Ike was the only commander who could have kept the Alliance and SHAEF together, Fox. Who else could have handled prima donnas like Patton, Clark, Montgomery, deGaulle? Ike and Marshall to my mind were at the top of the US military pantheon.
Yes, but we would have been much better off without Montgomery.
Here's a quote from the US Army Museum's write-up on Operation Varsity:
In his wartime memoir, A Soldier’s Story, GEN Bradley contended that the Germans had diverted the bulk of their forces east of the Rhine to the Remagen bridgehead, leaving weak forces around Wesel. He added that if Montgomery had crossed the Rhine on the run as Hodges and Patton did, or had allowed Simpson to do so with his Ninth Army, Varsity would never have been necessary, and that the operation was typical Montgomery overkill. Other officers had even harsher words, claiming that Montgomery used airborne forces to simply “put on a good show” and to further to his own standing as a military genius.
Link:
https://armyhistory.org/operation-varsity-the-last-airborne-deployment-of-world-war-ii/My father's unit (the 771st Tank Battalion) fought in the area of Wesel. My father's opinion of Montgomery was even lower - he said that Montgomery killed more brits and GI's than the Germans by the airborne operation rather than simply crossing the Rhine on the surface. My father was a 1LT combat medic who served through the battle of the Bulge and the push through Germany - combat medic's badge, purple heart and 3 bronze stars, all from pulling wounded men from between the lines from what his men told my mother. Less than a year before he died in 2014 at the age of 95 he was still cursing Montgomery for wanton slaughter of his own men.
