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Keegan, Sir John Desmond Patrick (1934-2012), military historian and
journalist, was born on 15 May 1934 at 18a Cedars Road, Clapham, London, the
eldest child of Francis Joseph Keegan (1898-1974) and his wife, Eileen Mary,
nee Bridgman (1911-2002). At the time of his birth registration his parents
lived at 11 Copthorne Avenue, Clapham. He was originally named John Desmond;
the name Patrick was acquired later. He had two brothers, Anthony (who died
in early childhood) and Francis, and two sisters, Clare and Mary. His
father, a local educational inspector, had served in the Royal Artillery in
the First World War. On the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 Keegan
and his family were evacuated to Somerset where his father had charge of
some 300 evacuated children. Keegan later provided an engaging account of
his youth, fascination with the preparations for D-day, and his own
nine-year war with orthopaedic tuberculosis in Six Armies in Normandy
(1982). His education at King's College, Taunton, and the Jesuit Wimbledon
College was interrupted at thirteen by a tubercular hip, resulting in
exposure during the freezing winter of 1947 in an open-air ward, treatment
repeated, followed by surgery that left him with a 'frozen' hip and a
permanent limp. Undaunted, he won a scholarship to read history at Balliol
College, Oxford, where he took the military history special subject, and
graduated with a second-class degree in 1957.
In 1958 Keegan accepted a job as a political analyst in the American
embassy, having visited the United States for the first time in 1957, thus
commencing a love affair with that country. In 1960 he was appointed a
senior lecturer in military history (later war studies) at the Royal
Military Academy, Sandhurst. On 10 December the same year he married Susanne
Ingeborg Everett (b. 1937), daughter of Thomas Foster Everett, medical
practitioner, of Horsington, Somerset. This marriage brought Keegan much
happiness and four children: Rose (b. 1961), Thomas (b. 1963), and twins
Matthew and Lucy (b. 1965). In 1968 his sister Mary married the medieval
historian Maurice Keen, another Balliol man, who had accompanied Keegan to
the USA and later played an important part in encouraging his interest in
earlier periods of history.
The academic department at Sandhurst that Keegan joined lay on the cusp of
upheaval, first expansion and then contraction, as the length of the
commissioning course was reduced. He loved Sandhurst's gentlemanly, relaxed
atmosphere. He was striking, neat, handsome, and always beautifully dressed.
Young officers were drawn to this placid, convivial, and interesting man,
both tolerant and witty. He found their company equally congenial, as he
identified with the army and strove to understand their trade even if he
could not join their profession. As his students became more senior so his
influence grew. Success did not change him, and he remained approachable and
a charming host; his house in Slim Road, Camberley, became a mecca for
intellectuals of all kinds. He had always been dogged and tenacious and
sometimes fell into arrogance, especially with those he did not like, and
even snobbery. Fundamentally, he was a much loved and decent man and, above
all, a devout Roman Catholic. Punctuality was not his strong point. Lectures
in the Churchill Hall were often paired. 'JK', as he was known, rarely
arrived at his lectern at the appointed hour, would wave at his colleague
from the control room at the back while scribbling, and would then deliver a
lecture completely divorced from the subject specified by the timetable. He
was usually forgiven much. Colleagues covered for him; the cadets delighted
in this winning eccentricity.
By 1975 Keegan had made only a slight contribution to historical writing,
although his style had been honed by working on the Purnell series of weekly
magazines on the two world wars. His status in the academic and wider world
changed dramatically in the spring of 1976 with the publication of The Face
of Battle. This was the product of an original as well as an imaginative and
inquiring mind. He asked several straightforward questions, but their
answers were complicated: 'what is it like to be in a battle?', and how
should this experience be conveyed? He loathed 'anecdotal history', 'the
inanimate landscape of documents', and what he called rhetorical 'battle
pieces' that had dominated Western historiography since Caesar (Face of
Battle, 18, 33, 34, 36). He went on to propose a sophisticated explanatory
model which placed individual experience at its heart and would break from
stereotypes 'set for so long by custom and unreflective imitation' (ibid.,
78). He took three British battles across time, Agincourt (1415), Waterloo
(1815), and the Somme (1916), and dissected them easily, brilliantly, and
with impressive literary flair. He pushed forward historiographical
boundaries, discussing not only the issues underlying combat motivation but
the treatment of the wounded. He recalled later, 'It was not a difficult
book to write. I knew exactly what I was going to say before I began; it
just came out' (interview, Booknotes, 8 May 1994).
The Face of Battle's impact was immediate and enormous. Michael Howard
pondered whether his own laudatory Sunday Times review of 30 May 1976 'had
not gone over the top' (personal knowledge). But he was right: it became 'a
military classic' and an international bestseller, especially in the
post-Vietnam USA. The book's form and content were well-matched. Keegan
worked harder and longer on it than on any of its successors and thus
avoided the carelessness that sometimes marred them, and they would never
equal its incisiveness. In his later works he competed with himself, with
one incomparable book, by which he would always be remembered, but which
most historians could not write one half as good if they laboured for six
professional lifetimes.
Keegan's sudden rise to eminence provoked envy, for he was inundated with
requests for books, articles, lectures, and interviews. His personal
administration remained chaotic. He was never in the office and the
telephone always rang; colleagues rarely answered it as they usually had to
deal with irate New York editors demanding where their 'very late
manuscript' was. These were rarely mollified when told it was in the post.
The mutual dislike between Keegan and his departmental head, David Chandler,
took on a ferocious edge by 1977-8. Chandler was envious of Keegan's success
and infuriated that Keegan had not (as he claimed) gained permission to
quote from Chandler's The Campaigns of Napoleon (1966), which provided one
of the typical 'battle pieces' that he criticized.
