Masters and Commanders

by Andrew Roberts

  In 1959, Lieutenant-General Sir Brian Horrocks recalled that the surrender of the Belgians on 28 May had suddenly opened up a 20-mile gap on the British left flank, and that ‘If the Germans had got into it, there might have been no evacuation from Dunkirk. It was thanks entirely to Alan Brooke that the gap was closed. He was more responsible than anyone else for the BEF getting back successfully.’ The Secretary of State for War between 1942 and 1945, Sir James Grigg, agreed, telling the Sunday Times in 1946: ‘By almost universal testimony it was due largely to [Brooke’s] skill and resolution that, not only his own Corps, but the whole…BEF escaped destruction in the retreat to Dunkirk.’57 Even Pownall admitted in June 1940 that Brooke ‘came out trumps’. As we shall see, the experience of the campaign taught Brooke a number of important lessons about how he believed the rest of the war should be fought, lessons that diverged sharply from the ones that Marshall had learnt at Fort Leavenworth, Chaumont and Fort Benning.

  On 6 June 1940, only three days after the last troops returned from Dunkirk, Churchill asked the War Office Planners for ‘proposals for transporting and landing tanks on the beach’, and a fortnight later wrote to suggest ‘a Corps of at least five thousand parachute troops’.58 A fortnight later he set up the Special Operations Executive, whose object, as well as general sabotage in Occupied countries, was to assist future invasion forces. It was an astonishing set of priorities for the leader of a country whose army had only days earlier been flung ignominiously off the Continent, and which must shortly itself face the threat of invasion, but was a sign of Churchill’s invincible optimism.

  In that same spirit, no sooner had Brooke returned to Britain than he was sent off to command a new BEF which would operate further south on the west coast of France, in Normandy and Brittany, alongside the French Army under General Maxime Weygand. The former CIGS, then Commander-in-Chief Home Forces, General Ironside, wrote in his diary, which he should not have been keeping, ‘It has been decided to send to France two Territorial divisions to add to the 51st [Highland Division] already there with the Armoured division. Brooke…seemed very distraught over the thought and considered that the Terrier divisions would never stand up to the bombing.’ The central question that worried Brooke was: ‘Will France stand up long enough to allow us to get them out?’59 Soon after landing in Cherbourg late on the night of 12 June 1940, he took command of this Second BEF west of the Seine–a total of one hundred thousand line-of-communication troops stretched between Normandy and the Loire, plus the crack 52nd Lowland Division–and made contact with Weygand. ‘Refugees again swarming everywhere,’ he wrote to Benita, ‘and heartbreaking to find oneself back amongst them.’60

  It soon became clear that the French had lost all will to fight. Indeed at breakfast two days later the seventy-three-year-old Weygand, looking ‘very wizened and tired’ and nursing a stiff neck from a car crash the previous night, told Brooke: ‘he would speak very frankly…the French army had ceased to be able to offer organized resistance and was disintegrating into disconnected groups…Paris had been given up and…he had no reserves whatever left.’61 Brooke concluded that his own army needed to get back to Brest and Cherbourg for embarkation to Britain as soon as possible. Grigg recalled that Brooke ‘had been appalled and distressed at being ordered back to France’, believing the mission impossible, but once there he was going to make the best of bringing home as many troops as possible, just as he had at Dunkirk.

  This was to be the occasion on which Brooke first came into contact with Churchill. It was also still officially the policy of the Anglo-French Inter-Allied Council to keep an Allied bridgehead in Brittany. Although both Weygand and his second-in-command, General Alphonse Georges, whom Brooke likened to ‘a great pink jelly fish–absolutely finished’, agreed with him that ‘the Brittany Defence Scheme was quite impossible owing to lack of troops’, Churchill did not accept this, and a very difficult telephone call resulted. It was the worst possible way for Brooke to be introduced to the Prime Minister’s sense of strategy and tactics.

