Arra Revised: Fill & Download for Free

There’s a passage early in Hemingway’s Across the River And Into the Trees where U.S. Army Colonel Richard Cantwell goes into Harry’s Bar in Venice to meet a war correspondent buddy and they order “Montys” - martinis made in the ratio 50:1, gin to Vermouth. This tells you all you need to know of Americans’ view of the secrets of General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery’s success in battle.This is of course unfair but does contain a kernel of truth. Montgomery had fought bravely in the First World War, having been shot through the lung at First Ypres and returned to fight at Arras and Passchendaele.He had seen far too many young lives thrown away in attacks with little chance of success and determined he would not be guilty of the same. He would not commit his men to battle until he had maximised all the factors in their favour as far as he could.So he was a very cautious general and also a highly organised and professional one. His 3rd (Iron) Infantry Division had been one of the few ‘stars’ of the BEF campaign in France and Belgium that ended at Dunkirk, making a brilliant impromptu night march across the perimeter, from right flank to extreme left to plug the gap left by the Belgian collapse.His doctrine for military operations combined maximum energy and preparation with ruthless appraisal of the actual prospects of achieving a worthwhile result. This was evident in his approach to the problems of intervention in Ireland in the early 1920s, where he combined an Ulsterman’s uncompromising attitude to policing with an early recommendation that the British Army should withdraw.Later, in the 1930s, he proved himself one of the few British commanders with insights into the challenges of combined operations and was notably successful in putting down insurrection in Palestine.He is criticised in North Africa for merely inheriting Auchinleck’s battle plan for Alam Halfa Ridge and for a bloody ‘battering ram’ approach to ‘Operation Lightfoot’ at El Alamein. In the first instance, Montgomery considerably revised and developed the armoured and infantry deployments and in the second, the whole point about the Alamein position was that there was no open flank between sea and Qattara Depression - and that worked both ways. As it was, it is striking that Monty was able to predict that the 8th Army would take ten days to break through the deep Axis defences and suffer 13,900 casualties. Both estimates were exactly correct.It may also be significant that his 8th Army was able to make considerably faster progress from Egypt to Tunis than the combined US First Army and British Ist Army was able to make from Algeria. Yes, the terrain was somewhat easier, but they had further to go and also had to breach the Mareth Line in Tunisia.These were the last campaigns Montgomery was able to fight as purely ‘British’ (Commonwealth) affairs. From Sicily onwards, he would be campaigning in partnership with American generals: Patton, Clark, Bradley, Hodges and Eisenhower. These caused new problems, In the first two instances, both were ‘grandstanders’, less interested in fighting an integrated battle than in maximising personal glory. In the case of Hodges, there is evidence that he didn’t have the same ‘grip’ on the battle that Montgomery had. The collaborations with Bradley, “the soldier’s general” and Ike were most successful but here Montgomery was his worst enemy with his abrupt, patronising and arrogant manner.Nevertheless, I remain persuaded that his approach to the campaign, emphasising a concentrated 40-division thrust across the North German plain towards Hamburg, enveloping the Ruhr from the north, was fundamentally more ‘sound’ (another favourite Monty word) than the American broad front approach in which Patton spent weeks battering his head against Metz and Bradley suffered hideous casualties in the ‘green hell’ of the Huertgen . Operation Market Garden was well conceived when first proposed but overly delayed and badly handled, particularly by the Airborne Corps commander, Browning.Above all, when analysing the performance of British and American generals in Europe, it has to be remembered that they were handling reluctant citizen armies from democracies with all the resulting political imperatives not to take heavy casualties. The Germans and Soviets were not operating under the same constraints.So, not a bad general but also one who was not as successful as he could have been, given a less abrasive appoach to dealing with his peers and political masters.

It was a British Offensive on a 22 mile front it was the first use of the revised tactics gradually coming into usage and the initial two days gve specticulat results in captured ground including Vimy Ridge but the offnsive bogged down later ionBattle of Arras (1917) - Wikipedia

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