George Patton, Bernard Montgomery, and Erwin Rommel are among the most recognized and successful military leaders of the twentieth century. However, as Lloyd Clark reveals in his penetrating 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. Then in the middle ranks, each faced battle for the first time in World War I, a searing experience that greatly influenced their future approach to leadership. When World War II broke out, the three men, by then generals, collided in North Africa in 1943, and again, climactically, in France after D-Day in 1944. Weaving letters, diary extracts, official reports, and other documents into his original narrative, and recounting dramatic battles, Clark also unsparingly examines the controversies that sometimes threatened to derail each man, whose ultimate legacies are legendary.