A war whose casus belli was never found, whose 400,000-man army simply faded away, and whose government vanished without surrendering a single general: Keegan wrote this within a year of Baghdad’s fall and calls it a mysterious war. His answer is that Iraq was an artificial state whose ruler had waged war on Iraq itself…

Why did two populations more alike than different fight one of history’s most ferocious wars — 237 named battles across a theatre larger than Napoleon’s Europe, murderous yet strangely indecisive? Keegan opens by inverting his most famous verdict: the First World War was cruel and unnecessary; this war was cruel, but it was not unnecessary.…

Keegan opens at the war memorial cross in his own West Country village, where one man in four never came back, and asks how a prosperous, interdependent Europe talked itself into a tragic and unnecessary war. His answer indicts no donkeys: the generals commanded armies of millions without eyes, ears, or voices — the power…

How did fifty million deaths become possible? Keegan opens by conceding that no single volume can contain the largest event in human history — then builds one anyway: six theaters, five portraits of the men who held the initiative (Hitler, Tojo, Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt), and six dissected battles, from the Few over Britain to the…