The quarrels of brothers

Masters and Commanders, by Andrew Roberts; Behind Closed Doors, by Laurence Rees

Andrew Roberts is one of the liveliest as well as the most considerable of contemporary historians. He is hard-working and exceptionally well-informed, lucid, highly intelligent, pugnacious, occasionally perverse (though much less often than he used to be), combining an impressive grasp of the overall picture with a fine eye for the illuminating detail. He also writes uncommonly well.

The Masters are Churchill and Roosevelt: the first considering himself a master of high strategy and certainly with much experience in that field; the second without any pretensions to such expertise but still vested with enormous powers — far more absolute, indeed, than any that Churchill ever enjoyed. The Commanders are Alan Brooke and George Marshall. Eisenhower, MacArthur, Montgomery, the commanders in the field, were far more prominently in the public eye. They won the campaigns: Brooke and Marshall stayed at home and won the war. It was an immense sacrifice on their parts that they did so. Both of them longed to direct armies in battle; both renounced the opportunity to do so — Brooke to lead the 8th Army in North Africa, Marshall to command on the Second Front — because they knew that they were indispensable. By 1944 Brooke thought that he could be spared in Whitehall. Churchill promised him the supreme command over the Normandy invasion, but in the end he could not deliver. An American had to get the job and the lot fell to Eisenhower. It was one of the bitterest disappointments in Brooke’s life and did more than anything else to sour his anyway tempestuous relationship with his prime minister.

It is a signal merit of Roberts’s book that he reminds one that, whatever the importance of demographic trends, economic forces, abstract ideologies, history is made by human beings.