Background
Alan Francis Brooke was born Alan Francis Brooke, in Bagneres-de-Bigorre, France, on July 23, 1883. He was a younger son of Sir Victor Brooke, baronet, of Colebrooke, the head of an old Anglo-Irish fighting family.
(Alanbrooke was CIGS - Chief of the Imperial General Staff...)
Alanbrooke was CIGS - Chief of the Imperial General Staff - for the greater part of the Second World War. He acted as mentor to Montgomery and military adviser to Churchill, with whom he clashed. As chairman of the Chiefs of Staff committee he also led for the British side in the bargaining and the brokering of the Grand Alliance, notably during the great conferences with Roosevelt and Stalin and their retinue at Casablanca,Teheran, Malta and elsewhere. As CIGS Alanbrooke was indispensable to the British and the Allied war effort. The diaries were sanitised by Arthur Bryant for his two books he wrote with Alanbrooke. Unexpurgated, says Danchev, they are explosive. The American generals, in particular, come in for attack. Danchev proposes to centre his edition on the Second World War. Pre and post-war entries are to be reduced to a Prologue and Epilogue). John Keegan says they are the military equivalent of the Colville Diaries (Churchill's private secretary), THE FRINGES OF POWER. These sold 24,000 in hardback at Hodder in 1985.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0297607316/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0002118130/?tag=2022091-20
Alan Francis Brooke was born Alan Francis Brooke, in Bagneres-de-Bigorre, France, on July 23, 1883. He was a younger son of Sir Victor Brooke, baronet, of Colebrooke, the head of an old Anglo-Irish fighting family.
He was educated in France and at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, England, and commissioned in the Royal Field Artillery in 1902.
After serving eight years in India, he distinguished himself in World War I as a gunner technician, finishing as the chief artillery officer of the British First Army in 1918. In the years before World War II he successively commanded Great Britain's first experimental armored division and anti-aircraft command and, when war broke out in 1939, went to France as commander of an army corps. During the retreat to Dunkirk he played a leading part in saving the British Expeditionary Force. He was subsequently appointed by Winston Churchill to command, first, the remaining British forces in France, and then the entire military force in Great Britain against the threatened German invasion. In December 1941, on the eve of the Japanese attacks in the Pacific, he was appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff (C. I. G. S. ) and, as such, operational head of the British army. Three months later, after the fall of Singapore, Churchill made him chairman of the chiefs of staff committee in which capacity, and that of C. I. G. S. , he served for the remainder of the war as the government's principal strategic adviser. He was thus one of those responsible for the strategy which the Allies pursued until their invasion and liberation of Western Europe. Brooke opposed both the American demand for what he considered to be a premature cross-Channel operation in 1942 and 1943 and Churchill's inclination for an outflanking attack on Hitler's European fortress through the Balkans. He insisted on engaging the Germans in the one area, the Mediterranean, where the Allies' sea power enabled them to offset their temporary inferiority in military manpower and arms, until they were ready to strike at Hitler directly across the English Channel. This Mediterranean policy, not as an end in itself but as a means to a greater end, was brilliantly successful and resulted, in the winter and spring of 1942-1943, in the expulsion of the Germans and Italians from Africa, the surrender of an Axis army of more than a quarter of a million men, the re-opening of the Mediterranean and, as a result, an immense improvement in the Allied shipping position--an indispensable preliminary to a successful cross-Channel operation. Later in 1943 it led to the capture of Sicily, the fall of Mussolini and Italy, and the invasion of the Italian mainland which, with the threat it presented to Germany's entire position in Southern Europe, resulted, as Brooke intended, in the deployment of a third of Germany's forces south of the Alps and along the Mediterranean littoral (coastal region). It was this dispersal of Germany's strength that robbed her of the advantage of interior lines and the rapid east-to-west communications that had broken Russia in World War I. This helped the Russians to take the offensive in the winter of 1943-1944 and the Allies to establish themselves with comparatively small casualties on the Normandy coast in the summer of 1944. He died of a heart ailment on June 17, 1963.
(Alanbrooke was CIGS - Chief of the Imperial General Staff...)
