Opening moves: August 1914

Ballantine's Illustrated History of World War II / the Violent Century: Campaign #19

by John Keegan

Used Book

Genres: History, World War I

Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Sir John Desmond Patrick Keegan, OBE, FRSL was a British military historian, lecturer and journalist. He published many works on the nature of combat between the 14th and 21st centuries concerning land, air, maritime and intelligence warfare as well as the psychology of battle.

Reviews

[Andrew Wardle · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Often-described, but rarely so lucidly as this.
One of the Pan-Ballantine monographs on famous military campaigns, this relates the first month of WW1 with a wealth of detail, informed and intelligent comment, and a plethora of photographs. The author of this volume is John Keegan, who went on to achieve great fame as a popular military historian. As a result, the writing, which in some of these monographs verges on semi-literate, is first-rate.
Military history buffs will find little here that is not recounted in other, later works, but on the other hand the larger later accounts add surprisingly little fact at a much higher word-count. A bonus in this one is that Keegan discusses the strengths and weaknesses of the German General Staff system together with those of its French, Russian and British imitators. And (if I read this elsewhere I'd forgotten it), Schlieffen concluded in his original planning that the German advance would be halted by the problem of Paris, its fortifications and garrison requiring more troops to neutralise it than the Germans would be able to spare even on the most optimistic forecast. As in fact it turned out - the details were different and the campaign was not conducted as he had planned.......but the German juggernaut was indeed stopped at the very gates of Paris. Perhaps his successors should have studied his writings a little more carefully - might have saved a lot of trouble !
Two nit-picks - the simultaneous fighting on the Eastern Front deserves more than the few sentences it is accorded here (especially after the problems of a two-front war are discussed at length in the opening chapter). And the maps, unusually for this series, are too few and too small-scale for the detailed descriptions in the text.

[Mike Glaser · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid overview of the opening campaign on the western front in 1914. The amazing thing about these Ballantine books is the number of noted authors that they convinced to write the books in these series. The downside is that in order to keep the price down in the early 1970’s when these books started to come out ( initially priced at $1), the binding is extremely cheap and as these books have aged, they have not held together well.

[George Kasnic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Limited to the western front, the book covers that in detail, sometimes getting lost in the minutiae of unit identifications and losing the flavor of the campaign. It seems to lose focus as it progresses. For a battle of such rapid movement, more maps would have been helpful. Richly illustrated with photographs and technical drawings. Not Keegan’s best work.