  On the evening of Friday 14 June, Brooke told Sir John Dill, who had recently taken over as CIGS, that he had given orders at 4 p.m. that the 52nd Division must ‘proceed as soon as possible to Cherbourg’. At 8 p.m. Dill called from Downing Street on a very bad telephone line to ask him about the dispositions of the 52nd. After Brooke repeated what he had agreed with him four hours earlier, Dill said, ‘The Prime Minister does not want you to do that.’ ‘What the hell does he want?’ asked Brooke. ‘He wants to speak to you,’ said Dill, handing over the receiver. Brooke later recalled of Churchill: ‘I had never met him, I had never talked to him, but I had heard a good deal about him!’62 In this, of course, Brooke was no different from any other sentient Briton over the previous four decades; but, as we have seen, Churchill had also fought alongside two of Brooke’s brothers, and Benita’s first husband had died of wounds sustained at Gallipoli.

  Churchill told Brooke that he had sent him to France ‘to make the French feel that we were supporting them’, and so the 52nd Division must not be evacuated. ‘It was impossible to make a corpse feel,’ Brooke replied, ‘and…the French army was, to all intents and purposes, dead, and certainly incapable of registering what had been done for it.’ Both men were confirmed lifelong Francophiles, but the facts of the situation were immediately clear to Brooke on the ground, and ought to have been to Churchill in London also. The argument went on for nearly half an hour, with Churchill seeming to imply that Brooke was ‘suffering from “cold feet”’ because he refused to comply with his wishes. ‘This was so infuriating that I was repeatedly on the verge of losing my temper,’ Brooke noted afterwards. The idea that one of the Fighting Brookes of Colebrooke was even implicitly being accused of having ‘cold feet’ must indeed have been fabulously galling. Standing by a window at his headquarters in Le Mans, Brooke looked out and saw two senior officers of the 52nd Division, James Drew and John Kennedy, sitting in the sunshine on a garden seat under a tree, waiting for his decision. The sight of these men ‘acted as a continual reminder of the human element of the 52nd Division’, and stiffened his resolve not to ‘sacrifice them with no attainable object in view’. He was in ‘an exhausted condition’ by the end of the conversation, when finally Churchill said: ‘All right, I agree with you.’63 Although it had nothing to do with Brooke, the 51st Highland Division were captured virtually en masse at Saint-Valéry that same day, although the 52nd Division were evacuated successfully. Brooke sailed back from Saint-Nazaire to Plymouth on the morning of 18 June aboard the trawler Cambridgeshire.

  In the second volume of his war memoirs, Churchill wrote (quite wrongly) that Brooke had rung him up to ‘press’ the evacuation view upon him, and that ‘after ten minutes I was convinced that he was right and we must go’. Brooke later commented that, although Churchill was largely ignorant of the prevailing conditions and was attempting to interfere with the judgement of the commander in the field, ‘The strength of his power of persuasion had to be experienced to realize the strength that was required to counter it!’ In Brooke, however, as we will see repeatedly throughout this book, Churchill’s unstoppable force had met its immovable object.

  Ten years later, while unveiling a portrait of Churchill at the Junior Carlton Club in London in December 1950, Brooke recalled that ‘I had never met Churchill at that time, but even at that distance and through this faulty line, I was at once aware of his dynamic personality and of his dominating influence. It was a useful experience as it gave me an insight into the influence that his magnetic personality might exercise on commanders at a distance.’64 The intervening decade had lent some enchantment to his views. ‘Winston never had the slightest doubt that he had inherited all the military genius from his great ancestor Marlborough!’ was a regular Brooke reprise to his diary at the time. ‘His military plans and ideas varied from the most brilliant conceptions at one end to the wildest and most dangerous ideas at the other.’65 Yet against that must be set the equally powerful
sentiment he expressed at the Junior Carlton Club, which he believed with equal conviction: ‘I shall, till my dying day, thank God for the great privilege of having been associated with him during those momentous war years.’66

  2

  Collecting Allies: ‘The finger of God is with us’ June 1940–December 1941

  The distinction between politics and strategy diminishes as the point of view is raised. At the summit, true politics and strategy are one.

