Of course, for England as a whole, the six years of conflict were a gruelling test of both the national will and of sheer endurance and it bears remembering that, of the major belligerents of World War II, only England and Germany were in the fight from the very beginning to the bitter end.ДЄ certain amount of normalcy gradually returned to life in Britain and the Keegan household in the spring of 1945, once the Second World War had finally run it's violent and tragic course. To the young Keegan, the later years of the war, particularly the time of the enormous build-up of men and materiel prior to the Normandy Invasion, was one of extraordinary excitement and, given the amazing scale of the events overtaking him and his countrymen, it can reasonably be surmised that his interest in military affairs probably took root during this earlyВ period in his life. Like most of the able-bodied men of his generation, Keegan's father had already served in uniform during the First World War however, both because of his age and because of his background in education, when war broke out with Germany for the second time in the space of twenty years, he was given a civilian task, that of helping to take care of some of the thousands of British children who had been evacuated from England's major population centers to save them from the ravages of the German 'Blitz'. And needless-to-say those effects were not trivial. John Keegan was only five years old when he first saw, through a child's eyes, the very real effects, both great and small, of war on his family and on his fellow countrymen. Given the modest circumstances ofВ Keegan's upbringing, it is probably no surprise that his early childhood was uneventful but that all changed for him, as it did for almost everyone else in Europe, in 1939. Born John Desmond Patrick Keegan, on, in Clapham, England, the future historian and best-selling writer was the son of a schools inspector and aВ housewife. The arc of Keegan's life, considering his rather unremarkable background, was both interesting and unexpectedly rich. He was 78 years old at the time of his death. The widely-respected student of warfare and the psychology of the battlefield had, after years of poor health and the amputation of one of his legs, ultimately been forced to rely on a wheelchair in order to get around. Sir John Keegan, OBE, internationally famous as an historian, author, and lecturer on military affairs, died on 2 August 2012 at his home in Kilmington, England.

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