The battle came at a point when the government of President Ulysses Grant had decided no longer to tolerate the alleged threat posed by Indian tribes to white settlers and prospectors in the distant Black Hills of Dakota. These tribes, which so far had eluded the policy of placing them on permanent reservations, included the many branches of the Lakota people (the Teton Sioux) and of the Cheyenne. They were loosely grouped under the leadership of the Hunkpapa Lakota leader, Sitting Bull. The government considered any group refusing to enter the reservations to be in a state of war with the United States. Sitting Bull responded by declaring that he, too, was at war. When the 7th US Cavalry, led by Lieutenant Colonel Custer (though formally commanded by Brigadier General Alfred Terry), entered the Black Hills territory in June 1876, conflict was almost certainly unavoidable.
Thousands of his fellow warriors and their families rallied to Sitting Bull. A few weeks before Custer’s arrival, Sitting Bull had undertaken the ritual mutilation of his arms with an awl to appease the Great Spirit (Wakan Tanka). He had then performed the Sun Dance for two days and was visited by a vision of white soldiers ‘falling like grasshoppers’. The augury seemed good, and although Sitting Bull preferred to avoid open conflict by regularly moving his growing tepee camp, his people interpreted the vision as evidence that the American soldiers could be beaten. By the time the Lakota and Cheyenne had set up a camp of hundreds of tents on the banks of the Little Big Horn tributary, crowded with more than 8,000 of their people and 20,000 horses, the young warriors were eager for battle. Some had already attacked another army column under General George Crook near the Rosebud River, but had been driven off. Had Custer known of this encounter, it might have warned him of the size of Sitting Bull’s forces, and of their willingness to engage in open battle rather than withdraw, as was often the case. His regiment arrived in the valley of the Little Big Horn on the morning of 25 June hoping to find Sitting Bull’s camp.
The topography, of bluffs and hills shielded by forest, made it difficult to see anything ahead, so Custer took the unusual step of dividing his small regiment of around 550 troopers. Major Marcus Reno was sent to scout the south bank of the river, while Custer proceeded along the north face of the valley. Captain Frederick Benteen was detailed to go north to search out the Indian camp and was soon lost to view. The division of his force sealed Custer’s fate. Reno led his men to a grassy slope from which some of Sitting Bull’s camp (though not its vast extent) was visible. He ordered his troop to charge, only to find, as his tired cavalrymen stirred up a heavy dust, that there were hundreds of warriors forming in front of him. The troop halted, dismounted and tried to establish a firing line, but the Lakota, angered by the unprovoked attack, swept on, with perhaps as many as 800–900 warriors against Reno’s 160 troopers and scouts. The US cavalry were armed with the powerful Springfield carbine, but this was a single-shot firearm. Many of Sitting Bull’s men (and women) carried the Winchester repeater, which was fired with little accuracy, but which could overwhelm an enemy unit. Reno ordered a ramshackle retreat to a small wood. While the frenzy of the Lakota was temporarily appeased as they killed the wounded, then stripped and mutilated the bodies, Reno’s survivors attempted an escape from the wood. More were caught and killed on the way but the few survivors met up with Benteen’s troops returning with Custer’s pack train.
Custer made his way with the remaining troopers, some 215 men, along a ridge beside the Little Big Horn. He decided to divide his force once again, leaving one group on a small hill to await Benteen’s expected arrival, and leading the rest of his troop towards the river to find a ford across it. If Custer had a plan at all, it is most likely that he hoped to seize women and children in the camp and use them as hostages. He still had little idea of the size of the enemy he was facing. This was largely because the ground he had chosen was split with small, bush-covered gullies and ravines. The Lakota and Cheyenne were adept at concealment in their familiar landscape, and filed silently and almost invisibly into the network of gullies. As many as 2,000 remained hidden from the cavalry as they slowly snaked their way towards the group Custer had stationed on top of a hill. The deception was devastating for the morale of the frightened men waiting on the hillside. Suddenly the thousands of concealed warriors, led by Yellow Nose and Lame White Man, leapt out, firing rifles and shooting arrows in a deadly, smoke-screened hail. What followed was short, sharp and bloody. ‘The firing was quick, quick,’ one Cheyenne witness later recalled; ‘Pop – pop – pop, very fast.’ The Lakota warrior, Crazy Horse, found a way through a narrow defile behind the troopers and attacked them from the rear. Around twenty soldiers managed to escape to join Custer further along the small escarpment, now known as Battle Ridge. Those still alive were then rushed by the oncoming warriors and killed to a man.
