June 22, 2015

Finest Hour 110, Spring 2001

Page 42

“I thank God from the bottom of my heart for having been allowed to work for him for 4 1/2 long and momentous years…”

By Graham Robson

Alanbrooke, by David Fraser. London: HarperCollins 1982, paperback reprint 1997, 552 pages, £9.99

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What a fascinating book this is! What a marker for military history; what an authoritative story of the way that Alan Brooke, in particular, and his top aides, kept British military strategy on the right path for so long. (I’d better make it clear he was Alan Brooke, later General Alan Brooke, finally Field Marshal Brooke, who chose the title of Lord Alanbrooke when raised to the peerage in 1945.)

From Christmas Day 1941 until Churchill was booted out by an ungrateful electorate in 1945, career soldier Alan Brooke was Chief of the Imperial General Staff. No other brass hat—not Monty, not Mountbatten, not Tedder, not even Eisenhower—could outrank him, and none could out-think him.

More than anyone else during World War II, the man Winston Churchill immediately nicknamed “Brookie” was the Prime Minister’s sheet anchor. Whenever die great man plunged off on another flight of strategic fancy or anodier romantic master plan, Brooke was there to haul him back into line. “Yes, Prime Minister, but….” must have been one of his frequent opening lines in a discussion.

It wasn’t easy. Though Brooke was CIGS, Churchill was Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, and fought a constant battle for strategic supremacy. Brooke might have been backed by his military colleagues but Churchill had destiny on his shoulder. Brooke was practical, but Churchill had “The Prof,” Beaverbrook and Bracken to divert him.

No wonder that blazing rows, in committee, came regularly. No wonder that Brooke regularly complained to colleagues about Churchill’s methods—yet he always came back for more. This, in so many ways, was a bare knuckle fight without end.

This is the official biography, which means that author David Fraser, himself once a senior general in the British army, has been able to dig deep. Not only does he know his military history, but somehow he has also got into Alanbrooke’s mind. Here in a thick and comprehensive biography is the story of Alanbrooke’s career, especially where it dovetailed so closely with that of Churchill.

It confirms everything we knew, or thought we knew, about Churchill’s way of making war, of his dreams of defeating Hitler, and of the way that he realised that he, and only he, could bring that about. It also confirms how illogical he could be. Brooke, like many other of Churchill’s associates, could be infuriated by the PMs caprice, by his impish shrugging off of the practicalities, by the sheer gusto of his working methods, and his often bizarre working timetable. There was a fundamental difference between the two. Churchill imagined how a victory could be achieved, and ignored the detail. Brooke, for his part, rarely imagined anything, but made sure that every campaign was feasible.

Like his associates, though, Brooke came to love Churchill. That feeling, it seems, was reciprocated. According to Fraser, “Churchill loved Alan Brooke, and to others often said so. He had implicit trust in him. Where others would be tongue-tied or resentfully inarticulate beneath the bludgeoning of Churchillian invective or exhortation, Brooke was eloquent, cogent, persuasive. Alanbrooke’s was a dissective, Churchill’s a romantic mind….”

Alanbrooke himself wrote, just as he completed his job as CIGS: “As for Winston, I thank God from the bottom of my heart for having been allowed to work for him for 4 1/2 long and momentous years….” How many more of us could have wished for that?

Mr. Robson is a motoring writer from Dorset, UK and co-author, with the editor, of Triumph Cars and The Complete Book of Collectible Cars.