Early on the morning of 12 August 1942 Lieutenant General Bernard Montgomery arrived in Cairo by plane from England, in response to an urgent summons. The previous nine days had been momentous ones in terms of Great Britain’s conduct of the Second World War. Both the Prime Minister and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff had been in the Egyptian capital with the express purpose of finding a solution to what the former considered to be serious deficiencies in the command of the British and Empire forces in the Western Desert. A calamitous defeat in June and a retreat to a line some 70 miles west of Alexandria, the furthest the Axis armies had advanced since the beginning of the war, had created a huge threat to Britain’s strategic position in the Middle East and even, by extension, to India.
Although the enemy army had been halted, there was little evidence in Churchill’s opinion of any plans to defeat it comprehensively. His remedy was change at the top. General Sir Claude Auchinleck was replaced as C-in-C Middle East by General Sir Harold Alexander, who arrived in Cairo only three days before Montgomery. Auchinleck’s Chief of Staff and his Deputy were also dismissed. A more difficult question arose over the selection of a new leader for the Eighth Army, which Auchinleck himself had been commanding since the end of June. Alan Brooke, the CIGS, strongly favoured Montgomery, but Churchill insisted on the appointment of Lieutenant General ‘Strafer’ Gott, a corps commander in the Army with considerable experience in the desert. Against his better judgement Brooke agreed, but on 7 August Gott was killed when the transport plane in which he was returning to Cairo was shot down by German fighters. Montgomery, at this time by no means a favourite of Churchill’s, was duly summoned.
By the time Montgomery arrived, Churchill and Brooke had moved on to a meeting with Stalin in Moscow, although they were to reappear in Egypt five days later. Montgomery was thus briefed initially by Auchinleck and then by Alexander before leaving for his first visit to Eighth Army early the next morning. By a happy chance the Brigadier General Staff at Army HQ was a friend of many years’ standing, Freddie de Guingand, who had himself been in the post for less than three weeks. Montgomery signalled de Guingand to meet him at the crossroads outside Alexandria and accompany him to Eighth Army’s Advanced HQ, situated not far behind the front line. By the time they arrived he was well briefed on the situation, which he found inherently unsatisfactory, so much so that he took immediate command of the Army, notwithstanding an agreement with Auchinleck that this should not happen for another two days. That evening he addressed Eighth Army staff in terms that all of them would remember for the rest of their lives.
Other than de Guingand and Brian Robertson, the Deputy Adjutant and Quartermaster General, the senior members of the staff were all new to Montgomery. The reputation which preceded him was of a man who had strong views on the capabilities of individual officers. He divided them into two categories, ‘absolutely first class’ and ‘quite useless’, and was both ruthless in weeding out those in the latter category and highly skilled in engineering their replacement by others in whom he reposed confidence. It is extraordinary, therefore, that a significant number of the key staff officers not only survived the first few weeks but continued to work for Montgomery throughout his time at Eighth Army and then followed him to 21st Army Group on his appointment as its C-in-C. On VE Day many of the senior officers at Army Group HQ could remember vividly that first electrifying address outside the Mess Tent on the Ruweisat Ridge.
Military histories and biographies seldom dwell at any length on the staff, preferring to focus attention on those either determining strategy or doing the actual fighting. Yet in twentieth and twenty-first century warfare, with all its complexities, excellent staff work at all levels has been fundamental to success, and was never more so than in the Second World War. The armies and army groups in the Great War may have been as large as or even larger than those in the subsequent conflict, but they were all too often static. The Second World War, by contrast, saw enormous bodies of men move great distances, often on long lines of communication, in successions of multifaceted operations involving not only ground, but also naval and air forces. Putting these armies into the field, controlling their actions and then sustaining them over long periods of time required organizational skills of a high order and on a scale hitherto unknown.
