I read tonight that Sir John Keegan has passed away at age 78. His obit from the Telegraph.
I had the opportunity to meet him in 1989 in London where he gave a lecture to a group of American Officers visiting the UK and later Normandy. A spell binding lecturer, he was truly a man who enjoyed what he did. His death, as that of his Sandhurst Colleague leaves a void in the company of Military Historians.
May he rest in peace.
Thanks, Townie. I met Sir John in the early 1980s at West Point when he came through for a visit, some years after he had written “The Face of Battle”, still a classic, and about a year after “Six Armies in Normandy.” When asked why he wrote it, he smiled and said that he did it for the money. And thank goodness he did.
Who was the Sandhurst colleague who also died? David Chandler died in 2004. Christopher Duffy? I have had the pleasure of knowing all three, Chandler more than the others, who had invited me to spend a sabbatical year at Sandhurst leading a seminar on the Vietnam Wars. I couldn’t go in the end for personal reasons and always regretted it.
R-I-P. (Didn’t know he was a Catholic.)
The world has lost a brilliant contributor. My copy of The Mask of Command is a bit dog-eared, coffee stained, and marked up as it is one of the few books I have re-read more than several times.
I met Keegan too at the same time as Scott. Interesting man–not all books of his were as good–his take on the Iraq war, with its fawning coverage of Tommy Franks, is about the least good of the lot. His book on the wars of North America, however, is lively and entertaining.
Didn’t Chandler teach at VMI for a few semesters?
And now to Keegan’s legacy: Milblogs are the inheritors of Keegan’s expose’ into war as the joe experiences it; and aggregated and studies will yield a goldmine of knowledge into modern, western leadership and management of war.