Book Review - The Last Stand by Nathaniel Philbrick

 The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn by Nathaniel Philbrick

New York: Viking, 2010                                                        ISBN 9780670021727

Could this be the definitive book on the Battle of the Little Bighorn? It may well be. Nathaniel Philbrick has brought his considerable talents to bear on the events that occurred between May 1876 when Custer and the Seventh Cavalry headed out to face the Lakota, and early July, when the news of Custer's defeat at the Little Bighorn became public. Along the way the reader not only gets an insight into Custer's character and history, but also those around him, and of the Indians, for whom this battle was also a "last stand".

While at times I felt the structure of this book was a little formulaic, with the narrative drive of Custer's demise interrupted by asides into history or culture, there can be no doubt that Philbrick has amassed voluminous sources and presented the reader with an account that has looked at all the evidence at hand (in a book of 466 pages, there are 92 pages of notes and a 27 page bibliography) and explained as near as can be known exactly what happened on the bluffs overlooking the Little Bighorn on 25-26 June 1876.

While many books about this subject have a barrow to push, either excoriating or glorifying Custer, Reno, Benteen or others, Philbrick has let the facts speak for themselves, noting when the "facts" might be passed down to us by someone with an axe to grind. No-one comes out of Philbrick's telling unscathed.

 Anyone who has read anything about Custer will know of his rashness and inability to follow orders: Philbrick emphasises that Custer had other worries than Indians on his mind in June 1876. He was seriously in debt after some disastrous investments, and as also in political trouble, coming out for the Democrats in opposition to President Grant. He needed a grand victory to secure himself both financially and politically. 

Major Reno perhaps comes out of this telling of the tale worst. His poor leadership and drunkenness during the battle led to the rout of his companies down on the plain, and if it wasn't for Benteen taking control on Reno Hill he too may have been lost with all his men. There is little to be said in his defence, and in fact the most interesting thing about his role in the battle is why Custer put him in charge of the left wing of his divided force to begin with, given the open hostility between the two. Reno could never surmount the misfortunes life threw at him, and died a drunk and broken man.

The most interesting character from the US Army side was Captain Frederick Benteen. A pathological hater, especially of Custer, his mix of disobedience, insubordination, lack of discipline and outright inspiration and bravery in those two days are breathtaking. He truly hated Custer and his decision to stay with Reno rather than go to Custer with ammunition is one of the great "what ifs" of the battle. While we will never know if it would have been decisive for him to join with Custer, we can be fairly sure that if he had moved on and left Reno to his own devices, Reno's battalions would have suffered a similar fate to those of Custer. In the end, it was Custer's desperation for a victory that he wanted to claim for himself and himself alone that led to disaster.

Philbrick, in my opinion, provides the clearest most easy-to-follow account of the fight on Reno Hill, and also reconstructs a very plausible account of what happened to Custer and his men. In the end, after all that has been written over the years, it is becoming clearer and clearer that Custer was simply outnumbered, and would most likely have been overwhelmed no matter what tactics he might have chosen to employ. That the situation came to that is a result not only of Custer's undoubted shortcomings and flaws, but of the machinations of Terry, the tentativeness of Crook, and even the actions of Sheridan and Grant.

What was meant to be a simple victory over a people being dispossessed became instead a symbol of hubris and mismanagement. The victory was merely delayed, and not by very long either. As Philbrick explains, most of the Indians involved in the battle were in reservations by the beginning of Winter 1876. He touches on the tragedy that was to follow, from the deaths of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull to the tragedy of the massacre at Wounded Knee, and the end of a way of life, if not a people.

For those interested in the Battle of the Little Bighorn and in what actually happened on those summer days in 1876, I can highly recommend this book.

  

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - War at the end of the World by James P. Duffy

 War at the end of the World: Douglas MacArthur and the Forgotten Fight for New Guinea, 1942-1945

by James P. Duffy

New York: NAL Caliber, 2016                                                                          ISBN 9780451418302

This is a well-written and well-balanced account of the New Guinea campaign of World War II. James Duffy has not broken any new ground with this book, but what he has done is tell - side-by-side - the American, Australian and Japanese stories of this arduous campaign, in a simple narrative of the battles and decision making involved in winning (and losing) them.

The New Guinea campaign lasted from almost the beginning of the Pacific War to almost the end, and traversed the entire island from East to West. From early 1942 to late 1944 the Allied forces, through a strategy of targeted battles and bypassing large enemy bases, comprehensively defeated the Japanese forces. One stark statistic - in New Guinea the American forces lost 7,000 men, and the Australians a similar number. The Japanese lost over 200,000 men killed in the campaign.

The stark difference in deaths can be sheeted home to a few reasons: the overwhelming technological and materiel advantage of the Allies, the flawed battle tactics of the Japanese, and the inability of Japan to supply its troops with enough materiel (particularly food and medicine). As Duffy points out, MacArthur was also frugal with his troops, reluctant to attack large Japanese bases if he could avoid it. 

Rabaul was the first instance of where this tactic was used. Initially, from necessity owing to lack of troops, MacArthur constantly tried to avoid set-piece battles with large Japanese forces. What MacArthur wanted was hard ground for airfields. Although he was an Army man, MacArthur fully understood the crucial nature of air power, especially in a war that was fought over water and islands.

