CRUCIBLE OF WAR: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766.

CRUCIBLE OF WAR: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 by Fred Anderson Knopf, $40.00

THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR, dimly remembered by Americans as a prelude to their revolution, is usually portrayed by historians as a struggle between the British and French empires for control of North America. Subsequently, it is sometimes seen by 20th-century writers as part of "the first world war," the conflict between the two empires that began in southwestern Pennsylvania and spread over seven years to the Caribbean, West Africa, India, and the Philippines.

The military historian John Keegan captures this conventional view in his introduction to the Modern Library's recent re-issue of Francis Parkman's 1884 account of the French and Indian War, Montcalm and Wolfe. Keegan writes that, "The story of the struggle between Britain and France to control the continent of North America is one of the great dramas of history." It is indeed a great story--how the French, holding most of the continent, from New Orleans to the Great Lakes and out to the Atlantic, managed to lose it to the British and Americans, who only controlled a thin strip along the Atlantic seaboard.

But it isn't as simple as conventional history tells it. Fred Anderson's terrific new history of that war goes a long way toward correcting the traditional view--but not quite far enough. I think it is a far better history than Montcalm and Wolfe, Parkman's supposed classic, which I find nastily anti-Catholic and mindlessly pro-American. As related by Anderson--a University of Colorado historian who, despite his academic perch, writes readable narrative history--the half century that followed 1750 was a four-way brawl for control of North America, not simply a contest between two empires. It began with two of the parties, the French and Indians, allied against the other two, the British and their American cousins.

In Anderson's version, the French lost because their strategic alliance with the Indians broke down. Most histories would end there, with James Wolfe taking Quebec in September 1759. But for Anderson, Wolfe's victory is only the halfway point, told in the 36th of his 74 chapters.

As Anderson tells it, the next phase of the struggle began almost immediately, with the Indians taking on the remaining two parties, the British-American alliance. First came the Cherokee War in the Carolinas and Tennessee, soon followed by "Pontiac's War," a name that understates the great rising of Indian tribes from Michigan to Pennsylvania and New York.

And when that war petered out, the last phase of the struggle began: the battle between the British and the Americans. Unfortunately, Anderson chooses only to tell the initial, less interesting part of this fight--all the acts of Parliament (Sugar, Currency, Quartering, and Stamp) that put us to sleep in high-school history classes. Here, in the last third of his history, he falters somewhat, lost in the swamps of late 18th-century political factions, both in the colonies and London. This last part of the book feels to me like half a story, with the climactic years that led to the American Revolution left untold.

But read this book to revel in its first two-thirds, where Anderson's hand is surer and his material better. He narrates the war well, intelligently weaving together the tactical details (which make his story interesting) with the strategic outlines (which make his story significant).

The French and Indian War began with young George Washington leading an ambush of French troops in May 1754 in the woods of southwestern Pennsylvania. Anderson relates in awe how the British commander in North America, General Edward Braddock, marched into disastrous defeat in the same area a year later with a shocked Washington at his side.

The force that beat Braddock was two-thirds Indian. "The French understood the importance of Indian alliances very well," Anderson writes, while the British didn't--and so the French rolled up victory after victory for the first three years of the war. In an interesting aside, Anderson also reports that French Canadian militiamen generally took their cue from their Indian allies, refusing to attack, for example, if their Indian comrades balked.

Anderson is at his best in describing the strategic consequences of the battle at Fort William Henry on Lake George, New York--the key event in "The Last of the Mohicans"--which was in some respects the turning point of the land war. He describes the battle as a kind of Indian Woodstock, with the word out that Indians who had aided the French in the previous year's battles were swimming in brandy. Indian warriors, he writes, "traveled as far as fifteen hundred miles to join the expedition." But when the terms of British surrender forbade the Indians to plunder the fort, the frustrated Indians made up for it by attacking the hapless British force as it retreated southward, in the episode that became known as "the massacre of Fort William Henry." The incident both galvanized the English colonies behind the war effort, and soured Franco-Indian relations, as the French became less enthusiastic about their allies.

Anderson also has fun taking James Wolfe down a few notches. He portrays the famous victory at Quebec as a selfish suicide attempt gone wrong--that is, a general, at the end of his rope and facing a return to Britain in disgrace, deciding to launch a hopeless attack and then trying to call it off as it began.

Anderson argues persuasively that Parkman and other historians have attached far too much significance to Wolfe's victory in Quebec. The true strategic "Day of Decision" in 1759 that won North America for the British (at least for another 25 years) was, he argues, the naval battle of Quiberon Bay, an event Parkman glides over in four quick sentences in Montcalm and Wolfe. In that encounter off the southern coast of Brittany, the innovative British admiral Sir Edward Hawke destroyed the last effective French squadron on the Atlantic. Thereafter, Anderson observes, the British Navy could destroy French commercial shipping, stifle any attempt at reinforcement, and operate without fear of French attempts to land troops in Britain. For the remaining three years of the war, the British took French forts almost at will on three different continents.

But the subsequent war with the Indians left the British in a poor military position: When mobs rioted in Boston and New York to protest the Stamp Act, Anderson notes, most of the British troops in North America were posted to Canada and the Indian territories west of the Appalachians. Here Anderson begins to lose his deft touch as he tries to enliven the political debates of the late 1760s, but brings the curtain down on his story just as those debates begin to point toward the American Revolution. But the first two-thirds of this history are marvelous, and worthwhile for anyone seeking to understand how the United States came into existence.

THOMAS E. RICKS is a Pulitzer-prize-winning military affairs reporter for The Washington Post.