In Whitehall, visible to even the most short-sighted from the gates of Downing Street, stands an outsize statue of Lord Alanbrooke, the strategic adviser to Winston Churchill during the second world war. His job was to help the prime minister see the big picture and concentrate on the decisions that really mattered. This was no easy task. Churchill was both a tricky master and ‘tinkerman’, but Alanbrooke had Ulster blood and knew how to say no.
One little village, San Pietro Infine, took more than a week and 1,500 American casualties to capture
He also had a remarkable facility for explaining complex strategic problems in simple terms. There is good evidence of this in the BBC archive (and on YouTube) in a television interview he gave in 1957. Wartime strategy, he said, all came down to two decisions. First, should the Allies defeat Germany or Japan first? That was easily agreed: Hitler first.
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