This is CBSI in the World. I'm John Bachelor with Professor Lloyd Clark.

The book is The Commanders, the leadership journey of George Patton

Bernard Montgomery and Erwin Rama. It is now the spring of 1944. Bernard

Montgomery is rewarded with overall command of the ground forces on D-Day, the crossing of the channel, the invasion of France.

He is to command the 21st Army Group. He's in charge of the landing itself.

He's been inspirational to his own men, but to his peers,

Eisenhower and the other commanders from the American side and the British side. He's irritating. He he creates friction he doesn't care what you think

of his opinion and we're going to go to a lecture the lecture of lectures he gives in

his life this is at st paul's school in May of 1944. He's given this presentation in April,

but now this morning, Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister, is present. The professor gives

us the detail that Bernard Montgomery lays out a map on the floor and he's going to tell them how he's going to conquer first the the Army Group B commanded by Erwin Rabel on the coast of France and then he's going to

conquer France and the German army and then he's going all the way to Berlin.

Professor, this is a scene that you can't make up. Bernard Montgomery giving the lecture of his life. What is the memory of the men who were in that room? Was he persuasive? Was he mesmerizing? Did they write it in their memoirs? He was scintillating in May 1944.

This is the man who had been presented with a plan that he said was not good enough that was full of holds he reinvented the

overlord plan and he took ownership of it and this was his presentation of the

Montgomery plan and he was absolutely at the center of it.

And it was not just the way that he presented it with great confidence, it was the way in which nobody left that room thinking it would not work.

He was a master of the detail. He was a master of the strategy. men like Winston Churchill, were mesmerized by this performance.

And it's very rare that one reads diaries of a veteran staff officers and finds the names of lecturers

emboldened in those pages. But when you look at the staff officers that were

present at that May briefing, everyone talks about Montgomery's performance.

It was remarkable.

...