Monty: The Making of a General (1887-1942)
Hamilton, Nigel
interfere with the enjoyment of life on a natural level. Still, all religions, however much they may quarrel on other points, agree on this one: Religion makes a difference. Naipaut's...
...so that this religion, which filled men's days with rituals and ceremonies of worsh*p, which preached the afterlife, at the same time gave men the sharpest sense of worldly injustice and made that part of religion...
...Box 1969 Bloomington, IN 47402 (812) 334-2715 or (212) 724-3799 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 35 gravest emergencies...
...And Montgomery was a g r e a t general...
...It is a pity that Naipaul could not focus on these peculiarly Islamic--as opposed to religious--traits, and thus extend our understanding of this alien part of the world...
...He promoted men on the basis of merit, not membership in fashionable regiments...
...Not until well after the war when the passion for civil service reform broke out among the well-born Mugwumps of New York and New England did the elder Theodore seek 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982...
...0 There opportunity America...
...One day it was preparing to withdraw to Cairo, the next to drive Rommel from North Africa...
...During the Civil War, the elder Roosevelt hired a substitute and none of his peers thought the worse of him for doing so...
...Naipaul's response shows the chasm separating him from these people--and also, perhaps, from some of us: " S t i l l I didn't follow...
...He was married to a Georgia lady of passionate Confederate sympathies whose brothers were active in the Rebel cause...
...What made him a g r e a t commander...
...his adversaries' memoirs (particularly The Romme/Papers) pay t r i b u t e to his talents...
...He reproduces many of Montgomery's memoranda, orders, anc~ reports and quotes at length from his own numerous interviews with Monty's contemporaries and subordinates...
...Rommel was rather like that--and Montgomery thrashed him...
...It offered only the faith...
...Whoever is p a t i e n t enough to sift through the book will begin to see what makes a great general...
...he made officers--even the most sedentary--join their men for seven-mile cross-country runs...
...Naipaut's religious blind spot--or perhaps I should call it hypersensit i v i t y - t e n d s to polarize reaction to his" book...
...He did not have the same urge or talent for ruthless exploitation of a victory as Patton or Rommel--Hamilton does not discuss Monty's failure to annihilate Rommel after the crushing victory of Alamein...
...Above all, he insisted on teamwork among all b r a n c h e s - - i n f a n t r y , armor, artillery, and engineers...
...Soldiers will risk their lives if need be, but not for commanders they think fools or butchers...
...Hamilton continually calls Monty a "professional" and his rivals in the British Army "amateurs"--and by this he refers not to their respective lengths of time in uniform but to their attitudes toward service...
...His tireless efforts to induce ordinary soldiers to lay aside a portion of their pay for wives and children suggest an attempt at compensation...
...And what, indeed, of Theodore Roosevelt tout court...
...Eliot A. Cohen Sarkes Tarz~an Inc...
...Monty's memos, orders, and speeches are superbly clear and concise, and the copious testimony of officers who served under him confirms one's sense that he knew how to talk to soldiers...
...His famous bush hat, studded with the regimental badges of all the units he had visited, was another clever psychological device...
...He fought his way through Sicily and, in northwest France in 1-944, his troops moved almost as far and as fast as P a t t o n ' s . In both Sicily and Europe, moreover, his armies pinned down German forces and thereby .paved the way for Patton's audacious maneuvers, . much as Grant's slugging matches with Lee in the Wilderness enabled Sherman to slice through the heart of the Confederacy...
...In sum, Mhnty lacks the perspective and the clarity of such great military biographies as G.F.R...
...he r e q u i r e d all officers to train their subordinates to take their places and once ran an exercise on the assumption that all officers were casualties-only sergeants left...
...Nonetheless, Monty was a superb strategist and tactician...
...On the other hand, we must beware of succumbing to a puerile romanticism, an unthinking admiration of commanders who take absurd risks, who exhaust or kill their men and ruin their equipment in pursuit of visions of swift, brilliant, and conclusive victory, of out-Pattoning Patton as it were...
...In rough order of significance they were the characters of his father and mother, his membership in one of the principal old New York families (this was the era portrayed by Edith Wharton), his precarious health, and his nurturing in an insulated world of privilege and high principle...
...His ruthless willingness to purge incompetents among his officers--a prerequisite of great generalshipw must also have contributed to a sense of security among front-line troops...
...The lesson to be derived from this book is an important one...
...Small wonder that in France his Third Division managed to remain a cohesive and effective unit until the very end, for Monty had ceaselessly practiced his men in tong and orderly r e t r e a t s . Again and again we see Monty insisting on the importance of tough and realistic training: He worked his men at night and in dirty weather...
...Monty was enormously competent at his job because he practiced and studied it to the exclusion of all else...
...Monty was also remarkably free of military prejudices...
...He was not a "tank general" or an "artillery general" but simply a general...
