Officers mistakes

[quincannon]

Cold not add a thing to what either of you have said. Excellent summary of what was going on at the time.

I still would shoot Weir. In my book he deserted his post under fire and committed mutiny.

[Deleted]

I need a day to think about this topic.


1. Decisions. Officers make good or bad decisions, as we define the military decision making process for that day (MDMP, cause I am lazy). SO there is a lane to discuss a bad call.


2. Decision makers. What if the decision maker is unfit to make decisions at his grade. This is the normal condition for this era. What are the task conditions and standards to be an officer of a given grade?  I am vastly amused that the Custer fanatics cite Miles as proof that Custer was not unfit to be an officer. Miles was a book seller in Boston, who joined Army as private. He did not have one hour or training in how to be an officer, at 2LT, at 1LT, at CPT, at MAJ, at LTC, at LTC, at COl, at BG, etc.  

Pay attention to grade, I think Custer would have been a very competent company commander after 1865.

3. Training matters. LTC Custer was not simply the worst trainer in the US Army 1865-1917.  His greed and selfishness prevented his subordinates from over coming his incompetence.

He diverted hundreds of soldiers from training for combat to meeting his personal needs. He assigned soldiers to feed his dogs, to manage his pets, to help his taxidermy, to entertain him, etc etc etc. So if subordinate companies have half their personnel committed to commanders health and welfare, that unit suffers. The 7th had a training problem, worst in the US Army. Please look at the leaves GAC took every year. He spent up to 9 months a year on leave. PLease, anyone who has served, make a comment.

[yanmacca]

Montroes raises some good points in his post, the point about the 7th having a lack of training is relevant and I am sure that William has also pointed out on other threads that the 7th were not used to working together.

This rings true at the way they approached the aborted move to Weir Peaks, and this is how the move panned out;

D Company (Weir)

Benteen’s follow up battalion
M Company (French)
H Company (Benteen)
K Company (Godfrey)
G Company (Wallace)

Reno and the packs/wounded
A Company (Moylan)
B Company (McDougal)

Benteen was the senior officer of the group of companies which followed Weir, and he said that this move forward had been conducted without orders by Reno, which sounds strange, but seeing how each company virtually looked after itself on the arrival and later withdrawal from Weir Peaks, just goes to show that they acted as individuals and not as a battalion.

[deadwoodgultch]

Montrose, there was more mess than this, the detached duty officers, quality in a number of cases. Some simply padding.

1st Lt James Bell Co. D leave

1st Lt. Charles Barden Co. L sick

1st Lt. Thomas Craycroft Co. K detached

2nd Lt. Albert Garlington Co. H detached

Capt. Owen Hale Co. K detached

1st Lt. Henry Jackson Co. F drtached

1st.Lt. Andrew Nave Co. I sick

1st Lt. Henry Nowland QM. detached

Col Samuel Sturgis CO. detached

Capt. Michael Sheridan Co. L detached

Major Joseph Tilford Staff detached

Capt. John Tourtellotte Co. G detached

Two officers en-route Scott and Eckerson

A number of NCO's not present

Lastly Felix Vinateri Chief Musician detached maybe practicing his kicking!

  

[dgfred]

Breakout... maybe at first but you can not say Warriors actually taking troopers weapons before killing them is a breakout. Is running for your life a breakout? Was there cover fire? Were they killing many Warriors in their breakout?

I think Reno did fine. Custer was supposed to support him and did not... why would you go 'looking' for him with a decimated command?

[yanmacca]

Well Greg, if you think that looking for Custer was wrong, well they did it and did badly in my view, so whether or not they thought that they owed it to their friends and colleagues to locate them, I don't know but they did so we have to accept that just as much as we accept that Custer went north.

[quincannon]

The name for what they did is a breakout from encirclement.

In a sense a breakout from encirclement is running for your life in the most literal sense. The second option is to die.

Who was there to provide coving fire in this circumstance? No one that I know of. How was that covering fire to be provided if those troops were to breakout? No way that I know of under that specific circumstance. Killing warriors does not matter. Breaking through them matters. Breaking contact matters.

Ian: The difference from running a company to running a battalion is three or four times more level of difficulty. It is made even harder by the fact that these units had not trained together. Then you must factor in that during this period, it was a straight line chain of command from regimental commander to company commander. These companies were small fiefdoms and unless a very strong battalion leader was appointed to control three or four of these fiefdoms there was most likely going to be just what you see withdrawing from Weir Point, or indeed anything else you saw during that afternoon. The Roman Church in my youth promulgated the expression that - The family that prays together stays together. Change a few words to - The battalion that trains together stays together.  Both are solid and should be heeded.

[yanmacca]

You are right Chuck, I don't think they were normally grouped in battalions, not like we saw in the twentieth century any way, as you said you had a regimental HQ and twelve cavalry companies and the only time you would see a battalion would be for a special mission and these companies would be randomly chosen and the battalion would be broken up once the mission was over.

[quincannon]

Task organization is what it is called, and after 70 years of cross attaching units to one another particularly in the Armor/Mechanized Infantry community, we finally discovered the combined arms battalion where tanks and mechanized Infantry operate within the same battalion structure all the time, thus eliminating the not knowing the stranger, and reducing to a nearly nonexistent minimum the friction of not knowing how each part of the team will operate in any given situation. It is well to pay heed to - Train as you would fight, and fight as you were trained.

