Such was Ziegler’s admiration that despite this apparent condemnation he confessed that he had a note pinned above his desk reading, ‘Remember that, after all, he was a great man.’ It is difficult to understand how any biographer can even profess impartiality if having made such a damning assessment he still admits to being constrained by such a self-imposed caveat. ‘Great’? Who says so? Apart from Mountbatten himself that is.

Both Churchill and Mountbatten had massive egos, huge ambitions and a propensity for self-aggrandisement on such a scale that if not actual dishonesty, certainly manufactured and distorted facts, and of course a war was the ideal stage for each of them. Churchill and Mountbatten both came from backgrounds of distinct social privilege. Churchill was born at Blenheim Palace, the eldest son of Lord Randolph Churchill and a direct descendent of the Duke of Marlborough. Mountbatten was born at Frogmore House in the grounds of Windsor Castle, the youngest child of Prince Louis of Battenberg who was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, and Mountbatten himself was a second cousin of King George VI.

Montgomery was a different case altogether, one where the illusion of an enormous ego seems in fact to have been a cover for insecurity and an inferiority complex; the apparently aggressive personality being a compensating mechanism. He was a general of reasonable competence who, through cleverly concealed opportunism, managed to beguile the world into believing he was a genius by manipulation of facts and consistent self-promotion. This will be examined later in greater detail and many of the classic symptoms of an inferiority complex – fear of making mistakes, tendency to be rude and aggressive, excessive seeking of attention, criticism of others, etc,- are documented and so completely characteristic of Montgomery that the hypothesis seems quite rational. Indeed this interpretation has already been put forward before, Antony Beevor in his book ‘D-Day’ saying that Montgomery ‘suffered from a breathtaking conceit that almost certainly stemmed from some sort of inferiority complex’. It is time that the reality behind the public image of the British military genius of World War Two, largely contrived by Montgomery himself and fanned by an adoring British media, was put into a context of dispassionate reality. Free of emotion and the constraints of convention we shall see someone who was a capable military commander but not much more. Montgomery is under scrutiny here to evaluate his actual performance against his own claim to greatness.

Churchill and Montgomery, had loveless childhoods and although such parental attitudes may not have been much worse than the norm for a certain strata of society in 19^th and early 20th century England, it seems likely that the experience left its mark, each of them in their different ways evolving into self-centred individuals of ruthless ambition. Mountbatten’s childhood by comparison seems to have been fairly happy although even at a young age he showed self-confidence way beyond his years, a trait that along with his increasing vanity would cause him to be detested by those with whom he worked in Government.

When I was researching for my book about the fall of Singapore, my first inkling that there was rather more to the popular image of Churchill than met the eye arose from a comment made by military historian Correlli Barnett in a Singapore edition of The Straits Times in 1997. In the correspondence section of that paper discussing the reasons for the fall of Singapore to the Japanese in 1942, Barnett said then that Churchill, more than anyone else, had been responsible and that ‘His fingers were all over it’ he said. Up until that point I had accepted the conventional accounts that attributed the Singapore debacle solely to ham-fisted and bungling by the military at a local level against a badly equipped and inferior force. I discovered that the truth was quite different and in the research for my book I began to uncover a veritable mine of hidden issues and facts that had been deflected by the individuals concerned or ignored by authors in the interests of orthodoxy.

By sheer accident I also uncovered concrete (literally) evidence that in fact, the Japanese army was far larger than had previously been thought to have been the case. This is revealed by a monument in the Japanese cemetery in Singapore that is there today for anyone to see. From 1977 to 1995 Barnett had been Keeper of the Archives at Churchill College Cambridge and was therefore in a unique position to offer an opinion. Intrigued by his assessment of Churchill I began my own investigations and found a wide range of opinions and accounts of the man. These varied from the expected hagiographies to the more recent dissections - in 1993 by Professor John Charmley, ‘Churchill – End of Glory’, in 1994 by Clive Ponting, ‘Churchill’, and in 1995 came Professor Richard Overy’s book ‘Why the Allies Won’. Then in 2006 ex-army officer Gordon Corrigan’s ‘Blood Sweat & Arrogance and the Myths of Churchill’s War’and his more recent 2010 book, ‘The Second World War’. All uncovered facts, issues and personality traits that were revealing in the extreme and all of them laid bare unpleasant truths about the man as a whole, but particularly so from the standpoint of his behaviour in the Second World War that had hitherto been virtually unknown or even imagined.

Also emerging from the research for my earlier book was a picture of Mountbatten that was completely at odds compared to the conventional wartime heroic image. Some years earlier I had acquired a copy of Stephen Harper’s 1985 book ‘Miracle of Deliverance - The case for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’. I bought the book at the time simply because I had lived in Malaysia for many years, was familiar with most of the Far East and was intrigued by the title. I discovered that a large part of that book was devoted to ‘Operation Zipper’, which Mountbatten led and which entailed the invasion of Malaya. Despite the fact that the Japanese had already surrendered and that a simple and orderly re-occupation was all that was required Mountbatten as Supreme Commander South-East Asia, was determined to have his moment of glory and insisted on invading the country rather than simply re-occupying it. I had never heard of this ‘Operation’ and for good reason. ‘Zipper’ cost a large and unnecessary loss of men and equipment and was such a disaster that even now it is very difficult to find any details of what actually went wrong. There appears to be a determined official ‘cover-up’. Stephen Harper was able to relate what actually happened only because he was there otherwise the full details of this sad episode would probably have always remained hidden. Harper was an officer on one of the ships of the invading armada and as far as I am aware his book is the only account that describes that fiasco.

