AoH Book Club: Andrew Roberts on Masters & Commanders

The acclaimed historian discusses his book on the four main conductors of Allied strategy during the Second World War.

Andrew Roberts

Masters & Commanders, when published in 2008, offered a new perspective on the grand strategy between the allies, but what also comes through is the personalities of the four men directing that strategy. Was there anything that surprised about the four in your research?

The most surprising thing was that there was anything new to say about such a well-trawled subject as the creation of the Western Allies’ grand strategy in the Second World War. I was incredibly lucky to discover the verbatim accounts of the War Cabinet between 1941 and 1945 taken down by a hitherto-unknown assistant secretary called Lawrence Burgis, who secretly kept copies of his shorthand notes, completely against the provisions of the Official Secrets Act 1911 . He was supposed to have burnt the notes in the Cabinet Office fireplace after typing them up, but instead he took them home and stored them away.

Masters & Commanders was therefore able to reveal exactly what Churchill, Brooke and others actually said word-for-word during these vital meetings that decided British wartime strategy. They had never been used before, because when I discovered them in the Churchill Archive Centre in Cambridge, no previous historian had deciphered Burgis’s personal shorthand hieroglyphics. I has also made extensive use of the recently-released notebooks of the Cabinet deputy secretary Norman Brook (later Lord Normanbrook), which had so far not been reproduced in book form. I also worked the Roosevelt Papers owned by Conrad Black, which have not been seen by outside scholars, and the diaries of Maj-Gen John Kennedy, which are full of new insights into War Office decision-making, as well as over sixty other contemporaries. As well as having a new ‘take’ on the Second World War, therefore, this book was packed with brand new Churchill quotations, jokes and apercus.

I was also surprised how often Churchill – at least in the early part of the war – admitted that the Germans were, unit for unit, better soldiers than the British. In the Far East he began by acknowledging the Japanese as superior jungle fighters. Never in public, of course, but at one point Brooke said he must ‘have a word’ with the PM over his habit of praising the German fighting man over the British.