So, MacArthur's first thought when looking at the next Japanese conglomeration was "does it have an airfield suitable for my bombers, and is that airfield in the right strategic spot?" If the answer was no, the Allies moved on to the next area. Sometimes, if the Japanese force around a suitable airfield was too large, MacArthur sometimes found a suitable place where the Japanese weren't, and built his own airfields. In some cases an airfield could be up and running a couple of days after construction started. The construction companies, both the Australian and the American Seabees, were the unsung heroes in this forgotten war.

I imagine some Australian readers might quibble about the phrase "forgotten war" being applied to the New Guinea campaign, but I think that Duffy's term is apt. Certainly Australians generally know about the Kokoda campaign, and maybe Buna and Gona, but how many of us know much about the early campaigns in New Britain and New Ireland, the Markham Valley, Kalopit, Finschhafen, Manus Island and Los Negros, Hollandia and Aitape, Biak and Morotai?  

War at the end of the World is a great resource to understand these lesser-known battles, and at the same time to understand the Japanese viewpoint, which quite often gets lost in histories such as these. That the Japanese high command let so many troops wither on the vine is hard to understand, even with the difficulties that they had in moving troops as the war tipped in favour of the Allies. So many times Duffy writes of Japanese formations that were frittered away in piecemeal attacks, or suicidal defences of areas of little strategic value.

What I liked about this book was Duffy's even-handedness in describing the Australian and American contributions to victory. While we Australians might think we did it all, the reality is that the Americans did most of the heavy lifting. Duffy gets the balance right in my opinion - clearly pointing out the holding operations of the Australians at Kokoda, and how their preponderance of skill and battle experience led the way through the early battles at Buna and Gona, and then giving way to the greater numbers of Americans as they arrived in the theatre. 

As the subtitle of this book suggests, Duffy also has a focus on MacArthur throughout this book. He makes us aware that his one aim was to get back to the Philippines, and writes well on his constant battle with the Navy and Chiefs of Staff to get the men and material he required to prosecute the war. Duffy alludes to the politics surrounding his command, and how astute MacArthur was in managing the men around him, above him and below him as well.

With one caveat, I can recommend this book as a very good and detailed overview of what in many ways has become a forgotten part of the Pacific War.

The caveat is that the maps are appalling - too few, too lacking in detail, and too poorly printed to be of any use. This is inexcusable in a book describing a campaign that covers one of the World's largest islands. The blame for this can't be laid at the feet of the author, but it really lets the book down. The bibliography and index are serviceable.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I picked this book up, but found it a readable and relatively comprehensive narrative of this long and complex campaign.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Whirlwind: the Air War against Japan 1942-1945 by Barrett Tillman

 Whirlwind: the Air War against Japan 1942-1945 by Barrett Tillman

New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2011          ISBN 9781416584414

This was an interesting and informative book. It was also a frustrating and annoying one. While it does describe the American air war against Japan, and does have some interesting historical information to impart, it focuses too much on the American side, not enough on the Japanese, and the style is so cliche-ridden it takes away not only from the information Tillman is trying to impart, but also from the pleasure of reading.

The book starts with a brief survey of the development of strategic thinking around air power, and specifically strategic bombing, which is a useful entree into what comes later. We then move on to the Doolittle raid, before moving into the main part of the story, and the book.

The main part focuses on the B29 - its development, initial use from China, and then the raids engendered from the Marianas, before the two atomic bomb missions that ended the war. Tillman covers the initial arduous missions that originated from China, flying their bombs, fuel and equipment "Over the Hump" from India - it took seven journies over the Himalaya to transport enough fuel for one 'plane's bombing mission.

The results from these sorties were underwhelming, partly because the B29 could only reach the south of Japan, and because the American bombing strategy was not effective with the new bomber. Precision daylight bombing, which was the American way, achieved poor results in Japan. One of the issues was that, from 32,000 feet, the B29 was flying in the jetstream, which affected the fall of the bombs, the first time any 'plane had this problem. The lack of numbers of aircraft over the target was a problem as well. Before Curtis LeMay turned the whole B29 operation around, the poor serviceability of the fleet meant that many bombers never made it to the target.

Curtis LeMay, young and focused, was not satisfied with the poor results the B29s were achieving, and so he completely changed how they operated after a blitz of training and maintenance fixed the problems of navigation and serviceability. From high-altitude precision bombing, he changed to low altitude carpet bombing with incendiaries which, over the course of a few months, destroyed about 40% of the urban area of Japan's main cities. This bombing, while terrifying to the victims, was much more effective in crippling the industrial capacity of Japan than the previous strategy.

Tillman spends some chapters on the Naval contribution to the campaign - by 1945 the Japanese ability to defend against mass incursions of aircraft was limited, and so Carrier task groups could sail close enough to any part of Japan and wreak havoc, which they did mainly against airfields and naval assets. Tillman writes about the futility of some of these attacks, especially against the Japanese Navy in the Inland Sea, which had been effectively bottled up by the B29s that mined many of the waters around Japan, apart from the fact that Japan's stocks of fuel oil were practically exhausted.

The books final chapters deal with the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which covers all the bases of that story, from an American viewpoint.

So, as a work of history, Whirlwind covers the bases, and if you know nothing about the history of the Pacific War you will learn something. The main issue I have with this book is the style that Tillman has chosen to use in writing this book. It's a bit too tabloid for the kind of serious history I think he intended, and some of the metaphors and similies he's used are quite jarring and occasionally border on the offensive. Another annoyance are the seemingly endless non-sequiters which leave the reader scratching their heads trying to work out the point that Tillman was trying to make.

