Sir John Keegan
Sir John Keegan, who has died aged 78, achieved an international reputation as a military historian, then discovered a talent for writing rapid analyses of international crises as the defence editor of The Daily Telegraph.
He had been on the teaching staff of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, for 25 years in 1986 when Max Hastings announced his recruitment to the paper the day he took over the editor’s chair. Keegan proved an unrivalled asset as the Soviet empire crumbled and collapsed, the government demanded a “peace dividend” in the form of cutbacks to the Armed Forces and a series of military actions flared up in the Middle East and the Balkans.
Whatever the subject before him, Keegan wrote with close knowledge of the military arts and a personal acquaintance with many senior serving officers who had been his pupils; above all, he demonstrated a deep awareness of the human aspects of warfare, which was cruel, confusing and frightening, if occasionally glorious.
It was always with surprise that new acquaintances discovered that Keegan was no battle-hardened veteran. He was a gentle civilian who was deeply imbued with his Roman Catholic faith and had been crippled with tuberculosis since childhood. While an unabashed supporter of the British alliance with the United States, he described himself as “95 per cent pacifist” and looked forward – though with increasing doubts in recent years — to a world which had abandoned war.
John Desmond Patrick Keegan was born on May 15 1934, and after the declaration of war was taken to the depths of rural England where his Irish father, a south London schools inspector who had been a gunner in the First World War, had responsibility for some 300 evacuated children. Well beyond the sound of enemy gunfire, John enjoyed an idyllic childhood, untouched by any personal experience of the tragedy of conflict.
Nevertheless, he maintained a close interest in every aspect of the fighting, following the news, learning to identify aircraft and meeting locally quartered troops from the Empire, Poland and elsewhere. Last to arrive were the Americans who, in the run-up to the invasion, seemed to fill every tiny road and market town until they vanished overnight in June 1944.
The family’s return to down-at-heel post-war London, where he was sent to the Jesuit-run Wimbledon College, was not a happy experience. In 1947 tuberculosis began to affect one hip. He was placed in an open-air ward of a hospital in Surrey, where the young patients had to wear pullovers and mittens in the worst winter of the century during the day, and were provided with the protection of flapping canvas screens lowered around them at night. He was allowed home after eight months.
The hip grew worse again, and he found himself taken back to hospital, encased in a plaster corset. This time he was not among children, but cheerful cockney veterans in a men’s ward of St Thomas’s, near Westminster Bridge. The Anglican chaplain taught him Greek; a polio victim coached him in French; and, thanks to a well-stocked library, Johnnie, as he was known there, was able to read much history and almost the entire works of Thomas Hardy.
On emerging from hospital two years later, his hip immobilised with a bone graft, Keegan won a place to read History at Oxford. But on going up to Balliol he developed TB again, and was away for another year while being treated with new drugs. He then returned, walking with a stick, to find himself among a highly talented intake, which included the future Lord Chief Justice Lord Bingham, Northern Ireland Secretaries Patrick Mayhew and Peter Brooke, historian Keith Thomas, the Benedictine monk Daniel Rees, and the Prince of Wales’s Australian schoolmaster Michael Collins Persse.
Keegan was tutored in the Middle Ages by Richard Southern and in the 17th century by the Marxist Christopher Hill. Although there was no chance of a military career, he observed the confidence of those who had done National Service and decided to take “Military History and the Theory of War” as a special subject.
After a long tour of the battlefields of the American Civil War with his future brother-in-law Maurice Keen, the medieval historian, he returned home to find work writing political reports for the American embassy in London for two years, then obtained a post as a lecturer at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. It was Keegan’s first proper job.
The academy had some similarities with an Oxford college, including beautiful grounds and buildings as well as good company. But while Oxford encouraged debate, Keegan found himself, as a civilian, lecturing on Military History to motivate young men who were part of a chain of command, trained to accept orders.
The rebellious streak that lurked within him meant that he did not always find this easy; nevertheless, he discovered how liberal and open-minded the Army could be (as long as its core values were not undermined). It tolerated the Keegan family donkey, Emilia, which kept breaking into the student officers’ quiet room. But while writing half a dozen 40,000-word potboilers for “Ballantyne’s Illustrated History of the Violent Century”, he was constantly aware that neither he nor his charges had any personal experience of war.
As a result, his first major book, The Face of Battle (1976), asked: what is it like to be in a battle? Instead of adopting a commander’s perspective, seeing every conflict as an impersonal flow of causation, currents and tendencies in the way favoured by contemporary historians, Keegan concentrated on the experience of the common soldier.
