Sir Keegan the Great!

His third book, The Face of Battle , made his name as a fine writer and is still widely regarded as his best despite more than 20 other works. He portrayed the life of the common soldier in three great British battles: Agincourt , Waterloo and the Somme He used original sources to bring out the physical and mental aspects of warfare, including bloodlust, fear, comradeship and the ugliness, dirt and even stink of the battlefield. Keegan was five years old when the second world war broke out.

His father came from an Irish Catholic family and had served in the artillery in the first world war, but when the second came was a schools inspector, taking responsibility for the welfare of hundreds of child evacuees. So the family left Clapham, south London, where John had been born, for the Somerset countryside late in The year-old John was impressed by the huge buildup for the Normandy invasion in , when southern England was flooded by military traffic.

He met soldiers of several nationalities, learned to identify aircraft and kept up with the war on maps. Many a schoolboy did the same, but for him the interest became lifelong.

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While he sometimes regretted his lack of military experience, he thought he would not have made a good soldier because of tendencies to insubordination. After he returned to London, Keegan's education at the Jesuit Wimbledon college was interrupted when he was 13 by a tubercular hip that led to a lengthy confinement in an open-air ward in the worst winter for decades.

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In eight months he was allowed home, yet the TB hip reasserted itself and took him to St Thomas's hospital in Lambeth, London. This time his fellow patients were cockney war veterans whose soldiers' tales fascinated him. After two years of this he left with a hip "frozen" by a bone operation and a permanent limp.

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He won a scholarship to study history at Balliol College, Oxford, but another year-long battle with TB delayed his start. In he graduated. Following two years of writing political analyses at the US embassy in London, in Keegan was appointed a lecturer in military history at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in Surrey, where he worked for 26 years.

He wrote potted military histories before starting his first major work, The Face of Battle, published when he was He was moved to write it by the realisation that neither he nor his cadet students had experienced the warfare they were studying.

War memories: John Keegan's life and times

It has remained in print ever since. But works such as The Mask of Command showed that he understood generalship as well as life in the trenches. 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". One key concept put forward was that war is inherently cultural.

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Keegan's discussion of Clausewitz was, however, heavily criticised as uninformed and inaccurate, by writers like Peter Paret , Christopher Bassford , and Richard M. He also contributed to work on historiography in modern conflict. A History of Men in Battle. Mahncke wrote that Keegan is seen as being "among the most prominent and widely read military historians of the late twentieth century".



Keegan's Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America , which gave accounts of many of the wars fought on the soil of North America, also contained opening and closing essays on his own personal relationship to America. He continued his interest in American military history with the publication of his book The American Civil War: A Military History , Hutchinson.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other people named John Keegan, see John Keegan disambiguation. Clapham , London, England. Kilmington, Wiltshire , England. John Keegan History Today, volume 50, issue 5. Retrieved 5 August Archived from the original on 12 August Retrieved 10 August I didn't want to change my beliefs, but there was too much evidence accumulating to stick to the article of faith.

John Keegan

It now does look as if air power has prevailed in the Balkans, and that the time has come to redefine how victory in war may be won. The London Gazette Supplement. Royal Society of Literature. Archived from the original on 5 March Retrieved 9 August Retrieved 29 January