Excellent early work | The Face of Battle

Insightful | The Face of Battle | John Keegan

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	• The Face of Battle John Keegan Peter Smith Pub Inc, 2001 average customer review:based on 69 reviews
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highly recommended

An outstanding military history by a master historian

_The Face of Battle_ closely examines three pivitol battles: Agincourt (1415), Waterloo (1815) and the Somme (1916). In his examination, Keegan outlines the overall strategic objectives and how the battlefields were chosen (typical fare for military history), but also seeks to understand the "intangibles" of combat - how and why soldiers act as they do, and how these actions and decisions influence the outcome of battle. I have a mixed reaction to the book.

The first quarter of the book almost put me off it entirely - in it Keegan discusses military history as a discipline, its purposes and the problems in analyzing and researching it, and provides a some hisoriography. While I understand Keegan's purpose in this, I wish it had been edited out. The discussion of the battles themselves is where Keegan shines.

With each battle, Keegan addresses not only the social context of the military of the times (that, for example, archers were considered beneath mounted warriors, and therefore were not actively engaged by them), but also the role of command and control and relative effectiveness of combat arms (infanry versus cavalry, infantry versus infantry, or artillery versus cavalry for example.) In looking at these battles, I found it interesitng that, with time, combat became increasingly lethal, the distance between combatants increased (along with the size of the battlefield) while the social heirarchy had changed little. (In fact, Keegan's discussion of the officer class in the British Army and the war's effect on officer selection was the best part of the book in my opinion.) Also of interest was the role discipline and command and control of units played in the success or failure of battle.

While Keegan is a first-rate historian, I had to deduct a star for the painful start. Nonetheless, his treatment of the heirarchy within armies and the evolution of tactics and deployment of small units given new technologies is first rate, as was his analysis of the increasing importance of small arms and infantry and its inverse relationship to the importance of a mounted officer class.

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Excellent early work

I found this to be thoroughly researched, well-written, and focused. The book covers the aspects of combat facing the individual and the effects close combat has on the individual in ways few others try. A definitive work on the subject of personal combat experience.

Insightful

Really gives the reader a sense of what it may (the author states that he has never seen combat himself) be like to be in the middle of the carnage.

Well worth reading.

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Annoying Flaws

I will agree with most of the previous reviewers that this book has a lot of merit. However, it has numerous errors & omissions.

Of the 3 battles, I noticed the most problems with the 3rd battle, The Somme. The omissions involve naming generals, such as Haig, without any context as to who they are or for which country they fought. Maybe this is geared for hard-core WWI history buffs. While I know WWII history pretty well, for instance, I know who Eisenhower or Montgomery were, I myself and I think most people, would need a refresher on their WWI counterparts.

Errors; He claims that in the US army "Private" has largely been replaced by "Specialist". Not true. It is the next step up, "corporal" that has been mostly replaced by "Specialist".

Second he off-handedly makes a claim about how only the British army treats marksmanship as a worthy goal. I so beg to differ. After all, while the British army fought the US Revolution & the war of 1812 in nice tight formations that fired in unison so that their inaccurate fire would be like a giant shotgun blast. The Americans, with their slow-to-load but accurate deer rifles picked off the British officers & non-comps. After all, these Americans depended on their marksmenship to put meat on the dinner table.

He also uses some slight-of-hand to make baseless estimates of the ratio of soldiers shot in the legs & arms vs torso. He claims that the ratio is reasonable because of the relative frontal area that each represents.

He makes claims about the American army in Vietnam being "addicted to pot". By any useful definition of addiction, the army, while on the average, using it heavily was not addicted to pot. Beer maybe, coffee yes, pot no.

He also doesn't really address the "post-heroic" armies, where folks in trailers sit many miles away from the battle while they direct remote control vehicles equiped with sensors and missles. Where robots, and not
humans clear houses and land of booby traps and mines.

There is good content on the first two battles, Agincourt and Waterloo and some insight to The Somme, but to what end? I'm not sure.

Very anglocentric. There are a lot of good military history books to read and most people would get more out of reading other books than this one.

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What is it like to be in battle? John Keegan, a senior instructor at Sandhurst, the British Military Academy, speaks for soldiers who were present in the fray.

For examples, Keegan selects Agincourt in 1415, Waterloo in 1815, and the Somme in 1916. What is common about them, what is different? Agincourt was hand-to-hand combat, thrust and cut--a fearful and personal encounter. At Waterloo, 400 years later, the battle was still largely personal. As it swayed back and forth, men on opposite sides came to recognize the same individuals they had fought off in previous charges.

Keegan closes his book with the Somme. For him it stands as the distillation of wars in the industrial age: long-distance killing of faceless men by others who merely activate the instruments of destruction.

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