Alan Brooke, 1st Viscount Alanbrooke

Background and early life

Alan Brooke was born on 23 July 1883 at Bagnères-de-Bigorre, Hautes-Pyrénées, to a prominent Anglo-Irish family from West Ulster. The Brookes had a long military tradition as the "Fighting Brookes of Colebrooke", with a history of service in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and World War I. He was the seventh and youngest child of Sir Victor Brooke, 3rd Baronet, of Colebrooke Park, Brookeborough, County Fermanagh, and the former Alice Bellingham, second daughter of Sir Alan Bellingham, 3rd Baronet, of Castle Bellingham in County Louth. Brooke's father died when he was just eight years old.

Brooke was educated at a day school in Pau, France, where he lived until the age of 16; he was bi-lingual in French (which he spoke with a heavy Gascon accent and spoke as a first language as a result of his upbringing in the French Pyrenees) and English. He spoke both French and English very fast, leading some Americans later in life to distrust a "fast-talking Limey." He was also fluent in German, and had learnt Urdu and Persian.

Brooke, desiring a military career, "only just" qualified for the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich in 1900, coming sixty-fifth out of seventy-two in the entrance exam, but passed out at seventeenth. Had he done any better he would have qualified for a commission in the Royal Engineers, as was his initial intention, and possibly would not have ended up on the General Staff after the Great War.

Brooke was commissioned into the Royal Regiment of Artillery as a second lieutenant on 24 December 1902. Due to his high placing at Woolwich, Brooke was allowed to choose which branch of the Royal Artillery to join. His choice was the Royal Field Artillery, with which he served in Ireland and India in the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914. He also "received his jacket" upon being selected to join the Royal Horse Artillery.

First World War

During the war, he was assigned to an ammunition column of the Royal Horse Artillery on the Western Front, where he gained a reputation as an outstanding planner of operations. He later was transferred to the 18th Division. At the Battle of the Somme in 1916, he introduced the French "creeping barrage" system, thereby helping the protection of the advancing infantry from enemy machine gun fire. Brooke was with the Canadian Corps from early 1917 and planned the barrages for the Battle of Vimy Ridge. In 1918 he was appointed GSO1 as the senior artillery staff officer in the First Army. Brooke ended the conflict as a lieutenant-colonel and a Companion of the Distinguished Service Order and Bar and was mentioned in despatches six times.

As with many others of his generation, the war left its mark upon Brooke. In October 1918, shortly before the Armistice of 11 November 1918, he wrote

One trip up to Lens where I wandered among the ruins...such ruin and such desolation. I climbed on to a heap of stones which represents the place where the Church once stood, and I looked down on the wreckage. One could spend days down there just looking down picturing to oneself the tragedies that have occurred in every corner of this place. If the stones could talk and could repeat what they have witnessed, and the thoughts they had read on dying men's faces I wonder if there would ever be any wars.

When the Armistice did eventually arrive Brooke was in London on leave. He watched the crowds of people celebrating but felt mixed feelings, as he himself later wrote:

That wild evening jarred on my feelings. I felt untold relief at the end being there at last, but was swamped with floods of memories of those years of struggle. I was filled with gloom that evening, and retired to bed early.

On 31 March 1942 he wrote:

... on the lack of good military commanders: Half our Corps and Divisional Commanders are totally unfit for their appointments, and yet if I was to sack them I could find no better! They lack character, imagination, drive and power of leadership. The reason for this state of affairs is to be found in the losses we sustained in the last war of all our best officers, who should now be our senior commanders.

Between the wars

During the interwar period, Brooke attended the first post-war course at the Staff College, Camberley in 1919. He managed to impress both his fellow students and the college's instructors during the relatively brief time he was there. He then served as a staff officer with the 50th Division from 1920 to 1923. Brooke then returned to Camberley, this time as an instructor, before attending the Imperial Defence College. He was later appointed as an instructor at the college, and while there he became acquainted with most of the officers who became leading British commanders of the Second World War. From 1929 onwards Brooke, promoted on 1 June 1935 to major general, held a number of important appointments: Inspector of Artillery, Director of Military Training and then General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the Mobile Division (later the 1st Armoured Division) in 1935. In 1938, on promotion to lieutenant-general, he took command of the Anti-Aircraft Corps (renamed Anti-Aircraft Command in April 1939) and built a strong relationship with Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, the AOC-in-C of Fighter Command, which laid a vital basis of co-operation between the two commands during the Battle of Britain the following year. In July 1939 Brooke moved to command Southern Command. By the outbreak of the Second World War, Brooke was already seen as one of the British Army's foremost generals.