I was looking forward to this book, but finished it feeling underwhelmed. It could have been much more than it is. I'll keep looking for a definitive tome on this subject.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Retribution by Max Hastings

Retribution : the Battle for Japan 1944-45 by Max Hastings

New York: Vintage Books, 2007                  ISBN 9780307275363

Max Hastings and Antony Beevor have become the doyens of World War II history in the early Twenty-First Century. Retribution is an interesting concept; an overall look at the final twelve months of the entire Eastern War. How to tackle such an immense task is a valid question, which Hastings has answered by looking at topics in turn. He begins with the summit held at Hawaii in July 1944 between Nimitz, MacArthur and Roosevelt, where the future of US strategy for the war was confirmed. Hastings sets the scene in this chapter, briefly covering the flow of the War to this stage, and laying out for the reader the tensions that existed between the Allies, and within the US itself.

His chapters then range from Burma, the Philippines, the Island Campaigns (focusing on Iwo Jima), the Nationalist Chinese, Prisoners of War, the Communist Chinese, the bombing offensive, and finally the atomic bomb and Russian offensive in Manchuria. While he writes well and at times eloquently about specific incidents, he also develops some themes throughout the book that are worth discussing.

The first theme is that of logistics, supply and technology. Early in the book, Hastings repeats the astonishing statistic that for every four tons of supplies shipped by the US to its armed forces, Japan shipped two pounds to theirs. While America realised the importance of supply, Japan didn't, and Hastings points out that the Japanese never came to grips with the idea that supply was just as important as the fighting quality of their troops.

America not only won the supply battle, but also the technology battle, and Hastings shows that more than in previous wars, improvements in technology, often gained at great expense, sometimes drove policy. Having spent a fortune on developing the B29, the US felt they had to find a way to use it. Enter Curtis LeMay, who changed the precision bombing tactics favoured by the USAAF up until 1944 to area incendiary bombing, the success of which meant some post-fact justification, given the previously espoused aversion to bombing civilian areas. Hastings' chapter on the atomic bomb is also instructive in this respect, with the political leaders not really grasping the World-changing nature of the device before it was used, but with the amount of money and effort required to create it part of the decision-making process. Hastings is also aware of the politics behind the decision to use the atomic bomb, with the US desire to win the war before the intervention of the Soviets certainly playing a part.

The friction between the Allies is a fascinating story, well-portrayed in this book. The US were very reluctant for the Colonial Powers to take up their former territories after the War, to the extent that they refused to help the French in Indo-China, while Britain and Australia for differing reasons were critical of the US efforts to sideline their input to Japan's defeat. The games played by the Nationalists in China eventually saw them lose the whole-hearted backing of the US, as the latter country began to fully realise the corruption and ineffectiveness of Chiang's regime.

The conflict within the US armed forces and government is also well-covered by Hastings. MacArthur was in many ways a loose cannon: his narcissism led to many a failure, but his popularity back home meant he couldn't be relieved of command. Hastings paints the re-taking of the Philippines as more wasteful than it should have been, with the destruction of Manila essentially a by-product of MacArthur's vanity. Hastings has little time for MacArthur as a battle commander, and no time for his publicity-seeking or politicking. He also deprecates Halsey for his error in pursuing the Japanese carrier decoy at Leyte Gulf, which Hastings puts down to Halsey wanting to one-up Spruance. There is no love lost either for Mountbatten, whom Hastings sees as out of his depth. In fact the only Allied commander whom Hastings admires is Slim, all the while acknowledging that Burma was in many respects a sideshow of the War.

And what of the Japanese commanders and government? It was clear to many if not most, that the War was lost in 1944, so why did they fight on? Honour and "Face" were certainly part of the equation, but also the mistaken belief that if they inflicted massive losses on the Allies, Japan might be able to reach a negotiated truce. Their lack of understanding of Allied feelings and indeed self-knowledge of their own actions in the War led them to believe - even as late as July 1945 - that they could reach an armistice that would allow them to keep Manchuria, Formosa and Korea and not be occupied. The combined blows of the atomic attacks and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria gave the Emperor a way of forcing a surrender onto his government while maintaining some sort of "Face", and a way to "endure the unendurable". The devastation that such wrong-headedness unleashed on their own people and country almost beggars belief, but as the title of this book suggests, perhaps it was a just punishment for what the Japanese perpetrated across most of Asia.

This book is certainly a must-read for anyone interested in the history of World War II: there is much more within its pages than this review has covered, all of it interesting and well-written.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Hidden Horrors by Yuki Tanaka

Hidden Horrors : Japanese War Crimes in World War II by Yuki Tanaka, with a foreword by John W. Dower

Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1996                 ISBN 0813327180


This is an interesting book with much food for thought, which endeavours to map out a new path for academic study of Japanese war crimes. Tanaka looks at some specific war crimes committed by Japanese soldiers and sailors, and tries to show how such things could have occurred through looking at the structure, training and beliefs of Japanese society and the Armed Forces in particular.

