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
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🗓️ 10 December 2022
⏱️ 7 minutes
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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=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
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.
Patton was born into a military family and from an early age felt he was destined for glory; following a disjointed childhood, Montgomery found purpose and direction in a military academy; Rommel’s father was a former officer, so his pursuit of a military career was logical. Having ascended to the middle ranks, each faced battle for the first time in World War I, a searing experience that greatly influenced their future approach to war and leadership. When war broke out again in 1939, Montgomery and Rommel were immediately engaged, while Patton chafed until the U.S. joined the Allies in 1942 and the three men, by then generals, collided in North Africa in 1943, and then again, climactically, in France after D-Day in 1944.
Weaving letters, diary extracts, official reports, and other documents into his original narrative, recounting dramatic battles as they developed on the ground and at headquarters, Clark also explores the controversies that swirled around Patton, Montgomery, and Rommel throughout their careers, sometimes threatening to derail them. Ultimately, however, their unique abilities to bridge the space between leader and led cemented their legendary reputations.
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS I in the World. I'm John Baffer with Professor Lloyd Clark. His new book is |
| 0:10.8 | The Commanders, the leadership journey of George Patton Bernard McImmeran, Erwin Rommel. |
| 0:14.9 | These are professional soldiers. They devote themselves to understanding warfare and yet |
| 0:20.2 | politics. The course for Owen Rommel is deeply compromised by the rise of the national |
| 0:29.1 | socialist, the Nazis. It is surprising to learn that right away Rommel establishes what |
| 0:36.4 | you have to say is a manipulative relationship with the fear of Adolf Hitler. He goes through |
| 0:43.1 | periods of admiring him and nodding him and being punished by him and nodding him, not being |
| 0:47.9 | punished by him. Professor, this is the strangest part because once you associate Rommel with |
| 0:54.6 | Hitler, he's not the same inspirational figure he was before. It's troubling only because it's |
| 1:03.0 | 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. As you say, he had this love-hate relationship |
| 1:37.2 | with Hitler. There were very few people that Rommel venerated more in his career. Most of the |
| 1:46.6 | admiration that Rommel shows for anyone in a superior position to his own is directed |
| 1:54.0 | wholly towards Hitler, his leadership, what he is perhaps providing Germany with to become a world |
| 2:03.5 | class power again. When he falls out of love with Hitler, it's not really for his politics, |
| 2:09.5 | which as I say, he glosses over it because he has let the army down or let Rommel down. It's about |
| 2:15.8 | success. And whenever Hitler was untrustworthy, Rommel deemed this to be a negative point against |
| 2:24.7 | the Führer. And the longer the second world war goes on, the more those negative points |
| 2:29.1 | seem to add up to quite a lot for Rommel. In August of 39, my note here says Rommel |
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