Review of Norman Gelb, Ike and Monty: Generals at War. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1994

Granatstein, J.L.

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

Canadian Military HistoryVolume 4 | Issue 1 Article 161-23-2012Ike and Monty: Generals at War by Norman Gelb[Review]J.L. GranatsteinYork UniversityThis Feature is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Canadian MilitaryHistory by an authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended CitationGranatstein, J.L. (1995) "Ike and Monty: Generals at War by Norman Gelb [Review]," Canadian Military History: Vol. 4 : Iss. 1 , Article16.Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol4/iss1/16ships, some remarkable new portraits of corvettes (like Sackville) and one of the dummy wooden gun fitted to Trillium for her first Atlantic crossing. Johnston has also gone to considerable effort to make this book 'accessible' to the novice, explaining how things like asdic, depth charges and radar worked and were operated, and what various officers and petty officers were responsible for. In the process he has recorded for posterity much arcane information which will soon be hard, if not impossible, to retrieve. Indeed, its hard to under estimate the importance of the information recorded in Corvettes Canada that would otherwise have been lost-and it is sobering to reflect on what has already been carried to the grave or discarded by dis-interested or ill-informed executors of estates. Collective memoirs are not always successful and works by amateur historians are often flawed by their failure to keep abreast of the historical writing in their field. Neither of these criticisms can be applied to Corvettes Canada. Johnston has woven the memories of 250 Old Salts from 50 different ships and the history of the wartime RCN into a tight fabric, one that is both entertaining and extremely valuable. If you have never read anything on the Canadian navy's part in the Battle of the Atlantic start with this one: if you've read everything that's already available you will find this one a gem. Marc Milner University of New Brunswick * * * * * Ike and Monty Norman Gelb. Ike and Monty: Generals at War, New York: William Morrow & Co., 1994, 480 pp. $25 US. 122 T he clash of personalities and war, just as in the song in "Our Town," go together like "love and marriage," and as Dad was told by mother, "you don't get one without the other." Too bad, for sometimes the vicious infighting between Allied commanders was such as to put the purpose of the conflict in doubt. An American writer living in Britain with several books on the Second World War to his credit, Norman Gelb might seem the ideal writer to try to explore the relationship between Montgomery and Eisenhower, and in some ways he is. Of his evenhandedness there can be little doubt as he assigns blame and praise with practised ease, sparing neither of his two subjects. Montgomery treated his son appallingly, shuffling him off to acquaintances during the war, while Eisenhower cheated on his wife, the boring, absent Mamie. Ike lost control of strategic operations in North Africa and Sicily, but Montgomery was so obsessed with the driving need to be right and to persuade everyone that he was so that he managed to persuade himself he held no responsibility whatsoever for the Dieppe debacle. Gelb makes the case that Eisenhower had no real sense of strategy, not least for his plans to invade France in 1942 that he prepared for George C. Marshall, and no real grasp of political reality as he demonstrated with his botching of the affaire Giraud and his inability to see the importance of Berlin. Was Montgomery any better than his rival? Not really, Gelb argues. As a tactician, he excelled in the set-piece battle, but his broader battlefield conceptions often neglected the reality that he had allies with politico-military aspirations of their own, and he had the political sense of a newt. "In defeat, unbeatable," wags said of the Field Marshal; "in victory unbearable." Inevitably the two fought and argued. Montgomery could not bear that the militarily untried Eisenhower was his superior, and Ike, his affability masking a tension that all but ate him up, could never quite figure out how to make the little Anglo-Irishman work in harness. "Monty is a good man to serve under," Eisenhower said once, "a difficult man to serve with; and an impossible man to serve over." Even that miss poke matters. Monty was impossible to serve under unless one was an acolyte, a disciple willing to sup at the great man's table and adopt his pearls of wisdom as gospel truth. You were either for Montgomery or a bitter enemy, in other words. Guy Simonds was quick to get on side; Harry Crerar tried, but his responsibilities as a national commander got in the way, and he could never quite master the art of sucking up to the impossible little man. Still, Montgomery was the best British trainer of the war and the first British commander to win a major battle in a war that had been marked only by a string of disasters. El Alamein was a relatively small scale battle but a critical one; North Africa was ponderously handled; Sicily was a cause of friction with the Americans; and Italy was again plodding in the extreme. Nonetheless, his handling of the Normandy battle, or so Gelb argues, was the most important Allied victory of the war. Monty foolishly spoiled his triumph by claiming that everything-yes, everything-from the beaches to Falaise had proceeded precisely according to plan when manifestly