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The John Batchelor Show

June 6, 1944: Rommel vs Montgomery with Patton in the wings: 4/8: The Commanders: The Leadership Journeys of George Patton, Bernard Montgomery, and Erwin Rommel by Lloyd Clark

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

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4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2023

⏱️ 6 minutes

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June 6, 1944: Rommel vs Montgomery with Patton in the wings: 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.

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is CBS Eye on the World. I'm John Bachelors with Professor Lloyd Clark. His new book is The

0:10.8

Commander's The Leadership Journey of George Patton Bernard McGumran or When Rommel. These are

0:14.8

professional soldiers. They devote themselves to understanding warfare and yet politics. The

0:22.4

course for Owen Rommel is deeply compromised by the rise of the national socialist, the Nazis.

0:30.9

And it is surprising to learn that right away Rommel establishes what you have to say is

0:37.8

a manipulative relationship with the fear with Adolf Hitler. And he goes through periods of

0:43.5

admiring him and nodding, admiring him, being punished by him and nodding, not being punished by him.

0:48.8

Professor, this is the strangest part because once you associate Rommel with Hitler, he's not the

0:55.4

quite, he's not the same inspirational figure he was before. It's troubling only because it's

1:02.8

impossible to remove the fact that he would have known of the remarks that Hitler said repeated

1:10.6

again and again treating human beings as worthy of being destroyed, particularly the Jews, but

1:15.6

many more people than that. Did Rommel reflect on that in his letters to Lucy? The anti-Semitism,

1:21.4

did he talk about it? He tended to gloss over what we might describe as the most extreme

1:29.9

excesses of Hitler's politics and personality. And as you say, he had this love-hate relationship

1:37.1

with Hitler. There were very few people, if any, that Rommel venerated more in his career.

1:45.7

Most of the admiration that Rommel shows for anyone in a superior position to his own is

1:53.1

directed wholly towards Hitler, his leadership, what he is perhaps providing Germany with to

2:01.9

become a world-class power again. When he falls out of love with Hitler, it's not really for his

2:08.9

politics, which as I say, he glosses over it because he has let the army down or let Rommel down.

2:15.0

It's about fuss. And whenever Hitler was untrustworthy, Rommel deems this to be a negative point

2:24.0

against the Führer. And the longer the Second World War goes on, the more those negative points

2:28.9

seem to add up to quite a lot for Rommel. In August of 39, my note here says, Rommel attends the

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