montgomery refused to allow his son David to have anything to do with his grandmother, and refused to attend her funeral in 1949.
The family returned to England once for a Lambeth Conference in 1897, and Bernard and his brother Harold were educated at The King's School, Canterbury. In 1901, Bishop Montgomery became secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and the family returned to London. Montgomery attended St Paul's School and then the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, from which he was almost expelled for rowdiness and violence. On graduation in September 1908 he was commissioned into the 1st Battalion the Royal Warwickshire Regiment as a second lieutenant, and first saw overseas service later that year in India. He was promoted to lieutenant in 1910, and in 1912 became adjutant of the 1st Battalion of his regiment at Shorncliffe Army Camp.

First World War

The Great War began in August 1914 and Montgomery moved to France with his battalion that month, which was at the time part of the 10th Infantry Brigade of the 4th Division of the British Expeditionary Force. He was promoted to temporary captain on 14 September. He saw action at the Battle of Le Cateau that month and during the retreat from Mons. At Méteren, near the Belgian border at Bailleul on 13 October 1914, during an Allied counter-offensive, he was shot through the right lung by a sniper. Lying in the open, he remained still and pretended to be dead, in the hope that he would not receive any more enemy attention. One of his men did attempt to rescue him but was shot dead by a hidden enemy sniper and collapsed over Montgomery. The sniper continued to fire and Montgomery was hit once more, in the knee, but the dead soldier, in Montgomery's words, "received many bullets meant for me." Assuming them to both be dead, the officers and men of Montgomery's battalion chose to leave them where they were until darkness arrived and stretcher bearers managed to recover the two bodies, with Montgomery by this time barely clinging on to life. The doctors at the advanced dressing station, too, had no hope for him and ordered a grave to be dug. Miraculously, however, Montgomery was still alive and, after being placed in an ambulance and then being sent to a hospital, was treated and eventually evacuated to England, where he would remain for well over a year. He was appointed a Companion of the Distinguished Service Order, for his gallant leadership during this period: the citation for this award, published in The London Gazette in December 1914 reads:
After recovering in early 1915, he was appointed brigade major, first of the 112th Infantry Brigade, and then with 104th Infantry Brigade, then training in Lancashire. He returned to the Western Front in early 1916 with his brigade, seeing service with it during the Battle of the Somme later in the year. In January 1917 he was assigned as a general staff officer, grade 2 with the 33rd Division and took part in the Battle of Arras in AprilMay. In July he transferred over as a GSO2 to IX Corps, part of General Sir Herbert Plumer's Second Army.
File:The Hundred Days Offensive, August-november 1918 Q11428.jpg|thumb|upright=1.3|right|The Minister of Munitions, Winston Churchill, watching the march past of the 47th Division in the Grande Place, Lille, France, October 1918. In front of him is the 47th Division's GSO1, Lieutenant Colonel Bernard Montgomery.
It was in this role that Montgomery served at the Battle of Passchendaele which began in late July 1917. He was promoted to the temporary rank of major in February 1918, and brevet major in June. He finished the war in November 1918 as GSO1 of the 47th Division, with the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel, to which appointment and rank he had been assigned on 16 July. A photograph from October 1918, reproduced in many biographies, shows the then unknown Lieutenant-Colonel Montgomery standing in front of Winston Churchill at the parade following the liberation of Lille.
Montgomery was profoundly influenced by his experiences during the war, in particular by the lack of leadership displayed by senior commanders. He later wrote:

Between the world wars

1920s and Ireland

After the First World War, Montgomery commanded the 17th Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, a battalion in the British Army of the Rhine, before reverting to his substantive rank of captain in November 1919. He had not at first been selected for the Staff College, Camberley, Surrey. But at a tennis party in Cologne, he was able to persuade the Commander-in-chief of the British Army of Occupation, Field Marshal Sir William Robertson, to add his name to the list.
After graduating from the Staff College, he was appointed brigade major in the 17th Infantry Brigade in January 1921. The brigade was stationed in County Cork, Ireland, carrying out counter-guerilla operations during the final stages of the Irish War of Independence.
Montgomery came to the conclusion that the conflict could not be won without harsh measures, and that self-government for Ireland was the only feasible solution; in 1923, after the establishment of the Irish Free State and during the Irish Civil War, Montgomery wrote to Colonel Arthur Percival of the Essex Regiment:
In one noteworthy incident on 2 May 1922, Montgomery led a force of 60 soldiers and four armoured cars to the town of Macroom to search for four British officers who were missing in the area. While he had hoped the show of force would assist in finding the men, he was under strict orders not to attack the IRA. On arriving in the town square in front of Macroom Castle, he summoned the IRA commander, Charlie Browne, to parley. At the castle gates Montgomery spoke to Browne, explaining what would happen should the officers not be released. Once finished, Browne responded with his own ultimatum to Montgomery to "leave town within 10 minutes". Browne then turned heels and returned to the Castle. At this point another IRA officer, Pat O'Sullivan, whistled to Montgomery drawing his attention to scores of IRA volunteers who had quietly taken up firing positions all around the square—surrounding Montgomery's forces. Realising his precarious position, Montgomery led his troops out of the town, a decision which raised hostile questions in the House of Commons but was later approved by Montgomery's own superiors. Unknown to Montgomery at this time, the four missing officers had already been executed.
In May 1923, Montgomery was posted to the 49th Infantry Division, a Territorial Army formation. He returned to the 1st Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment in 1925 as a company commander and was promoted to major in July 1925. From January 1926 to January 1929 he served as Deputy Assistant Adjutant General at the Staff College, Camberley, in the temporary rank of lieutenant-colonel.