4/8: The Commanders: The Leadership Journeys of George Patton, Bernard Montgomery, and Erwin Rommel by Lloyd Clark (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 19 January 2023
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Bernard Montgomery 1945
@Batchelorshow
4/8: The Commanders: The Leadership Journeys of George Patton, Bernard Montgomery, and Erwin Rommel by Lloyd Clark (Author)
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.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is CBS I On The World. I'm John Bachelors with Professor Lloyd Clark. His new book is The |
| 0:10.9 | Commander's The Leadership Journey of George Patton Bernard McArmoran, Irwin Rommel. These are |
| 0:15.0 | professional soldiers. They devote themselves to understanding warfare and yet politics. The |
| 0:22.0 | course for Irwin Rommel is deeply compromised by the rise of the national socialist, the Nazis. |
| 0:31.1 | And it is surprising to learn that right away Rommel establishes what you have to say is |
| 0:37.6 | a manipulative relationship with the fear with Adolf Hitler. And he goes through periods of |
| 0:43.6 | admiring him and nodding him, being punished by him and nodding, nodding punished by him. |
| 0:48.9 | Professor, this is the strangest part because once you associate Rommel with Hitler, he's not the |
| 0:55.6 | quite, he's not the same inspirational figure he was before. It's troubling only because it's |
| 1:02.9 | impossible to remove the fact that he would have known of the remarks that Hitler said repeated |
| 1:10.8 | again and again treating human beings as worthy of being destroyed, particularly the Jews, |
| 1:15.3 | but many more people than that. Did Rommel reflect on that in his letters to Lucy, the anti-Semitism? |
| 1:21.6 | Did he talk about it? He tended to gloss over what we might describe as the most extreme |
| 1:30.0 | excesses of Hitler's politics and personality. And as you say, he had this love-hate relationship |
| 1:37.2 | with Hitler. There were very few people, if any, that Rommel venerated more in his career. |
| 1:45.9 | Most of the admiration that Rommel shows for anyone in a superior position to his own |
| 1:53.0 | is directed wholly towards Hitler, his leadership, what he is perhaps providing Germany with to |
| 2:01.1 | become a world-class power again. When he falls out of love with Hitler, it is not really for his |
| 2:09.0 | politics, which as I say, he glosses over it because he has let the army down or let Rommel down. |
| 2:15.1 | It's about us. And whenever Hitler was untrustworthy, Rommel deemed this to be a negative point |
| 2:24.1 | against the führer. And the longer the Second World War goes on, the more those negative points |
| 2:29.0 | seem to add up to quite a lot for Rommel. In August of 39, my note here says, Rommel |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from John Batchelor, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of John Batchelor and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.