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http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article3497191.ece

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

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