This photograph of the Hunkpapa Lakota (Teton Sioux) chief Sitting Bull was taken in 1885, nine years after the battle at the Little Big Horn. By this time he had been forced to live on a reservation, a fate he had resisted in the 1870s.
How Custer reacted to the massacre can never be known. His remaining men gathered on what is now Last Stand Hill. More Lakota and Cheyenne crept forward under the cover of the ravines until, as before, they rose like an army of dragon’s teeth from the ground. Some forty troopers tried to make a break for freedom down towards the river but they were overwhelmed and annihilated. Others tried to hide in a large ravine, where they were battered to death or shot. Custer stayed at the hill and took a bullet just below the heart. The evidence of a second wound through his temple suggests that his brother Tom may have given him the coup de grâce. Then Tom, too, joined the dead. Not one soldier survived. Custer’s naked body had awls jammed into his ears, to make him hear better, according to the Lakota account; an arrow was used to pierce his penis. How many of Sitting Bull’s men died is not known with any precision. The following night and day his warriors tried to annihilate the 400 troopers still commanded by Benteen and Reno, but most survived behind a makeshift barricade on top of a ridge above the river. On 26 July, Sitting Bull struck his camp and moved on.
An 1889 lithograph depicts Custer’s last stand at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in June 1876. Though a romanticized view of the conflict, the narrow defiles from which the concealed warriors moved to attack the US cavalrymen can be clearly seen in the background.
The defeat of Custer shocked American opinion, not only because of the loss of a legendary ‘Indian-fighter’, but because it was the centenary year of American independence, when defeat by indigenous peoples was no longer thought possible. The army pursued the Lakota and Cheyenne to force them into reservations. Sitting Bull escaped to Canada but returned and surrendered in 1881. He was shot while resisting arrest in November 1890. The victory at Little Big Horn had a symbolic significance for both sides. Custer’s Last Stand was treated as an iconic act of American heroism. Sitting Bull’s victory came to be seen as a final monument to the struggle of American Indians protecting their vanishing birthright.
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No. 65 BATTLE OF ALAM HALFA
30 August – 4 September 1942
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The five-day battle for the desert ridge at Alam Halfa has always been overshadowed by the greater victory secured at El Alamein two months later, yet it was, as one German field marshal later recalled, ‘the turning point in the desert war’. British Commonwealth and Axis forces had battered each other back and forth across North Africa since 1940, but in 1942 the tide turned suddenly in favour of the combined German–Italian force commanded by Erwin Rommel, whose armies were now poised on the Egyptian frontier. One more defeat for the Allies and Egypt, the Suez Canal, even the seizure of the oil of the Middle East might be within Rommel’s grasp. Hurried efforts were made by the British to use deception to exaggerate their strength in Egypt, but the real deceit was the defensive strength of the British Commonwealth position holding the ridge. Rommel expected another walkover but fell into a well-prepared trap.
By Augus
t 1942, the British were making every effort to prevent the Axis enemy from capitalizing on the defeat of British Commonwealth forces in June, when Rommel had seized Tobruk in Libya and had raced to the Egyptian frontier. A deception operation codenamed ‘Sentinel’ was set up to introduce dummy gun positions into the Allied front line but time was against it. Another operation involved moving vehicles and dummy installations to simulate two whole divisions, one in defence of Cairo and another in front of the port of Alexandria. False information was leaked to the enemy to support the idea that there were 30,000 additional troops in reserve. What Rommel did not know was that the British could read his encrypted Enigma messages – Ultra intelligence – and this deception proved crucial because it allowed the new commander of the British 8th Army, General Bernard Montgomery, to eavesdrop regularly on Axis plans.