The first crime he examines in detail is the Sandakan Death Marches, where he notes how the Japanese mostly used Koreans and Formosans (Taiwanese) as guards for Prisoners of War. The brutal treatment handed out to these guards by their Japanese masters, they passed on to the Prisoners under their control. Tanaka also looks at the way Japan did and did not abide by the Geneva Convention, using prisoners for war work, and progressively starving them as Japan's position in the War became more perilous. While not excusing individual acts by Japanese soldiers and sailors, Tanaka shows the reader how the culture of the Japanese Armed Forces and the pressure of war led to such outcomes. It is interesting to note that in the first of the Sandakan Marches many Japanese also died. The horrific logic of war crimes came into play at Sandakan as well, with earlier outrages driving the Japanese to ensure that they left no witnesses alive.

Tanaka then moves on to the topic of rape and "Comfort Women" (a topic he has written on at some length subsequent to this book). He draws parallels here with both the Russians in Germany and the Allied occupation of Japan. The treatment of women in war is often horrific and Tanaka has some ideas on the transgressive nature of women in uniform, and how male bonding in war can lead to such outrages; ideas that others have written on in more detail.

Tanaka's next subject is Japanese cannibalism, on many levels perhaps the most troubling crime. This practice was quite widespread, and was not always the result of hunger. Sometimes dead Japanese were eaten, and sometimes even shot for food. Tanaka can give no real reason for the cannibalism that makes sense, except where is was obviously driven by hunger... certainly it was something that the Japanese wanted to hide when they could, with Allied discoveries of this practice usually occurring after they surprised groups of Japanese, or made sudden advances on the battlefield. The Allied attitude to reports and evidence of these crimes is interesting as well. While the Americans thought that such things should be publicised in aid of the war effort, the Australians were against the idea because of the distress it may have caused on the home front. That there were so few prosecutions for the crime after the war is put down by Tanaka to the reason that it would have caused distress to families of the victims, and the problem of providing evidence that would stand up in a court-room (i.e. of eye-witnesses to the consumption of the flesh, rather than evidence of cooking etc.).

The next chapter, on Unit 731, investigates the concept of "doubling": how doctors could experiment on live people, and how they justify it. Tanaka also here begins to look at Japanese acknowledgement that what they were doing was wrong, at least to the extent that they wanted to avoid punishment. The members of Unit 731 captured by the US were given immunity from prosecution on the basis that they handed over their research, after the US were assured that no Prisoners were used in experiments. The Soviets later showed that these assurances were lies.

Which brings the reader to the last crime that Tanaka looks at, the massacre of civilians at Kavieng. Tanka uses this incident to look at several things: how the Japanese concept of Gyokusai ("glorious self-annihilation") led to the "strategic necessity" of eliminating civilians, and how the soldiers involved knew they were doing something wrong, as they were ordered not to speak of the killings and rehearsed a cover story to explain the deaths away. What is also interesting in this example is that senior officers ensured the massacre happened in such a way that they could avoid blame. The readiness of such officers to blame conveniently dead colleagues for crimes was also much in evidence after the War.

In his conclusion, Tanaka shows how the Japanese Military moved from being a force that was compassionate to its prisoners and its own members who had been taken prisoner (in the early 20th century), to one where it was better to die than be taken prisoner. This certainly had an effect on how the Japanese treated Allied captives. The Japanese belief in themselves as the chosen race, and in their Emperor as a god, had a malignant effect on their treatment of conquered peoples. Tanaka calls in this book for a new historiography of Japanese war crimes, whereby Japanese - in a similar manner to the Germans - look at the whole of the wartime era, and how as a country they could have come to a point where such horrors were allowed to happen. This new historiography has yet to happen in Japan in any major way, although this book is now over 20 years old.

One for the serious students of the Pacific War, this book is worth reading, although in lacking a bibliography it leaves limited options for further study.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Green Armour by Osmar White

Green Armour by Osmar White

Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1945

Osmar White was a journalist for the Herald & Weekly Times during World War Two, and was sent by that paper to cover the war in New Guinea. Green Armour is his collection of thoughts about what he saw during that time, and written before the War had finished, but written when he knew the War was won.

This provided the author with an interesting perspective - he had the liberty to write about the events he had seen at Wau, Salamaua, and Kokoda with more truthfulness than he could at the time, and his recovery from wounds he received at Rendova Island gave him time to think strategically about how those early efforts by Australian and US forces had paved the way for the later, successful use of such forces in the island hopping campaign waged by MacArthur and Nimitz throughout the Pacific.

The first section of the book deals with the beginning of the campaign in New Guinea, and focuses on just how woefully unprepared the Australian troops were for any serious invasion. White explains how, if Japan had been bold enough to attack Moresby in March 1942, they would have succeeded, as both land, sea and air power from the Allied side were virtually non-existent at that time. White graphically describes how the lone squadron of Kittyhawks were just enough to stave off disaster in that crucial period.

White then recounts his journey, with two other legendary correspondents in Chester Wilmot and Damien Parer, through the jungle to Wau to see at first hand the activities of Kanga Force. White's description of the cruel nature of the terrain, and the virtual impossibility of supply through the jungle, is masterful journalism. The title of the book "Green Armour" refers to the New Guinea mountain jungle, which protected Australian forces when they were on the defensive, and, as White shows, helped the Japanese when they became the hunted.

White was present during the worst of the fighting along the Kokoda Track, before the Australians had learned to use the jungle to their advantage, and when, frankly, they were routed by the Japanese. He describes the confusion, panic and fear that comes with not knowing where the enemy is at any moment. He also describes the effect of the country and lack of supplies and equipment, with underfed and poorly looked-after men suffering as much from disease and sickness as from the depredations of the enemy.