it had not, but that grotesque flaw in a rigid, frigid personality does not really take away from his accomplishment in the field. Gelb's book is based on a mass of secondary material and a surprisingly light skim over the British and American primary 1Granatstein: <em>Ike and Monty</em> [Review]Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 1995sources. His prose is workmanlike, though the super-simplistic way he tells his story will be jarring to all but the completely uninitiated. Nor is he expert on British, Canadian and Newfoundland realities, putting the Argentia meeting of August 1941 in Canada and calling brigadiers "generals." Still, this is a good, fair treatment of a pair of controversial military personalities that fifty years later has had more partisans than analysts. In this account, if Ike comes out just a bit ahead, he probably deserves to do so. Eisenhower was no great strategist, but he built an Anglo-American team (why were there no Canadians on it?) and made it function. Montgomery, grudgingly part of that team, a tiresome, tireless goad of his designated master, nonetheless had to obey orders or in the final analysis face dismissal. He chose to go along to get ahead, and he ended the war a field marshal and the Empire's hero. He was a "nasty little shit" to many of those who had to serve under him, while no one would ever speak in such harsh, almost dismissive terms of Eisenhower, a man who won and held the personal affection and admiration of almost all who worked for him. It was difficult to be anti-American under Ike, but all too easy to curse the bloody Brits around Monty. That Gelb makes this clear is his accomplishment. J.L. Granatstein York University * * * * * Fan tass in Charly Forbes. Fantassin: pour mon pays, la gloire et...des prunes. Sillery: Les Editions du Septentrion, 1994, 451 pages. L es Editions du Septentrion merit commendation for undertaking the publication of war-related material by or about French-Canadians. They have also taken to translating books from English to French so that some Desmond Morton is now available to those whose workaday language is French. Leon Balcer's memoirs, including reminiscences of service in the Battle of the Atlantic, appeared in 1988. More recently there came a title dealing with the Cold War and, in quick succession, Gabriel Taschereau's anecdotes of service with 425 Squadron in Bomber Command and, more significantly, the posthumously published diary of Georges Verreault's time with the Royal Rifles of Canada including his years as a prisoner-of-war following the Hong Kong debacle. Now the French-reading public can share in the reminiscences of a well-known character who has left impressive imprints from Gaspe, through Norman fields, Dutch polders, Korean hills and countless points between. He is Joseph Jean-Charles Bertrand Forbes, popularly known as Charly. Charly, unfortunately, is the victim of poor editing especially concerning the transcription of English in the French text. There are far too many mistakes which should have been spotted prior to publication by an attentive proofreader with a solid background in English. I have had to make similar comments in the past when it came to the use of French in English texts. Why such an anomaly should persist only in Canada is an area perhaps worth investigating. It is not a problem in the United States nor in the U.K. or in France or, even, in Australia. These countries seem to take pride in reproducing any other language in the proper grammatical manner out of a sense of pride, accuracy and respect. Forbes is not to blame in this area but his editors are. His memory, however, lets him down so that song lyrics, titles and popular sayings are often misquoted. Another problem concerns historical accuracy. Forbes is no historian. Moreover, he was obviously in something of a hurry to publish so that his recollections of the past are often erroneous. Careful verification by experts would have prevented the making of statements that are plainly false either because they proceed from hearsay or from an occasionally confused and faulty memory. His claim that HMCS Matane sank a German U-boat off Halifax in 1944 is groundless. Though losses were terrible, there were not 4,000 Canadian casualties at Dieppe nor did the raid (19 August 1942) precede Barbarossa (22 June 1941). There were no amphibious tanks in the raid. Georges Vanier, the subject of two hilarious and verifiable anecdotes, did not lose his leg at Courcelette but at Cherisy in August 1918. Such shortcomings would normally seriously undermine the quality of a book. Two factors militate against this: the narrator's personality and his extraordinary abilities as a story-teller. Putting it on paper required help from a friend and former subaltern of Forbes' in the Royal 22e Regiment who is finishing a teaching career at CMR in 1995. With the help of Professor Guy Provost, Charly's "memoires" are so eminently readable that the reader becomes completely engrossed in the adventures of this extraordinary man. Anyone who has known Forbes can attest to the fact that he is not your run-of-the-mill fellow. He is multi-talented: intelligent, physically impressive. He paints and sings well, plays the violin, is quick-witted and fiercely proud. His courage has been proven time and time again in the most trying circumstances. Like so many others like him, he is quick to judge incompetence, 123 2Canadian Military History, Vol. 4 [1995], Iss. 1, Art. 16http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol4/iss1/16

