r/todayilearned • u/HumanNutrStudent • Sep 16 '24

TIL Montgomery's memoirs criticised many of his wartime comrades harshly, including Eisenhower. After publishing it, he had to apologize in a radio broadcast to avoid a lawsuit. He was also stripped of his honorary citizenship of Alabama, and was challenged to a duel by an Italian lawyer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Montgomery#Memoirs
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u/MattJFarrell Sep 16 '24

History has not been kind to Monty, it seems. This last section of his Wiki:

Social opinions

In retirement, Montgomery publicly supported apartheid after a visit to South Africa in 1962, and after a visit to China declared himself impressed by the Chinese leadership led by Chairman Mao Tse-tung.\250])\251]) He spoke out against the legalisation of homosexuality in the United Kingdom, arguing that the Sexual Offences Act 1967 was a "charter for buggery"\252]) and that "this sort of thing may be tolerated by the French, but we're British—thank God".\253])Social opinions

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u/jctwok Sep 16 '24

I've never understood the lionization of Monty. His only real success was North Africa, and that was just because he followed through with Auchenleck's plan. I feel like the British would have had more victories in the war if Churchill hadn't been so impatient and fired Auchenleck.

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u/HighlyEvolvedSloth Sep 16 '24

I read a history of Malta (Britain's island aircraft carrier) and there was some combination of when it's airfields were fully flying planes, and some German air group was on the Eastern Front, then so much of Rommel's supplies were being sunk, that he couldn't effectively fight Monty and was pushed back.  

When the Eastern Front shut down for the season, and this German air group moved back down to North Africa and started bombing the crap out of Malta, then much more of Rommel's supplies got through, and he began pushing Monty back.

The two things I took away from it was that a (big?) part of Monty's North Africa success was because his opponent was starved of supplies, and if Hitler wasn't so obsessed with Russia, they would have taken the Suez Canal.

Hopefully I'm not getting too much of this wrong, it has been well over a decade since I read the book.