6. Was Custer off his Game?

[Beth]

(6) Now my belief is that GAC was "off his game" in 1876. All the political shenanigans with Grant were no doubt weighing on him and he required a "big win". He, and some of the regiment, arrived at the last minute. The Powder River depot points to an equine logistics shambles. The pack train was equally shambolic. GAC poorly used his scouts/guides/trackers. He did not throw them out far enough on the 24th/25th. He brought his main regiment up too quickly, and forced himself into a premature "blind" attack on the 25th with little meaningful recon intel as to hostile strength, location and battlefield terrain.

[quincannon]

To assume that Custer was off his game, you thus assume that he had a game. I don't think the entire body of evidence would show he did, and in particular that he had a post 1865 game.

If we are going to start with Justin's off his game assumption, we must first examine Custer's norm. From what I see he was in a consistent off the game mode, but part of what we are here for is to listen and learn.

[Beth]

Politically Custer seems to have had a way of making himself appreciated by his superiors but he seems to have been very much an either/or person--you either loved him or disliked him, but he never left people neutral. Sheridan and Sherman seems to have believe Custer was exactly who was needed both for the 1876 Campaign and Washita.

I wonder what type of commander they viewed Custer as?

One of the big questions is why did they think that Custer's ability during the CW would translate into Indian Fighting?

[dave]

Beth
The quick answer to your question "One of the big questions is why did they think that Custer's ability during the CW would translate into Indian Fighting?
"

I simply answer is the US Army had no idea of what the Indians would do or respond. The Army had few officers with any experience with Indians and they were not upper echelon leaders. Sherman and Sheridan had not experience and Custer was one of the soldiers who had the Indians in battle.
GAC's record from the War showed Custer had the inability to make adjustments with his troops leat alone change his tactics fighting the Indians. Custer's fixation that the Indians would do or could not change tactics and he would pounce upon them without warning and just rolled them up like a blanket.
Custer's fantasy world had him being the hero and nothing else was aloud to be discussed especially any martial movement that might occur against his plans and troops.
I wonder if there is a maxim for this type of treatment where actions speak louder than words.
Regards
Dave

[quincannon]

One of the problems I see is that the U s Army had plenty of guys who knew how to fight Indians. We overlook the fact that the Army was fighting Indians at least from the time the 1st Dragoons came into existence, until the ACW. Most of those guys who knew though went off to the ACW and few came back, and those that did were so senior that they were pretty much out of the operational and tactical game. The new generation that went west post 1866 had no foundation with which to work. Some like McKenzie learned and adapted, Others were content to do little or nothing.

It takes a much higher standard of training and adaptation to take on an irregular force. They never heard of Clausewitz. The only way to beat an irregular is to be more irregular than they are. That is a lesson that must be learned over and over by each succeeding generation.

[mac]

"Others were content to do little or nothing"
I think this quote from QC perhaps says a lot about their view of "indian fighting", I wonder if it was seen as somehow "below them" to be fighting irregulars rather than "real" soldiers. Nothing to fear and nothing to learn.
Cheers

[yanmacca]

When you fight an indigenous foe like the American Indians, who know their own turf well and who fights in an unorthodox way, then any attacking military force would be at a disadvantage. Just compare both camps;

Military
1/ move and fight in close proximity and are methodical
2/ they need guides to help them to navigate the terrain
3/ they have to take everything they need along with them
4/ they are very vulnerable to ambush

Indians
1/ fight in no formation and adapt as the battle unfolds
2/ they know the terrain, thus use it to their advantage
3/ warriors could live off the land for short periods
4/ we saw how Custer surprised the village, but in the norm I would expect the Indians to stay one step ahead of the soldiers and if the chance came to ambush the army then they would know where, when and how to do it.

Yan.

[Beth]

One of the things I often feel about Custer is that he had a serious problem adjusting to post ACW life. He is a battle junkie stuck in a peacetime army. He viewed himself as war hero and man of action when in actuality he was stuck in an administrative roll on the edge of civilization.

However Custer elected to stay in the Army when a lot of CW veterans were finding their way as civilians. There seems to be an almost inertia of his character after the war--being stuck as Custer the Boy General and unable to move into Lt. Col GA Custer US Army. Instead he created Custer the Indian fighter of the press and the world believed him.

[mlynn]

Aug 13, 2015 5:26:46 GMT quincannon said:

One of the problems I see is that the U s Army had plenty of guys who knew how to fight Indians. We overlook the fact that the Army was fighting Indians at least from the time the 1st Dragoons came into existence, until the ACW. Most of those guys who knew though went off to the ACW and few came back, and those that did were so senior that they were pretty much out of the operational and tactical game. The new generation that went west post 1866 had no foundation with which to work. Some like McKenzie learned and adapted, Others were content to do little or nothing.

It takes a much higher standard of training and adaptation to take on an irregular force. They never heard of Clausewitz. The only way to beat an irregular is to be more irregular than they are. That is a lesson that must be learned over and over by each succeeding generation.

Would it not take an abstract thinker to fight "irregular force"?  Was Custer an abstract thinkers or did he fail because he wasn't able to adjust.?

[quincannon]

Not really abstract. The principles are exactly the same in fighting the irregular, as fighting confederates, or Turks, or wily Mister Moto.

What must be learned is the adaptation of those principles to the enemy at hand. Take the Comanche that you are presently studying. Comancheria was very similar to any force that in total is weak, but at point of contact can be strong. They were superb horsemen. The raided from a difficult to approach enclave, and retreated to that enclave to rest, regroup, and refit. They received outside support in weapons and other war making material from the Comanchero, the deal with anyone if the price is right businessman of their day, mainly out of Santa Fe and the New Mexico mountains.