...Nigel Hamilton's Monty: The Making of a General (1887-1942) is a massive attempt to rehabilitate him, to defend him against criticism which stemmed in large part from Monty's undeniable vanity, nastiness, and mendacity...
...Poland might provide him with a clue today...
...Ultimately, Naipaul's faith in political and practical solutions, in economic expertise and sophisticated parliamentary procedure, collides with I s l a m ' s faith in . . . the Faith: " I t was the late twentieth century--and not the faith--that could supply the answers--in institutions, legislation, economic systems...
...The war demanded delicacies of forbearance that could not have come easy in such a divided household...
...34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1982 All this notwithstanding, this book wilt repay an intelligent skimming, because of one cardinal fact...
...he insisted that all units under his command, even garrison troops, practice prolonged mobile warfare...
...It had suffered humiliating defeats and redeemed them, but it lacked a sense of direction...
...Churchill had described the Eighth Army under its previous commanders as brave but bewildered...
...He indulges in irritating and pointless explorations of Montgomery's diffi-cult relationship with his mother--as if all men who do not get along with their mothers become, of necessity, g r e a t generals...
...At times he seems on the verge of doing so, or at least, he pushes the limits of what the "reasonable" man can do: The Prophet had founded a state...
...Those readers, however, who derive " u n i v e r s a l c i v i l i z a t i o n " from specific, spiritually fortified JudeoChristian roots--who do not deny the value of material goods or technical expertise but perceive the need for spiritual fundaments--will have mixed reactions to this book...
...It ends with his return, many thousands of dollars the poorer, from ranching in the Dakota Badlands...
...Readers like Naipaul himself, patriotic citizens of "the universal civilization," confident that the acceptance of this civilization, with its medicine and its mechanized farming, its parliamentary systems and its institutions of higher learning, will bring p r o s p e r i t y and contentment to the Third World--these r e a d e r s will r e a c t as Naipaul does and deplore Arabia's inexplicable attachment to this dogmatic religion...
...He led his Third Division in a brilliantly successful r e t r e a t in France in 1940 (I do not mean to be ironic but simply to stress that retrograde movements are the most difficult ones in war...
...In books and movies--particularly Patton--he appears as an insubordinate weasel of a man, a r a t h e r comic figure who twitters about" thwashing Wommel" before moving to hog the oil and supplies that rightfully belong to American generals...
...like a Kiplingesque believer in the White Man's Burden, he wants them to swallow the "universal civilization" Whole...
...He had given men the idea of equality and union...
...is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Washington Post and former editorial page editor of the Washington Star...
...What would Miss Barbara Waiters have made of Washington's stodgy demeanor and uncomfortable false teeth...
...He overworks the point, but it is a valid one...
...The dynastic quarrels that had come early to this state had entered the theology of the religion...
...ID MORNINGS ON HORSEBACK David McCullough / Simon & Schuster/$19.95 Edwin M. Yoder, Jr...
...And yet he writes too much: This book spends 850 pages and barely reaches the end of the battle of El Alamein (although Hamilton does r e t e l l that struggle well...
...In fact, he goes further, making Montgomery out to be the hero of the Allied cause, g r e a t e r even than Churchill (who, like most other politicians and soldiers who cross Monty's path in this book, dies a l i t e r a r y death of a thousand cuts...
...E a r l y in the book an Iranian Moslem tells Naipaul that Islam stands for four things: "Brotherhood, honesty, the will to work, p i o p e r recompense for labour...
...This might not have made him a pleasant dinner companion, but it did make him a very good general...
...Given the restrictions on the use of these materials, this is likely to be the most fully documented biography of Monty that we will see for some time...
...Mornings Edwin M. Yoder, Jr...
...Politics was no trade for a merchant-gentleman, and neither was war...
...This late-twentieth-century Islam appeared to raise political issues...
...one day it was instructed to break up its divisions, the next to reunite them...
...But when Naipaul draws facile connections between these conditions and submission to God, or "rigid rules," or "Islamic" repudiations of self-seeking and materialism, they will be tempted to side with his Moslem subjects...
...Its subject is the atypical, one might almost say unAmerican, provenance of a really quite strange young man...
...MONTY: THE MAKING OF A GENERAL (1887-1942) Nigel Hamilton / McGraw-Hill / $22.95 Monty has never had a good press in the United States...
...Montgomery, of course, had his failings...
...His chief intelligence officer in 1940, later the commander of his tactical headquarters in Europe in 1944-45, was a Territorial officer (the English equivalent of a National Guardsman)--a category despised by most British Army regulars...
...He beat Rommel at Alam Halfa and at Alamein, when in neither case was his material superiority that much greater than that of his predecessors...
...Like most great generals, Monty had a sense of theater, as evidenced, for example, by his rule that there would be no coughing during his talks (although he relented from time to time by giving thirty-second coughing breaks during his longer discourses...
...Hamilton, who was befriended by Montgomery as a boy of twelve, Eliot A. Cohen is a teaching, fellow in tlse Department of Government of the Graduate School o fArts and Sciences at Harvard University...