After elegantly discussing why history is usually written by victors and the limitations of survivors’ accounts, he examined three battles: Agincourt in 1415, Waterloo in 1815 and the Somme in 1916. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, including priests’ eyewitness accounts of the first, a post-conflict questionnaire sent out by an officer after the second, and the flood of letters, diaries, poetry and official reports written during the last, he described what in the past had all too often been skated over: the deep fears, the lust for killing, the willingness to risk one’s life for a comrade — characteristics common to the soldiers of all three battles. He evoked the sights, sounds and smells of war, vividly bringing home the experience for both veterans and civilian readers.
The book was an immediate success, and has never been out of print. It marked out Keegan as the most sparkling writer among the talented lecturers of the Sandhurst war studies department. This led to some jealousy, but he was able to use the vital addition to his income to educate the two sons and two daughters born to him and his wife Susanne Everett, later the biographer of Alma Mahler and Oscar Kokoschka.
His next venture, an attempt to produce a military version of the annual Jane’s Fighting Ships, called World Armies (1978), lasted for only two editions. But Six Armies in Normandy (1982) opened with a moving prologue which was his finest prose passage, and was to be much anthologised. This outlined his assured, child like perceptions of a rural society in which the horse was still the main engine of farm work and Britain enjoyed the assured support of a vast empire before being severely buffeted by the onrush of uncomfortable reality in the 1950s and after. In it he recounted the story of the invasion of Europe from D-Day to the liberation of Paris to show how selected experiences of the Americans, Canadians, British, Germans, Poles and French reflected both the diverse natures of their societies and the particular factors that characterise all armies amid the chance of war.
When the Falklands conflict broke out in the same year, Keegan was at a conference in Israel. Confronted by a television reporter he was at first pessimistic about the chances of the Task Force. But on returning home he started to write under the pseudonym Patrick Desmond in The Spectator. This work was not only authoritative; it also did much to counter calls in the early weeks from other writers for the operation to be abandoned.
Two years later he at last obtained the chance to see war in close-up when The Daily Telegraph sent him (as Patrick Desmond again) to write about the escalating Lebanese civil war. The experience, he recorded, taught him “how physically disgusting battlefields are... like being in a municipal garbage dump” and what it was like to be frightened.
There were two co-operative works, Zones of Conflict: an Atlas of Future Wars, with Andrew Wheatcroft, and Soldiers: a History of Men in Battle, a companion to a BBC television series written with John Gau and his Sandhurst colleague Richard Holmes.
In 1986 the chance came to make the final break with the academic world that had been increasingly chafing him. According to Hastings’s memoir, Editor, Keegan rang for a chat, and on discovering that his friend was to edit The Telegraph, burst out: “Can I be your defence correspondent?” An immediate assurance was given, though it soon left Keegan wondering uneasily if he was fitted for the rigours of daily newspaper journalism.
But he quickly settled in at the paper’s Fleet Street office . In addition to taking some plodding first steps in news reporting, he produced three or four elegant leaders a week as well as longer, signed comment pieces. There was also the chance to write book reviews and a fine account of Waterloo .
With his ability to touch souls and stir consciences, Keegan found himself being offered large publishing contracts for writing on ever grander themes . The Mask of Command (1987) concerned the ability of leaders such as Alexander the Great, Wellington, Ulysses Grant and Hitler to weave a spell over their troops with a combination of energy, tenacity and ruthlessness. The Price of Admiralty (1988) took him into less familiar waters with an account of the evolution of naval warfare from Trafalgar to the Battle of the Atlantic in the Second World War.
Critics responded favourably to A History of Warfare (1993) — which was awarded the Duff Cooper Prize — in particular admiring the vastness of the book’s scope (it ranged from Genghis Khan, the Romans and the Japanese samurai to the soldiers of the 19th century). But his attacks on Clausewitz’s claim that war is a continuation of policy by other means – the military historians’ equivalent of the debate about the number of angels to be found on the head of a pin – bemused general readers and did not satisfy all professional colleagues.
All this time Keegan was also busy producing lively copy for The Telegraph where, even if he was not fully aware of it, he enjoyed a unique position in which he could reflect on the experience of a fast fading generation. As the passing years fed an increasing appetite for detail and explanation, he offered his own interpretations of the two great 20th-century conflicts in The Second World War (1989) and The First World War (1998), which was awarded the Westminster Medal.
