After a chiefs of staff meeting in the morning and a Cabinet meeting that he attended as COS at noon for Anthony Eden’s report on Russia, Brooke turned to his diary. He had no idea yet when Churchill would return. “I pray God,” Brooke wrote, “that He may give me sufficient strength to devote the energy and drive it may require. Difficult times with the PM I see clearly ahead of me and there again I pray God to help me by giving me guidance on how to handle the difficult situations which are certain to confront me.” Eden’s mission to Moscow had failed. Stalin wanted no restrictions on war materiel supplied, whatever the struggle to get it past the Kriegsmarine in the Arctic or by any other means. Lend-Lease was neither lend nor lease. His suspicions of the West would only be mollified, he had insisted, by recognition by Britain and the United States of intended Russian frontiers—land grabs—as they existed at the moment of Hitler’s invasion on June 21, 1941. He already knew there was no chance of Roosevelt’s agreement or that of the American Congress.
