Dimensions
167 x 242 x 52mm
The Last Great Chronicle of the Second World War.
For most of the Second World War General Sir Alan Brooke, later Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, was Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) - Britain's top soldier - and Churchill's principal military adviser, and antagonist, in the inner councils of war. He also led the British military in the bargaining and brokering of the Grand Alliance with Roosevelt and Stalin, in the great conferences at Casablanca, Tehran, Washington and Yalta. By common consent, he was the greatest CIGS in the history of the British Army.
These diaries have never been published, complete, before. Written in the strictest secrecy and against all regulations, these diaries provide a blow-by-blow account of how the Second World War was waged and eventually won, from the man at Churchill's elbow (and sometimes his throat).
They illuminate the desperate search for a strategy, the controversies over the Second front, the Allied bomber offensive, the Italian campaign, the D-Day landings, the race for Berlin, the dropping of the atomic bombs, the divisions of Yalta and the post-war settlement. They open a unique window onto the inner workings of the Grand Alliance. Alanbrooke's implacable arguments spared no one - politicians, Americans, Russians, Chinese, even his own generals: Wavell, Auchinleck, Montgomery, Slim, Alexander.
At home, he had to contend with Churchill and minister to Montgomery; abroad, he had to accommodate the Americans and satisfy the Soviets. Roosevelt and Stalin, Marshall and Molotov, De Gaulle and Eisenhower, Beaverbrook and Eden, all pass in review before him.
The diaries are in every way a revelation. The entries are uninhibited, the words and frustrations pour out onto the page. Alanbrooke - whose mask of command was legendary - is anguished and acidulous. He is exasperated. He is despairing. He is human.
The Alanbrooke diaries are the most important and the most controversial military diaries of the modern era.
