One of the most influential military historians of the 20th century is dead. Sir John Keegan, perhaps best known for his groundbreaking book The Face of Battle is remembered by Con Coughlin of the Telegraph:
While, on a personal note, I was deeply saddened to learn of the the death of my dear friend and colleague Sir John Keegan, I hope his passing will provide all of us with the opportunity to reflect on his truly monumental contribution to the study of military history, as well as his more waspish contributions as the Daily Telegraph‘s Defence Editor.
As Professor of Military History at Sandhurst, a position he held with distinction for many years before joining the Daily Telegraph in 1986, John, and he liked to be known in the Telegraph office, single-handedly transformed the way in which we approach military history. Before John made his seminal contributions with books such as The Face of Battle and The Mask of Command, military history was mainly confined to the study of strategy, tactics and technological advances in equipment. The human face — and cost — of warfare was largely overlooked, until Sir John opened up a whole new dimension to the discipline by addressing the human element of conflict.
Update: The New York Times obituary.
Mr. Keegan never served in the military. At 13, he contracted orthopedic tuberculosis and spent the next nine years being treated for it, five of them in a hospital, where he used the time to learn Latin and Greek from a chaplain. As he acknowledged in the introduction to “The Face of Battle,” he had “not been in a battle, nor near one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath.”
But he said he learned in 1984 “how physically disgusting battlefields are” and “what it feels like to be frightened” when The Telegraph sent him to Beirut, Lebanon, to write about the civil war there.
Mr. Keegan’s body of work ranged across centuries and continents and, as a whole, traced the evolution of warfare and its destructive technology while acknowledging its constants: the terrors of combat and the psychological toll that soldiers have endured.
Update, the second: “Sir Humphrey” at the Thin Pinstriped Line regrets the news:
Humphrey was deeply saddened to read of the death of the esteemed author and military historian, Sir John Keegan. He was one of the greatest authors of military history of the late 20th century, and many of his books can be found on Humphreys bookcases.
Humphrey first discovered Keenan’s work in his teens, and found the excellent analysis and writing style to be engrossing. It was always a pleasure to read his books, and the world is a poorer place for his passing. Similarly, his work on the Daily Telegraph provided first rate analytical capability to that paper, enabling him to join many disparate facts and events and turn them into a critical ‘so what’ assessment on the implications of a situation. In many ways Keegan was an intelligence analyst in all but name, and proponents of the value of Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) could do worse than look at his media articles to show how well written work, derived using the same information as everyone else had access to, could easily be used to inform policy makers without being classified as ‘Top Secret Burn Before Reading’.
One of the most important roles that Keegan played though was in his work at Sandhurst. Working alongside other superb historians, such as the late Richard Holmes, he was able to educate an entire generation of British Army Officers in the subtleties of the academic study of the profession of war. The 1970s and 1980s saw almost a ‘golden generation’ of academics emerge from Sandhurst, teaching and writing, and making the move from being a lecturer through to being internationally renowned historians. This was not a new move, for there has long been a strong academic trend at all three service academies over many years, and where whole generations of officers would have been brought into contact with their theories and ideas. The academic studies teams would teach on strategy, tactics, and history and try to bring the wider theoretical and conceptual understanding of military conflict, and merge it with what the cadets were learning in their basic training. This marked the start of a lifelong process of military education, where throughout their careers, military officers returned to Staff College for further updates on strategy, history and wider considerations.
