by Karl Shaw
The press loved him. A New York Times reporter wrote, “Custer, young as he is, displayed judgement worthy of a Napoleon.” In fact, his army record was highly erratic. Although he inspired fierce loyalty from some, he was indifferent to the welfare or safety of his men and his cavalry unit had the highest casualty rate of any in the Army.
By the end of the Civil War, Custer was a national hero, but then his star began to wane. His first post-war command ended when his Michigan Cavalry was disbanded after a mutiny, partly caused by his heavy-handed discipline. In July 1867, fifteen of his men deserted during a forced march. Custer ordered a search party “to shoot the supposed deserters down dead and to bring none in alive”. Soon afterwards, he deserted his own post so he could spend a day with his sick wife. Custer was arrested, court-martialled and suspended for a year without pay, but his old Civil War mentor General Sheridan came to his rescue and called him back to active duty.
Custer spent the next few years fighting Native Americans in various “campaigns”. More often than not, this amounted to nothing more than the slaughter of peaceful villages. In 1868, Custer destroyed a Cheyenne village led by Chief Black Kettle. Custer later claimed that his men killed 103 warriors. It turned out that most of the victims were old men, women and children; only eleven were fighting men including Black Kettle himself. The Cheyenne were not even at war with the Americans at this time. From that day on, the Native Americans knew Custer as “squaw-killer”.
In spite of his flawed military record, by the mid-1870s Custer was still one of the most recognized celebrities of his day. He had also cultivated a new image to catch the public’s imagination, wearing his reddish-blond, curly hair long and dressing in buckskin frontier clothes. Several magazine articles and a memoir – My Life on the Plains: or, Personal Experiences with Indians – helped acquire him an undeserved reputation as the Army’s most skilled Indian fighter, although his sole plains “victory” was the massacre of 1868. But the court-martial had damaged his military career and he was desperate for a victory to re-establish his reputation and restore his flagging finances.
Custer took to the field for the last time in the spring of 1876. After the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of the Dakotas, white prospectors had flooded on to Sioux and Cheyenne land and the Army was ordered to force the natives on to reservations to make way for miners. It was presented as a defence of innocent American pioneers from Indian attack but, in truth, it was an unprovoked military invasion. After a series of bloody skirmishes in the Black Hills, the US military decided that a “severe and persistent chastisement” was required to bring the natives to submission.
In Custer’s mind, the Sioux campaign might just be his big chance to make his mark on history. Which, of course, it did . . . although not perhaps in the way he had imagined.
In June, Custer and 750 men were sent out west across the Great Plains as an advance party from their base camp at Fort Lincoln to locate the villages of the Sioux and Cheyenne responsible for the Black Hills insurrections. He was under strict orders not to attack until he was joined by thousands of cavalry reinforcements. But Custer was looking for a fight. Three days later, after marching seventy-two miles, he found it on the Little Bighorn.
On 25 June, Custer stumbled on a huge camp comprising around 7,000 Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho bands near the Little Bighorn River. It was one of the largest groups of Native Americans ever assembled on the North American continent. Ignoring orders to wait for reinforcements and facing overwhelming superiority, Custer decided to attack.
Despite his experience of fighting Indians, he broke every rule of engagement. Warned by his Indian scouts not to light a fire because the smoke would give his position away, Custer did the opposite. He also completely underestimated his enemy. The Plains Indians were among the finest cavalrymen the world had ever seen, mostly armed with bows but many with repeat-action rifles far superior to the single-action carbines carried by the men of the 7th Cavalry.
