Bernard Montgomery
Bernard Montgomery beat Rommel at El Alamein, commanded all Allied ground forces on D-Day, and made himself intolerable to almost every American he worked with. Born in 1887 in London and raised partly in Tasmania, he described a childhood of beatings by his mother and was a difficult, undersized boy who nearly got himself expelled from Sandhurst for setting a cadet's shirt-tails alight. He was shot through the lung by a sniper at Méteren in 1914, was left for dead, and finished the war as a staff officer with a permanent conviction that generals who did not plan meticulously murdered their men. His wife died of septicaemia from an insect bite in 1937, and he retreated into professional obsession entirely. He was given the Eighth Army in August 1942 after the officer originally appointed was killed in an air crash, and he changed it — refusing any further withdrawal, cancelling contingency plans for retreat, visiting units constantly, and refusing to attack until he had the material superiority he wanted, which infuriated Churchill and worked. Alam Halfa in August was defensive; El Alamein in October and November was a twelve-day set-piece battle with two to one in men and tanks, and it was the first sustained British land victory of the war. He commanded the ground forces in Normandy under Eisenhower, and the argument about whether Caen was a deliberate hinge or a failed objective has run ever since. Market Garden in September 1944 was his plan and it failed. He took the German surrender on Lüneburg Heath in May 1945. He was vain, tactless and correct often enough to be unbearable, and he died in 1976.
- Lived: 1887 CE – 1976 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: field_marshal, military_leader
