John Keegan

Life and career

John Desmond Patrick Keegan was born in Clapham, London, on 15 May 1934. His father was an Irish First World War veteran. Keegan was evacuated to Somerset when the Second World War broke out. At age 13 Keegan contracted orthopaedic tuberculosis, which affected his gait. The long-term effects of this rendered him unfit for military service, and the timing of his birth made him too young for service in the war, facts he mentioned in his works as an ironic observation on his profession and interests. The illness also interrupted his education in his teenage years.

He studied for a period at King's College, Taunton, and for two years at Wimbledon College, which led to entry to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1953, where he read history with an emphasis on war theory. After graduation he worked at the American Embassy in London for three years.

In 1960 Keegan took up a lectureship in military history at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, which trains officers for the British Army. He remained there for 26 years, becoming a senior lecturer in military history during his tenure, during which he also held a visiting professorship at Princeton University and was Delmas Distinguished Professor of History at Vassar College in the United States.

Leaving the academy in 1986, Keegan joined The Daily Telegraph as a defence correspondent and stayed with the paper as defence editor until his death. He also wrote for the American conservative publication National Review Online. In 1998 he wrote and presented the BBC's Reith Lectures, entitling them "War in Our World".

Keegan died on 2 August 2012 of natural causes at his home in Kilmington, Wiltshire. He was survived by his wife, their two daughters and two sons.

Published work

In A History of Warfare, Keegan outlined the development and limitations of warfare from prehistory to the modern era. It looked at various topics, including the use of horses, logistics, and "fire". A key concept put forward was that war is inherently cultural. In the introduction, he vigorously denounced the notion that war is a reasonable tool of statecraft, "simply a continuation of [interstate] politics by other means", rejecting "Clausewitzian" ideas. However, Keegan's discussion of Clausewitz was criticised as uninformed and inaccurate by writers like Peter Paret, Christopher Bassford, and Richard M. Swain.

Other books written by Keegan are: The Iraq War, Intelligence in War, The First World War, The Second World War, The Battle for History, The Face of Battle, War and Our World, The Mask of Command, and Fields of Battle.

He also contributed to work on historiography in modern conflict. With Richard Holmes he wrote the BBC documentary Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle. Frank C. Mahncke wrote that Keegan is seen as "among the most prominent and widely read military historians of the late twentieth century". In a book-cover blurb extracted from a more complex article, Sir Michael Howard wrote, "at once the most readable and the most original of living historians".

Views on contemporary conflicts

• Keegan stated: "I will never oppose the Vietnam War. Americans were right to do it. I think they fought it in the wrong way. I don't think it's a war like fighting Hitler, but I think it was a right war, a correct war."
• Keegan believed that the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 showed that air power alone could win wars.
• An article in The Christian Science Monitor called Keegan a "staunch supporter" of the Iraq War. It quotes him: "Uncomfortable as the 'spectacle of raw military force' is, he concludes that the Iraq war represents 'a better guide to what needs to be done to secure the safety of our world than any amount of law-making or treaty-writing can offer.

Criticism

Keegan was criticised by peers, including Sir Michael Howard and Christopher Bassford for his critical position on Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian officer and author of Vom Kriege (On War), one of the basic texts on warfare and military strategy. Describing Keegan as "profoundly mistaken", Bassford stated, "Nothing anywhere in Keegan's work – despite his many diatribes about Clausewitz and 'the Clausewitzians' – reflects any reading whatsoever of Clausewitz's own writings." The political scientist Richard Betts criticised Keegan's understanding of the political dimensions of war, calling Keegan "a naïf about politics."

In his 1997 book Revolutionary Armies in the Modern Era: A Revisionist Approach (described as "too flawed to be recommended as an undergraduate text"), the historian Simon MacKenzie reports Keegan as saying that the best panzer units of the Schutzstaffel altered the course of the war and were "faithful unto death and fiercer in combat than any soldiers who fought them on western battlefields".

Detlef Siebert, a television documentarian, disagreed with Keegan's view that the deliberate targeting of civilian populations by aerial bombing "descended to the enemy's level", although he did call it a "moral blemish".

Honours

On 29 June 1991, as a war correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, Keegan was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) "in recognition of service within the operations in the Gulf". In the 2000 New Year Honours, he was knighted "for services to Military History".

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL) in 1986. In 1993 he won the Duff Cooper Prize.

In 1996 he was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize for lifetime achievement by the Society for Military History.

The University of Bath awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Letters (DLitt) in 2002.

