Montgomery was so badly wounded in 1914 that doctors ordered his grave dug
Two months into the First World War, a sniper shot Lieutenant Bernard Montgomery through the lung. Medics thought he was finished and had a grave prepared. He survived, and three decades later accepted the surrender of German forces in north-western Europe on Lüneburg Heath.
Montgomery was born in Kennington in 1887, fourth of nine children of a Church of Ireland vicar from an Ulster Scots gentry family in County Donegal; his maternal grandfather was the preacher and children's novelist Frederic Farrar. When his father became Bishop of Tasmania in 1889, Bernard grew up there. With his father away for months on end, his young mother beat the children and otherwise ignored them, and Bernard later admitted he was a dreadful little boy. He never forgave her and refused to attend her funeral in 1949. At Sandhurst he was nearly expelled for rowdiness before being commissioned into the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in 1908.
In October 1914, near Méteren on the Belgian border, he lay still pretending to be dead after the first bullet. A soldier who tried to rescue him was killed and fell across him, absorbing further shots, though Montgomery was hit again in the knee. Recovering, he returned as a staff officer for Arras and Passchendaele in 1917 and ended the war as chief of staff of a division. Between the wars he rose through battalion and brigade command.
In August 1942 he took over the Eighth Army in the Western Desert, then led it into Sicily and Italy. For the Normandy campaign he commanded all Allied ground forces from D-Day until 1 September 1944, then the 21st Army Group. Operation Market Garden failed to secure a Rhine crossing, but in the Battle of the Bulge he was given the northern flank, and in March 1945 his forces crossed the Rhine in Operation Plunder. They encircled the Ruhr, freed the Netherlands and took much of north-west Germany before the surrender on 4 May 1945.
After the war he commanded the British Army of the Rhine, served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff from 1946 to 1948, chaired the Western Union commanders' committee, and was NATO's deputy supreme commander in Europe until retiring in 1958. He became Viscount Montgomery of Alamein and died in 1976.
Source: Bernard Montgomery
