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The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers
On American bases across Iraq and Afghanistan, the rubbish went into a hole — plastics, batteries, medical waste, human remains — and was set alight with jet fuel. Balad burned a hundred and forty-seven tons a day for seven years. Soldiers slept a few hundred yards downwind and were told the smoke was harmless. Joseph…
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A Farewell to Arms
An American driving ambulances for the Italian army in 1917 is blown up eating cheese in a dugout, falls in love with the English nurse who patches him back together, and walks out of the war during the greatest rout in Italian history. What follows is not an escape — it is a second front,…
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A Higher Call
20 December 1943, over the German coast: a Messerschmitt closes on a B-17 so badly shot up it should not be flying, sees the dead tail gunner at his silent guns — and does not fire. Instead the German escorts the American bomber past his own flak batteries, points him toward neutral Sweden, salutes, and…
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The American Civil War
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.…
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The First World War
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…
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The Iraq War
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…
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The Second World War
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…
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1776
In October 1775 George III stands before Parliament and declares America in rebellion; outside Boston, the army meant to answer him has nine rounds of powder per man. McCullough follows the Continental Army through one calamitous year — the siege won by a bookseller’s cannon and a single night’s engineering, the New York campaign lost…
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The Art of War
War is a calculation performed before it is a fight: the victorious strategist seeks battle only after the victory has been won. In thirteen terse chapters, a fifth-century-B.C. Chinese commander counts the silver, reads dust clouds and startled birds, prizes the spy above the soldier, and rules that supreme excellence is breaking the enemy’s resistance…
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Noonday
September 1940: the first mass raid drones over London, and three middle-aged painters — Slade art students before the first war, its casualties ever after — go back into the fire. Elinor Brooke and Kit Neville drive ambulances; Paul Tarrant patrols Bloomsbury as a warden on sentry-craft learned in the trenches. And on a Russell…
An Official Ferrand Repository
Every book gives back