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h i s t o r y a l a n a l l p ort Battle Basics Monty’s Men: The British Army and the Liberation of Europe, 1944–5 By John Buckley (Yale University Press 370pp £20) It is strange to recall that on the eve of the Allied invasion of Europe in spring 1944, almost five years into the Second World War, very few soldiers in the British Army had actually fired a shot in anger against the Germans. The campaigns in North Africa and Italy, though certainly ferocious, had involved relatively few troops. Most of the great conscript army that the British had painstakingly mobilised, equipped and trained since the Dunkirk debacle of 1940 had spent the entire war so far in the United Kingdom. Its servicemen, the overwhelming majority of them ordinary civilians who had been temporarily conscripted into the armed forces, were almost wholly untested. It seemed ominous to consider how these well-meaning but amateur warriors might fair against the battle-hardened veterans of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. The chief of the Imperial General Staff, Alan Brooke, was not alone in privately fearing that D-day could result in a humiliating bloodbath in which his landing forces would be swept back into the sea. In the event, Operation Overlord was a remarkable success, achieved at a relatively low cost in lives. And over the 11 months that followed D-day, the British Army in northwestern Europe, commanded by General (later Field Marshal) Bernard Montgomery, would march 600 miles from the Normandy beaches to Schleswig-Holstein on the German border with Denmark. The whole campaign would be concluded in a fraction of the time it had taken the first British Expeditionary Force to defeat the Kaiser’s army over much the same ground in the First World War, and with only 30,000 troops killed – compared to the 95,000 lost at the Battle of the Somme alone in 1916. No haunting memorials to vast numbers of slaughtered troops would need to be built after 1945 to compare with those at Thiepval or Ypres. The British people had every reason to be thankful to their most famous general of the war, and Monty was not shy about basking in their appreciation. Yet just a few years after this greatest of victories, questions were being asked (albeit discreetly) about whether Monty’s army had really been as effective as its former leader insisted. The influential military historian Basil Liddell Hart complained in private correspondence that while the British Army Monty: the lion in winter had done a fair enough job in France and Germany, it had hardly excelled. Its weapons, especially its tanks, were often inferior in quality to those of the enemy, while its soldiers had lacked initiative and drive, rarely taking the opportunity to really press the Germans as their commanders wished them to. Far from being lions led by donkeys, Liddell Hart jibed, they had been unenthusiastic donkeys led by frustrated lions. Such criticisms began to be more openly expressed as the years went on, and by the 1980s they had achieved the status of conventional wisdom, as expressed in books such as Max Hastings’s bestselling Overlord and John Ellis’s Brute Force. In those authors’ views, the Anglo-American forces in the west, and especially the British, had prevailed against the Germans in 1945 not because of any great competence on the battlefield, but through sheer, dull weight of numbers, including a massive advantage in firepower. These are the views that John Buckley seeks to challenge in his new history of Monty’s army from D-day to V-E Day. Buckley has already written persuasively about the armoured contest in Normandy, arguing that the fearsome reputation of German tanks such as the Tiger has been much overblown. Now he has extended his argument to the whole of the campaign in Europe and to all the British land forces involved. He seeks to rehabilitate an army which in his view has been unfairly labelled as mediocre. This does not mean that he maintains an unwavering appreciation of its commander. Indeed, Buckley acknowledges that part of the problem stems from Montgomery’s unwillingness, both at the time and in his postwar memoirs, to admit that he was ever wrong about anything. The official British history of the campaign, published in the 1960s, depicted Monty’s progress into Germany as a series of almost uninterrupted triumphs, and was so smugly complacent about what had occurred under the great general’s watch that it really invited the sharp revisionism of Hastings and Ellis. But Buckley believes that the pendulum has now swung too far the other way, and that it is time to reassess the achievements of an army which, for all its undoubted limitations, did achieve some remarkable things in 1944 and 1945. It is a worthy and ultimately convincing argument. Monty’s Men is not a sparkling read, and the somewhat laboured progress of the narrative can result in a long journey for the reader, but it is ultimately worth it. Buckley makes a powerful case that the German performance in the final year of the war has been wholly overrated because of an obsessive and misleading focus on close combat alone. While it is true that many individual Literary Review | d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 3 / j a n u a r y 2 0 1 4 12