The staff came away from the Great War with a poor reputation. The image of red-tabbed officers living comfortably in French chateaux far behind the front is an enduring one. At higher HQs this was often the case, and Montgomery himself was struck by the lack of connection between their staff and those doing the fighting, a state of affairs which strongly influenced his own military philosophy. At divisional and brigade HQs this was far from the truth, but the standard of staff work was inevitably affected by the decision to close the staff colleges for the duration of the War, in retrospect a great mistake. By the start of the Second World War, the situation had changed. Almost every general officer who would hold high command or a senior staff position had been through the two-year course at one of the two staff colleges at Camberley and Quetta, whilst many of the best had also taught there; and although some of them might have been disinclined to pursue a career in staff work, they had a very good idea of what it involved. Just as importantly, not only did the two staff colleges remain open for the duration of the war, but they were joined by a third, at Haifa in Palestine. The courses were cut down from two years to less than six months and focused exclusively on preparing officers for staff work at General Staff Officer Grade 2 and Deputy Assistant Quartermaster General or Adjutant General level, appointments holding the rank of major. The supply of trained officers was thus maintained and, as many of them had also seen active service, they came with added credibility and attracted less resentment from their brother officers at the front than their Great War forebears.
As a military historian and biographer I had, like most of my fellow authors, focused on field commanders. Whilst casting around for a suitable subject for a new book, however, I was offered access to the papers of General Sir Charles Richardson. Richardson was one of those who had been at Eighth Army HQ on 13 August 1942 and had then accompanied Montgomery all the way from El Alamein to the Baltic, except for a brief period when he was lent to General Mark Clark. He had written his own autobiography and, just as importantly, was the biographer of Freddie de Guingand; his papers were thus of potentially considerable value. The germ of an idea began to take shape that I could explore many aspects of the staff in the field, built around the figure of Britain’s best known general of the twentieth century. I took the idea in the first instance to David Montgomery, not only because he was an authority on his father, but also because he had met many of the key members of his staff. His considerable enthusiasm encouraged me to believe that this would be an excellent subject.
Further investigation showed that there was no lack of source material. As they were required to do, each of the staff branches and sub-branches kept war diaries, which are varying in quality but nevertheless full of day-to-day information which throws some light on their activities. There is no lack of other official and semi-official documents bearing on the subject. Perhaps more importantly, many of those who had belonged to the HQs subsequently went into print: de Guingand, Richardson and several more by way of published autobiographies, others through rather more informal reminiscences. The officers at Montgomery’s Tactical HQ (‘Tac HQ’) were particularly prolific, possibly because their very closeness to the C-in-C meant that their experiences went well beyond those of the average staff officer. Many of the key figures also recorded interviews, now in the archives of the Imperial War Museum, the majority of which were conducted by Nigel Hamilton during the writing of his magisterial three-volume biography of Montgomery.
Monty, as he was familiarly known and will henceforward be called in this book, was fortunate to have inherited a talented group of individuals at Eighth Army HQ. That they had yet to be welded into a cohesive team was the result both of weak command in the past and, more recently, of extreme confusion. Monty, for his part, knew a great deal about staff work, both theoretical and practical. He had served on the Western Front in the Great War as a Brigade Major, as a GSO2 in both a division and a corps and briefly as the GSO1 of another division. He had attended the post-war course at Camberley in 1920, when it still lasted for a single year, and followed this with three successive staff appointments. He was on the Directing Staff at Camberley for three years in the late 1920s and Chief Instructor at Quetta in the mid-1930s. He had commanded, successively, a brigade, two divisions (one of them in action), two corps and a Home Forces command, the last the equivalent of an army and referred to as such by Monty. There was little he did not know about the work of the General Staff branch, but he was also very familiar with A and Q, the Adjutant General’s and Quartermaster General’s branches, and had strong views on administration.
This might have been intimidating within his HQs, but in fact Monty, or ‘Master’ as he was called behind his back, never interfered with staff work. His style of leadership was to select the best people, inform them fully of his plans and then let them get on with the job. If they were good, and most of them were, they survived. If not, and there are relatively few examples, they left. His insistence on running his campaigns from a small Tac HQ meant that he actually distanced himself physically from what was happening at his Main and Rear HQs. The key members of the staff were required to visit him frequently, but even in North Africa, once the army was on the move, Monty rarely spent time at his Main HQ and almost never visited his Rear HQ, whilst at 21st Army Group he knew few below the heads of branches and those at Tac HQ.
