Rating: 
Summary: Confused unedited review of documents - not a history
Review: The author, Keegan, has apparently done a lot of research in original military documents, very little in anything else. He also has not thought much about his materials nor about his manuscript.An example of the result is his section on the horrible and heroic Battle of the Marne, described so movingly by Barbara Tuchman in "The Guns of August". Keegan reduces it to a series of maneuvers and transfers of divisions from place to place. Appallingly Keegan omits any description of the battle - of hundreds of thousands of French soldiers' desperate and bloody struggle to save their country. Keegan naively and uncritically swallows whole the German General Staff's excuses for their army's retreat after its defeat at the Marne. If one reads only Keegan's account, one would have no notion that there had been much fighting and dying, only that the German 1st Army had unaccountably gotten out of position. Keegan would have us believe that the German Army gave up its war plan, and Germany its hope of victory, because of a bad field position. Had Keegan applied any critical thought at all, it would have been obvious from his own earlier chapters, that that could not have been the case. Keegan's lack of critical thought betrays him into such self-contradiction over and over, occasionally on the same page. His absorption in staff documents leaves the reader repeatedly at the end of long passages full of maneuver and counter-maneuver, with little mention of the actual fighting. Incongruously he concludes each such narrative with a summary of the staggering, and from Keegan's description, inexplicable, numbers of the dead and wounded. The reader's confusion is added to Keegan's own by the fewness and poor quality of the maps provided. Keegan's narrative involves dozens of place names not shown on any of his maps. For examples, it would take an erudite reader indeed to know the course of the river Sambre or the location of Ivangorod, without either being named on any of the few maps though mentioned repeatedly. A similar example is Keegan's notion of the origins of trench warfare. First he tells us that the British Army learned trench warfare from the Boers during the Boer War and introduced it to the Western Front. Later we learn that the Russian army had learned the importance of digging trenches during the Russo-Japanese War and had brought it to the Eastern Front. Keegan assures us that the Turks were proficient in digging in to fortify their lines. And he mentions that the Germans surprised the Allies on the Western Front with the strength of the entrenchments to which they had retreated after the Battle of the Marne. Keegan appears to be uncritically retelling uninformed soldier's scuttlebutt, oblivious to its contradictions. It makes one wonder if he even read his own manuscript. I read this because of the glowing back cover one-line raves from the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, and so on. Now I doubt their reviewers actually read this thing any more than Keegan did. The other reason was that Tuchman's "The Guns of August" was so good that I was looking for a decent one-volume history of the rest of the World War. I am still looking.
Rating:
Summary: A disappointment
Review: I'll start with the good aspects of this book: it increased my knowledge of World War I. This is my first full length account of the Great War and I feel I know more about the Battles of Ypres, Verdun, Somme, etc. I also know more about "Mustard Gas" and the European political situation that led to the Great War. I also think that Keegan accomplished his goal of overwhelming me with staggering death counts for inches of land. I found myself asking "why all this death for nothing? Can't the generals see this is insanity. Why don't they see the same old strategy is not working?" While I believe this is Keegan's goal, should it have been? As a professional military historian and author of several other books on military history, wouldn't Keegan serve the world more by trying to explain why, to get inside the generals' minds, to explain strategies? He does very little of any of this. At one point Keegan begins to explain some very intersting aspects of British General Haig's religon and how he used it to cope with the gut-wrenching death count. I confess I also became quite angry towards the end of the book when I realized the extent to which Keegan glossed over American involvement in the war. He describes one American battle, but quikly points out that the AEF only captured 13,000+ Germans because the Germans were caught by surprise. Isn't that one of the goals of attacking armies? Keegan's anti-American bias is also evident in his listing the death tolls of the involved nations...except America's. Finally, I find it very unprofessional that Rommel (of WWII) is mentioned more then American General John Pershing and that Keegan devotes more space describing memorials and gravesites than he does to American soldiers. One reviewer's comment that one should have a prior knowledge of European geography to understand the troop movements of 1914 hold true and Keegan devotes too much time to the movements of individual armies, companies, etc. and not enough to exciting and enlightening primary source accounts. When he does use primary sources, they tend to be the most intersting sections of the book. In all, not recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Data vs. Information
Review: There is a difference between data and information. Data concerns itself with details, where information concerns itself with meaningful patterns or conclusions. This book clearly presents a great deal of data and expects the reader to derive meaningful information from it. If you enjoy military history in the purest sense of the term, I recommend this book highly. If, however, you believe (as I did) that this book is a one-volume history of all aspects of the war: politics, social impact, economic forces, ethnic conflicts, etc., you will be disappointed. Do make sure that you know what sort of book this is before you invest the time to read it.
