num_pages: 815
description: For most of the Second World War, General Sir Alan Brooke (1883–1963), later Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, was Britain's Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) and Winston Churchill's principal military adviser, and antagonist, in the inner councils of war. He is commonly considered the greatest CIGS in the history of the British Army. His diaries—published here for the first time in complete and unexpurgated form—are one of the most important and the most controversial military diaries of the modern era. The last great chronicle of the Second World War, they provide a riveting blow-by-blow account of how the war was waged and eventually won—including the controversies over the Second Front and the desperate search for a strategy, the Allied bomber offensive, the Italian campaign, the D-day landings, the race for Berlin, the divisions of Yalta, and the postwar settlement.Beginning in September 1939, the diaries were written up each night in the strictest secrecy and against all regulations. Alanbrooke's mask of command was legendary but these diaries tell us what he really saw and felt: moments of triumph and exhilaration, but also frustration, depression, betrayal, and doubt. They expose the gulf between the military and the politicians of the War Cabinet, and how often military strategy was misguided and nearly derailed by political prejudices. They also reveal the incredible strain on Alanbrooke of the Allied conferences in Washington, Moscow, Casablanca, Quebec, and Tehran, as he tried after intense and exhausting argument (not least with Churchill) to match Allied strategy with the reality of British military power and the fragility of the British Empire. These diaries demonstrate the true depth of Alanbrooke's rage and despair at Churchill's failure to grasp overall strategy. This was particularly acute in the winter of 1943–44 when Churchill, fueled by medicine and alcohol, no longer seemed master of himself.
language: English
title: War Diaries 1939-1945
titlecomplete: War Diaries 1939-1945
characters: Bertram Ramsay, Hastings Ismay, 1st Baron Ismay, Alan Brooke, 1st Viscount Alanbrooke, Henry Pownall, Ernest Bevin, Archibald Nye, Charles Portal, 1st Viscount Portal of Hungerford, Arthur Tedder, 1st Baron Tedder, Clement Attlee, Andrew Cunningham, 1st Viscount Cunningham of Hyndhope, Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Anthony Eden, Harry Crerar, Frederick Leathers, 1st Viscount Leathers, Charles de Gaulle, James Grigg, Henry Maitland Wilson, Joseph Stalin, Bernard Montgomery, Bernard Paget, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ernest King, Oliver Leese, Bertram Sergison-Brooke, Stafford Cripps, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John Vereker, 6th Viscount Gort, Claude Auchinleck, Winston Churchill, Jan Christian Smuts, Henry H. Arnold, John Dill, Andrew McNaughton, George VI of the United Kingdom, Harold Alexander, 1st Earl Alexander of Tunis, Dudley Pound, Ronald Forbes Adam, Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, Leo Amery, Sholto Douglas, 1st Baron Douglas of Kirtleside, Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell, Archibald Wavell, 1st Earl Wavell, George C. Marshall
genres: Biography, War, British Literature, Memoir, Nonfiction, Autobiography, Military History, Military Fiction, History, World War II
ratings_count: 215
publisher: University of California Press