'ON NO ACCOUNT MUST THE CONTENTS OF THIS BOOK BE PUBLISHED.' So wrote Alan Brooke at the beginning of the diary that he was to keep from the first day of the second world war until the last. But published they were, little more than ten years after the war was over, and with the author's full consent. This was partly because Alanbrooke needed the money - the parsimony with which he was treated by the postwar Labour Government was a national disgrace - and partly because Winston Churchill had rushed into print with an account of the war from which the role of the chiefs of staff in general, and that of Alanbrooke in particular, had been airbrushed out.
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