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Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke

• Message 1.Β 

  Posted by Mike Waller (U4782937) on Friday, 19th November 2010

  I am just coming the the end of the 'War Diaries" and like most people have formed a very favourable view of the man himself. By his own account he does not seem to have got much wrong and, given that these are diaries, this seems remarkable. Are there any critics who have, successfully, managed to find strategic flaws?

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• Message 2

  , in reply to message 1.

  Posted by Mutatis_Mutandis (U8620894) on Saturday, 20th November 2010

  I would recommend "Masters and Commanders" by Andrew Roberts: Although it has a picture of Churchill and Roosevelt on the cover, most attention goes to the role of Alan Brooke. The work is based mostly on the notes and diaries kept (against regulations) by British officers and officials, so that is perhaps logical.
  
  Roberts puts the point where the American leadership started to get strategy right, and British leadership started to get it wrong, with somewhat arbitrary precision on 19 October 1943. Basically his argument is that up to then, the Mediterranean and other secondary campaigns made sense, as they made the best possible use of the still relatively weak Allied forces and weakened the Axis. But after that point the growing Allied strength should have been focused entirely on the invasion of France, instead of the slow struggle upwards through Italy.
  
  It seems a sensible argument to me, although it also made sense for the Allies to keep the Reich involved on several fronts simultaneously: Germany could simply not field enough soldiers and materiel to cope with that -- Galland famously said of the Luftwaffe that it was like a blanket that was always too small, exposing one area when pulled to cover another. The Allies in 1944 did have numerical superiority. If Hitler had had to fight only on one front -- of course his own foolishness prevented that -- the tactical superiority of the Wehrmacht would have mattered more.
  

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  Posted by hotmousemat (U2388917) on Saturday, 20th November 2010

  But after that point the growing Allied strength should have been focused entirely on the invasion of France, instead of the slow struggle upwards through Italy. Β 
  
  I think the usual counter is that it is never about strength but about logistics, in this case suitable landing ships. These ships just weren't available; it wasn't as if the army in Italy was using them. The army in Italy was relatively cheap to supply and it was in place, so the options were Italy and France when we can, or just France when we can.
  
  Churchill was getting constantly nagged by both the Americans and the Russians and comments that the entire strategy of the war seemed to be hanging on the availability 'LSTs' (Landing Ship Tanks)
  
  So the idea that Alanbrooke 'got it wrong' reminds me of criticisms of Haig in WW1 for not making more use of tanks. The first time Haig saw tanks demonstrated, he ordered 1000 of them. But knowing what you should be doing and being able to do it are two different things.

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  Posted by Mike Waller (U4782937) on Monday, 22nd November 2010

  I have just finished the diaries and am now suffering from withdrawal symptoms! I feel I have just lost the company of a highly valued companion. Perhaps I have been overawed by the great man's intellect, but I can see no valid grounds for criticising the Italian Campaign other than in resepct of tactical aspects, under the control of field commanders. When, after all, should it have been stop, before the invasion of Sciliy? (which I learned last night had a positive effect on the outcome at Kursk); before the fall of Rome?, before Itally was knocked out of the war? The key thing to me is that the Western Allies had superiority in numbers of men and materials; the Germans had superiority in terms of quality in most fields. It was essentially the Sherman tank versus the German super-tanks at the macro scale. With that kind of asymetrical contest, the overridding challenge for the Allies was to make Hitler spread his resources as thinly as possible. Stopping the Italian campaign would have sent a clear message to Hitler that the main attack would come in Northerrn France. This would have enabled him to build comparatively lightly manned defensive holding lines in Itally and then shift the resources thus released to defend the Channel/Atlantic coast; and this would have made the already very dificult challenge of securing a lodgement even harder. The other alternative open to the allies of switching resources from Italy to a distraction attack on the South of France seem to me to fail on the grounds given by Alanbrooke: creating a potential weakness in Italy and a serious time delay before the switched troops could be put to useful purpose. Once the new front had been established in France, Alanbrooke then resisted attempts by Churchill and Alexander to try to push on to Vienna. Here too he was right.

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