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John Keegan Military History Collection

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John Keegan Military History Collection


John Keegan is not only the foremost military historian of the modern day, but his concise and brilliant analysis seems destined to be studied in centuries to come as surely as Sun Tzu and Clauzwitz are now. For those glancing at this introduction with mild curiosity, let me put it this way – a new Keegan book is to military history buffs what a new J.K. Rowling book is the general public. This author is THE author. Anyone who has read Catton, Stokesbury, or Tuchman will appreciate this collection.

Surprisingly, out of a considerable bibliography, only a very few of his books have made it onto the torrent scene. What I have done here is gather every Keegan audiobook I could find, cleaned up the file names and fixed the tags, and released them as one group. I highly recommend that any new Keegan reader start with HISTORY OF WARFARE, his seminal work. No matter your position on political matters (pro or anti military, leftist or rightist), it reads like a novel and ties together the threads of conflict that have led to the modern day. He points out fact and detail that will leave you a little embarrassed that you hadn’t noticed them yourself.

From Wikipedia:

Keegan's books include a traditional battle-by-battle coverage of conflict, experience of the individual, historical causes of military events, technological change in warfare, military strategy, and challenges of leadership. He writes mainly for the educated non-specialist reader. Those who wish to sample his straightforward histories of war should read his histories of the Second World War and, more recently, of the First World War.

His work examines warfare throughout history, including human prehistory and the classical era; however the majority of his work concentrates on the 14th Century onwards to modern conflict of the 20th and 21st Centuries.

In A History of Warfare, Keegan outlines the development and limitations of warfare from prehistory to the modern era. It looks at various topics, including the use of horses, logistics, and "fire". One key concept put forward is that war is inherently cultural. In the introduction, he rigorously denounces the idiom "war is a continuation of policy by other means", rejecting on its face "Clausewitzian" ideas.

He has also contributed to work on historiography in modern conflict. With Richard Holmes he wrote the BBC documentary Soldiers, a history of men in battle.

Frank C. Mahncke wrote that Keegan is seen as being "among the most prominent and widely read military historians of the late twentieth century". In a book-cover blurb extracted from a more complex article, Michael Howard wrote, "at once the most readable and the most original of living historians".

It should be noted that his book, Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America, which gives rather concise accounts of many of the wars fought on the soil of North America, nevertheless contains something highly engaging: opening and closing essays that provide almost Tocquevillean insights into his own personal relationship to America.
Torrent Contents

1. John Keegan - History of Warfare (unabridged, 32 kbps ISBN 0-670-82359-7)
In his sweeping new study, Keegan examines the origins and nature of warfare, the ethos of the primitive and modern warrior and the development of weapons and defenses from the battle of Megiddo (1469 B.C.) into the nuclear age. Keegan offers a refreshingly original and challenging perspective. He characterizes warriors as the protectors of civilization rather than as its enemy and maintains that warfare is "entirely a masculine activity." Though warfare has become an ingrained practice over the course of 4000 years, he argues, its manifestation in the primitive world was circumscribed by ritual and ceremony that often embodied restraint, diplomacy and negotiation. Peacekeepers, he suggests, would benefit from studying primitive warmaking--especially now, "a time when the war of all against all already confronts us." A masterwork.

2. John Keegan – The Face of Battle, (128 kbps, ISBN 0-670-30432-8) is a 1976 non-fiction book on military history by the English military historian John Keegan, published by Viking Press. It deals with the structure of warfare in three time periods—medieval Europe, the Napoleonic Era, and World War I—by analyzing three battles: Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. All three of these battles involved British soldiers and occurred in approximately the same geographical area. The work was groundbreaking in that it does not examine the battles from only the generals' perspectives nor simply accumulate quotes from ordinary soldiers. Instead, it focuses on the practical mechanics of battle and critically examines popular myths about warfare. For instance, Keegan disputes the effectiveness of cavalry charges in even the Middle Ages. At Agincourt, the lightly armored archers dug stakes into the ground to impede horses, while heavy infantry who stood their ground had little to fear from cavalry. Focusing on the mechanics of battle, Keegan discusses troop spacing, the effectiveness of weapons and formations, and other measures of tactical importance. He also examines on the experience of the individual soldier of the time. This is particularly evident in the 1988 illustrated edition, whose frontispiece is a photograph of a weeping "Vietnamese soldier holding the body of his dead child".

