Was There a ‘Monty Method’ after the Second World War? Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery and the Changing Character of Land Warfare,1945–1958

I. Early Thoughts on the Tactical Application of Nuclear Weapons

Central to Montgomery’s perceptions about the changing character of warfare after 1945 was that the growing strength of modern air power would have a decisive influence on the conduct of future land warfare. The operational experiences of the Second World War had exposed to Montgomery the importance of tactical air power to the success of major combat operations on the ground. ⁹ Such was his conviction that combined-arms operations were the cornerstone of modern military actions that he insisted ‘air power’ be added to the Army’s official ‘Principles of War’ list during the course of the war. ¹⁰ The first major post-war exercise to be developed by Montgomery as CIGS, Exercise Evolution of August 1946, acknowledged this realization in its attempt to enunciate in broad outline a tactical doctrine for the army. It reminded officers that all military operations must now be considered army/air operations and that before the land battle could be fought, the battle for control of the air must be won. Montgomery wrote that the concentrated use of air-striking forces would be a ‘battle-winning factor of the first importance’. ¹¹ Later, this realization would gain greater relevance for the Field Marshal during the 1950s, with the arrival of small-yield nuclear weapons in the armouries of the tactical air forces of the United States and the Soviet Union. Even in the immediate post-war years, however, when detailed information on the technical characteristics of the bomb was still sparse, Montgomery was beginning to consider how the increasing destructiveness of modern weapons would affect ground combat.

Exercise Evolution also drew attention to the technological developments in the nuclear sphere. One of the papers that was issued to officers before the exercise stated under the heading ‘Important Points to Remember’ that ‘the implications of the atomic bomb on strategy are now being studied’ but that ‘it is too early to make any deductions’. ¹² It went on to say that in a future war the atomic bomb would probably be employed strategically against the enemy and that some commentators had suggested that this would have decisive results, with the role of the Army being relegated to one of ‘mopping up’. In a rather polemic riposte to this proposition, the paper stated that:

A revolutionary conclusion of this nature should not be accepted unless the evidence to support this is incontestable. No such evidence is yet available, nor may it be for many years. We must therefore be prepared, as in the past, for battle on land. ¹³

It was in the context of the preparation for land combat under nuclear conditions that Exercise Spearhead took place at the Army Staff College, Camberley, from 5 to 10 May 1947. The exercise had been developed and organized by Montgomery and was the first time that the use of nuclear weapons was simulated in a major training exercise. Spearhead sought to study the technique of an opposed landing by amphibious forces. It was set two years in the future, in 1949, and dealt with the invasion of the Italian mainland by British forces that were opposed by the Axis powers as they had been organized during the final years of the Second World War. ¹⁴ Essentially, it was a rerun of the Salerno landings during Operation Avalanche in 1943, but with a modern twist – the atomic bomb.

Echoing the cautious sentiments that had been expressed during the earlier Evolution exercise, the instructions explained that ‘at the present stage of scientific development it is not possible to obtain a workable picture of the conditions of unrestricted atomic and bacteriological warfare’, and stated that there was therefore a limit to the degree to which such weapons could be introduced into a military exercise. Nonetheless, it was hoped that with what limited information was available, it would be possible to introduce some aspects of nuclear combat into the exercise, keeping in mind that ‘only the fringe of the subject has been broached, and that in the widest sense the generally accepted battle technique of the past has not been superseded’. ¹⁵ In his opening address to officers before the exercise commenced, Montgomery said that it was unlikely that the atomic bomb would be employed against troops in the field but it might well be used against ports, communications centres, maintenance areas, bridgeheads, and large troop concentrations. For that reason he suggested that the Army would have to operate in a more dispersed fashion than hitherto, to avoid presenting worthwhile targets for enemy atomic strikes. Importantly, he urged that the repercussions of greater dispersion on the conduct of the tactical battle had to be understood by all officers. ¹⁶

The Army outline plan for the exercise provides some insight into how Montgomery’s subordinates approached the challenges of mounting amphibious operations under nuclear conditions. As suggested by the CIGS, during the assault phase, commanders would have to disperse widely so that a large beachhead could be established in which follow-on forces could deploy in relative safety from atomic bomb attack. This dispersion, however, ‘must not be so great that the frontage becomes tactically unsound’. ¹⁷ The beachhead would then have to be pushed out as rapidly as possible to secure tactical ground in order to deny enemy observation over the beaches and to gain space for the dispersal of administrative facilities. ¹⁸ In this phase, speed would be essential. To prevent enemy mobile defence forces from checking the break-out thrust from the beachhead, ‘the possibility of employing an atomic bomb … is being considered at Supreme Allied Headquarters’. ¹⁹