Works

• Waffen SS: The Asphalt Soldiers (New York: Ballantine, 1970)
• Barbarossa: Invasion of Russia, 1941 (New York, 1971)
• Opening Moves: August 1914 (New York: Ballantine, 1971)
• Guderian (New York: Ballantine, 1973)
• Rundstedt (New York: Ballantine, 1974)
• Dien Bien Phu (New York: Ballantine, 1974)
• The Face of Battle (London, 1976)
• Who Was Who in World War II (1978)
• The Nature of War with Joseph Darracott (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981)
• Six Armies in Normandy (1982)
• Zones of Conflict: An Atlas of Future Wars with Andrew Wheatcroft (New York, 1986)
• Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle with Richard Holmes (New York: Viking Press, 1986)
• The Mask of Command (London, 1987)
• The Price of Admiralty (1988)
• The Illustrated Face of Battle (New York and London: Viking, 1988)
• The Second World War (Viking Press, 1989)
• Churchill's Generals (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1991) editor
• A History of Warfare (London, 1993)
• The Battle for History: Refighting World War Two (Vintage Canada, 1995)
• Warpaths (Pimlico, 1996)
• Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America (1997)
• War and Our World: The Reith Lectures 1998 (London: Pimlico, 1999)
• The Book of War (ed.; Viking Press, 1999)
• The First World War (London: Hutchinson, 1998) ; (New York: Knopf, 1999)
• An Illustrated History of the First World War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001)
• Winston Churchill (2002)
• Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda (2003) (also published with alternative subtitle as Intelligence in War: The Value—and Limitations—of What the Military Can Learn About the Enemy )
• The Iraq War (2004)
• Atlas of World War II (ed.; London: Collins, 2006) (an update of the 1989 Times Atlas)
• The American Civil War (London, Hutchinson, 2009)

Notes

References

• Bassford, Christopher. "John Keegan and the Grand Tradition of Trashing Clausewitz." War in History, November 1994, pp. 319–36

• Snowman, Daniel. "John Keegan", pp. 28–30 from History Today, Volume 50, Issue # 5, May 2000

References

1. (5 August 2012). "Sir John Keegan obituary".
2. Daniel Snowman: [http://www.historytoday.com/daniel-snowman/john-keegan John Keegan] ''History Today'', volume 50, issue 5. 2000.
3. Back cover of ''The First World War''. Keegan, John, {{ISBN. 0-375-40052-4
4. (8 May 1994). "Booknotes: A History of Warfare (transcript of video interview)". C-SPAN.
5. van der Vat, Dan. (5 August 2012). "Sir John Keegan obituary".
6. Binder, David. (3 August 2012). "John Keegan, Historian of War and Warriors, Dies at 78". The New York Times.
7. Christopher Bassford, "John Keegan and the Grand Tradition of Trashing Clausewitz," War in History, November 1994, pp. 319–336.
8. [http://www.nwc.navy.mil/press/Review/2000/spring/br13-sp0.htm Naval War College] {{Webarchive. link. (13 December 2006 – Frank C. Mahncke, [[Naval War College]])
9. ''The New York Times Book Review'' – [[Michael Howard (historian). Sir Michael Howard]]
10. Binder, David. (2 August 2012). "John Keegan, Historian Who Put a Face on War, Dies at 78". [[NYTimes.com]].
11. (2000). "Kosovo and the Great Air Power Debate". [[International Security]].
12. Scott Tyson, Ann. (8 June 2004). "America's bewildering battle in Iraq follows new rules". [[The Christian Science Monitor]].
13. Michael Howard, "To the Ruthless Belong the Spoils", ''The New York Times Book Review'', 14 November 1993.
14. ''War in History'', November 1994, pp. 319–336, Christopher Bassford available at [http://www.clausewitz.com/CWZHOME/Keegan/KEEGWHOL.htm Clausewitz.com] {{Webarchive. link. (29 September 2017)
15. Betts, Richard. (Fall 2000). "Is Strategy an Illusion?". International Security.
16. Siebert, Detlef. "BWorld Wars: British Bombing Strategy in World War Two". BBC.
17. {{London Gazette. (28 June 1991)
18. {{London Gazette. (31 December 1999)
19. "Royal Society of Literature All Fellows". Royal Society of Literature.
20. "Past Winners of The Duff Cooper Prize".
21. "Samuel Eliot Morison Prize previous winners". [[Society for Military History]].
22. "Honorary Graduates 1989 to present". University of Bath.