He also brought his unrivalled grasp of the reality of military engagements to the frequent flare-ups which succeeded the fall of communism. He was proved entirely justified in dismissing the doubts expressed by Left-wing journalists about the abilities of the Allied coalition during the Gulf War of 1990, and treated himself to a crow of triumph afterwards. This was recognised by an OBE in 1991, though Hastings made no headway when he suggested that perhaps a journalistic award, too, might be in order.
Keegan did not always find friends elsewhere. Some fellow historians carped about the number of small mistakes, and complained that his later books — on the Iraq war and the use of intelligence in war — were not written with the authority of his earlier works. The RAF long resented what it saw as his failure to give it credit, and did not fail to note his error in stating that the air campaign in the Balkans could never bring President Milosevic of Serbia to defeat. He handsomely owned up to the error.
John Keegan was knighted in 2000, and among the professional honours heaped on him, he was made a visiting fellow at Princeton and a member of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. He was invited to give the Lees Knowles lectures at Cambridge and the Reith Lectures for the BBC, which were published in 1998 as War and Our World. Perhaps the most remarkable recognition came during the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Normandy campaign, when he was invited to brief President Bill Clinton at the White House.
He was also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Historical Society.
A man of unfailing good nature and tolerance, Keegan settled at a 17th-century manor house in Wiltshire, where he produced a column in the Telegraph Magazine recording life at the village of Kilmington. He wrote of its farmers and modern craftsmen, the changing seasons and the discovery of a bomb in a field. Most popular with readers were his stories of Edgar, the Keegan family’s self-assured Maine Coon cat, who pursued pheasants and rabbits with untroubled ruthlessness.
In 2009 Keegan published The American Civil War, a combination of narrative and critique which emphasised, above all, the importance of the continent’s geography in the conflict.
In his last years John Keegan was confined to a wheelchair after a bone clicked in his back while he was taking part in a parish pilgrimage. Even though he had to have a leg amputated, he continued for some time to be driven up to the Telegraph’s office on Wednesdays, to write leaders and other articles, to answer his post and take part in the leader-writers’ afternoon conference.
His wife and their four children survive him.
Sir John Keegan, born May 15 1934, died August 2 2012
Military historian and defence journalist who brought literary flair and profound research to his many books on war and soldiering
John Keegan established his reputation as a military historian during 20 years as a lecturer on the subject at Sandhurst, from 1960 to 1980. Denied military service after boyhood illness left him lame, he was able to appropriate the fear and stench of battle by rubbing shoulders with instructors at the academy who had fought in the Second World War or in Korea.
Subsequently, he was a studious visitor to the sites open to him of the actions he was to describe, producing histories of rare perception, sensitivity and social conscience. His turn to journalism as Defence Editor of The Daily Telegraph in 1986 greatly raised his public profile and offered a vast scope of information sources but he found, as have others, that influencing opinion with hard facts in short supply and an editorial line to follow is a trade distinct from historical analysis.
He began to establish his literary reputation in 1976 with The Face of Battle, a book that, so one critic noted, broke with the usual practice among military historians of being “as reluctant to describe the realities of battle as are romantic novelists the act of sex”. The book was a realistic analysis of three very different battles, Agincourt, Waterloo and the first day on the Somme. This was followed by World Armies (1978), Six Armies in Normandy (1982) and The Mask of Command (1987), all demonstrating his increasing grasp of the varying complexities of the mechanics of conflict, the unexpected pressures on allies, not least arising unhelpfully from domestic public opinion, and the stress of command at every level, with the loss of thousands of lives the consequence of failure to make the right judgments, realistic plans or adequate preparation.
Keegan’s depth of research — the hallmark of his most respected work — was formidably demonstrated by his editorship of The Times Atlas of the Second World War (1989). A geographically-based chronology starting from the ashes of the First World War where the seeds of the later conflict were propagated, through the warning years of Fascist and Japanese expansion, it presented in meticulous detail the annotated maps of the strategic moves and major battles, at sea, on land and in the air. Dealing also with the Resistance in Europe, economic factors during and consequent on the war and the politics of the peace-making, this “atlas” provides striking testimony to the intensity of Keegan’s research. His A History of Warfare, following in 1993, won the Duff Cooper Prize in 1994.
The First World War (1998) received the Westminster Medal in 1999 and looked to eclipse Liddell-Hart’s A History of the World War (1934) but was criticised for “leaving the reader unsure as to why the Germans lost”. Even so, the book and his work at The Telegraph laid the foundations for his knighthood in 2000. His treatment of the chief personalities on both sides in 1914-18 reveals a sympathy for the relentless difficulties faced by politicians and wartime commanders in determining the priorities for scarce resources, reacting to popular clamour and cleaving to what they believe to be the winning formula, and again demonstrates a dispassionate assembly of the facts and analysis that many writers on the same subject allowed to become tarnished by preconception.