The CIGS was pleased with the insights provided by the exercise, and afterwards wrote privately to his long-time friend and erstwhile chief of staff, Francis de Guingand, that ‘my Camberley exercise, Spearhead, was a tremendous success: quite the best thing I have seen for a long time’. ²⁰ When he addressed participants after the exercise, Montgomery had suggested that in order to perform such operations the Army would have to increase its efficiency in cross-country mobility, gain greater flexibility, and improve in its ability to deceive its opponent. ²¹ He concluded proceedings by informing officers that:

Military thought and tactical doctrine must always be well in advance of the time; the Army must be prepared mentally for new types of weapons and for the changed conditions of war which they bring about. The need to avoid large concentrations of troops vulnerable to mass destruction weapons conflicts with the tactical need to concentrate superior forces to overwhelm the enemy at the select time and place. The need to concentrate to achieve success in the offensive battle will continue but, in view of the dangers, concentration must be carried out as secretly and as quickly as possible. The tactical battle must be won as soon as possible so that the danger period is kept short and the Army may again seek safety in dispersion as early as possible. ²²

In order to keep tactical doctrine ‘well in advance of the time’, Montgomery established in 1948 a committee under General Sir John Crocker, the man he hoped would succeed him as CIGS, to rewrite the Army’s doctrine. Croker never was appointed head of the Army, Prime Minister Attlee believing Field Marshal Bill Slim to be better suited to the role, despite Montgomery’s objections. ²³ One can only speculate as to whether Montgomery would have had a greater influence over army matters had he got his way. Nonetheless, for the important job of reviewing Army doctrine Crocker was the ideal candidate. He was a problem solver, not a theorist, and had spent much of his career working through the issues of how to employ effectively armoured forces in deep manoeuvre operations, most notably during his secondment to the Royal Tank Corps Centre at Bovington during the 1930s. Montgomery wrote Crocker:

D.G.M.T. [Director General of Military Training] has been working away for some considerable time on various training publications. It is obvious that new ones are necessary since most of the existing ones are completely out of date. I have glanced through the drafts and am not at all satisfied with them … I have accordingly decided that the whole matter will be dealt with … by a small committee, of which you will be the Chairman. ²⁴

A cynic might observe that the work produced by the Crocker committee did not constitute a radical departure from the philosophy of the 21st Army Group’s way of doing business, but David French has shown that, through a closer examination, the three publications to emerge from the review actually contained far greater elements of manoeuvrist thinking than had previously been thought by historians. ²⁵

The capstone publication to emerge from Crocker’s enquiry was The Conduct of War (1950), which contained elements of both attrition and manoeuvre. The fundamental aim was not that of wearing down the enemy forces through attrition but the more manoeuvrist aim of breaking the enemy’s will to fight. It promoted the conduct of mobile, fluid operations, stressing that the ‘higher commander who can prevent the enemy from moving and who possesses mobility himself will always be successful’ and that an army with high mobility would always beat one that was based on numerical superiority. ²⁶ The Conduct of War also advocated a manoeuvre approach to the conduct of offensive operations, which would enable battles to be won in less time and with fewer casualties:

The enemy will be defeated with greater ease if he can be attacked on a flank or if a mobile force strong in armour can be loosed against his rear. The battle must therefore never be allowed to become or remain static. It will always be the aim of the commander to keep the battle open and to gain scope for manoeuvre. ²⁷

This approach to the conduct of ground combat was also advanced, to a lesser extent, within the other doctrinal pamphlets produced by the Crocker committee. For example, The Infantry Division in Battle (1950) reaffirmed the importance of the ‘tidy’ battlefield and the requirement to destroy the enemy through ‘hard and prolonged fighting’. ²⁸ However, it also urged commanders to take risks, exploit success with vigour, and abandon the more methodical methods to achieve decisive results, especially during the ‘break-out’ battle. ²⁹ Likewise, the 1952 companion to Infantry Division, which dealt with armoured forces, described the unique characteristics of armoured divisions as being those of mobility, flexibility, and hitting power. ³⁰ It stressed that the armoured division would lose much of its power if deployed in a static supporting role, and that ‘so long as a higher commander can keep his mass of armoured firepower mobile on the battlefield, so long will he hold the advantage’. ³¹ Although much of the language employed to describe mobile operations in these doctrinal pamphlets would have been familiar to senior officers who had commanded troops in the field during the Second World War, they do reflect a growing awareness for the need to relinquish some of the more methodical approaches to war-fighting if the Army hoped to emerge victorious in a future land war against a numerically superior Red Army.

