I'm John Bachelor with Sir Max Hastings. His new book is Sword Beach, D-Day Baptism by Fire. The

Orn Bridge is secure. Hold until you're relieved is the order, but we have a big plan here that

everybody has a piece of. Orn Bridge is one component that must be captured without destruction.

That's done. The plan is now intact, but everything is going to run

to a clock. And the man who designed this clock and the plan of the day is Sir Bernard

Montgomery, Monty, who is a hero and an inspiration and a vaudeville act all at once in the months before the invasion.

What was his big picture?

What did he see from the moment they showed him the plan initially, just three divisions?

He said, three beaches.

He said, no, five divisions and five beaches.

He had a vision.

What was it, Max?

It very often happens that great commanders in war, and maybe people who run all sorts of stuff in peace as well as war, are terrible human beings.

That was true, Patton, who one of the most obnoxious human beings would ever came out of the United States, but he was undoubtedly a great combat commander. But in the same way with Montgomery, in fact, Churchill said in

1942 after Montgomery had just achieved his first important victory at El Alamein in the desert,

and Churchill said to a friend of his, he said, such a pity, is it not, that the first of

our generals, who seems able to inflict a defeat upon the Germans, should be an unmitigated

cad and bounder. And Montgomery was a cad and bounder who even before D-Day had made

Americans, most of them hate his guts. And one of many reasons

that we all admire Dwight Eisenhower so much as Supreme Commander was that Dwight Eisenhower

entrusted the executive command of D-Day to Montgomery, and many times during the months before it took place,

Eisenhower had every reason to either punch Montgomery in the face or demand that he was

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