Second World War

Commander in Flanders, France and Britain

Following the outbreak of the Second World War, in September 1939, Brooke commanded II Corps in the British Expeditionary Force (BEF)—which included in its subordinate formations the 3rd Infantry Division, commanded by the then Major-General Bernard Montgomery, as well as Major-General Dudley Johnson's 4th Infantry Division. As corps commander, Brooke had a pessimistic view of the Allies' chances of countering a German offensive. He was sceptical of the quality and determination of the French Army, and of the Belgian Army. This scepticism appeared to be justified when he was on a visit to some French front-line units and was shocked to see unshaven men, ungroomed horses and dirty vehicles.

He had also little trust in Lord Gort, Commander-in-Chief of the BEF, who Brooke thought took too much interest in details while being incapable of taking a broad strategic view. Gort, on the other hand, regarded Brooke as a pessimist who failed to spread confidence, and was thinking of replacing him. Brooke correctly predicted that the Allied powers' Plan D envisioning an advance along the Meuse would allow the Wehrmacht to outflank them, but British High Command dismissed his warnings as defeatist.

When the German offensive began, Brooke, aided by Neil Ritchie, his Brigadier General Staff (BGS), distinguished himself in the handling of the British forces in the retreat to Dunkirk. His II Corps faced rapid German Army armoured advances following the Allied defeat at the Battle of Sedan. In late May 1940 it held off the major German attack on the Ypres-Comines Canal but then found its left flank exposed by the capitulation of the Belgian army. Brooke swiftly ordered Montgomery's 3rd Division to switch from the Corps' right flank to cover the gap. This was accomplished in a complicated night-time manoeuvre. Pushing more troops north to counter the threat to the embarking troops at the Dunkirk evacuation from German units advancing along the coast, II Corps retreated to their appointed places on the east or south-east of the shrinking perimeter of Dunkirk. Brooke's actions not only saved his own forces from capitulation, but prevented the Germans from seizing the 20-mile gap left by the Belgian surrender and capturing the entire BEF before it could safely evacuate.

Then on 29 May Brooke was ordered by Gort to return to England, leaving the Corps in Montgomery's hands. According to Montgomery, Brooke was so overcome with emotion at having to leave his men in such a crisis that "he broke down and wept" as he handed over to Montgomery on the beaches of La Panne. He was told by Gort to "proceed home ... for (the) task of reforming new armies" and so returned on a destroyer (30 May). Then "on June 2nd set out for the War Office to find out what I was wanted for" with a "light heart" and with no responsibility, and was then told by John Dill (CIGS) that he was to "return to France to form a new BEF"; he later said that hearing the command from Dill was "one of his blackest (moments) in the war". He had already realised that there was no hope of success for the "Brittany plan" (Breton redoubt) to keep an allied redoubt in France. After General Maxime Weygand warned him that the French Army was collapsing and could offer no further resistance, he decided that he needed to convince his superiors to allow him to withdraw his forces to Cherbourg and Brest for evacuation to Britain. He told Secretary of State for War Anthony Eden that the mission had "no military value and no hope of success" although he could not comment on its political value. In his first conversation with Prime Minister Winston Churchill (Brooke had been rung by Dill who was at 10 Downing Street) he insisted that all British forces should be withdrawn from France. Churchill initially objected but was eventually convinced by Brooke; around 200,000 British and Allied troops were successfully evacuated from ports in northwestern France.

Home Forces

After returning for a short spell at Southern Command Brooke was appointed in July 1940 Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, with orders to take charge of anti-invasion preparations. Thus it would have been Brooke's task to direct the land battle in the event of a German amphibious invasion of Great Britain. Contrary to his predecessor General Sir Edmund Ironside, who favoured a static coastal defence, Brooke developed a mobile reserve which was to swiftly counterattack the enemy forces before they were established. A light line of defence on the coast was to assure that the landings were delayed as much as possible. Writing after the war, Brooke acknowledged that he also "had every intention of using sprayed mustard gas on the beaches".