His translation to full-time journalism in 1986 was not achieved without comment. He replaced at The Daily Telegraph a former soldier well-known for his writing in military journals since his subaltern days and for being a fearless reporter from war zones. His Editor’s view was that a more critical commentary on British defence policies and dwindling manpower, capital and financial investment was required than was likely to be available from a former Establishment figure. Whether Keegan was in position to provide soundly based critical comment at that time is open to question but with the influence of the Editor of The Telegraph behind him he was certainly well placed to gather the evidence.
Courageously, he took a leaf from the book of his predecessor in visiting regions of conflict. During the preparations for the Gulf War of 1990-91, he was warmly received in the desert by officers who had been his students at Sandhurst, few of them being aware of his new role. He was appointed OBE in 1991 for his coverage of the first defeat of Saddam Hussein.
Selected to deliver the BBC Reith Lectures in 1998, he noted that mankind had acquired the power to cope with those other grim horsemen of the Apocalypse, famine and pestilence: it was war that had been the scourge of the 20th century. He challenged the Clausewitz dictum — or the popular simplified translation — that “war is the continuation of politics by other means”. “No military thinker,” he said, “has explained how nuclear warfare might be a continuation of politics.”
Concluding, he tried to be optimistic. “If war is to be driven to and beyond the horizon of civilisation, it will be because the United Nations retains both the will to confront unlawful force with lawful force and because the governments that lend it lawful force continue to train, pay and equip men of honour to carry out their orders.”
His Sandhurst experience continued to influence — perhaps over-influence — his thinking, in particular on that question of honour. He recalled in his introduction to the book of the Reith Lectures how, at Sandhurst, he came to recognise that “professional officers regarded the discharge of duty as a matter of personal honour. Dishonour was so disgraceful that it was preferable to risk death itself rather than be marked by that taint”.
This was a risky proposition of a generation of soldiers hardened by the contradictions of insurrections in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Northern Ireland, who were yet to meet with greater tests of their concepts of right and wrong in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq.
He drew adverse comment in some quarters when the US launched its “war on terror” in 2001. He was accused of showing less than his customary historical rigour by contrasting the tradition of “western” soldiery, who “fight face to face, in stand-up battle and have curious rules of honour”, and “Oriental” traditions of “ambush, surprise, treachery and deceit”, when history and military teaching tell us that surprise is a principle of war and that deceit and treachery are capable of interpretation as crimes or as a means, depending on whether they are successful and which side one is on.
He returned to authorship to produce his widely acclaimed The American Civil War (2009), addressing an immensely complex political and military subject with his characteristic mastery of detail and strategic grasp, while also recognising that the conflict cast a shadow over US society that lingers still. More than half a million Americans lost their lives in the first “industrial” war, in which the whole nation was harnessed to the interests of one side or the other. It ranks with the best of his war histories.
In parallel with his authorship and journalism Keegan remained active on the lecture circuit. He delivered the Lees Knowles Lecture at Cambridge in 1986, the Eisenhower Memorial Lecture at Kansas State University the same year, the Brown Memorial Lecture (Brown University) in 1989 and the Frum Memorial Lecture at Toronto in 1994. He was a Visiting Fellow of Princeton University in 1984 and Delmas Visiting Professor of History at Vassar College 1997-98.
John Desmond Patrick Keegan was born in 1934, the son of an inspector of schools. He claimed that his interest in military matters began as a child growing up during the Second World War. In the countryside around his Somerset home he watched, fascinated, the build-up of the great army preparing to invade Europe on D-Day as jeeps careered round the lanes and aircraft crowded the skies.
He read history at Balliol College, Oxford, with military history as his special subject. On coming down he found work for two years at the US Embassy writing political reports. Then the ideal job came up at Sandhurst.
He received many academic honours, including honorary doctorates from the University of New Brunswick, Queen’s University Belfast and Bath. He was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the US Society for Military History in 1996, appointed a Knight of Malta in 1999 and served as a Commissioner of the Commonwealth War Graves commission from 2001.
He married Susanne Everett in 1960. She survives him with two sons and two daughters.
Sir John Keegan, OBE, military historian and Defence Editor of The Daily Telegraph, was born on May 15, 1934. He died after a long illness on August 2, 2012, aged 78