At War with Churchill

A lonely senior army officer takes up his pen and writes a dedication to his wife in the flyleaf of a virgin notebook:

This book is not intended to be a diary of events, although it may contain references to my daily life. It is intended to be a record of my thoughts and impressions such as I would have discussed them with you had we been together . . .

The date is 28 September 1939. The author cannot know that what he will record in this 15-shilling notebook – and the many that follow it over the next six years – will become an astonishing first-hand account of Britain’s darkest hours, and a vivid, often harrowing portrait of one of its greatest leaders. For this is an extraordinary soldier, General Sir Alan Brooke, later Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, destined to become Churchill’s right-hand man as head of the British armed forces, and broker of the Grand Alliance with Roosevelt and Stalin. Yet despite the pivotal role he played, his name is still comparatively little known. Twentieth-century military diaries are a mixed bag, and big names are no guarantee of readability. General ‘Pug’ Ismay was Churchill’s military assistant during the war, but that didn’t prevent him from producing a memoir of paralysing tedium. Field Marshal Montgomery’s memoirs are worth a go, but only because his legendary ego rampages across every page, almost making the book a comic masterpiece. I much prefer honest, more human accounts – Spike Milligan’s side-splitting though often poignant tales of his wartime army service perhaps, John Hackett’s I Was a Stranger (SF Edition no. 25) or Anthony Rhodes’s Sword of Bone (SF Edition no. 35). But in my view, the Rolls-Royce of the bunch is Alanbrooke. His candid diaries are unparalleled gems. Even so, their first published incarnations did not serve them well. An ill-fated collaboration with the historian Arthur Bryant produced The Turn of the Tide (1957) and Triumph in the West (1959). Bryant seems not to have had the stomach for the job, bowdlerizing the diaries and rendering them anodyne and dull. Fortunately, in 2001, the historians Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman produced an unexpurgated version that also included comments added by Alanbrooke in the 1950s. The result sparkles, and its warmth and humanity lift it into the first rank. The diaries were born out of the loneliness and isolation of high military office. So while they allow Alanbrooke to vent his spleen as near-intolerable pressure mounts, they also offer the reader a portrait of fraught working relationships and crushing responsibilities. It was said the old soldier never intended to publish them. How-ever, he grew increasingly irritated with the release of each successive volume of Churchill’s own version of events, The Second World War, which appeared between 1948 and 1954. Alanbrooke felt the great man had been ungenerous to those around him, and that his own singular effort had been relegated to little more than a footnote. Even so, he sent Churchill a copy of his diaries when they came out, with a generous personal inscription on the flyleaf reaffirming his ‘unbounded admiration, profound respect, and deep affection’. Churchill replied with one icy paragraph of thanks. In many ways Alanbrooke was an outsider, something that makes his rise through the ranks all the more remarkable. Although of Irish aristocratic stock he had been born in the Pyrenees in 1883 and spent the first sixteen years of his life in France. He was a wiry, stylish man with strong Continental looks – black hair slicked to his scalp, a long, tanned face, a regally beaky nose, a neatly trimmed moustache and small, berry-dark eyes. Alanbrooke’s career had taken off as a result of his decisive leadership of II Corps of the British Expeditionary Force in the lead-up to the miraculous evacuation from Dunkirk – a feat that ought to have been impossible. He was dismayed to be sent straight back over the Channel in the vain hope of rallying the French. He knew it was a hopeless task, but characteristically he did his best until time ran out and the country surrendered. His sound military judgement and cool head did not go unnoticed. The newly installed Prime Minister wanted him as his Commander-in-Chief Home Forces.

When I thump the table and push my face towards him, what does he do? Thumps the table harder and glares back at me. I know these Brookes – stiff-necked Ulstermen, and there’s no one worse to deal with than that!

Churchill was joking when he wrote that, but in the years ahead he frequently found himself eyeball-to-eyeball with Alanbrooke in a tempestuous exchange of views. The C-in-C Home role was a tall order. Invasion was imminent, and meeting that threat was Alanbrooke’s principal responsibility. Unsurprisingly, he was racked with anxiety. It is this that gives his diaries their power. The entry for 19 July 1940 is typical:

I find it hard to realize fully the responsibility I am assuming. I only pray to God that I may be capable of carrying out the job. The idea of failure at this stage of the war is too ghastly to contemplate. I know that you will be with me in praying to God that he may give me the necessary strength and guidance.

The Battle of Britain was already raging, with the Luftwaffe pounding south-east England. Home defence had been a rather lick-and-stick affair, poorly equipped and chaotic, with even the most basic tools of war – rifles, ammunition, anti-tank guns, tanks and armoured cars – in woefully short supply. Alanbrooke set to work, lobbying hard for the equipment he needed, rigorously training troops, devising innovative defensive tactics, overhauling the command structure and dramatically improving communications. Fortunately, the invasion never came, but Alanbrooke’s energy had impressed Churchill, who now wanted him for the top job – Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS). If the Home defence role had been a challenge, the sheer magnitude of this new task was off the scale. Ultimate responsibility for prosecution of the entire war placed on the shoulders of one man was one thing. But there was another hurdle – he had to work with Churchill:

I had seen enough of him . . . his impetuous nature, his gambler’s spirit, and his determination to follow his own selected path at all costs, to realize fully what I was faced with.

