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Remembered Today:

Viscount Alanbrooke


Old Tom

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In 1916 Major Alan Brooke was BM RA with 18 Division. Can anyone outline his other appointments during WW1 please?

Old Tom

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In 1916 Major Alan Brooke was BM RA with 18 Division. Can anyone outline his other appointments during WW1 please?

Old Tom

From Who's Who:

* 1914: N Battery RHA, Secunderabad Cavalry Brigade.

* Sept 1914 - commanded ammunition column (per notes in Vol. 2 of the Official History, p 484, this is presumably H Section of 2nd Indian RHA Brigade)

* Feb 1915: Adjutant, 2nd Indian RHA Brigade in 2nd Indian Cavalry Division

* Nov 1915: Brigade-Major RA 18th Division (presumably transferred when Indian divisions withdrawn?)

* Feb 1917: GSO2 RA, Canadian Corps

* Jul 1918: GSO1 RA, First Army, until end March 1919, when he went to Camberley.

Hope that helps...

-Andrew

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Chapter IV of General Sir David Fraser's 1982 biography of the future CIGS, Alanbrooke, gives some useful insights into Alan Brooke's Great War service, and the lessons he took from that experience. There are also snippets of Great War interest in Alex Danchev & Dan Todman's 2001 edition of Alanbrooke's complete War Diaries 1939 - 1945.

The following is from Danchev & Todman, and is part of a letter from Brooke to his mother, written on the Somme on the 2 July 1916, when he was serving as Brigade Major RA with Ivor Maxe's 18th Division:

(p. xiii) "We have been busy at it since yesterday morning. At last our preliminary bombardment, which has been going on for several days, came to an end, and our infantry attacked at 7.30am. It has been a continual war of guns for close on a week, both night and day, each gun with its special task and lines allotted to it throughout that period; slowly pounding away at the German trenches, some of them systematically hammering a way through the back wire entanglements, others pounding trenches to pieces, bombarding villages to demoralise supports, keeping up barrage on roads, to prevent the supplies, ammunition etc being brought up, whilst our counter batteries took on the German trenches. After an intense bombardment of 65 minutes, our infantry left their trenches and attacked the German trenches. We had a very careful timetable of lifts worked out, by which the artillery lifted off each system of trenches just before the infantry arrived there, and moved on in advance of the infantry the whole time.

The attack of our Division was a great success, and we took exactly what we intended to take. We advanced about 1500 yards on a 2000 yards front. Our casulaties were pretty heavy, but not as heavy as they might have been, and up to the present we have taken 600 prisoners in this Division, and the whole countryside is covered with dead Germans."

As Alanbrooke's editors wryly note, "whether Alice [AB's mother] in her invalid bed fully appreciated this proud account of the first creeping barrage is a moot point, but she did preserve all her youngest son's letters. Loosely bound, for family and posterity, they made something very like a diary."

As the following example demonstrates, his initial appalled impressions at Third Ypres in autumn 1917 were refined by subsequent actual experience, and became the basis of Alanbrooke's own doctrine during the Second World War:

(p.78) "Brooke, on his first arrival in the Ypres Salient, had been appalled at the conditions. 'Mile upon mile of mud and swamp with practically no roads. Just before our attack I attended a conference which Douglas Haig ran at Canadian Corps HQ. I could hardly believe that my ears were not deceiving me! He spoke in the rosiest of terms of our chances of breaking through. I had been all over the ground and to my mind such an eventuality was quite impossible. I am certain he was misinformed and had never seen the ground for himself.'

Nevertheless, he was able to write on 8th November, 'You will have seen details in the papers of our attack on Passchendaele. It was a complete success and the crowning of the hard fighting which this Corps had endured during the past few weeks'."

(p.80) "The battles of August to October 1918 are seldom dramatised. [....] That victory must, in justice, be attributed not only to the concluding battles themselves, which once again restored 'open warfare', but also, and fundamentally, to the process of attrition, terrible though it was, which had preceded them. It was not for nothing that the Germans, on the other side of the hill, had ceaselessly reported that their army was bleeding to death on the ridges east of Ypres and in the rolling fields above the Somme. The mistakes and the tragedies are part of our history. Also part of that history, however, is the fact that in autumn 1918 the German Army was beaten, on level terms, decisively, and every British soldier knew it. 'Haig', said a German appreciation, 'contributed the most to prevent a German victory. Thus he really remained 'Master of the Field'."

Fraser continues this theme when summing up Alanbrooke's cardinal principals of war when GIGS during the Second World War:

(p.424) "[Alanbrooke] believed in attrition. It was attrition achieved in the skies over Germany, and above all on the Eastern rather than the Western front. This made no difference to the principle. There must be a wearing down. As firmly as Haig before him, and with the same logic, Brooke believed in attrition and preached it; and with the same ultimate triumph."

Danchev & Todman's edition of Alanbrooke's complete Second World War diaries declare that "by common consent, he was the greatest CIGS in the history of the British Army." Since I hold Haig to be the greatest C-in-C in the British Army's history on account of the unique scale of his achievement, it's pleasing to note David Fraser's linking of the principles of both and the part they each played in the ultimate victory of the Allied cause in both world wars. As an amusing footnote to this, the Danchev & Todman edition of Alanbrooke's diaries contain an entry from 19 March 1940. This is during the 'phoney war', when Alanbrooke is once again in France with the BEF, this time in command of II Corps, as France awaited the German onslaught:

(p. 47) "Lunched at Montreuil where I had a look at Sir Douglas Haig's statue done by a French artist. I only wish it had been put up in Whitehall instead of the existing atrocity."

George

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George,

Many thanks for those interesting quotes. It would threfore appear that Brooke's editor thought that Brookes letter was describing the first creeping barrage. However I believe others have claimed to be first. But 18 Div certainly were among the few sucessful divisions on the first day of the Somme and did finally take the Schwaben Redoubt in September.

Old Tom

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George,

Many thanks for those interesting quotes. It would threfore appear that Brooke's editor thought that Brookes letter was describing the first creeping barrage. However I believe others have claimed to be first. But 18 Div certainly were among the few sucessful divisions on the first day of the Somme and did finally take the Schwaben Redoubt in September.

Old Tom

Hi Tom, yes, I think the claim of 'first creeping barrage' from Danchev & Todman's Intro would be up for debate, so to speak! It doesn't help that they don't actually contextualise what they mean by that - first in the war, first by the BEF, or first on the Somme etc.

George

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