Churchill's Chief of Staff

...But Bryant stresses that Brooke himself was primarily responsible for the basic Allied decision to invade French North Africa in 1942 rather than Normandy in 1943, as was so earnestly desired by the U.S...

...He uses editorial devices, such as quoting from The Goebbels Diaries on the damaging effect of British bombing of German cities without citing the many official Allied surveys showing the disappointing results of this bombing campaign between 1941 and 1943...

...During the war, however, Brooke was too much of a military professional not to weaken this argument on behalf of what Bryant calls a "concentric" approach to the Axis with his frequent complaints regarding the incorrigible tendencies of Winston Churchill toward a similar dispersion of British strength — in Norway, in coastal raids, in short, in any type of operation which could not seriously hurt the enemy...

...As a result, he not merely has done injustice to the American position on the Second Front issue, he is often taken in by Brooke's weaker arguments while ignoring those in which the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff was strong...

...The Prime Minister's furious impatience, his unfairness to the British Army resulting from his own previous unhappy experiences with it, his interference in all levels of operations, his last-minute changes of plan and his refusal to make choices between alternative lines of conduct—these burdens of Brooke recall the refrain of many previous commanders who had worked with Churchill in the First World War...

...Army...

...Moreover, the new hero of El Alamein, General Sir Bernard Montgomery, backed the Prime Minister on this matter...

...If naturally somewhat reluctant to describe Sir Alan as a man too directly, on the other hand Bryant does propagandize rather baldly on behalf of Brooke's strategy...

...In general, indeed, although Bryant reflects some awareness of the fine U.S...

...Nevertheless, despite often unfavorable reviews in Britain and America—mostly by the semi-official U.S...

...naval historian, Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison—Sir Arthur Bryant's volume constitutes the first serious modification of the normally hostile American and adulatory British accounts of Churchill's conduct of the war...

...the former led to Italy and the latter, to Brooke's distress, to France...

...The U.S...

...Despite Sir Alan's eventual grudging acceptance of the Combined Chiefs of Staff as an organizational device through which Churchill, in particular, could be controlled by the military, given his own conservative views on strategy the CIGS naturally thought little of the judgment of Generals Marshall and Eisenhower on this issue...

...Reviewed by Trumbull Higgins Assistant professor of history, Hojstra College In the first of his two-volume study of Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke's war-time career—a study based upon the diaries and more recent observations of Brooke himself —Sir Arthur Bryant has undertaken a task beyond his capacities...

...Here Marshall was on strong ground...

...Something of Brooke's own rather obstinate and not always very pleasant personality comes out in the argument within the British military over landing in Sicily as opposed to Sardinia...

...Evidently Brooke reached this last conclusion because Marshall disagreed with him on the problem of obtaining shipping for a second front...

...Army histories, he does not care to consider their conclusions, conclusions so often fundamentally opposed to his own or those of Sir Alan Brooke...

...Thus, this first volume is of particular value for its candid descriptions of Churchill in view of the refusal of the official British war histories to reveal differences within the British War Cabinet and consequently to make clear what the personal position of Sir Alan Brooke's overwhelming master actually was on so many of the basic issues of the war...

...Best known for his popular and patriotic surveys of Great Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, Bryant has attempted a defense of Brooke in the vastly more complex field of the Second World War without fully understanding the military implications of his subject...

...According to Bryant's interpretation today, Brooke favored this in order to gain merchant shipping and to tie the Germans down in Southern Europe...

...As far as Bryant's charges on the closely related issue of landing craft are concerned, the chief reason Brooke's bete noire, the U.S...

...the same situation would recur in World War II...

...In the First World War, the grossly uneconomical employment of shipping to sustain deadlocked British campaigns in the Mediterranean had seriously delayed the conveyance of the American Expeditionary Force to the decisive French theater...

...Chief of Staff felt that the net losses in tonnage incurred in opening a new Mediterranean campaign would greatly outweigh the shipping savings resulting from the shortness of this route to Suez and India...

...Only in such a way, Bryant maintains in common with the usual postwar British argument, could the Allies hope to cross the English Channel in 1944 and successfully attack the fortified coast of France...

...Brooke's fundamental position in strategy from the time of his appointment as CIGS in late 1941, succeeding Sir John Dill, appears in his advocacy of an invasion of the Western Mediterranean in 1942-43...

...No wonder his Mediterranean - minded CIGS found Churchill "the most difficult man to serve" that he had ever met...

...The most interesting revelation made by Brooke and Bryant in this connection is the Prime Minister's heretofore unknown switchover to favor a second front in France in 1943 just after the North African landings of November 1942 had finally nailed the door shut on any such possibility...

...Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Ernest J. King, sent so many landing craft to the Pacific theater in 1943 was the success of Brooke's own strategy in entering the Mediterranean in 1942-43 and the consequent postponement of a second front with its need for large numbers of landing craft until 1944...

...And, in addition to the customary British dismissal of Eisenhower as an inadequate tactician, rather more surprisingly Brooke condemns Marshall for not understanding logistics...

...Winston Churchill, of course, was Brooke's chief problem...