Keegan's international reputation continued to soar. Six Armies in Normandy
(1982) was well reviewed, though some readers found it anti-climactic and
not an effective demonstration of his approach to military history. As Brian
Bond observed in a review in British Book News, it was difficult to fuse
individual experience with broader questions such as strategy, command,
logistics, and operations. Though appalled that American academics spent
their lunchtimes eating 'enormous indigestible sandwiches' (Warpaths, 50),
Keegan spent a pleasant period in 1984 at Princeton. On his return, he found
that Chandler had caught him out and had got his name before a disciplinary
panel. He outwitted Chandler by telephoning Max Hastings on his first day as
editor of the Daily Telegraph, in 1986. Hastings immediately offered him the
job of defence correspondent, which he accepted, and he made his reluctant
farewells to Sandhurst.
Keegan remained defence correspondent, later defence editor, of the Daily
Telegraph until 2009. He was well suited to writing leaders and feature
articles, less so to the grubbier aspects of a reporter's work. He proved a
success as a journalist, although elaborate lines of communication were
required to underpin him because he could not type and all his articles (and
books) were written by fountain pen in his jagged, wavering, but neat
handwriting. He arrived at the Telegraph, Hastings recalled, 'brimming with
erudition and enthusiasms' (Hastings, Editor, 33). Both men felt a special
affinity, what Hastings called a 'bond' based on 'an unfashionable belief
... that the soldier's is an honourable calling' (Hastings, Going to the
Wars, 26). Keegan's provocative turn of mind could create a stir
effortlessly; his duties took up no more than a day a week, leaving plenty
of time for serious writing. For his services to journalism in the Gulf War,
he was made an OBE in 1991.
Keegan's best books of this period were The Mask of Command (1987) and A
History of Warfare (1993). The former covered a neglected topic but was not
quite a brilliant success. His studies of Wellington and Grant were
beautifully executed, but the book was for some critics inadequately focused
and the sinews connecting Alexander the Great and Hitler too strained. A
History of Warfare won the Duff Cooper memorial prize, but though his case
studies offered keen insights, the book was too episodic, for the subject
demanded a sustained synthesis. Moreover, Keegan's attack on Carl von
Clausewitz's theories at a time when they were undergoing an admiring
renaissance in the West was perhaps symptomatic of a desire to take up a
perverse, minority view. His insistence that war is an expression of culture
rather than a continuation of policy proved a distraction and a false
antithesis. But it stirred up interest in the book. Likewise his The First
World War (1998) resolutely refused to accept the 'revisionist' argument
that British generalship on the western front consistently improved after
1915; he remained critical of 'chateau-generalship', as he had been in 1976.
Nor would he join in the depiction of the war poets as unrepresentative of
military opinion; for Keegan, Owen and Sassoon expressed 'a truthfulness' to
which inarticulate soldiers 'could assent' (Face of Battle, 281, 329).
As the author of twenty books Keegan ranked among the most well-known and
distinguished military historians of his generation. In 1994 he was the only
foreign scholar to be included in the six selected to brief President Bill
Clinton at the White House before the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of
D-day. He was knighted in 2000, awarded three honorary doctorates, and
invited to deliver many distinguished lectures, though he could be a halting
and diffident speaker. He also found time to serve on various public bodies,
including the Heritage Lottery Fund from 1994 until 2000. His last book, The
American Civil War (2009), revealed diminished powers, but was full of
insight on the influence of geography and the organizational challenges of
scale posed by a war of mass involvement in a society unprepared for war. By
the time of the book's publication he was suffering the debilitating effects
of ill health (including the amputation of a leg). After a protracted
rearguard action he died of a heart attack at his home, Kilmington Manor,
near Warminster, Wiltshire, on 2 August 2012. He was survived by his wife
and their four children.
Keegan's legacy was uneven but his achievement indisputable. He was an
original thinker who opened up an entirely new historiographical vista and
spawned many imitators. He was the author of arguably one of the two most
important books on military history written in the second half of the
twentieth century, both by British authors, the other being Michael Howard's
The Franco-Prussian War (1961). His beautiful prose and probing intellect
left an indelible influence on the writing of military history.
Brian Holden Reid
Sources B. Bond, 'The labours of Sisyphus: educational reform at RMA
Sandhurst, 1966-1976', RUSI Journal, 122/3 (1977), 38-44 + J. Keegan, Six
armies in Normandy: from D-day to the liberation of Paris, June 6th - August
25th, 1944 (1982) + B. Lamb, interview, Booknotes, television programme,
C-SPAN, 8 May 1994 + C. Bassford, 'John Keegan and the grand tradition of
trashing Clausewitz: a polemic', War in History, 1/3 (Nov 1994), 319-36 + J.
Keegan, Warpaths: travels of a military historian in north America (1995) +
M. Hastings, Going to the wars (2000) + M. Hastings, Editor: an inside story
of newspapers (2002) + R. Spiller, In the school of war (2010) + Daily
Telegraph (3 Aug 2012) + New York Times (3 Aug 2012) + The Times (4 Aug
2012); (9 Aug 2012) + The Independent (7 Aug 2012) + The Guardian (10 Aug
2012) + Burke, Peerage + WW (2012) + personal knowledge (2016) + private
information (2016) + b. cert. + m. cert. + d. cert.
Archives FILM BFI NFTVA, interview footage SOUND B. Lamb, interview,
Booknotes, C-SPAN, broadcast 8 May 1994
Likenesses photographs, 2000-08, Getty Images · photograph, 2008, Rex
Features, London [see illus.] · obituary photographs · photographs, Camera
Press, London
Wealth at death £1,053,054: probate, 8 Aug 2013, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
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