Fields Of Battle By John Keegan Essay

, Research Paper

Fields of Battle:

The Wars for North America

John Keegan, the author of Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America (334 pgs), is a very distinguished military historian. Keegan attended Oxford University, in England, his place of birth. He was Delmas Distinguished Professor of History at Vassar in fall 1997. He was a Fellow of Princeton University in 1984 and Lecturer in Military History at Cambridge, 1986-87. From 1960-1986 he was Senior Lecturer in Military History at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst. Since 1986 he has been Defense Editor of The Daily Telegraph. He was awarded the OBE in the Gulf War honors list, 1991. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Doctor of Laws of the University of New Brunswick. He is a Visitor of Hugh Sexey’s Hospital, Bruton, and is a Trustee of the National Heritage Memorial and Heritage Lottery Funds. He was the BBC Reith Lecturer for 1998, and has lectured at countless other places around the world. John Keegan is also the author of many other military-history books like The Face of Battle, The Second World War, Who’s Who in Military History, and A History of Warfare, to name a few. Despite being English, Keegan professes his love for America, but interestingly, not for Americans. Keegan says that he has visited America more than fifty times, whether for business or pleasure, but never even hints at having the desire to make the good ole’ U.S.A. his place of residence. Nonetheless, he certainly has a great knowledge of North America and its history of warfare.

Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America is sort of a semi-autobiography of John Keegan’s life. At the beginning, end, and countless parts throughout the book, Keegan makes references to trips to America, his childhood conceptions of America, places he has lectured, famous people he met (Bill Clinton included), and old battlefields he has visited. The rest of the book contains very detailed accounts of the major battles fought on North American soil. This begins with the settling of North America by the British and French and their battle for dominance. Next, Keegan covers The Revolutionary War (or The War of Independence, as it is called in England). Then we are informed about the Civil War, wars against the native Indians, and finally about the invention of the airplane and its importance and effect on warfare in more recent years.

Fields of Battle was written to be a history book with the added focus on geography’s role in America’s warfare. Keegan points out that American warfare was different from European warfare, because those who fought battles on American soil were unfamiliar with the landscape on which they were waging war, while Europe was settled thousands of years before North America was. He says, “It is not accidental that Champlain, the founder of French Canada, was a skilled mapmaker or that George Washington, the victor of the War of American Independence, was by profession a surveyor who had recorded the topography of wide areas of the back country over which he was later to campaign” (09). That is certainly an excellent point to make. They fought European wars on the North American landscape. Undoubtedly, this was a large factor in our victory over England in the Revolutionary War. The Americans had a far better understanding of the land, while maps were largely unavailable to England.

Keegan made another very good point at the beginning of Fields of Battle. He said that the inscription on The Statue of Liberty welcoming in the tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, coupled with the tracings of the star-shaped bastions of Fort Wood (used in defense against the British Royal Navy) is a paradox. Here America is beckoning people to come and start a new life within her borders, whereas she spent the last two hundred years of her existence, kicking people out. The British kicked out the French, the “Americans” kicked out the British, and the Americans (for the purpose of following form, I would like to say “kicked out”) rid themselves of trouble with Indians. Keegan guesses that this is the theme of his book, but never touches upon it again.

It is a little harder than expected to simply classify Fields of Battle as a military-history book about the wars fought on American soil. First of all, and it was mentioned earlier, this book is sort of autobiographical of John Keegan’s life and encounters with America. The entire first chapter is devoted to Keegan’s explaining his perspective and experiences of our country and our neighbor to the north. Also, Fields of Battle contains something that most other history books do not: a little bit of drama and suspense. These two are present throughout the book, but they are especially evident in the parts about Custer and his “Last Stand.” In addition, after Keegan told of the many mistakes on the part of McClellan, in overestimating the size of the Confederate’s forces, one feels a bit happy to see him relieved of his duty. In the piece about the invention of the airplane, a good deal of pages solely describe the life and times if the brothers Wright. Of what importance this serves, it is hard to find. The main substance of Fields of Battle is Keegan’s analyses of major battles, not of wars. Keegan did not describe the how the Civil War started, and he only briefly described how i