Custer’s men were far from the tough, craggy frontiersmen of the popular imagination. Nearly half were immigrants from England, Ireland, Germany and Italy. They were nervous, ill trained and, after a three-day march, desperately tired. Custer could have made it a lot easier on himself by taking with him a couple of Gatling machine-guns, which were capable of firing off 200 rounds a minute, but he didn’t see the point; he said the Gatlings were too heavy and would slow him down. He is also said to have thought that the use of such a devastating weapon would cause him to lose face with the Indians. Given Custer’s vanity, this isn’t difficult to believe. Although he knew he was outnumbered, he didn’t seem too concerned; his contempt for the Indians was well documented. He thought that the Sioux and Cheyenne would try to run away rather than fight, thus depriving him of a glorious victory that would revive his career.
His next act of stupidity, at a point where he was already hopelessly outnumbered by about ten to one, was to split his troops into three columns. Two of the three columns, led by Major Reno and Major Benteen, were instructed to ride left and right to encircle the Indian warriors. Custer would lead the third column of about 210 men, if you include packhorse drivers and native scouts, on a full frontal assault.
Dividing his force after the Indians had already spotted him was a suicidal tactical error. He never even made it to the Indian camp. Suddenly finding himself attacked from all sides by a murderous, howling mob of 4,000 well-armed warriors, his men retreated in disarray, stumbling and dying on the grassy slope above the Little Bighorn River.
Nobody really knows what happened in the final minutes. The Sioux and their allies offered very conflicting accounts and none of the white participants lived to tell the tale.21 Judging by the remarkably small number of spent shells, there was little in the way of organized resistance and the legendary “last stand” was probably more of a panic-stricken rout. Even the most inexperienced among them had heard of the terrible tortures the Indians inflicted upon their prisoners and they all knew the old soldiers’ saying: “Save the last bullet for yourself.” Many of the troopers were said to have simply given up, throwing their guns away and pleading for mercy. One of the scouts was found propped up with his coffee pot and cup by his side; both were filled with his blood. His penis had been hacked off and stuffed into his mouth and his testicles staked to the ground. Some were shot by rifles, others by arrows. Several had been battered to death with stone clubs. When the body of Custer’s brother Tom was found two days later, his head had been pounded to the thickness of a man’s hand.
Custer himself was found stripped naked with bullet holes in his left temple and chest. His eardrums had been burst with a spiked weapon called an awl and an arrow had been lodged in his genitals. Every one of the 225 men who rode with Custer was scalped at Little Big Horn save Custer himself. Perhaps fearing the worst, he had already had his famous golden locks shorn off in favour of a close crew-cut.
The outcome might have been different had Custer received support from his subordinates Reno and Benteen. Instead, both became bogged down in defensive actions. Reno, who had been seen swigging a bottle of whisky, clearly lost his nerve. On witnessing the massacre, both men decided to make a run for it.
News of Custer’s defeat, the worst military disaster in American history, reached Washington DC on 3 July, just as people were preparing to celebrate the Centennial of the Declaration of Independence. At first the press, Army and Government were united in their condemnation of Custer for blundering into a massacre but, just like the British after the charge of the Light Brigade, America was soon doing its very best to put a gloss on it. Custer was rewarded with a hero’s burial at West Point – or at least what was left of him.22 Largely through the tireless efforts of his widow, Elizabeth, who went on speaking tours promoting her husband’s legacy for the rest of her life, Custer, architect of the most astonishingly inept display of leadership in American military history, became a hero to generations of Americans; the myth of the noble US cavalry officer, battl
ing against hopeless odds, holding off the red savages to his dying breath, would endure well into the next century. But not to the Indians, who dubbed Custer simply “a fool who rode to his death”.
Most Embarrassing Intelligence Failure
During the Second World War, the Allies were worried by the possibility that Germany might be able to build a nuclear bomb if they gained access to Norway’s stocks of heavy water (deuterium oxide).
A committee was set up to investigate the possible threat with the code name “Maud”. The name came after a telegram had arrived from the top Danish physicist Niels Bohr, ending with the words: “. . . AND TELL MAUD RAY KENT”. The Allies were convinced that this could only be a coded message, possibly an anagram. Churchill’s top cryptologists were set to work on decoding the message. They came up with “Radium taken . . .” (presumably by the Nazis?) – “U and D may react . . .” – indicating an atomic reaction using uranium and deuteronium – and “Make UR Day NT”.
