Kenneth John Macksey MC (1 July 1923 – 30 November 2005) was a British author and historian who specialized in military history and military biography, particularly of the Second World War.
After serving in the Royal Armoured Corps from 1941 as a Driver Mechanic,[1] Macksey was commissioned in 1944.[2] He served during the rest of Second World War in the 79th Armoured Division under the command of Percy Hobart,[3] earning a Military Cross;[4] he later wrote a biography of Hobart. Macksey gained a permanent commission in 1946,[5] was transferred to the Royal Tank Regiment in 1947,[6] reached the rank of major in 1957 and retired from the Army in 1968.[7][8]
Amongst many other books, Macksey wrote a volume of alternate history entitled Invasion, which dealt with a successful invasion of England by Germany in 1940.[9] He also wrote the novel First Clash that describes a NATO–Warsaw Pact clash in the late 1980s and which seems in retrospect to be alternate history, but it was published in 1985 before the purported events of the conflict.[10] First Clash was written under contract to the Canadian Forces and focuses on the Canadian role in such a conflict. Macksey also edited The Hitler Options, the first volume of a series of "alternate decisions" alternate history anthologies from Greenhill Books, in 1995.[11]
In Macksey's Guderian: Panzer General, he debunked the view of historian Sir Basil Liddell-Hart regarding Hart's influence on the development of German tank theory before 1939.