It appears that Mountbatten’s decision was based entirely on the fact that he wanted to have the glory of commanding a victorious invading force with British troops recapturing enemy held beaches as they had done on D-Day. In this he had been encouraged by Churchill, who’d said that the shame of Singapore - for which he was primarily responsible - could only be assuaged by the capture of that fortress in battle, never mind the casualties. A more cautious commander would have realised that such an invasion was unnecessary and all that was required following the Japanese surrender was for Malaya to be re-occupied in a systematic and methodical manner. Impetuous and irresponsible as ever Mountbatten insisted on his forces storming ashore at an un-reconnoitred beach on the west coast of Malaya. Large numbers of men were drowned and equipment lost as they rapidly sank into the deep thick mud of the Straits of Malacca. If he was capable of such a cavalier and irresponsible attitude on this occasion then it seemed likely there might be other examples and so it has proved. In his 1994 book ‘Eminent Churchillians’, Andrew Roberts goes even further in debunking the myth of Mountbatten as a wartime hero, going so far as to describe him as:

1 Liddell Hart, Basil, The German Generals Talk, Quill New York, 1979

2 Arnold, Michael, The Sacrifice of Singapore – Churchill’s Biggest Blunder, Marshall & Cavendish, 2011

3 Ziegler, Philip, Mountbatten, Alfred a Knopf, 1985

4 Beevor, Anthony, D-Day, Viking, 2009

5 Charmley, John, Churchill, The End of Glory, Hodder& Stoughton, 1993

6 Overy, Richard, Why the Allies Won, Jonathan Cape, 1995

7 Corrigan, Gordon, Blood, Sweat & Arrogance – the Myths of Churchill’s War , Phoenix, 2007

8 Co#rrigan, Gordon, The Second World War, Atlantic Books, 2010

9 Harper, Stephen, Miracle of Deliverance, the case for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985

10 Roberts, Andrew, Eminent Churchillians, Weidenfeld& Nicholson, 1994

11 Barnet, Correlli, The Desert Generals, George Allen & Unwin, 1960

I was sitting in a restaurant in Wroclaw in Poland. Diagonally opposite me was a lady who came from Liverpool like me. We talked about common reminiscences of Liverpool. Her husband was sitting next to me listening. Eventually he asked me,

"And where do you live now?"

I replied "Between Southampton and Winchester" because many people have never heard of Eastleigh or Chandlers Ford.

"Where exactly between Southampton and Winchester?" he asked.

"Eastleigh - Chandlers Ford"

"I went to school there. As a child I lived in Nicholl Road and then in Hocombe Road"

I asked "What primary school did you go to? Merdon Avenue?"

"No. I only went to secondary school in the area"

"Which one?" I asked.

"Barton Peveril."

"I used to teach there."

He then asked my name.

"David Thomas"

"Oh! You taught me history. I went to University to study history because of your lessons"

I explained that it was my first year of teaching (it was actually my second year of teaching) and that my teaching would have been probably the lowest standard I taught at in my career because of that, as you improved in teaching with experience, so you were very green in your first year. I asked him what inspired him about my lessons, as it couldn`t have been my teaching at that early stage of my career.

"I remember that you were different from all the other teachers at the time, because you sat on the desk to teach, while the others sat in their chairs behind their desks."

I asked his name.

"David Atkinson."

I found David in my 1966-7 mark book when I returned home. I also remembered a Richard Atkinson in my tennis team at Barton Peveril, and it turned out that he was David`s younger brother.

We talked about the school and the staff he remembered. He remembered Malcolm Holmes as his PE teacher, and he remembered Arthur Sansbury who had taught him geography. He also remembered Richard Hart (English). David Atkinson would have been a pupil from 1960 – 1967, and now lives near Chester. He sent me an extract of a book he had written, a book which explained his love of walking and the mountains, and how he came to take up climbing - . “It began, improbably enough, in Room 10 on the third floor of Barton Peveril Grammar School, in Eastleigh, Hampshire. Now Room 10 was the fiefdom of craggy featured Mr Sansbury, Head of Geography and the most feared teacher in the school. Pupils who had incurred his wrath were often to be retribution. From those third floor windows, I looked out across the mushrooming suburbia as it swallowed up the Hampshire countryside, to a horizon of low hills and trees. As a sixth former, there was no longer the weekly gym class, and the prospect of having to climb the wall bars, to dread. There were no mountains in the view outside Room 10, but inside, yes, there were mountains. Mr Sansbury showed his students slides of glacial landforms in the Welsh mountains, and in the pictures and in his teaching of the subject, a new world was revealed to me.”

David Thomas - History Teacher at Barton Peveril Grammar School 1965-71

In a recent email David went on to say: … I am away in a few days for 3 weeks leading walks in the Austrian Alps, where I run a website. Maybe you would like to look at the site and perhaps mention it in the Bartonian www.sollwalks.co.uk It is a totally non profit making site. In fact it cost me to run it. Apart from walk details which might not interest anyone not going there to walk, it has beautiful photos of each walk.

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