Montgomery knew that he had to prevent any further disaster and was cautious in his approach. While preparing a major counter-offensive, he had to be able to absorb any stroke by the enemy. When Ultra revealed Rommel’s intention to strike by the end of August, before American assistance to the British became too strong, it also revealed that Rommel was going to undertake his attack desperately short of fuel. An intensified and successful effort was made to sink or bomb all the Axis vessels trying to bring oil to North Africa, and the fuel shortage limited what Rommel could do in his renewed offensive. For his part, Rommel prepared a predictable operation, launching spoiling attacks against the main Allied line while he concentrated most of his armour on a southern axis for a surprise attack that would allow his forces to get behind the British lines and destroy them from the rear. Speed was of the essence, as it had always been in Blitzkrieg warfare. Though he did not know it, the tank balance slightly favoured him. There were 234 German and 281 Italian tanks to 478 British, which were mostly older and less well-armed models. Only in the air was he outnumbered, a situation made worse by the poor supply of aviation fuel and problems of maintaining aircraft for combat in the desert.
Knowing his enemy’s plans in advance certainly made Montgomery’s task easier. He strengthened the deep belt of mines on his southern front and dug in his tanks and anti-tank guns along the Alam Halfa Ridge, a shallow hill that dominated the whole line. Rather than be lured onto the desert where German tanks and the feared 88-millimetre anti-tank gun would destroy Montgomery’s weaker vehicles, he opted for a plan to lure Rommel onto his guns, a case, as he famously said, of ‘dog eat rabbit’. This was not what Rommel expected and the deception, made necessary by experience of the desert war, proved decisive. On the night of 30–31 August, Axis armour rolled forward towards Montgomery’s southern flank. Rommel realized at once that the minefields were a much more complex barrier than had been thought. Suddenly flares burst in the air above his immobilized tanks and vehicles and tons of bombs were dropped accurately by the aircraft of the Desert Air Force. Co-operation between the Allied army and air force was critical to Montgomery’s success. A relentless barrage from the air was kept up throughout the following three days while the German air force, suffering from fuel shortages and with its bases subjected to regular bombing, lost control of the skies on the first day.
When Rommel’s army finally emerged from among the mines, the Germans were forced to wait for the Italian armour, still stuck in the minefield, to catch up. Further air attacks killed a number of senior German commanders, leaving the force decapitated at a critical moment. Rommel hesitated, but the lack of surprise and the loss of fuel, eaten up in the delays during the night, meant that his tanks could not press on east to surround the British Commonwealth line, since many would have been forced to come to a halt – sitting ducks for Allied artillery. At lunchtime Rommel changed tactic. He directed his panzer divisions to attack the Alam Halfa Ridge, hoping to lure out British armour so it could be destroyed. Instead his armour and vehicles came under withering tank, artillery and anti-tank fire and a ceaseless pounding from the air. When a German breakthrough seemed possible, Montgomery moved in the Royal Scots Greys from the reserve, and with the 1st Rifle Brigade they halted and turned back the German assault.
Rommel was nonplussed by British tactics but aware that he had little room left for manoeuvre. On 1 September, the 15th Panzer Division moved forward to assault the ridge again, but with the same result. Trapped between Montgomery’s strengthening forces to the north and east, and with the impassable Qatarra Depression to his south, he was compelled to order a withdrawal. The sensible decision by Montgomery to hold a firm defensive line rather than run risks was confirmed when he released the New Zealand Division to try to drive the Germans further back on 3 September, only for the offensive to result in a high proportion of the casualties suffered during the battle – 1,140 out of a total of 1,750. Axis losses were not as great as might have been expected from the aerial pounding – 2,910 casualties and tank losses estimated at between 52 and 67 tanks – but hundreds of other vehicles were lost and the Axis forces were subjected to a demoralizing level of bombardment that left many dazed and disoriented and Rommel himself close to physical collapse. It was the turning point of the desert war, and no-one was more surprised than Rommel. An enemy he had constantly underrated, led by a commander whose caution the Germans misinterpreted, was not only not surprised by his attack, but had surprises in store for him. When it came to the more famous Battle of El Alamein two months later, Montgomery’s use of deception to mask his intentions sprang one more, decisive, surprise.
This famous shot of Bernard Law Montgomery, commander of the British 8th Army, shows him observing the action from the turret of a tank. At the Battle of Alam Halfa he succeeded in deceiving the astute General Rommel about his battle deployment.