\u3cem\u3eIke and Monty: Generals at War\u3c/em\u3e by Norman Gelb [Review]

Scholars Commons

Canadian Military History
Volume 4 | Issue 1 Article 16
1-23-2012
Ike and Monty: Generals at War by Norman Gelb
[Review]
J.L. Granatstein
York University
This Feature is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in Canadian Military
History by an authorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.
Recommended Citation
Granatstein, J.L. (1995) "Ike and Monty: Generals at War by Norman Gelb [Review]," Canadian Military History: Vol. 4 : Iss. 1 , Article
16.
Available at: http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol4/iss1/16
ships, some remarkable new 
portraits of corvettes (like 
Sackville) and one of the dummy 
wooden gun fitted to Trillium for 
her first Atlantic crossing. 
Johnston has also gone to 
considerable effort to make this 
book 'accessible' to the novice, 
explaining how things like asdic, 
depth charges and radar worked 
and were operated, and what 
various officers and petty officers 
were responsible for. In the 
process he has recorded for 
posterity much arcane 
information which will soon be 
hard, if not impossible, to 
retrieve. Indeed, its hard to under 
estimate the importance of the 
information recorded in 
Corvettes Canada that would 
otherwise have been lost-and it 
is sobering to reflect on what has 
already been carried to the grave 
or discarded by dis-interested or 
ill-informed executors of estates. 
Collective memoirs are not 
always successful and works by 
amateur historians are often 
flawed by their failure to keep 
abreast of the historical writing 
in their field. Neither of these 
criticisms can be applied to 
Corvettes Canada. Johnston has 
woven the memories of 250 Old 
Salts from 50 different ships and 
the history of the wartime RCN 
into a tight fabric, one that is both 
entertaining and extremely 
valuable. If you have never read 
anything on the Canadian navy's 
part in the Battle of the Atlantic 
start with this one: if you've read 
everything that's already available 
you will find this one a gem. 
Marc Milner 
University of New Brunswick 
* * * * * 
Ike and Monty 
Norman Gelb. Ike and Monty: 
Generals at War, New York: 
William Morrow & Co., 1994, 480 
pp. $25 US. 
122 
T he clash of personalities and war, just as in the song in 
"Our Town," go together like "love 
and marriage," and as Dad was 
told by mother, "you don't get one 
without the other." Too bad, for 
sometimes the vicious infighting 
between Allied commanders was 
such as to put the purpose of the 
conflict in doubt. An American 
writer living in Britain with 
several books on the Second 
World War to his credit, Norman 
Gelb might seem the ideal writer 
to try to explore the relationship 
between Montgomery and 
Eisenhower, and in some ways he 
is. 
Of his evenhandedness there 
can be little doubt as he assigns 
blame and praise with practised 
ease, sparing neither of his two 
subjects. Montgomery treated his 
son appallingly, shuffling him off 
to acquaintances during the war, 
while Eisenhower cheated on his 
wife, the boring, absent Mamie. 
Ike lost control of strategic 
operations in North Africa and 
Sicily, but Montgomery was so 
obsessed with the driving need to 
be right and to persuade everyone 
that he was so that he managed 
to persuade himself he held no 
responsibility whatsoever for the 
Dieppe debacle. Gelb makes the 
case that Eisenhower had no real 
sense of strategy, not least for his 
plans to invade France in 1942 
that he prepared for George C. 
Marshall, and no real grasp of 
political reality as he 
demonstrated with his botching 
of the affaire Giraud and his 
inability to see the importance of 
Berlin. Was Montgomery any 
better than his rival? Not really, 
Gelb argues. As a tactician, he 
excelled in the set-piece battle, 
but his broader battlefield 
conceptions often neglected the 
