Montgomery: Unbeatable, Unbearable

The new biography by Gary Mead

Do we need another book on Montgomery of Alamein? If it is as good as this one, then my emphatic response is ‘Yes’. I think I have read most books on Monty (I had once planned to write a joint biography of Monty and Slim, but decided that it would be too humiliating for Monty’s memory that I have, at least for the time being, desisted) and rate this one highly. Mead resists the temptation to judge Monty, instead trying to understand him. He succeeds in his aim. You don’t need me to tell you that the best way to do this , as in much modern biography, is not via amateurish psychanalysis but by reporting what he said and did, and why. This is the best way to avoid making up ridiculous and tortuous commentary for instance on his sexual predilections, a trap into which fell both Alun Chalfont and Nigel Hamilton. This issue is easily and quickly disposed of: as Mead demonstrates, part of Monty’s complexity was his desperate need for maternal love and human affirmation. He couldn’t get it from adult men (because he saw men as competitors) and he couldn’t get it (generally) from women because he simply did not know how to communicate with the opposite sex. One of the most un-sexed people imaginable, Monty has been tarred with accusations of pedophilia by people who didn’t spend time with him and who have subsequently jumped to silly conclusions.

But this, of course, is peripheral to the Monty story. For the most part Mead accepts the Corelli Barnett and Barrie Pitt thesis, that the Monty legend was largely a product of his own machinations. He understood publicity in a way that Auchinleck and Slim didn’t, which is one of the reasons that his flame remains lit in British memory in a way that the aforementioned do not. This is not to say that Monty’s achievements were simply an unsubstantiated story. That would be ridiculous. Mead does a good job of laying these out, but strips them of Monty’s own post hoc spin. It reveals Monty as a great though flawed character, achieving much but deceiving himself and others about the true nature and extent of his greatness. The great sadness is to see how these flaws resulted in his long and lonely retirement, in which his only consolation was the adulation of the people of his generation who cheered him when he appeared in public. As this generation died off, so the adulation disappeared. Mead notes that in 2013 at the series of events in which my proposition of Bill Slim as Britain’s Greatest General tied with Wellington. Monty never even made the shortlist.