From these publications emerged the Army’s written doctrine for nuclear land combat. In October 1954 the Army distributed its first training pamphlet, Notes on Atomic Warfare. ³² It was the first detailed assessment by the Army on the tactical application of nuclear weapons, but still remained true to the basic principles enunciated in The Conduct of War four years earlier. In 1958 the War Office published its first army-wide official doctrine for nuclear war-fighting, which was a clear evolution of previous thought. It covered a five-year period and assumed that the Army would have its own nuclear artillery and that most, if not all, of the infantry would be mounted in armoured personnel carriers. In line with previous conceptions of fighting a defensive battle under nuclear conditions, the pamphlet envisaged the BAOR holding a major natural or artificial obstacle, such as a river line, so as to canalize a Soviet advance where it could then be subjected to nuclear fires and counter-attacked by mobile armoured forces. ³³ This doctrine was to stay with the Army well into the 1960s.

Montgomery’s influence upon Army doctrine during his time as the professional head of the service was therefore less constraining than the historiography of the post-war Army has suggested. The two exercises instigated by the then CIGS, Evolution and Spearhead, sought to understand the lessons of the past in order to inform thinking about future warfare so that the Army would be prepared to fight and prevail in a modern technological environment. Weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, were factored into these studies and revealed some of the problems that might be expected when operating in a nuclear environment. The conclusions drawn from Spearhead were that in order to circumvent the effects of enemy nuclear firepower, ground forces would need to be dispersed over great distances, possess high levels of tactical mobility, and be extremely flexible. These characteristics would become the pillars that would support later BAOR organizations during the middle 1950s when tactical nuclear weapons became integrated into NATO ground-force structures. As early as the late 1940s, however, the written doctrine produced by the Crocker committee was beginning to reflect the changing character of warfare with its emphasis on practising manoeuvre warfare within a high-tempo, fluid battlefield environment.

II. Forging the Weapon and the New Approach

In 1948, as noted, Montgomery left the War Office to become chairman of the Commanders-in-Chief Committee of the newly established Western Union Defence Organization. The organization would provide the blueprints for NATO’s military command structure, SHAPE, of which he became deputy commander in 1951 until his retirement seven years later. Working in an unprecedented international military headquarters provided Montgomery with unique insights into the dilemmas of Western European defence during the uncertain post-war years. Although in these positions Montgomery did not hold field command, but was concerned primarily with strategic planning and higher defence issues, he did dedicate time to thinking about the changing character of warfare and how this would affect NATO ground forces, especially those operating in the vital Central Front region. In this context Montgomery became NATO’s blacksmith, dedicated to forging the alliance a new weapon.

One of the earliest insights into the military thought of Montgomery as an international soldier can be gleaned from a memorandum from September 1951 to his SHAPE chief of staff. In it he describes his thoughts on the conduct of land operations of the future, in which success would depend on NATO’s ‘exploitation of the armoured vehicle’. Only through the ‘speedy, bold and skilful use of armor [sic]’ did Montgomery believe that Allied ground forces could mount a successful defence of the Central Front. Emulating the language of manoeuvre warfare that permeated the Crocker committee’s recently published doctrinal pamphlets, the Field Marshal wrote that since attacking forces would be canalized by road networks and other terrain features, ‘our aim will certainly be to attack the flanks and rear of such columns, creating maximum confusion and paralysis’. ³⁴ The use of terms such as ‘speedy’, ‘bold’, ‘confusion’, and ‘paralysis’ is the classical lexicon of manoeuvrist thought. As will be shown, this emphasis on mobile armoured forces conducting deep manoeuvre operations would underpin much of Montgomery’s thinking about the land battles of the future.

The platform Montgomery used throughout his NATO career to disseminate his new visions of future war were the annual command-post exercises at SHAPE. These exercises were designed and directed by Montgomery himself. An ardent promoter of the benefits of commanders creating their own working ‘atmospheres’, he believed that these events would allow the Supreme Commander to ‘impress his personality and military philosophy on his forces’. ³⁵ By all senior commanders being assembled at SHAPE once a year for this purpose, the broader problems confronting commanders could be studied at a high level, and those officers who had exercised high command in the field could disseminate their experiences and knowledge to help craft strategical and tactical concepts. It was planned that the command exercises would be the prelude to that particular year’s military manoeuvres.

Montgomery used these opportunities to impress his military vision on the senior military officers and defence ministers of NATO member nations. Field Marshal Lord Carver recalled that these annual exercises were one of the most valuable things that Montgomery contributed at SHAPE. They provided an opportunity for senior officers, who would not normally see one another, to meet in order to discuss the military problems confronting NATO. Montgomery took ownership of the exercises with relish and was entirely responsible for planning the scenarios and managing the events independent from the Supreme Commander. If Montgomery was the blacksmith that forged NATO’s weapon, then this was his anvil. The climax of each exercise was the DSACEUR’s closing address in which he would peer into the future of modern warfare. These lectures would form the foundation of all of Montgomery’s public speaking for the following year during his seemingly endless missions to various defence ministries and parliaments around Europe and North America. ³⁶ In this capacity Montgomery assumed the characteristics, according to his biographer, of a ‘visionary’, a ‘preacher’, and adopted an almost ‘saintly air’ to his behaviour. ³⁷