[Beth]

I know I read that different companies of the 7th were on assignment in different areas around the country and didn't reassemble until just weeks before they left FAL. Does anyone remember/know exactly how much time they had as a whole regiment before they left. I believe that Custer was one of the last to arrive after an extended trip to Washington.

[quincannon]

The amount of time they had or did not have Beth is a factor, but not reason for poor performance overall.

Should training have been conducted prior to departure? Yes it should have and this would have helped with but not overcome the deficiencies that existed in the 7th Cavalry.

Training must take place starting with the individual soldier. As he masters shooting and moving as an individual, he then should be subject to more advanced individual training, then on to training at the unit (company) level, then to training where companies operated together under a battalion structure. Above that at regimental level, it is more leadership training, getting those battalions on the same page, as a cohesive combat formation. It takes about a year to do all this, where the end result is a combat ready unit, and even then it is only combat ready, if the faucet of adequate logistics has been turned on to support both the training and combat phases of operations.

Another factor at LBH is the fact that there were a bunch of low skilled recruits assigned to that regiment in the months leading up to deployment. How does it matter? You can have a forty man unit trained to perfection. Infuse  untrained twenty into their ranks just before deployment, and your combat readiness that was once approaching near 100 percent drops down well below fifty, and you are back to the stage of readiness where you are at the individual level again. Training must be constant, ruthless, and realistic or you are wasting your time and the taxpayers money.

The biggest problem I see is one of organizational construct. The cavalry regiment of 1876 had a span of control factor of twelve. The optimal span of control for a military unit is from three to five, and five is on the very upper reaches for an organization counting on tooters instead of electronic communications. Couple that with putting together ad hoc task organizations of units that did not normally work together and you are just asking to get your ass handed to you.

Our friends in other places have never understood that which goes into fielding a unit goes far beyond saddling up and going off to battle. That is why they are there and we are here.

[dgfred]

Jan 23, 2017 18:28:59 GMT Beth said:

I know I read that different companies of the 7th were on assignment in different areas around the country and didn't reassemble until just weeks before they left FAL. Does anyone remember/know exactly how much time they had as a whole regiment before they left. I believe that Custer was one of the last to arrive after an extended trip to Washington.

Didn't some officers/men miss the trip altogether? I remember just enough to be dangerous. Sorry.

[yanmacca]

Tom has already named those officers Greg about eight posts before this one.

Here is a piece about the 7th cavalry which came from the military power web site, and it mentions about battalions and constabulary duty;

The regiment was constituted on July 28, 1866 in the Regular Army as the 7th Cavalry. It was organized on September 21, 1866 at Fort Riley, Kansas as part of an expansion of the Regular Army following the demobilization of the wartime volunteer and draft forces. From 1866 through 1871, the regiment was posted at Fort Riley and fought in the Indian Wars, notably at the Battle of the Washita in 1868.

Typical of post-Civil War cavalry regiments, the Seventh was organized as a twelve company regiment without formal battalion organization. However, battalions - renamed "squadrons" in 1883 - did exist. Companies A-D were assigned to 1st Battalion; Companies E-H were assigned to 2nd Battalion; and Companies I-M (no company J in Regiment) were assigned to 3rd Battalion. Throughout this period, the cavalryman was armed with Colt Single Action Army .45 caliber revolvers and single shot Springfield carbines, caliber .50-70 until 1870 and caliber .45-70 until 1892. He used one of the many variants of the McClellan saddle. Sabres were issued but not carried on campaign. The Seventh was the only U.S. cavalry regiment of the period to have a band, as the infantry regiments did. This is thought to have been the idea of Major Alfred Gibbs. This band adopted "Garry Owen" as their favourite tune and thus gave the Seventh their nickname among the rest of the Army. The troopers in the West didn't only fight Indians: on July 17, 1870 in Hays, Kansas a shoot-out between Sheriff Wild Bill Hickok and two troopers resulted in one soldier dead of wounds and one wounded.

From 1871 through 1873, 7th Cavalry companies participated in constabulary duties in the deep American South in support of the Reconstruction Act, and, for half the regiment, again in 1874–1876. In 1873 the 7th Cavalry moved its garrison post to Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory. From here, the regiment carried out the historic reconnaissance of the Black Hills in 1874, making the discovery of gold in the Black Hills public and starting a gold rush that precipitated the Great Sioux War of 1876-77. Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer was defeated at the Battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25 and 26, 1876. Although the Seventh is best known for its catastrophic defeat at the Little Bighorn, the regiment also participated in at least one victory: the capture of Chief Joseph's Nez Perce at the Battle of Bear Paw in 1877. The Regiment perpetrated the Wounded Knee Massacre on December 29, 1890, the end of the Indian Wars.

[dgfred]

Oops... missed that list. Thanks again.

[quincannon]

Your source is incorrect Ian. The formal organization into four company battalions was post 1883. Up until that time the battalion was whatever the commander wanted it to be.

I will check my sources this evening.