Summary of John Keegan's The Face of Battle

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I have never been in a battle, and I am becoming more and more convinced that I have little idea of what a battle can be like. Very few Europeans of my generation have learned at first hand that knowledge which was common among their fathers and grandfathers.
#2 The first group of people I excluded from my generalization was made up of those who were not old enough to have had combat experience of the Second World War. The second group was made up of soldiers who had not seen active service. While the object of their war was to avoid a decision at any given time or place, the Mau Mau in Kenya fought a war of raiding and subversion because they implicitly understood their inability to risk anything else.
#3 I have spent many years teaching officer cadets at Sandhurst, and I have always been aware of the inherent falsity of my position. I have never passed judgment on the behavior of soldiers under circumstances I have not experienced myself.
#4 The central question for the officer cadet is How would I behave in a battle. The discussion with your soldiers, whether it’s group therapy or not, will always include these emotions and sensations.

Sujets

• Military
• Strategy

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 06 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669380818
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on John Keegan's The Face of Battle
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

I have never been in a battle, and I am becoming more and more convinced that I have little idea of what a battle can be like. Very few Europeans of my generation have learned at first hand that knowledge which was common among their fathers and grandfathers.

#2

The first group of people I excluded from my generalization was made up of those who were not old enough to have had combat experience of the Second World War. The second group was made up of soldiers who had not seen active service. While the object of their war was to avoid a decision at any given time or place, the Mau Mau in Kenya fought a war of raiding and subversion because they implicitly understood their inability to risk anything else.

#3

I have spent many years teaching officer cadets at Sandhurst, and I have always been aware of the inherent falsity of my position. I have never passed judgment on the behavior of soldiers under circumstances I have not experienced myself.

#4

The central question for the officer cadet is How would I behave in a battle. The discussion with your soldiers, whether it’s group therapy or not, will always include these emotions and sensations.

#5

The atmosphere and surroundings of Sandhurst are not conducive to a realistic treatment of war. The students there are taught from the beginning to adopt the British officer’s custom of resuming their civilian identity as soon as they go off duty.

#6

The aim of officer-training is to reduce the conduct of war to a set of rules and a system of procedures, and to make orderly and rational what is essentially chaotic and instinctive. This is done by teaching the students how to describe events and situations in terms of a universally comprehensible vocabulary, and how to arrange what they have to say in a highly formalized sequence.

#7

Officer-training makes use of simulation techniques to a greater extent than any other profession. By teaching the young officer to organize his intake of sensations, to reduce the events of combat to a few and easily recognizable elements, and to categorize them under manageable headings, we are helping him to avert the onset of fear.

#8

The history of war can be used to prepare the young officer for the unknown. But it must be noted that the typical survey-course text of Military History from Hannibal to Hitler teaches that all battles fall into one of seven or eight types: battles of encounter, battles of attrition, battles of envelopment, battles of breakthrough, and so on.

#9

The student-officer, and it is he we are discussing, is simultaneously undergoing two processes of education. The first, highly vocational, aims to close his mind to unorthodox or difficult ideas and exclude from his field of vision everything that is irrelevant to his professional function.

#10

The student-officer undergoes a process of education that asks him to adopt different viewpoints when studying war. While not all regular officers find it difficult to think and talk about war from an unprofessional point of view, many do.

#11

The man-of-violence who is also the man of self-knowledge, self-control, compassion, and Weltanschauung is a common theme in Romantic literature. He exists in real life as well, and as often in the army as elsewhere.

#12

There is a barrier that stands in the way of a intellectual transition from the superficial and easy to the difficult and profound in the study of war: the military mind’s two-dimensional view of combat, which it is able to set aside when dealing with liberal-arts students.

#13

Military history is the study of generals and generalship, and it can yield remarkable results. However, it can also be sycophancy or hero-worship, and it often distorts perspective.

#14

Naval history is also very economic in nature. It is the study of weapon systems, big-gun battleship ships of the First World War and aircraft carriers of the Second. And it is very precise, from the professional point of view.

#15

The study of armies in peacetime is not, however, as beneficial for historians as the study of battle. The reason is that war is destructive of all institutional studies, and it compromises the purity of doctrines. It also damages the integrity of structures, upsets the balance of relationships, and disrupts the network of communication.