Command Post Exercise (CPX) I was held at SHAPE from 7 to 11 April 1952, and was lauded by the then SACEUR General Dwight D. Eisenhower as being ‘a milestone in SHAPE’s accomplishments’. ³⁸ More than 200 Allied officers of general rank attended Montgomery’s exercise where they were confronted forcibly with the military problems they could be expected to face if war broke out in Europe. The purpose of the exercise as articulated by Montgomery was to take ‘the military problem that confronts us in Europe and, with that background, to study the stage management and conduct of mobile operations in the early stages of a war’. ³⁹ The strategic setting for the exercise envisaged the employment of the US Sixth Fleet, a Fast Carrier Task Force with atomic capability, and a study of the tactical application of nuclear weapons. It became clear during the exercise that the examination of the effects of new weapons was a priority. Tactical mobility would be essential since, according to the Field Marshal, echoing a passage from the 1950 pamphlet The Conduct of War, ‘the higher commander who can prevent the enemy from moving, and who possesses mobility himself, will succeed’. ⁴⁰ Although greater mobility and the tactical use of nuclear weapons might act as force multipliers in the face of certain Soviet numerical ground-force superiority, Montgomery stressed that ultimately the ‘one factor in which we can enjoy a great advantage, both at the outset and throughout, is in brains’. ⁴¹

The following year’s exercise, CPX II, explored in greater detail the effects of nuclear weapons on modern war, including the tactical use of the atomic bomb in the land battle. ⁴² In his closing address Montgomery said that, if properly used, tactical nuclear weapons could be a ‘battle-winning factor of the first magnitude’. The survival of Allied ground forces in the opening stages of a third world war might depend, he warned, on whether they could learn to use tactical nuclear weapons effectively and capitalize on the tremendous firepower that they would provide commanders on the battlefield. Therefore, ‘our job is to so organise and conduct the battle that we force the enemy to present us with targets suitable for atomic attack’. Montgomery believed that the ability to bring about those conditions might well be the decisive factor in a future war. ⁴³

Montgomery also touched upon the tactical problems of fighting a future land war in the modern technological environment, urging commanders to learn the lessons of past wars. He believed that the influence of the linear tactics of the 1914 era, and of the opening stages of the 1939–45 war, was still having a dangerous effect on military thinking within NATO. He criticized the then popular idea that unless there was sufficient strength in land forces to form a continuous, impenetrable line across Europe then there could be no hope of a successful defence of Allied territory. Montgomery believed this notion to be ‘madness’, not least because he believed it would be economically ruinous to provide land forces on such a scale. Rather, he advocated a more manoeuvrist approach to offensive and defensive operations in modern warfare:

Attack is a matter of concentrating secretly a strong mobile force which is capable of smashing through the defender’s front and then of maintaining the advance to a great depth with a speed which constantly overtakes the defender’s ability to recover his balance. The defenders ability to react is throttled by the flexible use of air power. ⁴⁴

The proper defence against this kind of attack he believed had three essentials:

The attacker must not be able to gain complete mastery in the air. The defender must not be knocked off his balance by the first onslaught. The defence must be able to react with swift sharp blows before the attack has had time to exploit its initial advantage. ⁴⁵

In order to conduct manoeuvre warfare of this nature, Montgomery called for greater mobility and flexibility in NATO ground forces. This he saw as the key to victory over the Soviet masses since ‘if we can move more quickly than the Russians, and can concentrate a hard-hitting punch against them when they are off-balance, we can defeat them’. ⁴⁶

In May 1952 General Matthew Ridgway succeeded Eisenhower as SACEUR for a brief one-year stint until he himself was replaced by General Alfred Gruenther in July 1953. Under the latter’s command Montgomery’s thinking about modern warfare matured, and NATO’s weapon began to be hammered into shape. By this time it had become clear to NATO military leaders that they lacked the necessary combat-ready divisions, reserves, air-defence units, command-and-control systems, logistical systems, and other resources to guarantee a successful defence of Western Europe in the event of a Soviet attack. Therefore, the only deterrent to war remained the capability of the US Strategic Air Command and the UK Bomber Command to carry out a nuclear attack upon an aggressor’s homeland. This restricted SACEUR’s options of response to any other form of limited contingencies that might not warrant the immediate and massive use of strategic nuclear weapons. Consequently, on Montgomery’s insistence, Gruenther established a ‘New Approach Group’ (NAG) to recast NATO defensive concepts in the hope of strengthening the overall capacity of the Allies to cope with an attack, and to allow greater optional selectivity for SACEUR in his responses. The NAG was the first special study group to operate for an extended period of time at SHAPE, and its work was given the highest priority. An issue of primary concern for the NAG was the possibility of linking conventional ground forces to ‘new weapons’, the implied name given to American tactical nuclear weapons which were then nearing operational status. ⁴⁷

