 The Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) Alan Brooke was opposed to Churchill's "Rhodes madness", saying he had "worked himself into a frenzy of excitement about the Rhodes attack".Alan Brooke was opposed to it as a distraction from the Italian campaign and also as endangering their relations with the President (6,8 October 1943), although he also thought that Crete and Rhodes might have been easily captured earlier if the Americans had agreed, and "the war might have been finished by 1943".