The third section of the book deals with the preparation and early phases of the New Georgia campaign. The landings on and around New Georgia were the first trial of the concept of amphibious landings and island fighting that was to dominate the rest of the Pacific War. White demonstrates in his description how the jungle made attack difficult, how the planning of this early campaign did not take into account the difficulty of the terrain, or the tenaciousness of the Japanese in defence. However, White does demonstrate how the overwhelming material advantage held by the United States was slowly being brought to bear on the fighting, and how this capacity was changing the thinking of the Commanders of those forces, and also the Commanders of the Japanese Forces.

This book has the status of a classic of the genre, and one can see why - as a description of the early fighting in the South Pacific, this is hard to beat. Recommended.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Last Days of George Armstrong Custer by Thom Hatch

The Last Days of George Armstrong Custer by Thom Hatch

New York: St. Martin's Press, 2015                ISBN 9781250051028

Hagiography. The inherent danger in seeing no wrong in a person, especially if you are claiming to write history, is that you as historian may be hoist on your own petard. Thom Hatch, with his worship of Custer, has blown himself so high that he may never hit the ground. While the dust jacket tells us that Hatch will "set the record straight" all he actually does is make the reader question his interpretation of events.

And there is plenty of interpretation on offer to everyone, not only about the Battle of the Little Bighorn itself, but in many other aspects of Custer's career. Hatch, in every interpretation he makes, sides with Custer, and at times what he doesn't write in his book tells the reader as much as what he does.

Despite what the title suggests, this book not only delves into the last days of Custer's life, but also gives us over a hundred pages of preliminaries, covering most of the life and career of Custer. Hatch passes over Custer's less-than-stellar time at West Point, excusing his record number of demerits and low pass mark as the result of "youthful exuberance". Whilst not going into great detail, Hatch writes of Custer's Civil War as a triumphal progress as he does of his subsequent efforts against the Indians. By this part of the book it's clear to the reader that we are reading a one-sided account of events.

Hatch then goes on to describe the prelude to, and the Battle of, Little Bighorn relatively accurately. It is when he comes to his analysis that we again see his bias emerge. He is determined not to allow any opprobrium stick to his glorious General.

Hatch puts the entire blame for the failure of the Cavalry at Little Bighorn onto Major Reno's failed charge on the Indian village. While on one page he is equating Reno's failure to carry out Custer's order to the letter as a capital offence, in the next he incidentally shows us several reasons why Reno acted as he did: he thought Custer was coming along behind him, and Reno had no experience fighting Indians. One could, contra Hatch, just as easily argue that, given Custer knew Reno had not fought against Indians before, that he should have been much more explicit with his order, and in explaining what his tactics were to be. If - as Hatch contends - Reno's charge was the key to victory or defeat, it would have been well for Custer to do so. Reno was in fact second-in-command on the day and it would have been reasonable and even expected that Custer would discuss his overall tactics with him.

It is clear that Reno suffered from Battle Shock after the first contact at Little Bighorn, and his behaviour was far from what should have been expected from an officer, but it is a long bow to draw to place the entire failure of the Cavalry down to his ineffectual charge.

The irony of this excoriation of Reno for not following orders to the letter, after praising Custer for doing the same during the Civil War, is not lost on the reader, although it seems to be so to the author. Even with Hatch's idolisation of Custer throughout this book, it is clear in these pages that while Custer was no doubt personally brave, he was also reckless and impulsive. To attack what was as far as is known the largest Indian encampment ever seen on the Plains without even a reconnoitre of the lay of the land, or knowing if the River was passable, was reckless in the extreme, even if time was of the essence to catch the Indians by surprise.

Hatch describes how Custer almost had a "set play" for his battles against Indians - attack the front of the encampment with some troops, outflank and catch the Indians as they regroup or flee with the rest. This worked previously, but it seems that this time, under the aggressive leadership of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Gall the Indians had decided to stand and fight. They outnumbered the Cavalry by five-to-one.

There is no knowing what the outcome of the Battle would have been if Reno had continued his charge; Hatch assumes that Custer would have come in on the flank to an easy victory. An equally realistic scenario is Reno and his men being cut down in the maze of tepees while Custer was held off at the river before the weight of numbers forced him to retreat, or to suffer defeat.

The reality of course is that no one thing caused the disaster. If General Crook had notified Terry and Custer of his battle on the Rosebud, if Custer had better knowledge of the size and location of the village, yes, if Reno had charged into the village, if Benteen had kept moving toward Custer with the pack train, if Custer had retreated toward Benteen and Reno when he was still able, if Custer had got his men together in a defensive position early enough, if, if, if. The enormous amount of Little Bighorn literature spawns from these ifs, and a lot of it is better thought-out and argued than Hatch's book.

