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 Cae ...