Masters & Commanders
Andrew Roberts reflects on the often stormy relationship between Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff during the Second World War.
On Tuesday May 26th, 1942, General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), attended a luncheon at the Soviet Embassy in London to celebrate the signing that day of an Anglo-Soviet twenty-year mutual assistance agreement, six months after Hitler’s invasion of Russia. It was a grand affair, attended by the Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the Russian Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov, the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and all the Chiefs of Staff, as well as the deputy Prime Minister Clement Attlee and several other members of the War Cabinet. ‘Many toasts and many speeches’, recorded Brooke in his diary afterwards. ‘Somehow the whole affair gave me the creeps and made me feel that humanity has still many centuries to live through before universal peace can be found.’
Years later, after victory was won, Brooke – by then Viscount Alanbrooke – had cause to re-read that diary entry and thought himself naïve in having been given ‘the creeps’ by all the speeches at that luncheon. ‘I had evidently not yet become hardened to the insincerity of statements contained in the speeches of politicians and statesmen on such occasions!’ he commented.
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