Hatch also, to my mind, borders on the offensive when he brands the Indians as enemies of the United States, and of progress, writing "The United States had every right to expand its boundaries to include the Great Plains West. Oddly enough, many moder scholars believe there was something honorable about the Sioux fighting to defend their right to roam free. The West was becoming too small and populated to allow a group advocating violence to close off thousands of square miles.....Peace entreaties had been made and were dismissed." The disingenuousness of this paragraph, the last sentence in particular, is astounding. Peace entreaties had indeed been made, and regularly broken, by the United States Government. The Black Hills had been given in perpetuity to the Indian tribes and then taken away, as had many other locations across the West. What resort did the Indians have but to try to keep what was theirs by force, as negotiation and treaty had failed time and again. And surely there is honour in fighting for your freedom: I have no doubt Hatch, a Vietnam Veteran, would claim that himself. To state that there is honour in fighting for your way of life is not to denigrate the bravery of Custer, or of the Seventh Cavalry, who were on the right and wrong side of history at the same time, as were the Indians. By pushing his feelings too far, Hatch undermines himself, the petard explodes again.

There are better places to start with the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Custer, and indeed the American West, than with this book.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Dispatches by Michael Herr

Dispatches by Michael Herr

New York: Vintage International, 1991 (first published 1977)  ISBN 9780679735250

Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we've all been there. When Michael Herr wrote those words to end this classic book of reportage, I imagine he little thought that, thirty years later, many would indeed have been to Vietnam, on package tours or backpacker holidays.

Dispatches is a story of a different Vietnam to that seen today, a story of being in the midst of one of the worst wars of the Twentieth Century. Herr was a freelance correspondent, and Dispatches is not his account of this time in Vietnam, but more a reflection of the War: what it did to him, what it did to the US soldiers that were there, and in some ways what it did to the USA as a nation.

When it was first published in 1977 Dispatches was quickly hailed as the best book so far about the US involvement in Vietnam: that may still be the case thirty years later. It should be remembered that in 1977 the wounds that Vietnam had caused in America were still fresh: no heroes return for the troops, no victory - in fact an ignominious retreat and loss. Herr does not go into any detail as to why that happened, as his story is about the troops and the correspondents that wrote about them.

With a fine ear for the unintentional ironies of command-speak, Herr shows us that talk of "kill ratios", "pacification" and so on were meaningless to the "grunts" that risked all to retake Hue or who fought and died at Khe Sanh. It is the regular solider who is the hero of Herr's book, with his savagery, beauty and desire to go home (or, in rare instances, stay), described with respect and care.

Whether Herr supported the War - whether he was a "hawk" or a "dove" - is meaningless in the context of this book. He knew that many ordinary troops were suffering and dying for illusory gains on a map: that when the troops left the VC would return. The US military were like Canute, trying to turn back the tide of the North Vietnamese advance.

That there is in fact no meaning at all to this waste becomes clearer as the reader progresses through the book. The centre-piece of the book is the "siege" of Khe Sanh, a pointless exercise in waste. The Marines at the base die for lack of suitable cover ("Marines don't dig"), and the NVA die because they are told to. What is described by the Generals as a "keystone" to the defence of the South is, several months later, all but abandoned by both sides. Whenever a meaning for the War might be almost discernible through the mists of propaganda and psyops, it quickly disappears, like a night stoned on weed, or changes course like the tracer rounds that curl away from the target at the last moment.

Herr writes as well about his fellow correspondents. About how you only saw the War you wanted to see. About how he couldn't understand the way some could get anything useful from interviewing Generals, just as they couldn't understand how he could get useful material from being with the troops. He describes the soldiers disbelief that anyone could voluntarily spend time in Vietnam, he describes the fear engendered by close shaves, he describes the sadness at the loss of friends. It was a strange thing being a correspondent, the friendships, fear and dreams were similar to enlisted men, but the ability to fly out of the hot zone back to Saigon or China Beach, gave the war a surreal quality that Herr has done a lot to convey with the structure of his book, which moves from overhearing Marines talk during a firefight, to the conversations of "spooks" at HQ, to the chatter of fellow correspondents over drinks at the Continental Hotel in Saigon.

I read somewhere a description of Dispatches as an anti-war book. It is, in the sense that no-one who has been involved in battle could be pro-war, but the book is alive to the fact that there are things that happen during the horror of war that are meaningful, and even at times beautiful. He quotes Tim Page, after being asked by a publisher to write a book that would "once and for all take the glamour out of war."....[Page] "I mean, how the bloody hell can you do that?.....It's like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones." This passage occurs late in the book, and by then the reader knows that Herr does not entirely disagree with Page on the issue.

What does stay with Herr are the memories - in the short last section of the book entitled "Breathing Out", he is trying to cope with the dreams, the loss (ironically) of meaning in life outside of Vietnam, and tries to find solace in his old friends. Herr was an advisor on the film Apocalypse Now, and it was a character in that film, Kilgore, who cryptically says "Someday this war's going to end." The final pages of Herr's book suggests that, for those that were there, it never will.

A classic.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The Devil's birthday : the bridges to Arnhem, 1944 by Geoffrey Powell

The Devil's Birthday : the bridges to Arnhem, 1944 by Geoffrey Powell, foreword by General Sir John Hackett

London : Buchan & Enright, 1984                                                     ISBN 0907675255

Those of us with more than a passing interest in the history of World War II think we know all about Operation Market Garden, the failed attempt by the Allies to end the war in 1944 by an airborne assault through Holland to capture bridges over the Maas and Rhine rivers, skirt the Siegfried Line and enter Germany. We've read the book or seen the movie of A bridge too far, and know that it was the lack of intelligence about the SS divisions in the area, or the lack of radio communication that ruined the chances for success. This book puts those ideas to rights and more.

