7/8: 20th Century Generalship: 7/8: 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
🗓️ 2 April 2023
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
@BATCHELORSHOW
7/8: 20th Century Generalship: 7/8: 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 CBSI in the World. I'm John Bachelord Professor Lloyd Clark. The book is the commander's |
| 0:11.0 | leadership journey of George Patton Bernard Montgomery and Erwin Rommel. It is now the |
| 0:15.6 | spring of 1944. Bernard Montgomery is rewarded with overall command of the ground forces on |
| 0:23.3 | D. Day, the crossing of the channel, the invasion of France. He is to command the 21st Army |
| 0:29.4 | group he's in charge of the landing itself. He's been inspirational to his own men, but |
| 0:35.2 | to his peers Eisenhower and the other commanders who from the American side and the British |
| 0:41.0 | side, he's irritating. He creates friction. He doesn't care what you think of his opinion. |
| 0:46.8 | And we're going to go to a lecture. The lecture of lectures he gives in his life. This is |
| 0:50.8 | at St. Paul's School in May of 1944. He's given this presentation in April, but now this morning |
| 0:57.6 | Winston Churchill, the prime minister, is present. The professor gives us the detail that |
| 1:02.1 | Bernard Montgomery lays out a map on the floor and he's going to tell them how he's going to conquer |
| 1:07.4 | first the the Army group B commanded by Erwin Rommel on the coast of France. And then he's going |
| 1:14.3 | to conquer France and the German army and then he's going all the way to Berlin. Professor, |
| 1:19.2 | this is a scene that you can't make up. Bernard Montgomery giving the lecture of his life. |
| 1:24.1 | What is the memory of the men who were in that room? Was he persuasive? Was he mesmerizing? |
| 1:30.8 | Did they write it in their memoirs? He was scintillating in May 1944. This is the man |
| 1:38.1 | who had been presented with a plan that he said was not good enough. There was full of |
| 1:43.5 | holds. He reinvented the overlord plan and he took ownership of it. And this was his presentation |
| 1:51.4 | of the Montgomery plan and he was absolutely at the center of it. And it was not just the way |
| 1:57.9 | that he presented it with great confidence. It was the way in which nobody left that room thinking |
| 2:05.0 | it would not work. He was a master of the detail. He was a master of the strategy, men like Winston |
| 2:13.0 | Churchill were mesmerized by this performance. And it's very rare that one reads diaries of |
... |
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.