The mystery was finally unravelled when it turned out that Bohr was sending a message to his governess called Maud Ray who lived in Kent.
“Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.”
Associates of Edwin L. Drake, the first man to drill for oil in the USA, 1859
Most Embarrassing Intelligence Failure: Runner-Up
Since it was created in 1947, the CIA has failed to forecast almost every major political flashpoint of the last sixty-odd years, including the Iranian revolution and the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979; the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall in the 1980s; Indian nuclear testing in the 1990s; the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001; and the Arab Spring of 2011.
One of the CIA’s earliest embarrassing failures took place in the 1950s. The Soviet Noble Prize-winning physicist Pyotr Kapitsa was an expert on low-temperature gases. In 1946, he was arrested and sent to a Gulag. Some time later, he was mysteriously released and transferred to a Soviet research institute. Naturally, the CIA wanted to know why.
Photographs taken by American U-2 spy planes of mysterious aircraft powered by hydrogen liquefaction suggested one very dangerous possibility – perhaps Kapitsa’s talents had been harnessed to work on the power plant to develop a hydrogen-powered space plane.
After sinking some $6 million into trying to make their own version, the Americans realized that such a plane was not feasible. It turned out that Kapitsa had been working on an even bigger project that the CIA had somehow failed to notice – the launch of Sputnik, the world’s first successfully orbited artificial satellite.
Most Useless British General
When Britain sent an Army of 70,000 men to South Africa to fight the Boers in 1899, most people thought the war would be won within a matter of weeks. They had not reckoned on the incompetence of General Redvers Henry “Reverse” Buller.23
Buller was a huge man with a notorious appetite for rich food and fine wines and a speech impediment, acquired when he had received a kick in the mouth from a horse. On military campaigns, he took with him a specially made cast-iron kitchen which his men were expected to drag wherever his duties took him, along with wagons of champagne. It was rumoured that he was an alcoholic. Nevertheless, his appointment as head of the expeditionary force was hailed in the British press as a masterstroke. He had a reputation as a fearless man of action, deservedly, having served with distinction in five campaigns during the Zulu War of 1879, in which he was awarded the Victoria Cross. A contemporary noted, “There is no stronger commander in the British Army than this remote, almost grimly resolute, completely independent, utterly steadfast and always vigorous man.”
Unfortunately, although Buller was a first-rate subordinate, he had never actually held a command in war and was incapable of making good decisions under pressure. His preparation before leaving for South Africa was comically inept. He returned intelligence briefings unopened on the grounds that he knew “as much about South Africa as there is to know”. During training exercises, he wouldn’t allow his men to dig trenches or foxholes in case they damaged the countryside or take cover in case they got their uniforms dirty. Fighting could only take place between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. so as not to interfere with his officers’ social arrangements. Kitchener noted that Buller waged war “like a game of polo, with intervals for afternoon tea”.
As far as tactics were concerned, he assumed that because the Boers were descended from Europeans, they would fight like Europeans. In other words, it was their duty to stand in the open to be shot at with British rifles. Inconveniently, the Boers however did not play by Buller’s rules of war. They dressed in khaki clothes that blended into the landscape. They were also excellent marksmen and were happy to snipe at the British from concealed vantage points. This, Buller complained, was very unsporting behaviour. All the same, it simply hadn’t occurred to him that there was remotest chance that his regular Army could be defeated by a group of scruffy locals.
Within days of his arrival, Buller’s masterplan was in ruins. He was supposed to relieve the besieged towns of Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking. Instead, his forces suffered three disastrous defeats within a week against an enemy who were mostly untrained farmers and farm boys. At the Battle of Colenso, he launched a suicidal frontal assault against well-entrenched Boer troops. At one point, his Army charged straight into a swollen river and dozens of British soldiers were drowned. The rest were dragged out by the Boers and made prisoner.