Geoffrey Powell commanded C company of 156 Parachute Battalion throughout Market Garden and won the Military Cross for his actions there, although you won't find this out by reading The Devil's birthday. Nor will you find an apologia for what was one of the most vicious battles fought on the Western Front in World War II. What you will find is a clear headed exposition of the actions throughout Market Garden, dispelling some myths and  pointing to the real reasons the operation failed to achieve all its objectives.

What Powell makes clear is that the lack of time to properly plan such a complex operation cruelled its chances from the start. The Allies had built up a large airborne force, and were always on the lookout for ways to employ it - there had been quite a few operations planned after D-Day, all of which were cancelled as the advance of the Allies quickly overtook planned airborne objectives.

By September 1944 the Germans seemed to be not only on the run, but collapsing as a fighting force. Market Garden was planned to punch a hole in the collapsing lines, skirt around the top end of the Siegfried Line, cut off the Ruhr from Germany and voila, the war would be won. The planning of Market Garden took place in not much more than a week, with communications between Montgomery in France and Browning back in England not all that it could be. This led not only to some oversights in planning, but also a lack of time for the airborne command to push the USAAF and RAF to organise to land the troops closer to their objectives than what in fact occurred. The distance between the Dropping and Landing Zones and the bridges caused delays in capturing the bridge at Nijmegen, and led to the separation of forces at Arnhem, which doomed that part of the plan.

The lack of co-ordination between attack aircraft and the ground troops, due to lack of effective radio contact, and the Air Force's requirement that the attack aircraft couldn't be in the area of operations while troop-carrying or supply aircraft were in the area was a big problem.

The number of troops landed on the first day is an issue that Powell looks at closely and draws the conclusion that more could have been done to get more boots on the ground more quickly in the drop zones - the Air Forces should have been pushed to run more than one drop in a day, and there should have been more thought into which troops and supplies were dropped when - the decision by Browning to include his HQ battalion in the first drop is, to Powell, a wrong one.

The main part of the operation was the ground assault under the command of General Horrocks, and Powell gives us plenty of detail here, explaining the difficulties of running an army up one road, while also pointing out where that army was perhaps less than expeditious in its advance. He importantly points out that is was the tardiness of the advance of the flanking forces (12 Corps and 8 Corps), that led to the small German forces being able to continue to attack 30 Corps on the main road, and indeed cut that road on more than one occasion, delaying the whole operation significantly.

And what of the German forces? Much has been made in the past of the lack of intelligence about the SS Panzer Corps that were refitting in the area. However, as Powell points out, these forces were small in number, and in fact the number of troops and tanks in the area was about what the Allies had expected. What was less expected was the stiff resistance of the troops, not only because some of them were in the SS, but also because they were now fighting very close to home soil. The Germans were fortunate that the commanders in the area at the time, including Student and Bittrich, were seasoned, smart and effective. Having stated that, it is worth noting that the British forces in Oosterbeek held out for as long as they did partly because the forces opposing them were scratch units with not much tactical nous, so the German story was mixed. In fact Student himself called Market Garden a 'great success' for the Allies.

Powell's description of the fighting in the Oosterbeek pocket is harrowing to read, and no doubt accurate as he was there. As with many stories of war, the horrible waste of lives is the thing that sticks with the reader - more thought from the Allies, and perhaps less triumphalism might have stopped this operation before it began. In the end it was the "broad push" and not the "thunderbolt surprise" that got the Allies over the Rhine and into Germany. Powell has his doubts that, even if successful, Market Garden would have significantly shortened the War, and I tend to agree.

Powell ends this book with a discussion of the worth of airborne forces, and comes to the conclusion that their true worth is in operations on a smaller scale than that of Market Garden. He points out that in larger strategic operations such as Market Garden (or the invasion of Crete by the German airborne forces), even if the forces are successful their loss rate is horrendous. However, for smaller scale tactical operations there is great value in using such units. He points out that by this stage in the War the Allies had built up such a large airborne force the powers that be felt they had to do something with it to justify its formation.

Powell's last paragraph is worth quoting in full - "It is arguable that Eisenhower would have been better served in the autumn of 1944 by another half-dozen infantry or armoured divisions, backed by adequate logistic resources, than by First Allied Airborne Army. The airborne forces of the United States and Britain were expensive indeed in high quality men and in the special facilities needed to train them, in manufacturing capacity and in base area support, in scientific research and in military planners. Without any doubt, the two Allies had a need for smallish bodies of parachute or glider troops, of battalion or of regimental size. On the other hand it is not easy to justify the scarce resources which the Americans and the British devoted to their fine airborne, forces, and to the aircraft which flew them into battle."

This book may be the definitive account of operation Market Garden. It is definitely readable, interesting and comprehensive. Recommended.


Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Blind eye to murder by Tom Bower

Blind eye to murder : Britain, America and the purging of Nazi Germany - a pledge betrayed
by Tom Bower

London: Andre Deutsch, 1981                                   ISBN 0233972927


It's not often that reading a book makes you feel sick, and yet at the same time the desire to finish it is not diminished. This is one of those books.

Most people when they think about Nazi war crimes might think of the Nuremberg trials, or perhaps the Eichmann trial, and think that in the years since the war there has been a thorough and undiminishing search for the perpetrators of the worst Nazi excesses. That this was never really the case is made clear in the pages of this book.

Tom Bower came to this story through his own dealings with German officials in the 1970s, who he later found to be former Nazis. Like most, he had assumed that part of the purpose of the War was to deal with and punish such people, and that, to a great extent, this had been achieved.