  Winston Churchill, The World Crisis

  After the war, Sir James Grigg said he ‘felt it would be wrong to portray Brooke as selfless and unambitious, he had a natural and healthy ambition of the successful professional soldier’.1 Two days after Churchill visited Brooke’s V Corps near Gosport on 17 July 1940, Brooke was appointed commander-in-chief Home Forces. His contretemps with Churchill at Le Mans had clearly not damaged his career prospects, and he was now faced with the tough job of training an army that had abandoned most of its heavy equipment in France. He flung himself into the task. Writing to Wavell some months later, he opined that ‘We are not anything like as tough as we were in the last war. There has been far too much luxury, Safety First, etc, in this country. Our own idea is to look after our comforts and avoid being hurt in any way.’ That was why, during his time commanding the Home Forces, Brooke insisted on protracted exercises lasting several days, in all weathers, with 30-mile marches and longer.

  The post also had the advantage, for an ambitious general, of regular contact with the Prime Minister, including occasional visits to Chequers. He was there on the afternoon of 3 October when he joined the Chiefs of Staff to discuss Operation Ajax, a plan to attack Trondheim in Norway, which had been evacuated by the British only the previous May. On 16 November 1940, he also stayed for the night at Ditchley, the country house that Churchill repaired to at weekends when the moon was high and the Luftwaffe bombers were believed to be able to pinpoint Chequers.

  Despite these visits, however, Churchill did not socialize with Brooke outside their working relationship. The visitors’ book at Chartwell, the Prime Minister’s home in Kent, which includes the names of all the 780 people who stayed there after 1922, does not feature Brooke’s name at all. By contrast, Professor Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell) appears eighty-six times, Montgomery forty-six, Bracken thirty-one, and there are also entries for Alexander, Ismay, Ironside and scores of others.2 After the war Brooke was elected to the Other Club, founded by Churchill and F. E. Smith in 1911, although he did not often attend. This club was far more widely based than Churchill’s cronies, and included several people who profoundly disagreed with him politically, but he had veto rights over its candidates, and so Brooke’s membership can be taken as a guarantee that they were not enemies.

  Brooke almost never fought Churchill out of pride or pugnacity or perversity, but did so because of the effect of their decisions on the services. With his powerful moral conscience, Brooke was always, figuratively speaking, looking out of that Le Mans window and seeing the young men sitting under the tree in the sunshine possibly being condemned to capture or worse if he settled for an easier life. Like Dill, Brooke was a devout Ulster Protestant, with a deep religious faith that supported him, especially during the tragic time of heartbreak and guilt after the death of his first wife. During the Phoney War, the eight months before fighting began in earnest, when Brooke was in France, he and Benita arranged to read identical Bible extracts every day at the same time. By contrast, Churchill had been convinced since his subaltern days, when he read The Martyrdom of Man by William Winwood Reade, that Jesus Christ had been a charismatic and inspired prophet and a profoundly holy man, but was not the Son of God. As Moran put it: ‘King and Country, in that order, that’s about the only religion Winston has.’3 Churchill’s private secretary Jock Colville believed that the first time the Prime Minister attended a church service during the war, other than a funeral, was in Scotland in March 1945.

  On 11 October 1940, staying at Chequers for the weekend, Churchill and Brooke disagreed over the use being made of the eccentric but occasionally brilliant Major-General Percy Hobart (pronounced ‘Hubbard’), who was then languishing as a lance-corporal in the Home Guard due to the War Office’s extreme disinclination to employ him. ‘Brooke said he was too wild,’ recorded Colville, ‘but Winston reminded him of Wolfe standing on a chair in front of Chatham brandishing his sword. “You cannot expect”, he said, “to have the genius type with a conventional copy-book style.”’ That exchange could almost be taken as a template for their future relationship, with Brooke warning against wildness, and Churchill defending it as genius. (Over Hobart, Churchill was right, as the ingenious inventions he deployed at D-Day were later to prove.)

  That evening’s discussions did not break up until 2.15 a.m., giving Brooke another foretaste of what lay in store for him when he became CIGS. The Chiefs of Staff nicknamed these late-night meetings ‘the Midnight Follies’, after the famous 1920s hotel cabaret act, Midnight Follies at the Metropole. The First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, had a subtle way of pointing out how late Churchill was keeping them up; when offered a whisky and soda by Churchill at 2 a.m. he would say: ‘I never drink spirits in the morning. I’ll have a glass of port.’4 Churchill seemed addicted to these late nights, but they were to infuriate Brooke, since unlike the Prime Minister he could not take an afternoon nap at the War Office. One historian has pointed out that ‘It says something about their code of politeness, duty and respect that none of those who suffered under these afflictions, not even the arch-sufferer Sir Alan Brooke, is known ever to have protested to his face.’5 Perhaps they were conscious of being present when history was being made, and did not wish to seem petty.