Brooke believed that the lack of a unified command of the three services was "a grave danger" to the defence of the country. Despite this, and the fact that the available forces never reached the numbers he thought were required, Brooke considered the situation far from "helpless" if the Germans were to invade. "We should certainly have a desperate struggle and the future might well have hung in the balance, but I certainly felt that given a fair share of the fortunes of war we should certainly succeed in finally defending these shores", he wrote after the war. But in the end, the German invasion plan was never taken beyond the preliminary assembly of forces.

Chief of the Imperial General Staff

In December 1941 Brooke succeeded Field Marshal Sir John Dill as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), the professional head of the British Army, in which appointment he also represented the British Army on the Chiefs of Staff Committee.

In March 1942 he succeeded Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound as chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee.

As CIGS, Brooke was the functional head of the British Army, and as chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, which he dominated by force of intellect and personality, he took the leading military part in the overall strategic direction of the British war effort. In 1942, Brooke joined the Western Allies' ultimate command, the U.S.-British Combined Chiefs of Staff.

Despite the traditional distrust that had existed between the military and the political side of the War Office, he got along quite well with his political counterpart, the Secretary of State for War, first the Conservative politician David Margesson and later Sir James Grigg, the former head civil servant of the department, who in an unusual move was promoted to the ministerial post.

Brooke's focus was primarily on his Mediterranean strategy for the Mediterranean theatre. Here, his principal aims were to rid North Africa of Axis forces and knock Italy out of the war, thereby opening up the Mediterranean for Allied shipping. Later, to mount the cross-Channel invasion when the Allies were ready and the Germans sufficiently weakened.

Brooke's and the British view of the Mediterranean operations contrasted with the American commitment to an early invasion of western Europe, which led to several heated arguments at conferences of the Combined Chiefs of Staff.

At the Casablanca Conference in January 1943, it was decided that the Allies should invade Sicily, under the command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a decision that effectively postponed the planned invasion of Western Europe until 1944. The Casablanca agreement was in fact a compromise, brokered largely by Brooke's old friend Field Marshal Sir John Dill, Chief of the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington, D.C. "I owe him [Dill] an unbounded debt of gratitude for his help on that occasion and in many other similar ones", Brooke wrote after the war.

Relationship with Churchill

During the years as CIGS, Brooke had a stormy relationship with Winston Churchill. Brooke was often frustrated with the Prime Minister's habits and working methods, his abuse of generals and constant meddling in strategic matters. At the same time Brooke greatly admired Churchill for the way he inspired the Allied cause and for the way he bore the heavy burden of war leadership. In one typical passage in Brooke's war diaries Churchill is described as a "genius mixed with an astonishing lack of vision – he is quite the most difficult man to work with that I have ever struck but I should not have missed the chance of working with him for anything on earth!"

Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Churchill and his senior military staff used the Arcadia Conference in Washington to decide the general strategy for the war. The American Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall came up with the idea of a Combined Chiefs of Staff that would make final military decisions (subject to approval by President Roosevelt and Churchill). Marshall sold it to Roosevelt and together the two sold the idea to Churchill. Churchill's military aides were much less favourable, and Brooke was strongly opposed. However, Brooke was left behind in London to handle the daily details of running the British war effort, and was not consulted. The combined board was permanently stationed in Washington, where Field Marshal Dill represented the British half. The Combined Board did have thirteen in-person full meetings, which Brooke attended.

When Churchill's many fanciful strategic ideas collided with sound military strategy it was only Brooke on the Chiefs of Staff Committee who was able to stand up to the Prime Minister. Churchill said about Brooke: "When I thump the table and push my face towards him what does he do? Thumps the table harder and glares back at me. I know these Brookes – stiff-necked Ulstermen and there's no one worse to deal with than that!" It has been claimed that part of Churchill's greatness was that he appointed Brooke as CIGS and kept him for the whole war.

Brooke was particularly annoyed by Churchill's idea of capturing the northern tip of Sumatra. But in some cases Brooke did not see the political dimension of strategy as the Prime Minister did. The CIGS was sceptical about the British intervention in the Greek Civil War in late 1944 (during the Dekemvriana), believing this was an operation which would drain troops from the central front in Germany. But at this stage the war was practically won and Churchill saw the possibility of preventing Greece from becoming a communist state.

