Man who really saved the army
He helped Churchill beat Hitler, but was forgotten hero of Dunkirk and WWII
AHUNDRED years ago, in early 1917, towards the end of the Great War, a young British Army officer began to write his name modestly but indelibly on the pages of world history.
Alan Francis Brooke was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his development of the great rolling barrages that finally broke the German Army’s resistance. With the Allies victorious, he ended the Great War as Lieutenant-Colonel with a bar to his DSO, the Croix-de-Guerre, and six “mentions in despatches”. Thereafter he was a man clearly marked for command.
Little more than a decade later, soon after World War II broke out, Brooke, now promoted to Lieutenant-General, was put in command of the second of the two Corps making up the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) sent to France to take on Hitler’s Germany.
Disastrous
The disastrous story of the BEF’s retreat to Dunkirk is often told, but Brooke’s huge part in the saving of the army seems always to have been understated.
The BEF, poorly equipped, was no match for Germany’s vast superiority in numbers of troops, aircraft, and, above all, in her highly mobile armour. On May 25, 1940, the only northern port available to the British for retreat was Dunkirk. As the British Commander-in-Chief, Lord Gort, struggled to improvise new defences and to restore his communications, the Belgian Army had begun to disintegrate on the BEF’s left. The encircling German forces were closing in fast.
What has been called “the deliverance of Dunkirk”, followed. Afterwards, the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, told the House of Commons he had feared it would be his lot to announce “the greatest military disaster in our long history. The whole root and core and brain of the British Army…seemed about to perish upon the field or to be led into an ignominious captivity… It seemed impossible that any large number of Allied troops could reach the coast.”
That they did reach it and escape, as Arthur Bryant wrote in his book The Turn of the Tide (Collins 1957), was thanks mainly to one man.
During the four crucial days between the Belgian collapse and the beginning of the evacuation, Alan Brooke, with the four divisions of his Corps, had taken command of all the desperately pressed men fighting their way back down a narrowing corridor to the improvised evacuation lines around Dunkirk. Though 17 German divisions had been released as a result of the Belgian capitulation, by his speed and foresight Brooke anticipated the attackers’ every move, and in the words of the Official War Historian, “directed operations with great skill on a plan which the enemy was not allowed seriously to upset”.
Churchill later wrote: “All this day of the 28th, the escape of the British Army hung in the balance… General Brooke and his II Corps fought a magnificent battle… The Germans sustained a bloody repulse.”
Thus the miracle of the Navy’s evacuation was preceded by an equal miracle – that of the army’s reaching the coast at all. Whether one calls it a “retreat” or a “strategic withdrawal”, Alan Brooke’s achievement in bringing the army through the closing defile of his enemies is accepted as one of the great feats of British military history.
(We don’t have space to discuss the controversial incident of Hitler’s order, fuelled by his ambition to turn towards Paris, and supported possibly by Marshall von Runstedt, for his panzers not to advance on the British at this stage. This delay on the part of the German armour was a piece of luck – or yet another miracle – that contributed to the success of the British evacuation.)
As is well known, a total of 338226 Allied troops were saved at Dunkirk.
Exhausted
When Brooke finally arrived, exhausted, in Britain, to his shock he was given orders by Field Marshall Dill to return immediately to France.
He was ordered to take command not only of the 140000 British troops who were still in action in the more southerly area, but also of the extra forces about to cross the Channel to join them, intended to form a new BEF “to sustain the French...”. As Brooke wrote in his diary: “This was certainly one of my blackest moments of the war.”
He knew instinctively what might soon happen, taking into account the lack of resolve on the part of the French to keep fighting. But he had to go.
When he reached France, all was as he had expected. Brooke soon realised that “another Dunkirk” might be impending. In grim defiance of his superior officers back in Britain, so risking his career, Brooke sent orders that the new Canadian troops who had just arrived in France at the port of Brest, were to turn round immediately and re-embark for Britain.
Churchill himself argued the point with Brooke for 10 minutes over the phone. The PM had never met Brooke before, let alone realised that here was one officer who wasn’t scared of him. But Churchill belatedly gave in and agreed that because he was on the spot Brooke must go ahead and do whatever he felt was wise.
So, in the nick of time, Brooke organised another mass evacuation of 197 000. In the end, by means of “the two Dunkirks”, the total number of men rescued by the navy was more than half a million. Typically, the first thing Brooke was asked when he arrived again at the War Office in London was: “Why didn’t you save more vehicles and equipment?”
But there was no holding back this officer. A month later, Brooke was made Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, and so given command of all the forces preparing to repel invasion by the Germans.
He carried out this post brilliantly for 16 months. It was in the Battle of Britain that the Royal Air Force heroically defied Goering’s Luftwaffe and caused Hitler to give up all hope of invading England.
Then, in 1941, Brooke was summoned by Churchill to become Chief of the Imperial General Staff (Cigs), to be the operational head of the British Army, his concern no longer with tactics but with grand strategy.
But further military honours awaited Brooke. Three months later, just before the fall of Singapore, he was made Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee. Now he was no longer running only the army, but also controlled the navy and the RAF, thus entrusted with the total military direction of the war.
The character of the Churchill-Brooke partnership is illustrated by a hostess of the prime minister after the new Cigs had come to visit him at her house: “I don’t know how Brooke is going to get on with Winston,” she said, “but he seemed to spend all the afternoon sitting on the sofa and saying, ‘No, no, sir, you can’t!’”
As Bryant writes: “Henceforward, until the end of the war, Brooke was in daily consultation with Churchill, accompanied him on all his wartime journeys and his conferences with Stalin and Roosevelt. As chief British spokesman on the Combined Chiefs of Staff of the United Kingdom and the United States, he played a leading part in persuading the Americans to adopt the strategy that brought about the turn of the tide during 1942 and 1943…”
Churchill’s qualities as a courageous leader are well known. His failings were impatience and impetuosity. It was in checking these latter tendencies that Brooke became such a great counterpart to his leader. Brooke had the imagination to see what was possible and what was not. He never lost sight of the global picture. In all their arguments and differences, the prime minister and his Gigs were the perfect complement to each other.
Command
Three times during their partnership, Churchill offered Brooke supreme command in the field of battle. The first two he refused, very reluctantly, for he felt his place was at the prime minister’s side. The third offer, before the Allied landings in Normandy, was made to Brooke, but later withdrawn because of the “political need” for an American (General Eisenhower) to be given the supreme command. Brooke was bitterly disappointed by this decision, but accepted it as a soldier should.
Brooke therefore never received the popular acclaim given to soldiers such as Montgomery, Alexander, Eisenhower, and MacArthur. The honours showered on Brooke passed almost unnoticed – a Field Marshall’s baton, the Garter, the Order of Merit, a peerage, and many others. But Brooke shunned the limelight lest it should interfere with his work or his relations with the prime minister.
In Bryant’s words: “The man who saved the army at Dunkirk and helped chart the road to victory was best known in his declining years as a lecturer on bird films and President of the London Zoo.”