...His MARKET-GARDEN plan--the scheme to drive his armies across the Rhine through a corridor seized and held by paratroops--was excessively ambitious and fragile, as Cornelius Ryan makes clear in A BHdge Too Far...
...Why not call for those four things ? Why go beyond those four things ? Why involve those four things with something as big as Islam...
...One must begin by admitting that qua biography this is a poor piece of work...
...He was careful to keep himself fit (he n e i t h e r drank nor smoked) and well rested--Hamilton describes his annoyance at aides who woke him for anything less than the If you would like information on advertising in The American Spectator, please call or write: Susan France The American Spectator P.O...
...It was not until Bernard Montgomery took command of the 8th Army in Egypt in 1942 that Britain-and the A l l i e s - - p r o d u c e d a leader capable of arousing a spirit of unyielding offensive self-sacrifice . . . . ' ' Hamilton has other faults, among them a taste for psycho-twaddle...
...True, Hamilton does not conceal Monty's petty viciousness and most other flaws in his character - - b u t he does try to excuse them...
...He even forgets that military history makes little sense without detailed and colorful topographical description...
...Like a latter-day Wilsonian, Naipaul wants to make the Islamic World safe for democracy...
...They will, of course, agree with Naipaul's criticisms of the Moslem s t a t e ' s confusion of political and religious spheres and its attempt to create a religious utopia...
...Similarly, he would drive his men hard, when necessary, but placed particular importance on the kinds of small creature comforts and recreation that keep soldiers going...
...on Horseback is not, however, another study of TR's colorful and combative Presidency...
...Of Lincoln's penchant for melancholy dreams...
...His methods ranged from individual training of the soldier to tactical exercises without troops for his officers, to eleven-day corps-sized "rough houses" with tens of thousands of men and all their paraphernalia...
...But it had the flaw of its origins--the flaw that ran right through Islamic history: to the political Lssues It ratsed it offered no political or practical solution...
...They will confound the fervor of Iran's Marxist students with the zeal of her Moslem mullahs, and prescribe as an antidote the benign reasonableness of the secular West, with its pursuit of comfort and exaltation of material well-being...
...Tolstoy might have provided him with a clue in "What Men Live By...
...TR's father, the first Theodore Roosevelt, affectionately known to the family as "Thee," moved at a social level where public spiritedness did not readily translate into an interest in politics--and in fact bred a certain contempt for it...
...Monty's greatest asset, however, was his ability to impress his military persona--his way of doing things, and his intentions--on the Eighth Army...
...Montgomery's great ability, in the words of Brigadier John Strawson, "was that he seemed to know exactly what to do, explained it in terms which made everyone both clear as to what was required and convinced that it was right, and then went on actually to do it...
...In this light, Hamilton's indiscriminate volubility proves to be the book's main strength...
...Hamilton is a poor hand at giving the political and sometimes even the military background of the events he describes-at best, he offers only stage flats to set off the strutting of his hero...
...Bloommgton, Indtana says in the Foreword, "the gift of his friendship--the manner in which he took me into his house as a second s o n - - i s not something I can ever f o r g e t ; and in...
...For one thing, Hamilton's account reveals Montgomery's uncommon skill at training troops...
...He was open to technical inventions and advances, such as airborne warfare or the possibilities of close air support...
...Monty knew how to pace himself and his men...
...Tempted," because t h e r e are radical differences--radical disagreements--between Islam and the West...
...Henderson's Stonewall Jackson, or Field Marshal Slim's memoirs, Defeat Into Victory...
...Of Jefferson's pet mockingbird...
...One of his f i r s t and most important decisions upon arriving in North Africa was that henceforth units would fight as divisions (the basic combined arms team) rather than in smaller ad hoc groups...
...Unlike all previous historians, Hamilton had complete access to Montgomery's papers...
...R o o s e v e l t ' s strangeness lay, for the most part, in the elements of his heritage, awaiting transmittal...
...undertaking this biography I felt I would be repaying a debt of g r a t i t u d e . " This, then, is hardly an objective piece of work, however honorable the biographer's motives...
...Of all the notable Presidents this "accidental President" at 42 was probably the most unusual...
...In some measure this is a welcome development--unlike too many of our officers today, none of the great commanders of World War II that I know of had advanced degrees in business administration...
...In short, even if Monty's men did not love him--he was a remote and indeed unlovable man--they trusted him...
...But his situation was quite impossible...
...Even in Great Britain, Monty's reputation has suf~fered under the onslaughts of Corelli Barnett's The Desert Generals and Alun Chalfont's unauthorized biography...
...The American armed forces--and to a greater extent sections of the informed American public--are turning against the "managerial" officer in favor of the "warrior" type...
...Few of our more uncommon Presidents, one suspects, would have survived the devices of electronic politics...
Vol. 15 • March 1982 • No. 3
