'The soldiers would follow him anywhere': The WW2 general who outwitted his arch-rival

Field Marshal Bernard "Monty" Montgomery died 50 years ago. In 1968, he told the BBC about the Battle of El Alamein, and his German counterpart Erwin Rommel, the "Desert Fox".

"In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable." In one remark, Winston Churchill captured the infuriating brilliance of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the brains behind the celebrated November 1942 victory at the Second Battle of El Alamein. Seen as a turning point in World War Two, the battle in North Africa inspired another famous Churchill quote: "Now, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

By the time of the general's death on 24 March 1976, aged 88, the now Lord Montgomery of Alamein had enjoyed a long and sometimes controversial retirement. A prickly character unafraid of stirring up trouble, in his memoir he had dismissed General Dwight D Eisenhower, his old supreme commander and future US president, with the typically arrogant: "Nice chap. No soldier." In a moment of self-awareness, he once joked: "My business, as you know, is fighting – fighting the Germans or anybody else, too, who wants to have a fight."