So you still use the same principles, the same tactics, but adapt the technique in employing them to finding out and destroying what makes the Comanche tick. You train your horsemen to be just as good as theirs. You penetrate deep into their stronghold areas and stay there, taking away their abilities to recover. You go after and destroy their supply networks. You deny them food and fresh mounts. What you are doing then is stopping their ability to raid with impunity, and slowly drawing the noose tightly around their necks.

Fighting the irregular is a fight of the constant application of pressure with no respite. It is the fight of the patient.

I don't know if we can fairly access Custer as any kind of thinker. He always had someone else thinking for him, and the occasion we most talk about here it is pretty obvious he didn't do much. So if I had to say based only on the available evidence I would say he did not think at all, abstract or otherwise.

[dave]

I know very little about guerrilla fighting but some of the more successful ones were really barbaric in tactics and behavior. William Quantrill, "Bloody Bill" Anderson, James Lane, Mao Tse-tung and Sun Tzu were all successful guerrilla fighters. One that has been mentioned in one of the threads before was T.E. Lawrence. The one common thread I see with these men is that they were all on their own without leadership or physical support of any kind. Am I mistaken in this viewpoint?

Custer had a very bloody experience with guerrilla warfare in the fall of 1864 fighting John Mosby and his force in the Shenandoah Valley. This campaign was ordered by Grant via Sheridan in effect to destroy the "breadbasket" of the Confederacy to hasten the end of the War. Custer was eventually successful but was under close orders so was he a guerrilla fighter?
Regards
Dave

[quincannon]

If you think any guerrilla was on their own without support you are greatly mistaken. A guerrilla cannot exist without the support of the people around him. Chairman Mao (you should read his book Dave) referred to the guerrilla as the fish who swim in the sea of the population. It is from those people that the support comes from.

Lawrence is a little different in the he was supported by an established society pitted against a hostile occupier, the Turks. More nuance than difference

Leadership and physical support: The classic case here in the west, is the French resistance, That movement was largely directed by London, down to specific targeting from time to time. The direction was filtered through SOE and OSS, and the on ground facilitators were Jedburgs. We had similar operations going on all over the world. Yugoslavia is one you rarely hear about. Probably our biggest success of all was with OSS Detachment 101 in Burma who ran a very large force of Kachin Rangers.

I am reading a book right now that outlines how we set up a support network for Uncle Ho. He by the way was a big time fanboy of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and Abraham Lincoln.. Amazing stuff on how these support networks actually are stablished and function. In fact the Ho Chi Minh Trail was actually laid out, by OSS operatives.

I really would not characterize John Mosby as a guerrilla in the classic sense. I am sure a whole lot of folks would disagree. I think his operations were more in line with what The Alamo Scouts did in the Pacific, mostly geared to intelligence gathering. Mosby did some guerrilla work as well, but I think a careful study of his work would support my contention.

Custer may have fought guerrillas but he was not a guerrilla fighter. He was a lot of things including a nebbish (the pitifully ineffectual part of that definition) but he could neither fight a guerrilla or be a guerrilla. He had neither temperament or patience for the task

[dave]

I mentioned support with the concept of being supported by the military as regular units would be rather than by the community willingly or not. I mentioned Mosby because tome he was on the ragged edge of partisan/guerrilla or regular army. Mosby was considered part of the Confederate Army by Lee and Richmond but certainly not by Grant or the Federal Army in the field.

I really know very little about Chairman Ho and have never studied Viet Nam. I find myself too engrossed in previous American wars to spend any time with post WW II activities except a little about Korea. My resources, both financial and mental, are fairly strained now so I can't branch out any farther. I like to study a subject in some detail rather than scanning more subjects thinly.

For my break from studying about American history I am reading the Crowner John Mysteries by Bernard Knight based upon a fictional coroner for Devon County in 1196. Based on real records and individuals of 12th century England in the city of Essex this series is extremely informative and interesting especially if you are a LEO active or retired as most of our laws are based on the Anglo-Saxon/Norman codes established in Medieval the Period. Highly recommend this series as a great summer read.
Regards
Dave

[quincannon]

You are then subdividing "support" into two distinct categories, but the guerrilla depends upon both

All guerrilla forces receive support from an outside agency of some sort. It takes factories to supply weaponry and ammunition, and the other military centric items required by the guerrilla. Therefore there must be a conduit established from a base friendly to the guerrilla and inaccessible to the counter-guerrilla, that is the source of those supplies.

In Burma the base was India, the transporters 10th Air Force, and the facilitator OSS Det. 101

In France it the base was England, the transporters the RAF and USAAF, and the facilitators the Jedburgs.

In Indo China 1944/45 the base was China (primarily Kunming), the transport mostly by ground over old opium smuggling trails fashioned into a network, and the facilitators the OSS.

All of this would be for naught though were it not for the support of the population that the guerrilla operates among.

It was the very same with Mosby. He had so many hideouts in Fairfax and Loudon Counties, and the support of the people he operated among that no one was going to catch him.

Who gives a crap what Grant thought. He did think well enough of him to appoint him as an ambassador during his administration. Read "Ranger Mosby" and "Gray Ghosts and Rebel Raiders", both by Virgil Carrington "Pat" Jones ( who was a very interesting man who I have broken bread with several times), plus Mosby's own book, and you can answer all these support questions concerning him for yourself. Pat Jones also wrote "the" book on the Rough Riders.

You should look into Ellis Peters' Brother Cadfile series.

[dave]

QC
"ppreciate the information regarding guerrilla operations which I will add to my knowledge bank.

I have read the The Shardlake Series by CJ Sansom but will look into The Cadfael Chronicles next, thanks for the information.
Regards
Dave