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h i s t o r y Wehrmacht and SS formations fought tenaciously, even fanatically, in defence of the Fatherland, it was in the service of a flawed and ultimately doomed strategy. The ordinary British soldier rarely demonstrated the kind of implacable ferocity that his German counterpart often did, but it is unreasonable to suppose that he ever might have done. The Germans were fighting in defence of a totalitarian regime that had no compunction whatsoever about murdering tens of thousands of its own soldiers in order to stiffen their resolve. The British Army was composed of conscripts who stubbornly remained civilians under their uniforms to the end, and it had to respect the fact that there were definite limits to their willingness to sacrifice themselves for the cause, however just they felt it to be. Still, if Monty’s army lacked the grim fervour of Hitler’s, what it did possess was an overall operational coherence which the Germans, with their fixation on combat, lacked. The Wehrmacht paid far too little attention to the logistical underpinnings necessary to keep a modern military force viable in the long term – unglamorous but critical functions such as intelligence gathering, communications, supply, medical support and the welfare of the troops. It was in these areas that the British excelled, and, as Buckley shows in example after example, the disparity would mean that while the tough but brittle Wehrmacht would ultimately fracture into pieces under the stresses of continual battle, Monty’s force was able to endure a similar battering yet emerge from it whole. Bravery is all very well, but it is betrayed in the absence of cool, competent man-management, something the British demonstrated in 1944 and 1945 and the Germans did not. ‘Who won the bloody war anyway?’ Buckley is reminding everyone, in effect. And he has a good point. To order this book for £20, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 38 j ay pa r i n i Wire Power The Men Who United the States: The Amazing Stories of the Explorers, Inventors and Mavericks Who Made America By Simon Winchester (William Collins 463pp £25) Simon Winchester is one of those quintessentially British writers who will go anywhere, literally and figuratively. He is perhaps most famous for his bestselling The Professor and the Madman, a wholly original and compulsively readable book in which he explored the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. But he has also, in the course of many decades as a journalist and writer of nonfiction books, walked around Korea on foot, studied the violence of the Balkans up close and sat in prison in Argentina at the time of the Falkland mayhem of 1982 (he happened to be on the islands during the Argentine invasion and was later captured in Patagonia and jailed for several months). He has been a field geologist in Uganda and worked on an oil rig in the North Sea. What gives a kind of unity to the man and his work is a vast curiosity about the world. In book after book he lets himself roam freely in a subject, trying to find meaning in the broadest sense: the links that exist between isolated moments of individual inspiration and larger events – geological or psychic. In an age when specialists dominate most academic professions, it’s something of a relief to come upon the likes of Winchester, who is foolhardy enough to take huge intellectual leaps. No sane historian would want to go where he goes in The Men Who United the States. But, in large part because of his amateur status, boldness and decidedly nonacademic approach to history, Winchester achieves something quite remarkable here. The book is not perfect, of course. What book is? But it is remarkable. He wonders in these highly readable pages how it came to be that the various states of this extremely disparate country managed to Subscribe to and save more than 15% off the newsstand price See page 72 become the USA. He doesn’t, of course, ask whether this was a good thing or not. (I myself feel extremely uncomfortable whenever I leave Vermont; I regard Texas, in particular, as a place so foreign that it hardly seems to belong to the United States. But that’s me.) Winchester sets out, often on foot, to rediscover the men who managed to create an American infrastructure. Many of them, such as Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and Thomas Edison, are extremely well known; others, such as John Stevens, a pioneer in steam-propelled transportation, and Bill Siemering, who had a great deal to do with the establishment of National Public Radio (NPR), made huge contributions but seem to have slipped through the cracks of history. The book is neatly organised into five sections that connect to five elements: wood, earth, water, fire and metal. Each of these sections charts some particular phase in the development of a national infrastructure, whether it be the creation of roads, highway systems, canals and intercontinental railway links or the plan to push electric power lines and telephone lines from coast to coast. Winchester takes us all the way up to the recent creation of the internet – perhaps the most unexpected and powerful of all linking systems in history. Of course, the developments of national infrastructure relate closely to the idea of Manifest Destiny, which found an eloquent theorist in Frederick Jackson Turner, d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 3 / j a n u a r y 2 0 1 4 | Literary Review 13

