War Diaries, 1939-1945: Field Marshall Lord Alanbrooke

Publisher and industry reviews

UK Kirkus review

It is commonly but wrongly said that, after more than fifty years, there can be no more astonishing revelations about the world war that raged from 1939 to 1945: but of course there can. Here is a long volume to prove the point. The diaries kept (illegally) through the war by Sir Alan Brooke, later Lord Alanbrooke, were edited by Sir Arthur Bryant, the popular historian, in the late 1950s. It now turns out that Bryant over-cooked his edition, not only tampering with Brooke's soldierly prose, but leaving out what Brooke really thought about the other great men with whom he had to work. In a trough of the Cold War, Bryant could print in full Brooke's tales of drunken banquets in the Kremlin and double-dealing by Soviet commanders; but when Marshall had just rescued western Europe with his plan, and Eisenhower was president of the United States, Brooke's strictures on their lack of strategic grasp were suppressed. Trickier still, Bryan thought it impolitic to reveal in Churchill's lifetime how badly Churchill and Brooke had got on, while Brooke ran in the Chiefs of Staff committee - as he did from March 1942 to the end of the war. Not only did they disagree repeatedly, Brooke even wondered whether Churchill, wonderful as he was, could possibly be in his right mind. For decades, the popular image of how the war had been fought rested, in this country, on Churchill's own six-volume account of it, in which there was no room for anyone else near him in stature. Here is a powerful correction. Churchill, intensly self-centred, saw himself as the nation's saviour; this book proves he did not act alone. It was the combined effort of Churchill and Brooke - and others, of course - rather than the prime minister's unaided genius, that gave Britain guidance for survival. This book is both a masterpiece in its content, and a model of how editing should be done. (Kirkus UK)