BRITAIN: Monty: The Legend of El Alamein

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Arnhem Bridge. El Alamein epitomized Montgomery's battlefield style: a long, careful buildup of matériel superiority followed by a massive frontal attack with secondary flanking pushes. These tactics were successful in many battles—at Mareth, Tunisia, the Sangro River in Italy, and Caen, France—but they also led to some disasters. The most notable was the ill-starred 1944 operation "Market Garden," a Montgomery plan to march straight into Germany's Ruhr Valley by seizing five bridges that crossed the Rhine in Holland. The drive collapsed at the crucial crossing, Arnhem Bridge, with a devastating defeat of U.S. and British forces.

Later Montgomery admitted that he made "a bad mistake at Arnhem." At the time, however, he blamed the disaster on Eisenhower, charging that the American commander had failed to provide Monty's forces with enough matériel. Indeed, throughout the war Montgomery fought an acrimonious verbal battle against overall American command of the Allied armies. This war within a war became so heated that at one point Eisenhower threatened to force Montgomery's removal. Said Monty later: "Ike had simply no experience for the job. As a field commander he was very bad."

Clearly, Montgomery had his shortcomings. Nonetheless he was in Britain far more than just a general. He was a link to the fading days of empire and glory, the man who won the final battles before the eclipse of British military prowess by the rise of the superpowers. As British Military Historian Michael Howard has written, "It is doubtful whether he will be regarded by posterity as one of the great captains of history." But in the popular mind, the hero of El Alamein probably has a secure place alongside, if not Alexander and Napoleon, then at least Marlborough and Wellington, which even Monty might agree is acceptable soldier's company.