reality that he had allies with 
politico-military aspirations of 
their own, and he had the political 
sense of a newt. "In defeat, 
unbeatable," wags said of the 
Field Marshal; "in victory 
unbearable." 
Inevitably the two fought 
and argued. Montgomery could 
not bear that the militarily 
untried Eisenhower was his 
superior, and Ike, his affability 
masking a tension that all but 
ate him up, could never quite 
figure out how to make the little 
Anglo-Irishman work in harness. 
"Monty is a good man to serve 
under," Eisenhower said once, "a 
difficult man to serve with; and 
an impossible man to serve 
over." Even that miss poke 
matters. Monty was impossible 
to serve under unless one was 
an acolyte, a disciple willing to 
sup at the great man's table and 
adopt his pearls of wisdom as 
gospel truth. You were either for 
Montgomery or a bitter enemy, 
in other words. Guy Simonds 
was quick to get on side; Harry 
Crerar tried, but his 
responsibilities as a national 
commander got in the way, and 
he could never quite master the 
art of sucking up to the 
impossible little man. 
Still, Montgomery was the 
best British trainer of the war and 
the first British commander to 
win a major battle in a war that 
had been marked only by a string 
of disasters. El Alamein was a 
relatively small scale battle but a 
critical one; North Africa was 
ponderously handled; Sicily was 
a cause of friction with the 
Americans; and Italy was again 
plodding in the extreme. 
Nonetheless, his handling of the 
Normandy battle, or so Gelb 
argues, was the most important 
Allied victory of the war. Monty 
foolishly spoiled his triumph by 
claiming that everything-yes, 
everything-from the beaches to 
Falaise had proceeded precisely 
according to plan when 
manifestly it had not, but that 
grotesque flaw in a rigid, frigid 
personality does not really take 
away from his accomplishment in 
the field. 
Gelb's book is based on a 
mass of secondary material and 
a surprisingly light skim over the 
British and American primary 
1
Granatstein: <em>Ike and Monty</em> [Review]
Published by Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 1995
sources. His prose is 
workmanlike, though the super-
simplistic way he tells his story 
will be jarring to all but the 
completely uninitiated. Nor is he 
expert on British, Canadian and 
Newfoundland realities, putting 
the Argentia meeting of August 
1941 in Canada and calling 
brigadiers "generals." 
Still, this is a good, 
fair treatment of a pair 
of controversial military 
personalities that fifty years later 
has had more partisans than 
analysts. In this account, if Ike 
comes out just a bit ahead, he 
probably deserves to do so. 
Eisenhower was no great 
strategist, but he built an Anglo-
American team (why were there 
no Canadians on it?) and made it 
function. Montgomery, grudgingly 
part of that team, a tiresome, 
tireless goad of his designated 
master, nonetheless had to obey 
orders or in the final analysis face 
dismissal. He chose to go along 
to get ahead, and he ended the 
war a field marshal and the 
Empire's hero. He was a "nasty 
little shit" to many of those who 
had to serve under him, while no 
one would ever speak in such 
harsh, almost dismissive terms of 
Eisenhower, a man who won and 
held the personal affection and 
admiration of almost all who 
worked for him. It was difficult 
to be anti-American under Ike, 
but all too easy to curse the 
bloody Brits around Monty. That 
Gelb makes this clear is his 
accomplishment. 
J.L. Granatstein 
York University 
* * * * * 
Fan tass in 
Charly Forbes. Fantassin: pour 
mon pays, la gloire et...des 
prunes. Sillery: Les Editions du 
Septentrion, 1994, 451 pages. 
L es Editions du Septentrion merit commendation for 
undertaking the publication of 
war-related material by or about 
French-Canadians. They have 
also taken to translating books 
