"For most of the Second World War, General Sir Alan Brooke (1883-1963), later Field Marshall Lord Alanbrooke, was Britain's Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) and Winston Churchill's principal military adviser, and antagonist, in the inner councils of war. He is commonly considered the greatest CIGS in the history of the British Army. His diaries are one of the most important and most controversial military diaries of the modern era. The last great chronicle of the Second World War, they provide a riveting blow-by-blow account of how the war was waged and eventually won - including the controversies over the Second Front and the desperate search for a strategy, the Allied bomber offensive, the Italian campaign, the D-Day landings, the race for Berlin, the divisions of Yalta, and the post-war settlement." "Alanbrooke's sensibility together with his unique perspective from the epicenter of the most dramatic upheaval of the twentieth century make War Diaries 1939-1945 one of the most fascinating and important documents of the era."--Jacket.

ntroduction: The Unhappy Warrior -- 28 September 1939 -- 30 May 1940 -- 12 June 1940 -- 30 November 1941 -- 1 December 1941 -- 31 December 1942 -- 1 January -- 31 December 1943 -- 1 January -- 31 December 1944 -- 1 January -- 31 August 1945.