George Armstrong Custer has long been one of the most controversial figures in American military history. Famously last in his class at West Point ( he was worse than John McCain) he was a hero of the "War to Set Men Free." Serving as a young protégé to such luminaries and miscreants as George McClellan and Alfred Pleasonton, Custer was promoted to brigadier general of volunteers at the tender age of twenty three. At East Cavalry Field, Custer led a mounted charge of the 1st Michigan Cavalry, . which he lead from the front losing more than 200 troopers in the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg.Finally coming under the command of Maj. Gen. Philip Sheridan in 1864, Custer was involved in most of the battles in the eastern theatre of the war, destroying Jubal Early's army and accepting the flag of truce at Appomattox. Promoted brevet Major General he amassed a stellar career as a fighting officer.
He was vain and theatrical but that was the style of the time. Although his soldiers mocked his costumes they respected that he lead from the front unlike many other officers of the time. Perhaps he was too stupid to be afraid, but there is no doubt he was a man of courage. The fact is he was a warrior. And warriors kill people. Warriors like Genghis Khan, Saladin, El Cid, Richard the Lionhearted, Charles Martel, Gustas Alpohus, Napleon, Wellington, Andrew Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Robert E. Lee, US Grant, Black Jack Pershing, Douglas MacArthur, and George Patton. Some were more brutal than others. Some were leaders and some were butchers. But they were in the business of killing the enemy. As Patton once said "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." Political attitudes come and go and standards of behavior change over time but the fundamental rules still apply.
The question is do we have military leaders who will do what has to be done today. Will they be willing to kill the enemy. Because the enemy has shown they have no compunction in killing us. Is the military full of Custers or Grants. Where do we stand after eight years of Obama firing the fighting soldiers and putting the politicians in place.
"We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
16 comments:
Great write up. The amazing thing about Custer is he was only 25 when the civil war ended and obtained the rank of Major General and 36 when died.
War was a young man's game back then, even for the Generals.
When Custer rounded that corner
And ran into all those Sioux
They shoulda run.
Instead they had a great victory
And sealed their fate.
And they knew it.
I'm still thinking about that library of 6,000 books. Jefferson would've been proud.
I think they're there. It's the ones who get promoted because they kiss up to people like Senator Ma'am who are the problem.
PS Custer was one of 4 captains (Elon Farnsworth, Judson Kilpatrick, Wesley Merritt) promoted to brigadier general because they showed promise and the Union Cavalry was in sad shape even after 2 years of war.
And nobody reputable seriously buys the idea he wanted to steal all the glory for himself at Little Big Horn.
He didn't get there early, but he had to rush to get there in any kind of time. The plan was for the 7th to be in position at dawn on the 26th. He got there at noon on the 25th, but he still had to find the village, which took 3 hours (the valley of the Little big Horn is apparently a very large place).
Just as he did, one of his patrols bumped into a party of Indians and he thought he'd been spotted (actually, they were going back to the reservation after getting cold feet). Knowing the Indians would scatter if they knew troops were in the area, he felt he had no choice, but to attack.
The irony is, even if all had gone as planned and Custer attacked at dawn, it still might have turned out the way it did - or worse.
The infantry didn't get to the valley until the morning of the 27th.
An old military maxim is : "Il nous faut de l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace!"
But sometimes he who dares, loses. Cf: Custer.
Of the three bigs of the Union Army, Grant was by far the cautious one.
Sheridan and, especially, Sherman were more willing to risk it.
As he commanded cavalry, Sheridan is the one that comes to mind, but Sherman, with his infantry, took a huge gamble marching through Georgia.
To ans your question, Troop, most of the jr line (combat) officers still have the "right" stuff, but they're leaving in droves because of the spineless politicized flag-rank officers and things like women in combat units, open homosexuals and now trannys. It's either toe the PC line or leave. Most of the fighting generals have been purged and replaced with ones obedient to their PC masters. A by now well-established unofficial zampolit has been established to ensure the "right" people are promoted and to weed out anyone who is so foolish as to believe that training to fight and win wars trumps "diversity" training.
("Diversity" is our number one priority"--Superintendent of the Naval Academy. "It would be an even bigger tragedy if this [Ft Hood shooting]detracts from our diversity training"--Chief of Staff of the Army) Woe be it to the serving officer who does not understand these new "priorities"..
