Review by Andrew Roberts

“ON NO ACCOUNT MUST THE CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK BE PUBLISHED,” wrote Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke on the opening page of his wartime diary, and it is easy to understand why. As the “Master of Strategy,” the man Churchill had implored to become Britain’s senior soldier, Alanbrooke was the repository of all the most important wartime secrets. Even when they were published in 1957, the diaries were heavily censored both on grounds of national security and for fear of antagonising powerful figures such as the then American President Dwight Eisenhower and the past and serving prime ministers Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan.

They are now published unexpurgated for the first time and, although it has long been no secret that Alanbrooke did not always see eye to eye on strategic matters with Churchill, it is only now apparent that for much of the war he could hardly bear the prime minister. Churchill, on the other hand, seems to have harboured no reciprocal ill-will towards Alanbrooke.

Alanbrooke’s influence on global strategy cannot be underestimated. It was he, more even than Churchill, Roosevelt or Stalin, who set out the stages by which Nazi Germany was going to be defeated in the West. It was he who laid down the crucial sequence of North Africa, Italy and Normandy as the path to Berlin. Once thought of as a tough, humourless, Ulster-born “brass hat,” it is now clear that Alanbrooke was a passionate man given to bouts of depression and elation and also of fury against many of those with whom he had to work, especially Generals Marshall, Eisenhower and Patton and much of the British political establishment.

His cautious, painstaking approach often clashed with that of Churchill. It was the dichotomy of a chess-player versus a poker-player. Yet Churchill never once overruled his Chiefs of Staff Committee, however much he might have disagreed with them at times. The shadow of the Great War disaster at Gallipoli still hung over him and he knew better than to trust his impulsive genius more than Alanbrooke’s logical arguments. In his turn, Alanbrooke considered it his duty to prevent Churchill from getting Britain into another Gallipoli, a task in which he succeeded when quashing Churchill’s plans for attacking the Balkans in 1943 and Sumatra in 1944.

Although the minutes of the Chiefs of Staff Committee in the Public Record Office give the bare, factual outlines of what was discussed and agreed in the meetings, these new diaries flesh out the story and record the often volcanic rows which developed between the key players. Far from being the impassive, Olympian figures of wartime propaganda, Churchill and the High Command were often despairing of what to do next and at bitter loggerheads over the way the war should be fought.

Where Churchill was romantic, boisterous, inspirational and occasionally, so Alanbrooke suspected, drunk, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff was cautious, pessimistic, sober and adamant. Both men were combative, wilful, driven and anxious to prevail. The personal tension between the men eventually worked in Britain’s favour, ensuring that grand strategy combined a mixture of Churchill’s genius and Alanbrooke’s professionalism. It was a pained, often exasperated working relationship that nonetheless helped to win the Second World War, even if it collapsed soon afterwards.

“Brookie wants to have it both ways,” commented Clementine Churchill when the first of his two memoirs, The Turn of the Tide, was published in 1957, after he had written a fulsome (if somewhat hypocritical) dedication in the copy he sent Churchill. As Montgomery told the book’s editor, the historian Sir Arthur Bryant, Churchill was “very angry indeed” at this, the first crack in the edifice of his wartime reputation. He would have been apoplectic if he had read what Alanbrooke and Bryant had excised from the diaries.

Yet it must be recalled that Alanbrooke was often generous to Churchill in the diaries and he regularly pointed out that they were written at times of tremendous stress, often late at night, and as a way of letting off steam and thus preventing his irritation with his colleagues becoming apparent to their faces. They therefore probably saved as many rows as they documented.

In the major strategic arguments of the war, and especially in delaying the Second Front until June 1944 when the Allies were properly ready, Alanbrooke was right and it was probably very fortunate that a “No man” was where he was instead of yet another one of the “Yes men” who surrounded Churchill.

These diaries were a psychological safety-valve for a soldier who laboured under as great a weight of political and military pressure as any in history and they should be read as such. As he broke yet another pencil in half, saying “Prime Minister, I flatly disagree,” Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke was doing his duty better than any other Allied general on active service. Part of Churchill’s greatness lay in the fact that he appointed Alanbrooke and, albeit often grudgingly, always accepted his advice.