Montgomery was not completely seduced by the allure of the atom, however. In a memorandum prepared for Gruenther as he assumed his new position as Supreme Commander, Montgomery warned his new boss against investing too much hope in atomic weapons to solve the military problems facing his command. He suggested that the arrival of the atomic bomb might force a re-evaluation of tactical conceptions and that it might also allow the Allies to redress the balance of power with the Soviet Union in both the strategical and tactical fields. Yet, he counselled that ‘none of the present claims … can be proved; they are imponderables’. He was sure that the use of the atomic bomb would have a retarding effect on the enemy movement westwards, ‘but we cannot say how great that retardation will be’. In the context of the relationship between nuclear weapons and conventional ground forces, Montgomery offered an analogy of a hammer and an anvil: ‘The hammer is the strategic air offensive. The anvil is the tactical land/air forces holding the enemy in the vital sectors of the “free-world front”.’ ⁴⁸

This integration of nuclear weapons into broader concepts of the land battle, especially in the vital Central Front region, was a turning point in NATO strategy. Montgomery was the chief architect of this ‘New Look’ nuclear posture, and the tactical application of nuclear weapons in support of ground forces became central to his vision of future land warfare. However, he had yet to communicate this new philosophy to the SHAPE staff itself. The critique of Exercise Try Out II, on 20 July 1953, provided Montgomery with the opportunity to articulate to senior officers his views on the changing character of warfare. Commenting after the exercise, he informed participants that:

Air power is the dominant factor in modern war. There is one way and one way only in which SACEUR can influence the war in the first few weeks, and that is by air power. He must be able to control and coordinate the air operations, coordinate air defence matters throughout his command, and control the employment of atomic weapons in support of the land forces. ⁴⁹

Montgomery’s diarist noted that his speech was ‘refreshing, clear and constructive’ and was met at its conclusion with ‘an instantaneous ovation which lasted minutes’. The address was deemed a success because ‘it was quite apparent that he had been understood’. ⁵⁰

With the SHAPE staff now fully absorbed in the new working atmosphere, Montgomery addressed the NAG on 21 January 1954 and informed it that planning at SHAPE ‘must be based on the assumption that both sides use atomic weapons from the outset’, since the Soviets would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons in a future war and the Allies would therefore be forced to use them in reply. ⁵¹ The Field Marshal’s concept of such a nuclear land war was that in the central European region, a tough resilient shield of mobile ground forces would be anchored on strong troop concentrations on the flanks in Hamburg to the north and Bavaria to the south. In the middle lay the mass of central Europe which was interspersed with a number of major rivers, all of which ran roughly north to south. Montgomery proposed that these rivers should form a forward obstacle line that was protected by a light screen of mobile covering troops, whose job was to canalize attacking forces so that they presented a profitable target for nuclear strikes. Behind the obstacle line there would be deployed an extremely mobile corps of hard-hitting units that would range swiftly from one end to the other conducting local counter-attacks and breaking up the enemy formations. ⁵²

During Command Post Exercise IV in April 1954, military officials and civilian dignitaries from all NATO nations, except Iceland, gathered at SHAPE to study the problems of the defence of Western Europe. This provided General Gruenther, Field Marshal Montgomery, and General Lauris Norstad (Commander Allied Air Forces Central Europe) with the perfect opportunity to explain and to sell the new concepts being worked over by the NAG. On talking about the land element, Montgomery informed the officials that it would be ‘nonsense’ to believe that the advent of tactical nuclear weapons would not affect the tactics and organization of ground forces and that those armaments must be assimilated with conventional weapon systems. He added that the greatest benefit bestowed by nuclear weapons on the armies of the Western Allies was that they would enable SACEUR to plan offensively from the start, arguing that ‘we must plan to win, from the start, and not merely to check an enemy onslaught’. ⁵³

In May, a few weeks after the exercise, Montgomery drafted a directive on the behalf of Gruenther to be distributed to NATO commanders-in-chief. It stressed that it was important to study the application of new weapons so that NATO’s ground forces would not be caught tied to out-of-date methods in a future war fought with atomic weapons. It urged that:

The first essential in our common examination of the problem of future war on land, is to free our minds from the 1944/45 philosophy, to project our thoughts forward to the time when a liberal number of atomic weapons will be available on both sides, and to use this weapon as the principal agent around which the battle will be planned and fought. ⁵⁴

