Warpaths: Travels of a Military Historian in North America

Dean F. Oliver is a postdoctoral fellow at the Norman Paterson School of
International Affairs.

This offering by one of the world’s leading military historians is a
great disappointment. Its underlying theme—that strategic geography
shaped the course of military affairs on the North American continent,
principally through river, road, and rail systems and the fortifications
erected to protect them—is fair enough; the details, however, are
spotty and the analysis slim.

The book begins by situating the continent’s geography and military
history against Keegan’s personal recollections and experiences,
especially his many professional visits to North American military
colleges, universities, and battlefields. The writing is breezy and
agreeable;the anecdotes are lively and well placed. But his failure in
the opening pages to differentiate, or even attempt to differentiate,
between Canadians and Americans is disturbing, and his quick slippage
from Canadian to North American in subsequent chapters is just plain
annoying.

Individual chapters successfully cover the forts of New France,
Yorktown, Confederate Virginia (especially the peninsula east of
Richmond), and the American Great Plains, and present a folksy,
opinionated survey of selected operations; but they are far from
comprehensive (the War of 1812 is excluded, for example, as are the last
two and a half years of the U.S. Civil War), and interpretative
curiosities abound. Why was it “unimaginable” in the late 18th
century that Americans would one day kill Americans in another war, when
thousands had done precisely that during the Revolution? By what
reckoning does John C. Frémont rank as a “leading Civil War
general”? The rhetorical flourish and terse, thought-provoking
one-liners are among Keegan’s trademarks—to be expected and indeed
encouraged in a work clearly designed for the popular market—but loose
language, dubious logic, and a proliferation of minor errors are not.
Did John Cabot really land at L’Anse aux Meadows? The shallow,
paternalistic commentary on American race relations and his avowedly
anti-Native views will likewise unnerve many readers.