War diaries

Brooke kept a diary during the whole of the Second World War. Originally intended for his wife, Benita, the diaries were later expanded on by Lord Alanbrooke, as he had become, in the 1950s. They contain descriptions on the day-to-day running of the British war effort (including some indiscreet references to top secret interceptions of German radio traffic), Brooke's thoughts on strategy, as well as frequent anecdotes from the many meetings he had with the Allied leadership during the war.

The diaries have become famous mostly because of the frequent remarks on and criticisms of Churchill. Although the diaries contain passages expressing admiration of Churchill, they also served as a vent for Brooke's frustration with working with the Prime Minister. The diaries also give sharp opinions on several of the top Allied leaders. The American generals Eisenhower and Marshall, for example, are described as poor strategists and Field Marshal Sir Harold Alexander as unintelligent. Among the few individuals of whom Brooke seems to have kept consistently positive opinions, from a military standpoint, were Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Field Marshal Sir John Dill, and Joseph Stalin. Brooke admired Stalin for his quick brain and grasp of military strategy. Otherwise he had no illusions about the man, describing Stalin thus: "He has got an unpleasantly cold, crafty, dead face, and whenever I look at him I can imagine his sending off people to their doom without ever turning a hair."

The first (abridged and censored) version published in the 1950s was edited by the distinguished historian Sir Arthur Bryant: 1957 (The Turn of the Tide) and 1959 (Triumph in the West). Originally Brooke intended that the diaries were never to be published but one reason that he changed his mind was the lack of credit to him and the Chiefs of Staff in Churchill's own war memoirs, which essentially presented their ideas and innovations as the Prime Minister's own. Although censorship and libel laws accounted for numerous suppressions of what Brooke had originally written concerning persons who were still alive, the Bryant books became controversial even in their truncated state, mainly as a result of the comments on Churchill, Marshall, Eisenhower, Gort, and others. Churchill himself did not appreciate the books. In 1952, both Churchill and Lord Beaverbrook threatened legal action against a biography of Stanley Baldwin by G. M. Young, and a settlement was reached by lawyer Arnold Goodman to remove the offending sentences. Publisher Rupert Hart-Davis had the "hideously expensive" job of removing and replacing seven leaves from 7,580 copies of the biography. Diary entries also refer to intercepts of German signals decrypted at Bletchley Park (which Brooke visited twice), which were secret until 1974.

Post-war career

Following the Second World War and his retirement from the regular army, Lord Alanbrooke, as he was now, who could have chosen almost any honorary position he wanted, chose to be the Colonel Commandant of the Honourable Artillery Company. He held this position from 1946 to 1954. In addition, he served on the boards of several companies, both in industry and in banking. He was director of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the Midland Bank, the National Discount Company and the Belfast Banking Company. Alanbrooke was particularly fond of being a director of the Hudson's Bay Company where he served for eleven years from 1948.

According to historian Andrew Sangster, there was a reason for his choice to work in the private sector - i.e. not to stay in the military. Lord Alanbrooke ended the Second World War not well off: he had to move from his house and publishing his memoirs helped because such books sold well at that time.

Marriages and children

Lord Alanbrooke was married twice. After six years of engagement, in 1914 he married Jane Richardson, daughter of Colonel John Mervyn Ashdall Carleton Richardson, a neighbour who lived at Rossfad, County Fermanagh, Ulster. Six days into their honeymoon, the then Alan Brooke was recalled to active duty when the First World War started. The couple had one daughter and one son:

Rosemary Brooke (25 October 1918 – 2016)

Thomas Brooke, 2nd Viscount Alanbrooke (9 January 1920 – 19 December 1972)

Jane Brooke died of complications from an operation to repair a broken vertebra following a car accident in 1925 in which her husband was at the steering wheel. Jane's death deeply affected Brooke, who blamed himself for the accident and felt guilt over it for the rest of his life.

