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War Diaries, 1939-1945. Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke. Edited by Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001. Published in the U.S. by University of California Press. ISBN 0-297-60731-6. Photographs. Notes. Index. Pp. Ii, 763. L25.00.
This is an exceedingly important book. In 1957 and 1959, portions of Lord Alanbrooke's diaries, liberally edited by Sir Arthur Bryant, were published under the titles, The Turn of the Tide and Triumph in the West. Their publication caused a furor, for Bryant's version often showed Churchill's Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) at his intemperate worst. At the same time, Bryant sought to portray his subject as a master strategist in the tradition of the Duke of Marlborough. One outcome was that Alanbrooke, generally accepted as Britain's outstanding CIGS of the twentieth century, emerged from the ordeal with his reputation severely damaged. Another was that Bryant's edition was so unreliable and misleading that scholars had to turn to the original version, deposited at the Liddell Hart Centre archives, to derive a more accurate picture.
Now, the Trustees of Lord Alanbrooke's settlement have attempted to rectify the problem by allowing almost all of the original diaries and Alanbrooke's handwritten postwar comments upon them to be published in their...