Monty Battles of Field Marshall Bernard Law Hod Gen

Nigel Hamilton's award-winning Monty trilogy was hailed in both Britain and the United States as an extraordinary achievement, "magisterial in its shape and scope, brilliantly woven, and a joy to read." Now, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the D-Day landings and the campaign to defeat Germany that followed, Nigel Hamilton has revised and condensed his official biography of Field Marshal Montgomery into a single The Battles of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. Based on personal diaries, wartime signals, notes, and letters as well as interviews with Montgomery's closest family, friends, colleagues, and subordinates and access to tens of thousands of unpublished documents in the United States and Great Britain, this is the closest any writer has ever penetrated to the heart and soul of the man who commanded the Anglo-American armies on D-Day and became known the world over simply as "Monty." A tortured, vengeful man, whose artist wife died in heartbreaking circumstances two years before World War II, Monty knew but one to prove himself as military teacher and commander. In the course of this authoritative narrative, we see Monty both at his best and at his brilliant and boastful, compassionate and cruel, farsighted and yet sometimes petty and obnoxious. It is a mesmerizing portrait not only of great leadership but also of the trials of war and coalition tensions, as, after Alamein, British and American generals jostle for their place in the Allied sun. Monty's sheer professionalism awes us - as does his arrogance and conceit. A hero to his troops, he becomes a thorn in the side of his allies and superiors, reducing Eisenhower to the point of resignation as Supreme Commander and Churchill to despair. Yet this is, too, the inside story of World War II as it was waged on the field, with Monty battling not only against the Germans in north Africa, Sicily, Italy, and northwest Europe, but also with an Allied high command he co