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UNIRONIC BATTLE CAPTAINS OF D-DAY. 8/8: The Commanders: The Leadership Journeys of George Patton, Bernard Montgomery, and Erwin Rommel by Lloyd Clark (Author)

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John Batchelor

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4.62.7K Ratings

🗓️ 7 June 2025

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

UNIRONIC BATTLE CAPTAINS OF D-DAY.   8/8: 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
1945.
1944 TOMMIES

Transcript

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0:00.0

This is CBSI on the world with Professor Lloyd Clark.

0:08.8

He's director of research at the Center for Army Leadership at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst.

0:15.2

That is why the major theme here is leadership, not who wins the battles, but how the men responded to the leader,

0:23.2

how the junior leaders learned from the senior leaders. We'll begin with Erwin Rommel only because

0:29.5

he's executed as a traitor by Adolf Hitler. And what I learn about Erwin Rommel is that

0:37.1

his wife, Lucy, never, never relented on the

0:41.3

idea that he was persecuted because he was successful and that he was not involved in the plot

0:47.8

against Hitler. But then again, Lucy was looking at it from the point of view of a survivor of the

0:52.8

Second War in Germany, which was

0:55.0

a deprived land for many years afterwards, not until the Marshall Plan showed up in the late

1:01.8

40s. Did Germany stop starving? So I don't ask Lucy Rommel to have an opinion that stands up in

1:09.8

the 21st century.

1:11.4

Professor, the fact that there was a plot against Hitler recommends all of these officers.

1:17.4

Is there a moment you can see in what we have of the letters to Lucy or his memoirs,

1:23.2

where Rommel realized that he was working for the devil?

1:29.2

I think that what we see increasingly is Rommel recognizing that Hitler was a very flawed man,

1:39.5

not necessarily as a leader or even as a politician,

1:43.4

but as a personality, his behaviour traits were

1:47.4

something that Rommel increasingly didn't like. If you add on to that the way that he seemed to be

1:53.3

so callous with the lives of troops, he wouldn't listen to expert comment, including his own.

1:59.3

I think by Normandy, we see in Ronald's letters to Lucy

2:03.3

that he's beginning to change his mind about Hitler and he's beginning to be a little less

...

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