A while back I read a book about Wellington's peninsular campaign. There were several battles that he could have won, but he refrained from engagement. He thought the losses would be too great. If you were an enlisted man and wanted to survive the war, he was the general to serve under. On the down side, he was a firm believer in flogging and thought that enlisted men could not be promoted to the officer class.......On the other hand, Napoleon was ruthless in pursuit of gloire. He was heedless of losses in pursuit of victory and flat out abandoned several of his armies. He did, however, give his soldiers lots of medals and ribbons for acts of valor and several of his ablest field marshals started their career as enlisted men......Wellington, of course, had the satisfaction of winning the war, but Napoleon has always been the favorite of historians. Along with Lincoln and Jesus, he is the most written about historical figure of all time. Until recently, the evaluations were mostly favorable. The man of destiny. Not just French writers either. Goethe and Kant. Even English writers like Byron and Carlyle succumbed to hero worship.......So there you have it. Being vainglorious will lose the war, but win the movie contract........When I was young, Custer was treated as a tragic hero. Nowadays, when you see him portrayed on screen, he is mostly shown as a conceited fool.......If he had died during a Civil War battle, his reputation would have remained intact, but sadly he died fighting the Indians. The 7th Cavalry no longer rides to the rescue. They've become our SS shock troops, and it is impossible for Hollywood to portray Indian fighters in a positive light......I don't know if history is treating Custer right. History gets a lot of things wrong.
William said...
When I was young, Custer was treated as a tragic hero. Nowadays, when you see him portrayed on screen, he is mostly shown as a conceited fool.......If he had died during a Civil War battle, his reputation would have remained intact, but sadly he died fighting the Indians. The 7th Cavalry no longer rides to the rescue. They've become our SS shock troops
That started in the 20s, when all the little commies started making their presence felt in academia, presenting themselves as the "voice of the disillusion" of WWI.
The movies still reflected popular opinion, including patriotism, partly because it was good business and partly because the movie moguls (Troop can sink his teeth into this) were all Jews who had escaped Europe and loved everything this country had to offer.
When the blacklist lifted in '65, all the vermin crawled out of the woodwork and the movies trumpeted the party line.
Fortunately for them, Fred Benteen's opinions about Custer gave them a template they could say was accurate. Problem was, Benteen was such a sour ball, he liked nobody and the Army felt the same about him. Custer was one of those people you either loved or hated and the Lefties concentrated on the haters, almost exclusively Benteen.
As I say, nobody who is credible buys Benteen's (and US Grant's) contention that Custer got half his regiment killed because he wanted all the credit and got his men to the valley early to make sure of it.
You can pretty much bet, if the Lefties say it happened a certain way in history, it didn't.
He was brave and reckless and it caught up with him at Little Big Horn.
Patton was brave too, but he wasn't stupid like Custer (except for dealing with the press and media).
Evi L. Bloggerlady said...
He was brave and reckless and it caught up with him at Little Big Horn.
Patton was brave too, but he wasn't stupid like Custer (except for dealing with the press and media).
He wasn't all that reckless. What caught up with him at Little Big Horn was the law of averages.
As for Patton, he was that stupid. Read about the mess he made of trying to take Metz. Or the raid on Hammelburg.
Georgie was lucky the press in the ETO liked him better than the press in the Med.
Neither Patton nor Cuter was stupid.
Combat Generals have to make real time decisions with incomplete information, so its always easy to 2nd guess. Patton's philosophy was to always attack when possible since it saved men in the long run. The downside is you occasionally get men killed with no result. But that's more than balanced by the times you take the enemy by surprise or hit where they ain't.
The Germans feared Patton the most, because he took risks whereas Generals like Bradly never attacked without plenty of preparation and planning.
rcocean said...
Neither Patton nor Custer was stupid.
Combat Generals have to make real time decisions with incomplete information, so its always easy to 2nd guess. Patton's philosophy was to always attack when possible since it saved men in the long run. The downside is you occasionally get men killed with no result. But that's more than balanced by the times you take the enemy by surprise or hit where they ain't.
Most good generals attack, MacArthur certainly did, so did Sheridan, so did Sherman.
Metz was not bad info; Patton was hung up on the Moselle and had convinced himself the Wehrmacht was done for, that he could go ahead and just bull his way through. He ignored the intel and SHAEF.
Not smart.
If you want to depict Custer as dumb you point out that he graduated last in his class.If I'm not mistaken,back in those days the freshman cadet class was around 250 cadets.If you graduate 33rd out of a starting class of 250 you are not dumb.
edutcher, Kilpatrick wasn't one of the three captains promoted directly to brigadier, it was just Custer, Merritt and Farnsworth:
* Farnsworth got himself spectacularly, stupidly dead in a charge at Gettysburg that made anything Custer ever did, including Little Big Horn, look like the work of military genius in comparison.
* Merritt had a stellar career during the war, albeit not one that attracted the sort of attention that followed Kilpatrick or Custer, and he went on to be another Indian fighter, sitting on Reno's court of inquiry over Little Big Horn, and eventually ended his career as the first American military governor of the Philippines.
And Pleasonton gave them all their brevets because he and Hooker had shitcanned a bunch of McClellanite colonels and brigadiers, some of them essentially foreign mercenaries, and they were looking for reliable young West Pointers to get the cavalry under politically reliable control - Farnsworth in particular was "connected".
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