Alan Brooke declined Winston Churchill's offer of the appointment to head Middle East Command, telling the Prime Minister that there would be no time to reorganise the Imperial General Staff and that he had no knowledge of desert warfare. Secretly he confided in his diary that he felt he would serve better by remaining in his present post in order to exercise some control over the Prime Minister's wilder schemes and, also, to prevent Claude Auchinleck from thinking that he had come out on purpose to work his way into the latter's shoes
