John Keegan

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Sir John Keegan (born 1934) is a British military historian.

Contents

[edit] Life

Keegan was born in Clapham, the son of Irish Catholics. His father served in the trenches in World War I. He was educated at Wimbledon College for two years, then entered Balliol College, Oxford in 1953. He worked at the American Embassy in London for two years. In 1960 he was appointed to a lectureship at Sandhurst, a post he held for 26 years (he has also taught at Princeton University and Vassar College.[1].) In 1986 Keegan moved to the Daily Telegraph to take up the post of Defense Correspondent; at present he is the paper's Defense Editor. In 1998 he wrote and presented the BBC's Reith Lectures, entitled War and Our World. He was knighted in 2000.

In an irony he himself has noted in a number of his works, despite being a military historian and lecturer, Keegan himself has never been in the military or seen combat due to a congenital deformity (he writes in detail of this in the introduction to his book The Mask of Command). In any event, he was too young to have fought in the greatest war in history, World War II.

In an interview in 1994, Keegan described himself as a conservative who had voted for the Conservative in the last few British general elections, and described the Daily Telegraph as the conservative newspaper.[2]) He also writes for the American conservative website, National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com).

[edit] Work

Keegan's books cover not only the traditional battle-by-battle aspect of military history but also other aspects of war such as the experience of the individual soldier (The Face of Battle), the historical causes of military events, the role of technological change in warfare and its impact not only on the fighting soldier's experience but also on the strategy of commanders, and the choices and dilemmas faced by military leaders from Alexander the Great to the nuclear age (The Mask of Command). Keegan has examined warfare in many historical periods and arenas, starting with human prehistory and including the wars of the Ancient Greeks, the Napoleonic conflicts, and the First and Second World Wars (A History of Warfare). He has written on naval history from the "wooden walls" of Nelson's Navy to the nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines of today (The Price of Admiralty). And he has contributed a study of the historiography of the Second World War, The Battle for History.

Frank C. Mahncke, a US defense analyst writing for the Naval War College, says of Keegan, "He is among the most prominent and widely read military historians of the late twentieth century."[2]

Keegan's work has been criticized by historians Sir Michael Howard, Peter Paret and Christopher Bassford for his alleged attacks[citation needed] on the famous Prussian military theoretician Carl von Clausewitz. Howard said Keegan was "profoundly mistaken,"[3] Paret called him a "poseur."[citation needed] And Bassford has written that "Nothing anywhere in Keegan's work—despite his many diatribes about Clausewitz and 'the Clausewitzians'—reflects any reading whatsoever of Clausewitz's own writings."[4]

Ironically, in The New York Times Book Review, quoted on the back covers of Keegan's Intelligence in War and Fields of Battle: the Wars for North America, Michael Howard wrote of Keegan's A History of Warfare, "[It is p]erhaps the most remarkable study of warfare that has yet been written...John Keegan is at once the most readable and the most original of living historians."

[edit] Views on US Overthrow of Saddam Hussein

Keegan supported the US and UK invasion of Iraq in 2003 which removed the genocidal dictator Saddam Hussein and criticized journalists who did not. His views are illustrated in an editorial he wrote for the Telegraph on 29 August 2002, titled: "If Churchill were alive today, he would strike at Saddam." He wrote: "[The US] is the richest and most powerful nation the world has ever known, perfectly capable of crushing any warmonger without risk to itself or to regional peace in any part of the world. ... At the moment Saddam could be toppled quickly, cheaply and without difficulty. The moment will not last. Churchill would see the opportunity and, if in power, would grasp it. He would ignore the timidity of yesterday's men and strike. ... The signs are, thank goodness, that President Bush is determined not to fall."[3]

In August 2003, Keegan wrote: "The war in Iraq seems to be drawing to a close... Resistance cannot last long. Saddam's Iraq has been defeated and will shortly have been purged of the Ba'ath Party apparatus. Saddam's war plan, if he had one, must be reckoned one of the most inept ever designed. It made no use of the country's natural defences. ... This has been a collapse, not a war. ... The older media generation, particularly those covering the war from comfortable television studios, has not covered itself with glory. Deeply infected with anti-war feeling and Left-wing antipathy to the use of force as a means of doing good, it has once again sought to depict the achievements of the West's servicemen as a subject for disapproval."[4]

[edit] Books

[edit] Endnotes

  1. ^ Back cover of The First World War, by John Keegan. ISBN 0-375-40052-4
  2. ^ [1].
  3. ^ Michael Howard, "To the Ruthless Belong the Spoils," The New York Times Book Review, 14 November 1993.
  4. ^ Christopher Bassford, "John Keegan and the Grand Tradition of Trashing Clausewitz." War in History, November 1994, pp.319-336.

[edit] References

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