Montgomery and the Battle of Normandy: A Selection from the Diaries, Correspondence and other Papers of Field Marshal The Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, January to August, 1944 (review)

Almost two decades after the publication of the volume, Montgomery and the Eighth Army, which Stephen Brooks edited for the Army Records Society, readers will welcome this new volume from the Army Records Society, again edited by Brooks. The volume consists of some 150 documents covering the critical eight months leading up to D-Day and the climactic Battle of Normandy which was the beginning of the end of Hitler's Third Reich. In his outstanding 1995 book, Why the Allies Won, Richard Overy summed up the outcome succinctly: "Allied victory in France put paid to any prospect that Germany could avoid defeat."

Stephen Brooks's documentary volume is the next best thing to the experience of reading the primary documents themselves in the domed reading room of the Imperial War Museum. In a volume necessarily limited in size, it is impossible to include all of Monty's memoranda and letters, which doubtless explains the omission of his memorandum of 6 July 1944, regarding the tank: "I cannot emphasize too strongly that victory in battles depends not on tank action alone, but on the intimate cooperation of all arms; the tank by itself can achieve little." If such an omission is perfectly understandable, it is less easy to excuse the absence of maps.

Although there are no startling revelations among these documents, one is reminded of the enormity of Montgomery's achievement when he returned to England from North Africa in January 1944: he found a people who were getting war weary and where enthusiasm was lacking. Hard-pressed workers had no holidays, lived in half-heated homes, and blackouts and black streets at night added to the grimness of life. "Austerity followed one about like a lean and hungry dog," wrote Alan Moorehead. Besides spreading his own absolute confidence to young, apprehensive soldiers, at the request of the Ministry of Supply, Monty was asked to talk to workers up and down wartime Britain. The Ministry of Supply thanked Monty for serving as tonic to a workpeople who had been getting somewhat jaded and needed some inspiration to carry them on. As we learn in these documents, the Prime Minister was not as pleased: Montgomery was to stop his "public tours & civic receptions." Previously, King George VI had been very critical of Monty's wearing the black beret of the Royal Armored Corps, and his "flagrant departures from the orthodox uniform of a general" (p. 325). At a February audience with the King, when Monty explained the morale value of the black beret and how the beret made him instantly recognizable to his men, the King raised no further objections to the beret. In a British army where "spit and polish" remained a prominent feature of army life, and an army that continued to mirror a class conscious society (see Jeremy A. Crang's study, The British Army and the People's War 1939-1945), the informal, untraditional, maverick Montgomery was able to bridge the gulf between himself and his men. Nowhere was Montgomery's concern for the welfare of his men more obvious than in his determination not to waste their lives.

While readers will draw their own conclusions from reading these documents, in the opinion of the reviewer, the collection supports the conclusion reached by Carlo D'Este in his masterful work, Decision in Normandy, that despite all of the criticism leveled at Montgomery, in the epic battles of El Alamein and Normandy, Monty displayed the rare qualities that one expects to find in the great battlefield commander, including a flexibility of mind and the ability to adjust when confronted with the unexpected. In the last volume of his tour...