Alanbrooke assumed his new role on 1 December 1941. Within a week, the Japanese had brought the United States into the war with their attack on Pearl Harbor, and the new CIGS’s organizational headaches instantly became global. Things rapidly got worse. On 10 December 1941, Alanbrooke arrived at the War Office to be told that the Japanese had sunk the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse.

This . . . puts us in a very serious position for the prosecution of the war. It means that from Africa eastwards to America through the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, we have lost command of the sea. This affects reinforcements to the Middle East, India, Burma, the Far East, Australia and New Zealand!

Not only did he have to deal with the day-to-day business of the military machine, he now also had to play an integral part in hand-ling international diplomacy among the allies that led to the so-called Grand Alliance. The relationship with the United States had to be finessed and plans of action agreed upon. Eggshell-delicate negotiations with the Soviet Union followed. Despite what was at stake, these produced some of the most amusing passages in the diaries. Alanbrooke’s encounters with Stalin and his generals are marvellously described, especially his accounts of formal dinners at the Kremlin, where Soviet generals were apt to slide slowly under the table as the evening wore on:

I was in dread of this banquet all day and shuddered at the idea of having to spend the evening dodging the effects of vodka . . . During the first hour we got through at least a dozen toasts. Luckily, I had a jug of water in front of me, and when I was not being watched I filled up my glass with water instead of vodka . . . In front of me amongst the many fish dishes was a small suckling pig covered with a blanket of white sauce. He had a black truffle eye and an orange peel mouth. He was never eaten, and as the evening slipped by his black eye remained fixed on me, and the orange peel mouth developed a sardonic smile! I can still see that pig now if I shut my eyes.

Alanbrooke recognized Stalin as ‘an outstanding man but not an attractive one’, describing his ‘cold, crafty, dead face’, and finding no difficulty in imagining him sending people to their doom without turning a hair. As the war progresses the diaries steadily fill with details of battle after battle – not just with the Germans and the Japanese, but also between Alanbrooke and Churchill. It was not unusual to see the Prime Minister sulking, crying with rage or shaking his fist in someone’s face. His sarcasm was also hard to take. Alanbrooke’s notes for February 1942 give a typical example:

He came out continually with remarks such as: ‘Have you not got a single general in that army who can win battles? Have none of them any ideas? Must we continually lose battles in this way?’ etc etc. Such remarks lowered the confidence of other ministers in the efficiency of the army, and could be nothing but detrimental to the present crisis.

Despite many more morale-sapping blows, the Allies gradually began to gain the upper hand. Churchill’s failing health left him increasingly fractious and exhausted. He was losing his grasp on detail, and often on reality. On 6 July 1944 Alanbrooke wrote:

At 10 pm we had a frightful meeting with Winston which lasted until 2 am!! It was quite the worst we have had with him. He was very tired . . . he had tried to recuperate with drink. As a result he was in a maudlin, bad tempered, drunken mood, ready to take offence at anything, suspicious of everybody, and in a highly vindictive mood against the Americans. In fact so vindictive that his whole outlook on strategy was warped.

By September, things were no better. Alanbrooke was by now seriously concerned that Churchill’s behaviour risked damaging the all-important relationship with the American commanders in coordinating the final liberation of Europe. After a particularly bad meeting, he wrote:

He was again in a most unpleasant mood. Produced the most ridiculous arguments . . . He knows no details, has only got half the picture in his mind, talks absurdities and makes my blood boil to listen to his nonsense. I find it hard to remain civil. And the wonderful thing is that ¾ of the population of the world imagine that Winston Churchill is one of the Strategists of History, a second Marlborough, and the other ¼ have no conception what a public menace he is and has been throughout this war! It is far better that the world should never know and never suspect the feet of clay of that otherwise superhuman being. Without him England was lost for a certainty, with him England has been on the verge of disaster time and time again . . . Never have I admired and despised a man simultaneously to the same extent. Never have such opposite extremes been combined in the same human being.

However, it is clear from his subsequent footnotes that he was haunted by the rawness of his original diary entries on Churchill and was keen to place them in context:

On reading these diaries I have repeatedly felt ashamed of the abuse I had poured on him, especially during the latter years. It must, however, be remembered that my diary was the safety valve and only outlet for all my pent-up feelings. Feelings that had been engendered through friction generated from prolonged contacts of very tired individuals.

He admitted he had failed to make adequate allowance for Churchill’s ill health, when the Prime Minister had suffered repeated bouts of pneumonia and other ailments, but he was generous in his final assessment of their time together:

I shall always look back on the years I worked with him as some of the most difficult and trying ones in my life. For all that, I thank God that I was given an opportunity of working alongside of such a man, and of having my eyes opened to the fact that occasionally such supermen exist on this earth.

If you are only able to read one military diary, do make it this one. There really is none better.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 63 © Anthony Longden 2019