THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 14, 1996 TAG: 9607150184
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JAMES E. PERSON JR.
LENGTH: 74 lines
FIELDS OF BATTLE
The Wars for North America
JOHN KEEGAN
Alfred A. Knopf. 348 pp. $30.
All too often military histories of North America are reeled off with no account given of why this particular plot of land was strategically important or that piece of ground was repeatedly fought over. But John Keegan, distinguished historian and author of The Face of Battle (1976) and The Second World War (1990), doesn't follow this unfortunate trend.
Instead Keegan focuses on the battles fought in several key geographical regions in North America since the days of the French and Indian Wars, then tells in interesting detail why they were fought, and why the parcels of real estate involved were considered valuable.
It's a great service to interested readers. Keegan provides information the way a genial, intelligent friend holds an audience spellbound with his impressions of a marvelous place.
The author draws from a generous knowledge of North American history. He demonstrates, for example, why the system of ports, posts and portages from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River to the farthest reaches of the Old Northwest Territory were of vital interest to the French government in the 17th and 18th centuries. He describes the geographical site of Quebec City, nearly impervious to cannon fire from the St. Lawrence or from the opposite shore, as well as the nearby Plains of Abraham, a natural battlefield.
Keegan then demonstrates how Quebec's formidable defenses could only be breached by the masterful strategy of the doomed but victorious James Wolfe, which enabled British assault forces to defeat the city's French defenders.
Keegan continues this pattern throughout the book. He provides an overview of the physical characteristics of the land fought over in the American Revolution before focusing on the Siege of Yorktown. He surveys the battlefields of the South during the Civil War, then turns to George McClellan's disastrous Peninsular Campaign of 1862. He examines the terrain of the American West and the ways of its indigenous people before studying George Armstrong Custer's ill-fated expedition to the Little Bighorn in eastern Montana.
Keegan concludes with a chapter that seems curiously out of place. It concerns the role of B-17 Flying Fortress in the European theater of operations in World War II.
There are some minor problems in this otherwise well-researched book. In the Civil War chapter Keegan writes that Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston ``decided to withdraw'' his forces at the end of the second day's battle at Shiloh. In truth, at the end of the second day Johnston was dead, having bled to death while his staff physicians trated the Northern wounded.
In another slip, Keegan names the ``four rivers that flow off the Appalachian chain'' into Chesapeake Bay as the Susquehanna, the Potomac, the York and the James - forgetting the fifth river, the Rappahannock. And the Battle of Chancellorsville was fought in May, not April, of 1863.
But these minor errors hardly detract from this compelling read. It's chockful of interesting asides buttressed by solid scholarship. Keegan's wry style is reminiscent of Alistair Cooke: He writes thatduring the French and Indian Wars, Wolfe's forces in Canada were sent off ``to complete the depopulation of French Acadia, burning houses and ships and taking prisoners. Others who joined in the work recorded the slaughter of livestock and the scalping of humans. The war in Canada was not nice.'' Indeed not.
There is, Keegan writes, ``an American mystery, the nature of which I only begin to perceive. If I were obliged to define it, I would say it is the ethos - masculine, pervasive, unrelenting - of work as an end in itself. War is a form of work, and America makes war, however reluctantly, however unwillingly, in a particularly workmanlike way. I do not love war; but I love America.''
This is all conveyed convincingly and eloquently in Fields of Battle. MEMO: James E. Person Jr., a native of Virginia who now lives in
Michigan, is the editor of ``The Unbought Grace of Life: Essays in Honor
of Russell Kirk.'' by CNB