Montgomery brought this new vision to a home audience during a much publicized address to the Royal United Services Institute on 21 October 1954. As his May directive had illustrated, he used this speech to make it clear that all operational planning at SHAPE was based on the use of nuclear weapons and that those armaments would consequently have a profound impact on the conduct of war, strategy, tactics, and the size and composition of ground forces. ⁵⁵ He stated that:

We must make a serious study of the shape of future war on land. It is of little use to superimpose new weapons on World War II organizations, and then to try and work out the tactical changes involved; we have got to examine the problems against a new background. ⁵⁶

That new background was the Field Marshal’s conviction that the skilful application of nuclear firepower combined with the operations of streamlined land forces would be a decisive factor in the air/land battle of the future. One of the major problems to be faced would be how to force the enemy to concentrate, thus providing a suitable target for nuclear firepower, while not presenting a profitable target to enemy nuclear fires. ⁵⁷ The types of forces required to fight this new kind of battle would be ‘mobile, hard-hitting, offensive troops of magnificent morale, very highly disciplined, under young and active commanders’. ⁵⁸ In order to exploit the power of the atom, but avoid its effects, Montgomery had a clear conception of the types of qualities that must be sought in the next generation of officers:

Armies must develop a more lively and opportunist type of battle leader than exists at present, in both junior and senior ranks. Such a leader must have the imagination, the daring, and the resources to seize fleeting local opportunities; he must be trained to act independently and immediately within the framework of a general plan, rather than on precise and detailed orders or only after reference to a superior. ⁵⁹

These are certainly not the type of characteristics that one would look for in an officer who was required to direct the highly centralized methodical battles which Montgomery imposed on his subordinate army commanders during the Second World War. In that conflict he believed that the ‘master plan’ developed by the senior commander (in this case himself) was adhered to rigidly and not changed or distorted by junior officers.

Although this approach was appropriate for the operational setting in which the 21st Army Group found itself in northern France, Montgomery’s orderly command style could not be adapted for fluid, high-tempo operations, and often prevented the exploitation of impromptu breakthroughs with mobile armoured forces. ⁶⁰ However, it is clear that he was now beginning to realize that this type of highly centralized and methodical operational technique would not be suited to a rapidly changing battlefield where the use of devastating and ubiquitous nuclear firepower by the enemy would make impossible the development of any kind of ‘master plan’. His advocacy of this new type of leader that emphasized freedom of thought, imagination, daring, and risk-taking therefore exposes a more manoeuvrist bent to his military thinking as an international soldier. Indeed, the type of officer he was promoting could perhaps be described as one that was a more effective proponent of operational art.

III. Shield Forces and the European Central Front

The end of the first post-war decade saw the arrival in Europe of American tactical nuclear weapons, a symbol of NATO’s new-look nuclear posture. In October 1953 the first units equipped with the M-65 280 mm nuclear cannon were deployed to the continent and, a year later, these were followed by MGR-1 Honest John rockets and MGM-5 Corporal guided missile units. ⁶¹ On 22 November 1954 the North Atlantic Council approved the Military Committee’s report, MC 48, as a guide for future planning. For the first time, it committed ground forces in Europe to the first use of nuclear weapons in the event of Soviet aggression, stating that ‘NATO would be unable to prevent the rapid overrunning of Europe unless NATO immediately employed these weapons both strategically and tactically’. ⁶² Montgomery and his colleagues in the NAG had therefore successfully ‘sold’ the New Approach to the Military Committee, which concluded that the only means to prevent the rapid overrunning of Europe was ‘by the use of highly trained and mobile forces with an integrated atomic capability, properly deployed in depth and immediately ready to fight with maximum intensity on D-Day and in the early phases’. ⁶³

Tactical nuclear weapons alone, however, would not solve the defence dilemmas on the Central Front – what was really needed was German manpower. In May 1955 this became possible with the accession of the Federal Republic of Germany to the NATO alliance. Montgomery had been a keen proponent of a rearmed West Germany in the Atlantic Alliance since his days as chairman of the Western Union Defence Organization’s Commanders-in-Chief Committee, and he believed that since the Germans had no overseas commitments they could effectively concentrate their efforts on playing their part in the defence of Europe. ⁶⁴ Hitherto, NATO ground forces had been obliged to hold their main defensive positions on the Rhine–Ijssel line, even though that would not afford protection to the vital industrial areas of the Ruhr or provide an adequate defence in depth for Western Europe. Now, with nuclear firepower and German manpower, it would be possible to mount a forward defence well to the east of the Rhine–Ijssel. ⁶⁵