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No. 66 THE NORMANDY INVASION
6 June 1944
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Up to the very hour of the invasion of the Normandy coast on the morning of 6 June 1944, the Western Allies had succeeded in concealing from the Germans the exact destination of the vast amphibious operation – known as ‘Overlord’ – that had been preparing in southern Britain for months beforehand. Normandy was certainly on the Germans’ list of guesses, but their failure to anticipate exactly where Allied forces would land meant that the German armies were divided between all the probable options and this fatally weakened their ability to react quickly enough to drive the invaders back into the sea. One of the greatest deception operations in history, codenamed ‘Bodyguard’, allowed the Allies to achieve almost complete surprise and the first firm foothold in Adolf Hitler’s ‘Fortress Europe’.
Planning for the invasion had begun in April 1943, when the United States and Britain (supported by the British Commonwealth and Empire) finally reached a very provisional agreement for an operation to be mounted sometime in the spring of 1944 against the northern French coast. The British lacked confidence in the invasion; the Americans were determined to carry it through, but understood its many serious dangers. A way of reducing the risks was to mislead the enemy and weaken his initial response. However, to keep secret the destination of 4,000 ships, 2 million men and 12,000 aircraft was an unprecedented challenge. It seemed at the time almost impossible that the plan to invade Normandy (the date was not yet fixed) could be kept secret for six months. Practical measures could be taken: no-go zones were established around the southern coasts of Britain; travel restrictions were imposed, preventing anyone not on official business from leaving Britain in the last weeks before the invasion; mail was severely censored, and, in the weeks just before the invasion, mail to destinations abroad was suspended altogether. These precautions were designed to reduce the risk of information leaking out – an issue of secrecy rather than deception.
The Allies soon realized that a daring plan of misinformation was needed to convince the German leaders that they had correctly guessed the main destination of the invasion. In December 1943, ‘Bodyguard’ was launched, codenamed after Churchill’s wry dictum that in war truth had to be concealed ‘by a bodyguard of lies’
. The plan was divided into two separate operations. ‘Fortitude North’ was designed to persuade the German High Command that a diversionary attack on Norway was planned using forces stationed in Scotland. This was to compel the German army to keep or even enlarge its forces there. ‘Fortitude South’ had to make it appear that the major invasion force was stationed in southeast England, ready to cross to the Pas de Calais and threaten western Germany. ‘Fortitude North’ had limited success, not only because Hitler had always worried about a Norwegian invasion and kept a larger garrison there than commitments on other fronts justified, but also because the German radio intercept system in Norway was tuned in to the approaching Soviet enemy and paid little attention to the false radio traffic signalled from Scotland. Much more rested on the success of ‘Fortitude South’.
The operation in the south involved a complex web of deceit. In the first place, a vast phantom force was set up in the southern and eastern counties of England under the bogus title of First United States Army Group (FUSAG). Command was given to the most famous and flamboyant of American commanders, the pistol-toting General George S Patton. This was given as public knowledge, to persuade the Germans that FUSAG must really exist. The falsehood was sustained by huge parks of dummy tanks made from rubber (built by prop-makers at the Shepperton film studios), landing craft of wood and fabric, and numerous air bases with dummy buildings and fake aircraft, and all illuminated sufficiently for the benefit of German night reconnaissance, but not so much as to make the deception evident. On a line west of the south-coast town of Portsmouth, where the real invasion forces were stationed, everything was dark and darkened – tents were covered, towels changed from white to khaki, smokeless stoves installed. By day, the Germans’ aerial reconnaissance was hazardous, but their aircraft were allowed to photograph the FUSAG area in order to provide evidence of this as the main invasion force. Double agents in Britain – German spies who had been caught and turned, some for years – fed small drops of information to confirm the existence of FUSAG. One agent in particular, an elderly Dutchman known as ‘Albert van Loop’, originally recruited by the German secret service, then turned by the FBI, fed the Germans a diet of false military unit numbers. This was plausible because the American army numbered regular units from one to twenty-five and reserve units from seventy-six onwards, leaving plenty of numbers free in between. By January 1944, German military intelligence had identified fifty-five divisions in Britain when there were only thirty-seven, and by May had identified seventy-nine when there were only forty-seven.
A History of War in 100 Battles Page 29