3. John Keegan – Intelligence in War, (64 kbps ISBN 0-375-40053-2) According to Keegan (The First World War), there is a good reason why "military intelligence" is so often described as an oxymoron: inflicting and enduring destruction often has no room for reflection, just retaliation. But retaliation tends toward attrition, and attrition is expensive; thought, for Keegan, offers a means of reducing war's price, taking commanders and armies inside enemy decision-action loops, helping identify enemy weakness, warning of enemy intentions or disclosing enemy strategy. Keegan offers a series of case studies in the operational significance of intelligence, ranging from Admiral Nelson's successful pursuit of the French fleet in 1805, through Stonewall Jackson's possession of detailed local knowledge in his 1862 Shenandoah Valley campaign, to the employment of electronic intelligence in the naval operations of WWI and its extension and refinement during WWII. For that conflict, Keegan expands his analysis, discussing intelligence aspects of the German invasion of Crete, the U.S. victory at Midway and the defeat of the U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. To balance an account heavily focused on technology, he incorporates a chapter on the importance of human intelligence in providing information on the Nazi V-weapons. Keegan concludes with a discussion of post-1945 military intelligence that stresses the difference between a Cold War in which the central targets of intelligence gathering were susceptible to concrete, scientific methods, and more recent targets that, lacking form and organization, require penetration through understanding. That paradigm shift in turn is part of Keegan's general argument that intelligence data does not guarantee success. This book shows that the British need not have lost on Crete; that the American victory at Midway was not predetermined. At a time when armed forces tout the "information revolution," Keegan writes in the belief that the outcomes of war are ultimately the result of fighting.

4. John Keegan - Six Armies In Normandy (64 kbps, ISBN 0-14-005293-3), Noted British military historian John Keegan takes an innovative approach to the invasion of Normandy, correctly observing that, while colossal, it was merely the beginning of a series of furious battles in northern France. He accordingly tackles not only the actions of June 6, 1944, but the subsequent Normandy campaigns by five Allied nations and their German opponent. Focusing on specific actions, such as the U.S. 101st Airborne night drop into France and the British infantry battles surrounding the city of Caen, Keegan provides an exciting chronological account of the action in Normandy that offers stirring accounts of considerable depth about specific tactical decisions. Beyond the vivid battle stories, Six Armies in Normandy will engage those who study battles and tactics intellectually and also provides valuable insight into the diplomatic activity between Allied nations necessary for victory in Europe

5. John Keegan – The First World War (128 kbps, ISBN 0-375-40052-4), In a riveting narrative that puts diaries, letters and action reports to good use, British military historian Keegan (The Face of Battle, etc.) delivers a stunningly vivid history of the Great War. He is equally at ease and equally generous and sympathetic probing the hearts and minds of lowly soldiers in the trenches or examining the thoughts and motivations of leaders (such as Joffre, Haig and Hindenburg) who directed the maelstrom. In the end, Keegan leaves us with a brilliant, panoramic portrait of an epic struggle that was at once noble and futile, world-shaking and pathetic. The war was unnecessary, Keegan writes, because the train of events that led to it could have been derailed at any time, "had prudence or common goodwill found a voice." And it was tragic, consigning 10 million to their graves, destroying "the benevolent and optimistic culture" of Europe and sowing the seeds of WWII. While Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War (Forecasts, Mar. 8) offers a revisionist, economic interpretation of the causes of WWI, Keegan stands impressively mute before the unanswerable question he poses: "Why did a prosperous continent, at the height of its success as a source and agent of global wealth and power and at one of the peaks of its intellectual and cultural achievement, choose to risk all it had won for itself and all it offered to the world in the lottery of a vicious and local internecine conflict?"


JOHN KEEGAN BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Barbarossa: Invasion of Russia, 1941 (New York, 1971) ISBN 0-345-02111-8
• Opening Moves - August 1941 (New York: Ballantine, 1971) ISBN 0-345-09798-X
• The Face of Battle (London, 1976) ISBN 0-670-30432-8
• Six Armies in Normandy (1982) ISBN 0-14-005293-3
• Zones Of Conflict: An Atlas Of Future Warswith Andrew Wheatcroft(New York, 1986) ISBN 0-671-60115-6
• The Mask of Command (London, 1987) ISBN 0-7126-6526-9
• The Price of Admiralty (1988) ISBN 0-09-173771-0
• Who Was Who In World War II (1978) ISBN 0-85368-182-1
• The Illustrated Face of Battle (New York and London: Viking, 1988) ISBN 0-670-82703-7
• The Second World War (Viking Press, 1990) ISBN 0-670-82359-7
• A History of Warfare (London, 1993) ISBN 0-679-73082-6
• Warpaths (Pimlico, 1996) ISBN 1-8441-3750-3
• The Battle for History: Refighting World War Two (Vintage), 1996) ISBN 0-679-76743-6
• Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America (1997) ISBN 0-679-74664-1
• War and Our World: The Reith Lectures 1998 (London: Pimlico, 1999) ISBN 0-375-70520-1
• The Book of War (ed.) (Viking Press, 1999) ISBN 0-670-88804-4
• The First World War (New York: Knopf, 1999) ISBN 0-375-40052-4
• Winston Churchill (2002) ISBN 0-670-03079-1
• Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda (2003) ISBN 0-375-40053-2
• The Iraq War (2004) ISBN 0-09-180018-8
• Atlas of World War II edited by John Keegan (London: Collins, 2006) ISBN 0-00-721465-0 (an update of the 1989 Times Atlas)

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