Rating:
Summary: Long on Details and Short on Strategic Overview.
Review: This book mirrors Keegan's one volume history of World War II. As general histories, both books are steady droning compendiums of endless details. Keegan is understated about strategic situations, and fails to viscerally capture the turning points of the battles and wars, leaving the reader slogging through battles and decisions with too little context. The maps are inadequate. The reader becomes quickly lost in left flank and right flank and one french village after another, losing the mental picture of events in Keegan's droning narrative. I would reccommend Keegan's other excellent books, the Face of Battle and the Mask of Command. There Keegan exercises the narrative story telling of a master historian. This history reads like an encyclopedia article. It is comprehensive but uninformative. One feels that one has read all about the war, but absorbed little.
Rating: 
Summary: A balanced treatment
Review: A balanced treatment of the First World War. Much emphasis is spent on the military aspects of the conflict. While the social and economic issues of the war are mentioned, the bulk of the book is concerned with tactics and command decisions. Keegan gives an excellent treatment of the war on all fronts, giving a virtual blow-by-blow as the conflict dragged on. For those looking for details about how the war was fought from a technical, command perspective, I highly recommend it. If you are looking for a book that will give you some feeling for what the war was like for the average soldier, I would look elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: If Only they had better communications technology...
Review: John Keegan does his usual good job of synthesizing a complex event down to its core issues in 427 pages. There is not a lot new here but he does dredge up some interesting facts, as well as providing sound analysis and pithy comments. Under Keegan's analysis, the vaunted Schlieffen Plan appears as a hopelessly flawed effort based on overly-optimistic assumptions rather than realistic staff work. German military atrocities in Belgium in 1914, with well over 1,000 civilians shot, appear as idiotic acts serving no useful military purpose. French reconnaissance in 1914, both cavalry corps and aviation, were terrible and allowed the French to blunder into German forces in the Ardennes. German units excelled in field fortification from the outset, based on study of the Russo-Japanese War; the German army had a 3:2 superiority in engineers and all troops were trained to dig in whenever they stopped advancing. In the east, superior military intelligence capabilities gave the outnumbered Germans an edge over the Russians, but Keegan notes a Russian superiority in maneuver warfare and strategic deception (both attributes that would contribute to victory in 1943-5). Despite portrayals of "Chateau Generalship", 56 British generals were killed in action in WWI, against only 21 British generals KIA in WWII. Keegan sees the main reason for the trench stalemate as a technological lag in Command & Control technology: "the generals were trapped within the iron fetters of a technology all too adequate for mass destruction of life but quite inadequate to restore to them the flexibilities of control that would have kept destruction of life within bearable limits." Certainly C2 deficiencies (e.g. lack of tactical radios) contributed to inadequate combined arms coordination between infantry and artillery but this is only part of the story, since Germany regained tactical mobility in 1918 by doctrinal not technological improvements. Large masses of infantry attacking across open ground would have failed with or without tactical radios. Keegan misses the importance of the development of a vast assortment of infantry support weapons in the last two years, such as sub-machine-guns, mortars, flame-throwers, grenade-launchers, that provided unsupported infantry with the firepower to breach a prepared defense. Restricted terrain on the Western Front also played a big part in the stalemate. Tactical stalemates would re-occur in later wars when similar conditions prevailed (narrow front, many killing systems) such as at Kursk or the first few days on the Suez in 1973. Blaming trench warfare on a sole technological deficiency is overly simplistic. Nevertheless, a good read.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent introduction to the history of WWI
