Shot through the lung by a sniper in 1914 and pinned under the body of the man who tried to rescue him, Bernard Montgomery survived a wound so severe that doctors ordered his grave dug. This episode explores how that experience, an abusive childhood in Tasmania, and near-expulsion from Sandhurst forged Britain’s most famous World War II commander, a man whose battlefield brilliance was inseparable from a personality that alienated nearly everyone around him.

We cover the Macroom Castle standoff in Ireland, his marriage to Betty Carver and her death from an infected insect bite, the venereal disease memo that nearly got him fired, the brutal night-retreat training that saved the British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk, his refusal to attack Rommel until victory at El Alamein was a mathematical certainty, and the Normandy decoy strategy at Caen that he could not bring himself to explain. Along the way: the Flying Fortress bet with Bedell Smith, the campaign to remove him in 1944, and Churchill’s famous summary of his character.

• How childhood abuse and World War I trench experience shaped his obsession with preparation
• The Dunkirk flank maneuver made possible by grueling peacetime night exercises
• Why he ignored Churchill’s pressure and waited to fight the Second Battle of El Alamein
• The Caen decoy plan and the ego that turned a strategic success into a PR disaster
• His controversial postwar statements on apartheid, Mao, and homosexuality legislation