John Keegan, an Englishman widely considered the eminent military historian of his time and author of over 20 books, including the masterpiece "The Face of Battle," died Thursday at his home, Kilmington, England. He was 78 years.
His death was announced in The Telegraph, where he served as director of military affairs. No cause of death was given, although Coughlin, executive director of the foreign newspaper, said in an email that Mr Keegan had died after a long illness.
Keegan has never served in the army. At 13, he contracted tuberculosis and spent the next nine years received surgical treatment for this, five of them in a hospital, where he used the time to learn Latin and Greek by a priest.
As recognized in the introduction of "The Face of Battle", which "was not a battle, or about one, or a sense of distance, or have seen the consequences."
But he said that he learned in 1984 ", and battlefields are physically repulsive" and "how it feels to be scared" when the Telegraph was sent to Beirut, Lebanon, to write about the Civil War.
The body of Mr. Keegan working distance through the centuries and continents, and, overall, has followed the evolution of war and its destructive technology, while recognizing their constant: the terrors of combat and cargo psychological soldiers immediately.
He had a strong interest in the United States, receiving a grant to visit Princeton, writing meditations on war in North America and briefing on President Bill Clinton in preparation for the 50 anniversary of the invasion of Normandy in 1994.
Keegan was particularly concerned with the cultural roots of the war, asking, "Why do men fight" in his classic 1993 study of "A History of the war," said the military conflict was a ritual in which the cultural modern concept of total war, as in the First World War was an aberration.
His subjects include Henry V of England, Napoleon and Hitler's military machine, but also deal with the war in the nuclear age, which ends in "The Face of Battle" that war is almost unthinkable. "The suspicion grows that the battle has already abolished," he wrote.
In "The war in Iraq," published in 2004, followed by the technological revolution in warfare with the introduction of computer-guided "smart weapons". He also made a political judgment, to conclude - even with the recent war and not yet transformed by sectarian conflict and the increase in U.S. troops - that the invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein was justified.
Probably none of his books was the most admired "The Face of Battle," which was published in 1976. The Cambridge historian JH Plumb called "very creative, original, so" and "the most brilliant." A successful publisher, who launched his career as a popular historian Keegan.
He examined the book in three battles: Agincourt in 1415, Waterloo in 1815 and the Somme in 1916, all relating to the British. His story is dark and compelling tale of what happens in the heat of battle, including the execution of prisoners.
He was not above a personal note. In describing the horrors of the Somme, where his father was gasejat seems to grow melancholy, pausing to reflect on how the shadow of war was even 70 years later.
He speaks of "the military historian, who, as has been said by the extinction of this courageous effort, or what, falls a terrible state of lethargy, the keys of his typewriter, touch leadenly guidelines of the card printing, as waves of a battalion of Kitchener does not make their goal, more and more slowly toward the bottom of the page. "
John Desmond Patrick Keegan was born May 15, 1934, in London. During the German bombing in 1940, was evacuated with other children in Taunton, England, far from the targets of the bombers of the Luftwaffe. "I had a good war," he wrote, "a boy in London, closed the first cry of the sirens."
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