  Created in 1924 to provide the Government with expert co-ordinated service advice, the Chiefs of Staff became a permanent committee of the War Cabinet in 1939. When Churchill became prime minister and assumed the title of minister of defence in May 1940, he frequently attended their meetings, which when he was present were called Staff Conferences. Churchill was very conscious that it had been the absence of a constitutionally established, military inter-service authority, working directly for the prime minister, that had led to the dangerous dissensions between the ‘Frocks [frock coats]’ (politicians) and the ‘Brass Hats’ (soldiers) during the Great War, the Masters and Commanders of their day. He avoided a repetition of that by working on all strategic problems with and through the Chiefs of Staff, however frustrating they all found it at times.

  The Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee when Brooke joined was Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound. Like Churchill and Harold Macmillan, Pound had an American mother. Elizabeth Pickman Rogers came from a Massachusetts seafaring family, but her son had few fond memories of her since her kleptomania and profligacy destroyed his parents’ marriage.6 He began his naval career at thirteen, excelled at exams and was appointed naval assistant to the First Sea Lord, Sir John ‘Jackie’ Fisher, during the Great War. He thus had first-hand knowledge of the combustible relationship between Fisher and Churchill, and learnt lessons about how to deal with Churchill that he later put to good use as chief of the Naval Staff.

  In 1916 Pound was given his first independent command, the battleship HMS Colossus, which took part in the sinking of the cruiser Wiesbaden and a destroyer at the battle of Jutland. During the severe shelling, the range-taker standing next to Pound on the bridge had his arm blown off. In the inter-war years, Pound served first as chief of staff to Sir Roger Keyes, then as second sea lord, and then as commander-in-chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, the Navy’s best active command. Partly due to a series of illnesses at the Admiralty, he became first sea lord in July 1939, despite arthritis of the hip that forced him to walk with a cane. It was probably he who ordered the famous ‘Winston is back!’ signal to be telegraphed to all the ships of the Navy in September 1939, although wags implied that it was as much a warning to the captains as an invocation to their crews.

  Drawing
on his experiences under Fisher, Pound evolved a way of dealing with the Prime Minister that he vouchsafed to a deputy: ‘Never say a direct “No” to Churchill at a meeting. You can argue against it, and as long as you don’t exaggerate your case the PM will always let you have your say.’ Churchill rarely spoke of friendship, but he did with regard to Pound, often telling his naval aide Commander C. R. ‘Tommy’ Thompson that the First Sea Lord was one of the three men whose companionship meant most to him, the others being Lord Beaverbrook and the South African premier Jan Christian Smuts. Colville recalled that Churchill ‘bullied’ Pound over the telephone when he thought the Admiralty was being unimaginative, but the admiral’s ‘serious wrinkled face would flicker with pleasure and amusement when Churchill teased him’. One summer night at Chequers, walking in the rose garden after dinner, Pound, ‘who was lame but unquestionably sober’, fell down the steps and lay flat on his back. ‘Try to remember’, said Churchill, as he and Colville helped him to his feet, ‘that you are an Admiral of the Fleet and not a midshipman.’ A slow smile spread across Pound’s face.7

  Pound’s American counterpart, the US Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Harold R. ‘Betty’ Stark, drafted ‘Plan Dog’ in Washington in October 1940, his view of how a global war should be fought were the United States and Great Britain to become active allies against the Axis powers. It was then refined by other Staff officers and subsequently sent to Marshall who also approved it. In essence it set out what came to be known as the ‘Germany First’ policy, stating that ‘If Britain wins decisively against Germany, we could win everywhere; but…if she loses, the problem confronting us would be very great; and while we might not lose everywhere, we might, possibly, not win anywhere.’8