Review: This book is John Keegan doing what John Keegan does best: presenting eminently readable, thoroghly engaging and thought-provoking military history. As Americans, we tend to get a fairly whitewashed history of WWI from school and Hollywood. My early education amounted to a cursory overview plus Paths of Glory and Gallipoli. Both outstanding and compelling movies, certainly, but not exactly sound historical grounding in a dramatic and crucial historical period. This book fills in the gap as an excellent introductory yet serious history of World War I. For me, prior to this book WWI equalled trench warfare, and the big question was how these people managed to persist in such unchanging futility for over 4 years. That was about it. Of course, there is an element of truth there, but the whole affair is far more complex. The four years of war saw dramatic advances in tactics and equipment such that warfare in 1918 was barely recognizable next to warfare in 1914. Keegan helps to enlighten us as to the course of the war, the horrible problems both leaders and soldiers labored under that give rise to trench warfare, and the many different attempts to break it. Keegan's exploration of the causes and after- effects of the war are typically thoughtful, and I think one of his key strengths is his ability to bring together military, social, and political history. What I like is that he manages to discuss these topics at just the right level: detailed enough to be complete and informative, yet brief enough to be readable. When he talks about mobilization schedules and the failings of the pre-war power structures, he gives you enough information to make his points and point out facinating details, and yet only very rarely get bogged down in minutiae. John Keegan's writing style can be a little difficult at times. His average sentence length is a bit on the high side and he does occasionally abuse commas. The key is just to persist until you've normalized it. When I first started reading his books, I found the style a little disconcerting, but once I had read 50 pages or so I had sublimated it and just enjoyed his fairly lively prose (for history, anyway!). If you like this book, John Keegan's "The Second World War" is a similarly excellent "survey history" of WWII, and the first sections of it compliment this book very nicely.
Rating:
Summary: Almost everything you might be looking for
Review: Since John Keegan came out with this history of the Great War, I have heard nothing but unqualified praise for it from the media. Certainly, it is a well written and immaculately researched volume. If this is your introduction to World War I, this is about as good a place to start as you can find. Keegan's book is comprehensive in its scope, yet contains just enough detail to keep afficionadoes of tactics and statistics happy. My complaints about this book are somewhat more subtle. First, it deals almost entirely with the grand plans and grand characters, but almost completely ignores (or at least only deals with superficially) the common soldier in the trenches. What was it like for the average man fighting at Verdun, Tannenberg or East Africa? Keegan never tells us. My second, and perhaps biggest complaint is that, for all of Keegan's reputation, he doesn't cover any new ground. This book is straight reportage. It's very good reportage. But it doesn't offer any analysis that offers the reader any new insights into the legacy of the 20th century's first global conflict.
Rating: 
Summary: Seminal Work If You Can Catch the Thrust
Review: I've read many of the reviews here and notice the lack of comment on Keegan's most controversial point, i.e. the Western Front was secondary to the Central Powers until Brest-Litovsk; hence, the detailed review of the Russian Front and the scant mention of American activity. The American contribution was largely operational, limited to stopping an already-spent Kaiser Offensive. Keegan makes the crucial point that it was American potential, not actual combat, that made the US role decisive. I also note the lack of comment on Keegan's discovery that Schlieflin had to "fudge" his own notes to make his plan operable. There's an eye-opener vis the Generalstab for you! Keegan doesn't do detailed narratives. If you want maps (I had no problem with Keegan's) and day-to-day movements, there are more specialized works.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent ... but
Review: A brilliantly compiled work with some interesting and original analysis, especially on the inevitability of war once mobilization on the part of the French and Germans had commenced. My only criticism was on a part of the first war that I particularly wanted some insight into: The relevance, or otherwise, of the peripheral campaigns, especially in the Middle East. Most historians dismiss this theater either as an irrelevance or completely overplay its importance. Although Mr. Keegan addressed the Russian front in detail, and touched on the Italian, Balkan and colonial fronts en passe, I was a little disappointed that a little more detail on Allenby's campaigns, and their importance (or otherwise), was not forthcoming: I would like to have seen Mr. Keegan's keen insights on this aspect of the war expanded upon. Nevertheless, I highly recommend this otherwise superb work.
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