Background
Alan Brooke was born in 1883 at Bagnères-de-Bigorre, Hautes-Pyrénées, to a prominent Anglo-Irish family from West Ulster with a long military tradition.
Alan Brooke was born in 1883 at Bagnères-de-Bigorre, Hautes-Pyrénées, to a prominent Anglo-Irish family from West Ulster with a long military tradition.
He was educated in France and at the Royal Military Academy (Woolwich) and served in the Royal Artillery during World War I.
Brooke served in Ireland and India before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. He served on the Western Frontwith the Royal Artillery. It has been claimed that during the Battle of the Somme in 1916 he introduced the idea of the creeping barrage system. An expert on artillery tactics, Brooke was mentioned six times in dispatches and became chief artillery officer in the 1st British Army.
In 1923 Brooke was promoted to colonel and lectured at Camberley Military College and the Imperial Defense College. He served with Bernard Montgomery who later commented: " I had, and retain, a great liking and an enormous admiration and respect for him. I consider he is the best soldier that any nation had produced for very many years." In 1937 Brooke was given the command of Britain's first mobile division and the following year he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant general and became head of the Territorial Anti-Aircraft Corps.
In August 1939 Brooke was appointed head of Southern Command and on the outbreak of the Second World War went to France as a member of the British Expeditionary Force under General John Gort. In June 1940 Brooke played a leading role in the evacuation of British troops at Dunkirk. General Brian Horrocks argued in his autobiography, A Full Life (1960): "The more I have studied this campaign the clearer it becomes that the man who really saved the B.E.F. was our own corps commander, Lieutenant-General A. F. Brooke. I felt vaguely at the time that this alert, seemingly iron, man without a nerve in his body, whom I met from time to time at 3rd Division headquarters and who gave out his orders in short, clipped sentences, was a great soldier, but it is only now that I realise fully just how great he was. We regarded him as a highly efficient military machine. It is only since I have read his diaries that I appreciate what a consummate actor he must have been. Behind the confident mask was the sensitive nature of a man who hated war."
Brooke returned to Britain and in July 1940 he replaced Edmund Ironside as commander of the Home Forces. In this post Brooke had several major disagreements with Winston Churchill about military strategy. It therefore came as a surprise when Churchill appointed him Chief of Imperial Staff in December 1941. General Harold Alexander believed it was a good appointment: "Brookie, as we always call him, was the outstanding and obvious man for the job; a fine soldier in every sense, and trusted and admired by the whole Army."
Although the two men continued to disagree about a large number of issues, for example, Brooke favoured an early invasion of Europe on order to take pressure off the Red Army on the Eastern Front, he gradually became Churchill's most important military adviser in the war.
Brooke was offered command of the British troops in the Middle East in August 1942 but turned it down suggesting General Harold Alexander for the post. In his diary Brooke recorded that it was more important for him to remain in Britain in order to stop Winston Churchill making any major military mistakes. He wrote in his diary: "We had to consider this morning one of Winston's worst minutes I have ever seen. I can only believe that he must have been quite tight when he dictated it. My God! How little the world at large knows what his failings and defects are!"
Churchill had promised Brooke command of Operation Overlord in 1944. However, President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that General Dwight Eisenhower should be given this important task. Promoted to field marshal in January 1944 he was created Baron Alanbrooke of Brookeborough in September 1945. After retiring from the British Army he was a director of Midland Bank.
Alan Brooke died on 17th June 1963.
Brooke was married twice. After six years of engagement he married Jane Richardson in 1914, a neighbour in County Fermanagh in Ulster. Six days into their honeymoon Brooke was recalled to active duty when the First World War started. The couple had one daughter and one son, Rosemary and Thomas. Jane Brooke died following a car accident in 1925 in which her husband was at the steering wheel.
He married Benita Lees (1892–1968), daughter of Sir Harold Pelly, 4th Bt., and the widow of Sir Thomas Lees, 2nd Bt., in 1929. The marriage was very happy for the uxorious Brooke and resulted in one daughter and one son, Kathleen and Victor.[60] During the war the couple lived in Hartley Wintney in Hampshire. After the war, the Brookes' financial situation forced the couple to move into the gardener's cottage of their former home, where they lived for the rest of their lives. Their last years were darkened by the death of their daughter, Kathleen, in a riding accident in 1961.
Brooke had a love of nature. Hunting and fishing were among his great interests. His foremost passion, however, was birds. Brooke was a noted ornithologist, especially in bird photography. He was president of the Zoological Society of London from 1950–54 and vice-president of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
