Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke War Diaries, 1939–1945.
University of California Press, 763 pages, $40
In 1980, in his valedictory lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History, Hugh Trevor-Roper discussed the events of 1940, when the world hung in a balance between very different futures. Drawing attention to the fallacy of historical determinism and Marxist historiography, he observed that
no one could rationally have assumed that at the precise moment of the fall of France there would be, in Britain, a statesman able to unite all parties, and the people, in the will and confidence to continue what could easily have been represented as a pointless struggle.
Trevor-Roper knows what our professors today seem to be too smart to grasp, that the “crisis does not always produce the man.” In 1940, Winston Churchill stood between day and night. It was all the more remarkable that in late 1941 at another moment of great military crisis—Russia near defeat; Japan overrunning Malaya, Hong Kong, and Burma; the Germans victorious in North Africa and threatening Persia and Britain’s irreplaceable oil supply—Britain produced the perfect complement to Churchill: General Sir Alan Brooke, the man who translated Churchill’s genius into workable military strategy.
Alanbrooke (Brookie, as all his friends knew him, was created Viscount Alanbrooke in 1946) was an artilleryman from an old military family—the Brookes of Ulster sent twenty-six men to fight in the First World War and twenty-seven in the Second. He served with distinction on the
