Alan Brooke

Hopkins to Churchill, 1942: “‘Where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God’…Even to the end.”

Scholarship accumulates and sources multiply, Todman writes. The perspective of Churchill’s memoirs persists—if sometimes heavily qualified.

Still visible above swirls of pettiness, heroes remain: Brooke, the great general; above him, looming ever larger, the man who saved liberty.

Wingate “lives on in the long-range penetration groups, and all these intricate and daring air and military operations.” —WSC

Among his generals, Churchill thought Alexander “the best we had.” Alex for his part was ever faithful, saying, “I can’t simply refuse Winston.”

Why would Hamilton raise the inconsequential to the significant? With admirers like this, Churchill’s memory needs no enemies.

Speaking of Britain and its Empire in 1941, Winston Churchill said: “We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.”1 A few weeks earlier he had advised the boys at Harrow School: “Never give in—never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”2 The image he conveyed is one of hardiness and personal toughness, and it galvanized his countrymen. Yet we rarely give thought to where he found the hardiness and resilience he conveyed.