#16

The historian’s job is to keep emotions in check, especially when dealing with a subject as sensitive as battle. However, some historians have been able to write an exhaustive account of the First World War without displaying any emotion at all.

#17

The historian must allow the combatants to speak for themselves, and this is not just a permissible but an essential ingredient of battle narrative and battle analysis. However, the historian must be careful to use contemporary letters and diaries in the right way.

#18

Anecdote should not be despised, but it is only one of the stones to the historian’s hand. Other sources, reports, accounts, statistics, map-tracings, pictures, and photographs should be coaxed to speak.

#19

The historian must learn to make up his mind about the facts of battle in the light of what all the participants felt about their predicament. He must understand the limits of leadership and obedience, and the far shores of courage.

#20

The historian’s duty is to understand the past, and to make up his own mind is the essential precondition to that end. But many military historians avoid making up their minds about anything, since they have already decided that their only responsibility is to entertain the reader.

#21

The rhetoric of battle history is demonstrated in an extreme form in a passage which, though I have dismissed it as myth history, is so famous and striking an example of the battle piece that I cannot resist reproducing it.

#22

The Battle of Waterloo was an extraordinary event, but it is difficult to believe that the British soldiers, who were trained soldiers, showed no nervous enthusiasm or disorder while they were fighting.

#23

The evidence against the battle piece is being stacked. The British are all attacking and all with equal intensity, and no individual turns tail and runs. The French are all resisting, though some are super-energetically doing so.

#24

The British Army 1642-1970, by Brigadier Peter Young, D. S. O. , M. C. , describes the charge of the British Heavy Brigade of cavalry against the Russians at Balaclava, October 25th, 1854. This successful action just preceded the disastrous charge of the Light Brigade.

#25

The second passage by David Chandler is from his exhaustive study of The Campaigns of Napoleon and describes the charge of the French Reserve Cavalry against the Russians at Eylau, February 8th, 1807.

#26

The three pieces differ in their style and the demands they make on the reader’s credulity. Brigadier Young’s is a jolly genre scene, David Chandler’s is Second Empire Salon School, and Michael Howard’s is Neo-Classical and sombre in tone.

#27

The French manœuvre of 1807 was extremely complicated, and it reads like something from a military Kama Sutra. But it was not that difficult in practice. The presence of the Russians raises questions about how the French could have passed from in front of the Russian formations to the other side.

#28

The authors of The March on Paris would probably agree that the events and character of a battle are of minor importance compared to its outcome. They would argue that the outcomes of Balaclava, Eylau, and Gravelotte-St-Privat were of greater importance than the experience of those who took part.

#29

The outcome approach to military history, like the time-honored but outmoded causes and results approach to general history, pre-judges the terms in which the narrative can be cast. The soldier’s view is much more complicated than the commander’s, and it is centered on the issue of personal survival.

#30

The author has read a lot about battle, and has found that the British military’s norms of behavior and code of training are consistent with the statements he has made. The first incident describes an incident in the middle stages of the Third Battle of Ypres, in which an Australian officer came upon a circle of troops surrounding a two-storied pillbox, and fired at a loophole in the upper story from which shots were coming.

#31

The third extract is from the History of the Irish Guards in the Second World War. The battalion was fighting in a mountainous region of Italy in 1943. A company officer was relating his experience: We ran straight into a large body of Germans and, after a few bursts of Bren and Tommy gun fire, about forty ran out with their hands up. Elated by this, we proceeded to winkle them out at a great pace.

#32

The British army has a humane attitude towards the use of violence, and it is responsible for the doctrine of minimum necessary force, which applies strictly to its role as an arm of the civil power in domestic disorder. However, it seeks to instill in its leaders the attitudes it does because experience has taught it that its mechanisms of command and control can only be kept functioning under stress if officers obey the rules of procedure.

#33

The three incidents of German soldiers doing their duty and killing surrendering Allied soldiers are absolutely meaningless from a win/lose perspective. However, they are significant from a significance perspective. They demonstrate the mood of the German soldiers at the time, and the importance of the American army historical service’s study of human behavior in combat.

#34

The American army, and subsequently the British, took the findings of the U