from English to French so that 
some Desmond Morton is now 
available to those whose 
workaday language is French. 
Leon Balcer's memoirs, including 
reminiscences of service in the 
Battle of the Atlantic, appeared in 
1988. More recently there came 
a title dealing with the Cold War 
and, in quick succession, Gabriel 
Taschereau's anecdotes of service 
with 425 Squadron in Bomber 
Command and, more 
significantly, the posthumously 
published diary of Georges 
Verreault's time with the Royal 
Rifles of Canada including his 
years as a prisoner-of-war 
following the Hong Kong debacle. 
Now the French-reading public 
can share in the reminiscences of 
a well-known character who has 
left impressive imprints from 
Gaspe, through Norman fields, 
Dutch polders, Korean hills and 
countless points between. He is 
Joseph Jean-Charles Bertrand 
Forbes, popularly known as 
Charly. 
Charly, unfortunately, is the 
victim of poor editing especially 
concerning the transcription of 
English in the French text. There 
are far too many mistakes which 
should have been spotted prior to 
publication by an attentive 
proofreader with a solid 
background in English. I have 
had to make similar comments in 
the past when it came to the use 
of French in English texts. Why 
such an anomaly should persist 
only in Canada is an area perhaps 
worth investigating. It is not a 
problem in the United States nor 
in the U.K. or in France or, even, 
in Australia. These countries 
seem to take pride in reproducing 
any other language in the proper 
grammatical manner out of a 
sense of pride, accuracy and 
respect. Forbes is not to blame in 
this area but his editors are. His 
memory, however, lets him down 
so that song lyrics, titles and 
popular sayings are often 
misquoted. 
Another problem concerns 
historical accuracy. Forbes is no 
historian. Moreover, he was 
obviously in something of a hurry 
to publish so that his 
recollections of the past are often 
erroneous. Careful verification by 
experts would have prevented the 
making of statements that are 
plainly false either because they 
proceed from hearsay or from an 
occasionally confused and faulty 
memory. His claim that HMCS 
Matane sank a German U-boat 
off Halifax in 1944 is groundless. 
Though losses were terrible, there 
were not 4,000 Canadian 
casualties at Dieppe nor did the 
raid (19 August 1942) precede 
Barbarossa (22 June 1941). 
There were no amphibious tanks 
in the raid. Georges Vanier, the 
subject of two hilarious and 
verifiable anecdotes, did not lose 
his leg at Courcelette but at 
Cherisy in August 1918. 
Such shortcomings would 
normally seriously undermine the 
quality of a book. Two factors 
militate against this: the 
narrator's personality and his 
extraordinary abilities as a story-
teller. Putting it on paper required 
help from a friend and former 
subaltern of Forbes' in the Royal 
22e Regiment who is finishing a 
teaching career at CMR in 1995. 
With the help of Professor Guy 
Provost, Charly's "memoires" are 
so eminently readable that the 
reader becomes completely 
engrossed in the adventures of 
this extraordinary man. 
Anyone who has known 
Forbes can attest to the fact that 
he is not your run-of-the-mill 
fellow. He is multi-talented: 
intelligent, physically impressive. 
He paints and sings well, plays 
the violin, is quick-witted and 
fiercely proud. His courage has 
been proven time and time again 
in the most trying circumstances. 
Like so many others like him, he 
is quick to judge incompetence, 
123 
2
Canadian Military History, Vol. 4 [1995], Iss. 1, Art. 16
http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol4/iss1/16


https://scholars.wlu.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1188&amp;context=cmh

\u3cem\u3eIke and Monty: Generals at War\u3c/em\u3e by Norman Gelb [Review]

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