Bernard Montgomery

Biography

Bernard Montgomery was born in Kennington in 1887 and educated at St Paul's School and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, before joining the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in 1908. In the First World War he was shot through the lung at Méteren in 1914, then served as a staff officer at Arras and Passchendaele and finished the war as chief of staff of the 47th Division. Between the wars he served in Ireland and rose to command a brigade and then a division.

In August 1942 he took command of the Eighth Army in North Africa and led it to victory at El Alamein and on through Tunisia, Sicily and Italy. He commanded all Allied ground forces in the Normandy invasion of June 1944 and then the 21st Army Group in north-west Europe, including Operation Market Garden, the northern shoulder of the Battle of the Bulge and the crossing of the Rhine. On 4 May 1945, at Lüneburg Heath, he accepted the surrender of German forces in north-west Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark.

After the war he commanded the British Army of the Rhine, was Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1946 to 1948, chaired the Western Union commanders-in-chief committee from 1948 to 1951, and served as NATO's Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe until he retired in 1958. Created Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, he died in 1976.