To begin at the beginning: the title. ‘Unbeatable, Unbearable’ is supposedly Winston Churchill’s opinion of Bernard Montgomery – that in defeat he was the first, and in victory the second. Gary Mead acknowledges that it is merely ‘attributed’ to Churchill. According to the late Richard Langworth, the unrivalled curator of Churchillian wit and wisdom, it and the rather more grandiloquent ‘In defeat, indomitable; in victory, insufferable’ are widely bruited about but are not in the Churchill canon.
Does it matter? We can be confident that the other major Allied figures of the second world war who dealt with Monty – Alanbrooke, Eisenhower and Ismay – would not have disagreed too much. But key is the word ‘victory’, which was in short supply in the early years of the war. One well-attested Churchill quote is: ‘Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat.’ In fact Churchill was more circumspect, presaging it with: ‘It may almost be said.’ The RAF, after all, had turned the strategic tide in the Battle of Britain; Richard O’Connor’s Western Desert Force had destroyed an Italian army of ten divisions in Cyrenaica; and the Royal Navy had put an effective end to German surface raiding in the North Atlantic.