While the main objective of this book is to shine a light on Monty’s staff, the book is inevitably just as much about him. The story of the staff can only be told in the context of the events in which he played the leading part, but what it attempts to do is to describe how those events were influenced by the work and advice of his staff. Several thousand officers and men served in the HQs of Eighth Army and 21st Army Group between 1942 and 1945, but the focus must inevitably alight on relatively few of them, broadly divided into two groups. The first of these consists of the major players, headed by de Guingand and including the heads of the various staff branches and functions and the senior advisers. The second group contains those much more junior officers who were physically close to Monty, his personal staff and personal liaison officers, the latter something of an innovation and a most important ingredient of Monty’s approach to running a campaign.
In order to appreciate how all these men made their individual contributions, it is also necessary to understand something about their work. The organization of Eighth Army HQ was relatively straightforward. Its strength fluctuated, rather depending on what the Army was doing at the time. At its peak it contained over 200 officers and 1200 other ranks, but in the quiet patch between the end of the Tunisian campaign and the invasion of Sicily, the numbers dropped to 67 and 323 respectively. There was always a superior HQ – in order of succession, Middle East Command, 18th Army Group and 15th Army Group – to look after much of the logistics and take over the rear areas once these were liberated.
By contrast, 21st Army Group HQ was huge. It was itself the superior HQ for between two and four armies and, although SHAEF sat above it, in practice it handled all its own administrative requirements, which were highly complex. In addition to its armies it ran a large Line of Communications organization. It had branches and departments which were unheard of in the Eighth Army, such as Publicity & Psychological Warfare, Airfield Construction and Survey. Among many other activities it constructed and ran long pipelines to carry petroleum and aviation fuel, and it operated its own general hospitals. Unlike in Italy, where an organization divorced from military command relieved those doing the fighting as early as possible, 21st Army Group remained directly responsible for Civil Affairs in its rear areas and, from early 1945, for Military Government in its sector of Germany. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that by VE Day the combined Tac, Main and Rear HQs of the Army Group numbered over 1,000 officers and 3,500 other ranks.
In this book there is an inherent bias amongst the senior officers towards the general staff, as its work tended to have the greatest impact on events, but I have not ignored the logistical side which made such a huge contribution to victory. The A, or personnel, staff gets less attention, but it was as vital as the others in the overall scheme of things and I have covered it in general, particularly in 21st Army Group, although there are few mentions of individuals.
It is also essential to look at Eighth Army before Monty’s arrival. Although he was the agent of considerable change in the army itself, at Army HQ the detailed staff work continued much as before and there were few changes in personnel. The contrast between the ways in which Auchinleck and Monty used their staff, on the other hand, was substantial.
Whilst Monty dominates the story, the ‘hero’ of the book is really de Guingand, the man who made it all happen. He was the antithesis of ‘Master’, most noticeably because of his emollient character: if Monty ruffled feathers, de Guingand smoothed them, and on at least one occasion he saved Monty from the potentially disastrous consequences of his actions. The members of the staff were devoted to him on a much more personal level than they were to Monty. They also admired him hugely for his professionalism and dedication. As the second dominant personality in this story from mid-1942 onwards, he is referred to throughout by the name by which he was known to everyone, superiors, peers and subordinates, British and Allies – ‘Freddie’.
On 8 June 1946, a great Victory Parade was held in London, with representatives of the Armed Forces and Civilian Services and detachments from the British Empire and most of the United Nations. The members of the Chiefs of Staff Committee had a prominent role both in the parade and on the saluting base, whilst field commanders were present in abundance, including Monty, who was rapturously received by the crowd. There were, however, no representatives of the staff of any of the various formations which had done the fighting. Lieutenant General Sandy Galloway, who had not only served as the very first BGS of Eighth Army, but had also succeeded Freddie as Chief of Staff of 21st Army Group immediately after the end of the war, wrote to him two days earlier:
I should have thought that they might have included some of the staff who played a part in all the immense work that went on. This war has not only been a war of commanders, but of intense and brilliant staff work.*
My hope is that this book will help to demonstrate the truth of Galloway’s words.
* Letter from Galloway to de Guingand, 6.11.46.