This is CBSI in the world.

I'm John Batchel with Professor Lloyd Clark.

The book is The Commanders, the leadership journey of George Patton, Bernard Montgomery, and Irwin Rommel.

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

who are from the American side and the British side, he's irritating. 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 Army Group B, commanded by Erwin Rommel on the coast of France, and then he's going to conquer first the Army Group B commanded by Irwin Rommel 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 Burgumbray 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 hold. 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.

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