Alanbrooke was CIGS - Chief of the Imperial General Staff - for the greater part of the Second World War. He acted as mentor to Montgomery and military adviser to Churchill, with whom he clashed. As chairman of the Chiefs of Staff committee he also led for the British side in the bargaining and the brokering of the Grand Alliance, notably during the great conferences with Roosevelt and Stalin and their retinue at Casablanca,Teheran, Malta and elsewhere. As CIGS Alanbrooke was indispensable to the British and the Allied war effort. The diaries were sanitised by Arthur Bryant for his two books he wrote with Alanbrooke. Unexpurgated, says Danchev, they are explosive. The American generals, in particular, come in for attack. Danchev proposes to centre his edition on the Second World War. Pre and post-war entries are to be reduced to a Prologue and Epilogue). John Keegan says they are the military equivalent of the Colville Diaries (Churchill's private secretary), THE FRINGES OF POWER. These sold 24,000 in hardback at Hodder in 1985.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
John Keegan in his review of ALCHEMIST OF WAR in The Spectator described Danchev as "one of the two most brilliant people [he] taught at Sandhurst". He is currently Professor of International Relations at Keele.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
The Unexpurgated Diaries,
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This review is from: War Diaries, 1939-1945 (Paperback)
This book details everything left out of earlier biographies. We learn his true attitudes about Winston Churchill, the good and the bad, and also about Eisenhower, Montgomery, Alexander, Roosevelt, George Marshall, and others. He had little use for most of the American officers' military skills, but Eisenhower rose in his esteem over time. This book is a necessity for scholars about World War II. For instance, Alanbrooke notes that FDR was urging an early date for the landing in North Africa in large part to help the Democratic Party in the election of November 1942, and it gives rise to the question how much that election had to do with the Allies choosing to invade North Africa. (It was planned to begin earlier than it did, but had to be postponed repeatly for lack of boats, or the weather, etc. It did not finally occur until a few days after the election, in which the Democrats lost dozens of House seats as FDR had feared)... There are not many places the scholar can learn all the facts that Alanbrooke knew, least of all in his 40-year earlier biography based on selected parts of the same diaries. This is vastly better.
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