Buller sent one of his commanders, the inept General William Gatacre, known as “Backacher” to his troops, to capture a strategic railway station at Stormberg Junction. This involved sending a detachment of 2,700 men on a rapid march through the night to launch a surprise attack. It was a physically demanding plan, but Gatacre was a fitness fanatic who assumed that everyone was as fit as he was. The tactical advantage was thrown away because they forgot to take a map with them and they got lost.
When dawn broke, the confused British soldiers were surprised to find themselves at the bottom of a steep cliff. At the top of the cliff, a small unit of crack Boer riflemen was enjoying breakfast. Instead of retreating, Gatacre ordered his men to attack by climbing up the almost sheer rock face, straight into a hail of Boer bullets. Meanwhile, more Boers were arriving, attracted by the noise of the fighting. By the time Gatacre got around to calling for a retreat, twenty-eight British soldiers were dead and sixty-one were wounded. Unfortunately, Gatacre forgot to communicate his order to the 634 men who were still clinging to the cliff. They were simply left behind with no choice but to surrender. Buller telegraphed Gatacre: “Better luck next time.”
Buller, meanwhile, was busy shelling a hill near Magersfontein in the belief that there was a Boer encampment at the top. The Boers were actually at the bottom of the hill enjoying the firework display. Believing that that the bombardment had softened the Boers up, Buller sent General Methuen to take the hill with 3,500 men. The Boers watched as the British troops marched confidently towards them across open ground, then opened fire; 900 British soldiers were massacred, the rest fled.
His second-in-command, General Sir Charles Warren, was somehow even more clueless than Buller. His appointment was described as “an enigma”; his previous job had been head of the Metropolitan Police while Jack the Ripper was busy killing prostitutes. He was also in the habit of bathing in public. During the battle for Hussar Hill in February 1900, Buller found Warren splashing in his bathtub when he was supposed to be directing his troops. It wasn’t some kind of “bravery under fire” gesture; he was at some distance from the fighting that he was supposed to be commanding.
Buller put Warren in charge of the British forces at the critical battle for Spion Kop. For no apparent reason, both men agreed that the hill was of vital strategic importance and had to be taken. Before the battle, Warren spent twenty-six hours personally supervising the transfer of his bathtub and the rest of his personal luggage across the Tugela River, giving the Boers enough time to bolster their troops fr
om 600 to 6,000.
Under the cover of darkness, Warren sent a team of 2,000 assault troops to climb the steep-sided hill as Buller and the rest of his Army – about 20,000 men – stood idly by and watched. Warren delegated an officer with a fractured leg to lead the climb. When his order was queried, he changed his mind and chose a disabled fifty-five-year-old to lead the assault instead.
Warren’s men reached what they took to be the summit, but at first light they realized that they weren’t at the summit at all. They were halfway up on an exposed plateau, roughly the size of a football pitch, surrounded by Boers on three sides. Even worse, they couldn’t dig in because the terrain was rocky and they had packed only twenty shovels between them, and as someone had also forgotten to take sandbags, they had nothing to hide behind either.
The Boers opened fire and the British troops were massacred. With no means of communicating with the men on the hill, Warren could only watch. When Winston Churchill, who was there as a war correspondent, found Buller and told him that his men were being wiped out, the General had him arrested.
Buller was happy later to point an accusing finger at Warren. He wrote home to his wife: “We were fighting all last week, but old Warren is a duffer and lost me a good chance.”
Warren put a different spin on it. Although 650 British soldiers lay dead with a further 554 wounded and 170 captured, he noted that “the Boers had a severe knock at Spion Kop and were ready to run on seeing British bayonets”.
Buller’s mistakes as a general cost him his job and his reputation. He was sacked as military commander in South Africa and placed on half pay. He returned to England disgraced, and was posted to army training at Aldershot.