In his role as pseudo-inspector-general for NATO, Montgomery was responsible for articulating SHAPE’s strategic vision to the German military authorities. In a meeting with the then commander of Allied Forces Central Europe, Marshal Alphonse Juin, in August 1955, Montgomery noted that ‘it is important we both sing the same song when discussing land forces with the Germans’. ⁶⁶ The song Montgomery had in mind was one he had been singing for the past year – in order to mount an effective defence on the ground in central Europe a light frontier force would be required to induce an attacking enemy to concentrate, after which they would be hit with tactical nuclear strikes and counter-attacked by mobile armoured forces. In this defensive conception, Montgomery earmarked the anticipated German land forces as performing the vital role of the light screen of mobile covering forces that would develop profitable nuclear targets for Allied atomic weapons. On 8 September 1955 Montgomery travelled to Bonn to lay out this new philosophy of modern war and was successful in promoting his vision of military operations on the Central Front to the German authorities, who supported a ‘fluid strategy based on mobile forces as against a conception of static or field defences’. ⁶⁷

Although there would be a strong manoeuvre element to the defensive battle, attrition of enemy forces was still a fundamental aim of operations: a logical rationale since this would allow the Western Allies to exploit the firepower of nuclear weapons to exact heavy losses on the Red Army, and by so doing, counterbalance its superiority in manpower. Thus, this cannot be dismissed simply as being a return to a strategy of methodical destruction of the enemy forces through heavy firepower à la Alamein. In the unique conditions created by the proliferation of tactical nuclear weapons, nuclear firepower would become the dominant factor on the battlefield. Whereas, in conventional warfare, artillery and tactical air forces supported the troops, in tactical nuclear warfare the reverse was true and ground forces would become subservient to the nuclear-armed air and ground units. However, these shield forces were not merely ‘plate glass’ that would shatter at first contact with the enemy. As a memorandum by NATO’s Standing Group Liaison Officer puts it:

It is not a static shield – it is a defence in time and space. For though it be dented and bent, it must hold until the atomic counteroffensive, which would be launched at the first alarm, has so damaged the invading forces, their avenues of approach, and their reserves of men and materials, that the attack will be brought to a halt. Having stopped the enemy and regained the initiative, the forces of the ‘shield’, profiting from the damaging blows inflicted by our air counteroffensive, will then eliminate any limited foothold he may have gained within NATO’s borders. ⁶⁸

Thus, the role of the shield forces in this air/land battle was to trade space for time in a delaying action before regaining the initiative and launching a counteroffensive. The Military Committee’s planning paper MC 14/2 articulated the need for shield forces to work towards ‘generating appropriate targets for Allied nuclear weapons, exploiting terrain to create situations which will inflict maximum attrition on the enemy and halting his attack’. ⁶⁹ The analogy of conventional and nuclear forces working together like a sword and a shield, with ground forces reflecting a sudden blow while air forces parry with a devastating nuclear attack, shrouds the true meaning of their relationship. Rather, they were designed to operate much more like a barbed-wire entanglement, ensnaring the attacker, slowing the advance and canalizing it into prepared killing-grounds, where it would then be subjected to tactical nuclear strikes from air- and ground-based weapon systems.

However, unlike a static concertina obstacle, the ground forces on the Central Front would have to rely on speed, agility, and manoeuvrability in order to fight and prevail on such a battlefield. To defeat the manpower-heavy divisions of the Red Army, land formations required high levels of tactical mobility and flexibility in command and control, something for which Montgomery had argued for many years. The debate on the reorganization of the size and composition of armoured and infantry divisions manifested in multilateral discussions between the different member states within NATO and within the individual nations themselves. ⁷⁰ Montgomery had his own ideas on the reorganization of ground forces for nuclear war, which reflected his changing views on modern warfare. On 12 October 1955 he gave another lecture at the Royal United Services Institute in London in which he outlined his perceptions on future army organizations. Again, this talk garnered much attention in the press and among defence circles, and copies of it were subsequently distributed among the NATO Permanent Representatives. ⁷¹

Montgomery outlined the requirement concomitant with SHAPE policy that land forces must be so organized that they were inextricably linked to nuclear capabilities. They must also be organized with less manpower and more firepower. Since nuclear land war in Europe would be ‘heavy and continuous’, Montgomery urged that army formations should be self-contained units that were capable of maintaining independent combat operations for prolonged periods of time without the need for reinforcement. ⁷² He turned his attention to the organization of the divisional structure, arguing that:

The day of the armoured division and of the infantry division as we knew them in the late war is past. The armoured division is expensive in overheads, it lacks staying power, and it is not capable of sustained battle action. The infantry division cannot fight effectively in most countries without armoured assistance, and tanks must now be an integral part of the division. ⁷³

