4/8: Rise and Fall and Legend of George S. Patton for Memorial Day. 4/8: The Commanders: The Leadership Journeys of George Patton, Bernard Montgomery, and Erwin Rommel by Lloyd Clark
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 29 May 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
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4/8: Rise and Fall and Legend of George S. Patton for Memorial Day. 4/8: The Commanders: The Leadership Journeys of George Patton, Bernard Montgomery, and Erwin Rommel by Lloyd Clark
https://www.amazon.com/Commanders-Leadership-Journeys-Bernard-Montgomery/dp/0802160220/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1IW4D1GLPGRA5&keywords=the+commanders+lloyd+clark&qid=1674136061&s=books&sprefix=THE+COMMANDERS%2Cstripbooks%2C141&sr=1-1
Born in the two decades prior to World War I, George Patton, Bernard Montgomery, and Erwin Rommel became among the most recognized and successful military leaders of the 20th century. However, as acclaimed military historian Lloyd Clark reveals in his penetrating and insightful braided chronicle of their lives, they charted very different, often interrupted, paths to their ultimate leadership positions commanding hundreds of thousands of troops during World War II and celebrated as heroes in the United States, Britain, and Germany.
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| 0:00.0 | This episode is brought to you by Shopify. |
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| 0:31.0 | This is CBS I in the World. I'm John Bacheler with Professor Lloyd Clark. |
| 0:40.0 | His new book is The Commanders, the leadership journey of George Patton Bernard McGumran or Win Rommel. |
| 0:45.0 | These are professional soldiers. They devote themselves to understanding warfare and yet politics. |
| 0:53.0 | The course for Owen Rommel is deeply compromised by the rise of the national socialist, the Nazis. |
| 1:02.0 | And it is surprising to learn that right away Rommel establishes what you have to say is a manipulative relationship with the fear of Adolf Hitler. |
| 1:13.0 | And he goes through periods of admiring him and nodding him, being punished by him and nodding him, not being punished by him. |
| 1:20.0 | Professor, this is the strangest part because once you associate Rommel with Hitler, he's not the same inspirational figure he was before. |
| 1:31.0 | It's troubling only because it's impossible to remove the fact that he would have known of the remarks that Hitler said repeated again and again treating human beings as worthy of being destroyed, particularly the Jews, but many more people than that. |
| 1:48.0 | Did Rommel reflect on that in his letters to Lucy, the anti-Semitism? Did he talk about it? |
| 1:54.0 | He tended to gloss over what we might describe as the most extreme excesses of Hitler's politics and personality. |
| 2:04.0 | And as you say, he had this love-hate relationship with Hitler. |
| 2:10.0 | There were very few people, if any, that Rommel venerated more in his career. |
| 2:16.0 | Most of the admiration that Rommel shows for anyone in a superior position to his own is directed wholly towards Hitler, his leadership, what he is perhaps providing Germany with to become a world class power again. |
| 2:37.0 | When he falls out of love with Hitler, it's not really for his politics, which as I say, he glosses over it because he has let the army down or let Rommel down. It's about us. |
| 2:47.0 | And whenever Hitler was untrustworthy, Rommel deemed this to be a negative point against the führer. |
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