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h i s t o r y a l a n a l l p ort

Battle Basics Monty’s Men: The British Army and the Liberation of Europe, 1944–5

By John Buckley (Yale University Press 370pp £20)

It is strange to recall that on the eve of the Allied invasion of Europe in spring 1944, almost five years into the Second World War, very few soldiers in the British Army had actually fired a shot in anger against the Germans. The campaigns in North Africa and Italy, though certainly ferocious, had involved relatively few troops. Most of the great conscript army that the British had painstakingly mobilised, equipped and trained since the Dunkirk debacle of 1940 had spent the entire war so far in the United Kingdom. Its servicemen, the overwhelming majority of them ordinary civilians who had been temporarily conscripted into the armed forces, were almost wholly untested. It seemed ominous to consider how these well-meaning but amateur warriors might fair against the battle-hardened veterans of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. The chief of the Imperial General Staff, Alan Brooke, was not alone in privately fearing that D-day could result in a humiliating bloodbath in which his landing forces would be swept back into the sea.

In the event, Operation Overlord was a remarkable success, achieved at a relatively low cost in lives. And over the 11 months that followed D-day, the British Army in northwestern Europe, commanded by General (later Field Marshal) Bernard Montgomery, would march 600 miles from the Normandy beaches to Schleswig-Holstein on the German border with Denmark. The whole campaign would be concluded in a fraction of the time it had taken the first British Expeditionary Force to defeat the Kaiser’s army over much the same ground in the First World War, and with only 30,000 troops killed – compared to the 95,000 lost at the Battle of the Somme alone in 1916. No haunting memorials to vast numbers of slaughtered troops would need to be built after 1945 to compare with those at Thiepval or Ypres. The British people had every reason to be thankful to their most famous general of the war, and Monty was not shy about basking in their appreciation.

Yet just a few years after this greatest of victories, questions were being asked (albeit discreetly) about whether Monty’s army had really been as effective as its former leader insisted. The influential military historian Basil Liddell Hart complained in private correspondence that while the British Army

Monty: the lion in winter had done a fair enough job in France and Germany, it had hardly excelled. Its weapons, especially its tanks, were often inferior in quality to those of the enemy, while its soldiers had lacked initiative and drive, rarely taking the opportunity to really press the Germans as their commanders wished them to. Far from being lions led by donkeys, Liddell Hart jibed, they had been unenthusiastic donkeys led by frustrated lions. Such criticisms began to be more openly expressed as the years went on, and by the 1980s they had achieved the status of conventional wisdom, as expressed in books such as Max Hastings’s bestselling Overlord and John Ellis’s Brute Force. In those authors’ views, the Anglo-American forces in the west, and especially the British, had prevailed against the Germans in 1945 not because of any great competence on the battlefield, but through sheer, dull weight of numbers, including a massive advantage in firepower.

These are the views that John Buckley seeks to challenge in his new history of Monty’s army from D-day to V-E Day. Buckley has already written persuasively about the armoured contest in Normandy, arguing that the fearsome reputation of German tanks such as the Tiger has been much overblown. Now he has extended his argument to the whole of the campaign in Europe and to all the British land forces involved. He seeks to rehabilitate an army which in his view has been unfairly labelled as mediocre. This does not mean that he maintains an unwavering appreciation of its commander. Indeed, Buckley acknowledges that part of the problem stems from Montgomery’s unwillingness, both at the time and in his postwar memoirs, to admit that he was ever wrong about anything. The official British history of the campaign, published in the 1960s, depicted Monty’s progress into Germany as a series of almost uninterrupted triumphs, and was so smugly complacent about what had occurred under the great general’s watch that it really invited the sharp revisionism of Hastings and Ellis. But Buckley believes that the pendulum has now swung too far the other way, and that it is time to reassess the achievements of an army which, for all its undoubted limitations, did achieve some remarkable things in 1944 and 1945.

It is a worthy and ultimately convincing argument. Monty’s Men is not a sparkling read, and the somewhat laboured progress of the narrative can result in a long journey for the reader, but it is ultimately worth it. Buckley makes a powerful case that the German performance in the final year of the war has been wholly overrated because of an obsessive and misleading focus on close combat alone. While it is true that many individual

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