Montgomery proposed that the traditional divisional structures be replaced with what he called the ‘standard divisions’, which were combined-arms formations consisting of small groups of infantry, armour, and artillery. He believed that these standard divisions would be able to fight effectively on a wide front in the mobile battle envisioned by SHAPE planners and would also be well suited to fight static defensive battles if required. He also suggested that the standard divisions contain a large element of armoured forces since ‘there will come a moment in the tactical battle when the opportunity is favourable for launching a flood of tanks against the enemy’. ⁷⁴ In conclusion, he stated that ultimately the governing factor in the organization of armies was that they should be reduced in size as nuclear weapons became available and that they should generally become more streamlined – in particular by reducing the administrative ‘tail’ and the number and size of command headquarters. ⁷⁵ As has been shown in the first section of this article, Montgomery had been well aware since the closing stages of the Second World War that the power of modern weapons, particularly air systems, would impact heavily on the conduct of the land battle. The arrival of nuclear weapons accelerated his convictions on the importance of all-arms combined divisional structures.

IV. Conclusions

A closer look at the post-war military thought of Field Marshal Montgomery reveals that it was much more progressive than has hitherto been suggested by historians. For the last decade of his career, he was second in command of a truly unique international military headquarters. The activities of SHAPE were focused exclusively on solving the military dilemma of how to defend Western Europe against a powerful adversary that had the potential to launch a sudden overwhelming onslaught against the territories of the NATO nations. It was this specific strategic and operational context that shaped Montgomery’s perceptions about future land warfare and its changing character. Against this geostrategic background were two important technological developments that influenced his thinking after 1945: the growing strength and power of modern aircraft – something that Montgomery had begun to acknowledge by the end of the Second World War – and the advent of nuclear weapons. Taken together, these factors moulded the Field Marshal’s military thought into a shape which was almost unrecognizable from the style of war-fighting which has subsequently become inextricably linked to the name Bernard L. Montgomery.

First, the character of a future nuclear land war required a complete rethink of the doctrine, tactics, and organizations of land forces. This is something about which Montgomery had begun to think at the War Office when as CIGS he had introduced nuclear play into military exercises, and which he emphasized incessantly during his time as an international soldier. On a battlefield dominated by highly destructive nuclear weapons and highly effective tactical air forces, there was simply no place for the meticulously stage-managed tactical battle that was possible during the Second World War. Montgomery realized that the chaos that would ensue from this high-tempo and unprecedentedly violent military environment would deliver the death knell to the tightly controlled methodical battle. What were now required were highly flexible and mobile ground forces that could rapidly switch between concentration and dispersion with ease. Individual units would need to be small self-contained formations, since they would soon be cut off from higher command echelons and it would be difficult to reinforce them with reserves. To fight and prevail under these conditions, commanders would need to possess high levels of initiative, imagination, assertiveness, and daring, since they would have to quickly exploit success in what would be a rapidly evolving battle.

Second, the ground forces which would be fighting in central Europe were, for political and geostrategic reasons, committed to a forward defence so that they could protect the narrow land mass of western Germany. However, rather than simply holding static positions, as has been suggested unhelpfully, these shield forces were more akin to a barbed-wire entanglement rather than plate glass, as they were designed to fight mobile actions in depth. Montgomery, along with his colleagues at SHAPE, understood this and planned accordingly. Of course, these forces relied on a preponderance of (nuclear) firepower, not because they were wedded to outdated concepts of attrition warfare, but because this reflected the changing character of land warfare as it evolved in the central European region. Under nuclear conditions, nuclear firepower became the dominant arm on the battlefield and all other units became subservient to it. The role of conventional forces in this context was merely to create conditions in which nuclear firepower could be applied more effectively. This often meant forcing the opposition to concentrate in space so that it provided a profitable nuclear target or canalizing it into predesignated nuclear killing-grounds. Therefore, to apply the concepts of manoeuvre and attrition warfare, as understood in the traditional sense, to nuclear land combat would not work, since the conditions would be fundamentally different to those of conventional warfare.

Thus, there was a ‘Monty method’ after the Second World War which was as uniquely identifiable as being his as those methods employed by him in the great land battles of the Second World War. It is true that other senior officers in Europe and the United States had reached similar conclusions to Montgomery during this period regarding the future character of warfare. However, he presents a special case in that his conceptions of nuclear land combat, and the role of ground forces within it, are so far removed from the style of warfare with which he has personally been typecast and associated for the past 70 years. Perhaps Montgomery’s most important contribution to post-war military thought was his understanding on how the increase in battlefield firepower brought about by tactical nuclear weapons would force radical change on ground forces. His insistence on imposing a nuclear New Look on SHAPE in the middle 1950s, for better or for worse, fundamentally changed NATO strategy by tying its ground forces to the tactical application of nuclear weapons. As NATO’s blacksmith, he forged the alliance a new weapon. That weapon – the marriage of mobile conventional ground forces supported by tactical nuclear weapons – was his real legacy in that it was wielded by subsequent SACEURs in the defence of Europe until the end of the Cold War.