Brooke married secondly Benita Lees (1892–1968), daughter of Sir Harold Pelly, 4th Baronet and the widow of Sir Thomas Lees, 2nd Baronet, in 1929. The marriage was very happy for the uxorious Brooke. They too had a daughter and a son:

Kathleen Benita Brooke (23 January 1931 – 20 November 1961)

Alan Victor Harold Brooke, 3rd and last Viscount Alanbrooke (24 November 1932 – 10 January 2018)

During the war the couple lived in Hartley Wintney in Hampshire. After the war, their financial situation forced the couple to move into the gardener's cottage of their former home, where they lived for the rest of their lives. Their last years were darkened by the death of their daughter, Kathleen, in a riding accident in 1961.

Interests

Lord Alanbrooke had a love of nature. Hunting and fishing were among his great interests. His foremost passion, however, was birds. He was a noted ornithologist, especially in bird photography. In 1944, he ordered the RAF not to use an island off the coast of Norfolk as a bombing range because of its significance to nesting roseate terns. He was president of the Zoological Society of London between 1950 and 1954, and vice-president of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) between 1949 and 1961. He was an honorary member of the Royal Photographic Society from February 1954 until his death.

Death

On 17 June 1963, Lord Alanbrooke suffered a heart attack and died quietly in his bed with his wife beside him. The same day, he had been due to attend the Garter Service in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. Nine days later he was given a funeral in Windsor and buried in St Mary's Church, Hartley Wintney. He was succeeded in the viscountcy and barony by his elder son, Thomas.

Honours

United Kingdom

Brooke was created Baron Alanbrooke, of Brookeborough in the County of Fermanagh, in 1945, and Viscount Alanbrooke, of Brookeborough in the County of Fermanagh, in 1946. Other awards included:

Knight of the Garter (KG) in 1946

Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath (GCB) in 1942

Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in 1940

Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) in 1937

Member of the Order of Merit (OM) in 1946

Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order (GCVO) in 1953

Companion of the Distinguished Service Order in 1916 and Bar in 1918

Aide-de-Camp General to the King, 1944 to 1946

Colonel Commandant The Glider Pilot Regiment 1942–1951

Colonel Commandant Honourable Artillery Company 1946–1954

Master Gunner, St. James's Park, the ceremonial head of the Royal Regiment of Artillery 1946–1956

Constable of the Tower of London, 1950–1955

Colonel Commandant Royal Artillery 19??–1957

Deputy Lieutenant County of Southampton and the Town of Southampton 1950

Lord Lieutenant of the County of London 1950–1957

Foreign decorations

Order of Polonia Restituta 1st Class (Poland) (1943)

Order of Suvorov 1st Class (USSR) (1944)

Grand Cordon of the Order of Leopold with Palm (Belgium) (1946)

Croix de Guerre 1940 with Palm (Belgium) (1946)

Military Order of the White Lion (Czechoslovakia) (1946)

Grand Cross of the Order of the Redeemer (Greece) (1946)

Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Netherlands Lion (1948)

Croix de guerre (Belgium) (1918)

Grand Cross of the Order of Christ (Portugal) (1955)

Coat of arms

His coat of arms as issued to him by the College of Arms is: "Or, a cross engrailed per pale Gules and Sable, in dexter chief a crescent for difference."

Memorials

Welbeck College and the Duke of York's Royal Military School named one of their houses after him.

Several military barracks are named after him, such as Alanbrooke Barracks in Paderborn Garrison, Germany, and Alanbrooke Barracks in Topcliffe, North Yorkshire.

A statue of Alanbrooke by Ivor Roberts-Jones was unveiled at Whitehall, London, in 1993.

Allanbrooke Road in Sentosa, Singapore is named after him.

In popular culture

Brooke was portrayed in the television drama Churchill and the Generals by Eric Porter and in the film Churchill by Danny Webb.

He is memorably described by the narrator in Anthony Powell's novel, The Military Philosophers (the 9th volume in his roman-fleuve, A Dance to the Music of Time), who refers to:...the hurricane-like imminence of a thickset general, obviously of high rank, wearing enormous horn-rimmed spectacles. He had just burst from a flagged staff-car almost before it had drawn up by the kerb. Now he tore up the steps of the building at the charge, exploding through the inner door into the hall. An extraordinary current of physical energy, almost of electricity, suddenly pervaded the place. I could feel it stabbing through me. This was the CIGS.