He begins his investigation with the attitudes of both Britain and America to the problem while the War was still under way. It's clear that the desire to punish Nazi evil-doers was initially driven by politicians, in Britain especially, with the Civil Servants playing catch-up to announcements from Churchill, Eden and company that perpetrators of crimes would be hunted down and brought to justice wherever they were. And the Civil Servants did what Civil Servants do best - nothing. In some ways they had a realistic attitude to the "problem" of Nazi crimes, in that they were aware that it would be a huge effort to find and prosecute all who were guilty, but they were also quite sanguine about how much they wanted to see "chaps like us" (businessmen and soldiers) in front of a judge. There were also real doubts as to whether legally there would be any basis to charging people for something that was legal when they did it, regardless of the moral aspect: as Ewald Bucher (Minister of Justice in West Germany 1963-65) said "Morality has nothing to do with law. If you're concerned about morality, go to church."

The Americans were ostensibly more interested in catching and trying criminals, but control of the process became a power struggle between different entities within the army and government, which led to a similar outcome to the British: an under-staffed, under-informed group of people, with no clear mandate on what they were supposed to be doing, trying to investigate and prosecute during the mayhem that was the immediate post-war period.

Faced with a gigantic problem and limited resources, the Western Allies hit upon the idea of de-nazification, a process where suspected Nazis were arraigned before a tribunal and punished according to a set range of penalties depending on their involvement with the Party or the War. The problem was that many of the members of the de-nazification panels were themselves ex-Nazis, so were not inclined to punish members severely. This had a snowball effect, and the panels quickly became virtually useless as a means to identify and punish. Another big problem was that the victorious Allies, intent on getting Germany functioning again, had to quickly get basic institutions up and running again. The soldiers on the ground, untrained in interrogation and politically naive, turned to those Germans with the most recent experience of Government office - ex-Nazis. This naivete went to the top of the occupying armies, with General Patton remarking that the de-nazification process was "just like a Democratic and Republican election fight."

In the British Zone particularly, the police and judiciary were quickly and heavily populated with ex-Nazi police and judges, which had long-term effects on the success of future investigations. Those ex-Nazis who were once again in positions of influence then started a successful campaign against "victors justice" and "revenge punishments", which gained traction especially in the USA. These campaigns, combined with the worsening Cold War situation, led those in power, some of whom were never enthusiastic about war crimes trials in the first place, to look at setting end dates to trials, amnesties and a return to "normality".

This quite often led, as in the case of the Malmedy massacre protagonists, to the underlings who pulled the trigger being executed, but those higher up the chain of command who gave the orders, being released after a few years in prison. In general, even if found guilty, many of the higher commanders and industrialists got very light sentences - a few years for murder or engaging slave labour. The requirements for a charge were also very strict - eye witnesses had to testify in court to seeing the accused kill someone for example, for a charge to stick.

These requirements came about through the inability of the Western Allies to conceive of how the Nazi killing machine actually worked. In fact it is only in relatively recent times that the entire structure of the Nazi extermination and slave labour operations have been fully understood, and the guilt of many who escaped justice has been fully investigated. The scale of the crimes were too shocking to be believed in 1945, and the allies only ever had part of the picture, especially when it came the the horrors perpetuated in Eastern Europe.

When responsibility for investigating and prosecuting crimes fell to West Germany after it was released from occupation, things proceeded at the same slow pace, with the same over-meticulous application of the law. Of course by now many people in power both in politics and business had a vested interest in keeping the enquiries low-key, as they may have become entangled themselves in any big activity around war crimes and people's past careers.

Bower records this sordid period in history with a suppressed outrage which is entirely appropriate. He records verbatim the comments of some of the actors (whom he interviewed), who don't deny their cynicism and wish for the whole "trial thing" to be finished as quickly and as smoothly (i.e. with the least trouble to them) as possible. The British in particular had no qualms about "passing a sponge" over people's past histories if they could be of use in the new Germany.

In the last pages of the book, Bower discusses the desire for Shlusstrich, or drawing a line, under history, which, in 1980 was what almost everybody wanted to do. I will quote his last two paragraphs, which begin by referring to two people who were being tried, in 1979, for their roles in the Madjanek Concentration Camp -

"But whether 'Bloody Brigitte' or Hermann Hackmann remain imprisoned for one year or the rest of their lives makes little, if any, difference to justice. Few of those who gave the orders have ever been punished. The dead are beyond seeing their murderers punished. Only the handful of victims who survived can gain any solace. At least they are spared the chance of meeting one of their many tormentors shopping in their own neighbourhood, or holidaying in their favourite resort; but no one has asked them for an opinion about the Schlusstrich.

Perhaps the sad farce which will draw to an end in Dusseldorf some time in 1981 [the trial of Hackmann and Lachert] does not matter either. Perhaps the crimes of the Third Reich were too monstrous for human justice. If so, then the hopes and faith of countless mend and women, many of whom paid for their beliefs with their lives, have been betrayed. Perhaps another generation will learn the lesson when they are invited to fight for justice and a better world, and realize that when victory is won they will not be asked what kind of justice was meant, or what kind of world they want. Those in London and Washington who, during the war, persistently argued the futility of giving any commitment to postwar justice have been proved right. Or was it just a self-fulfilling prophecy?"

Well researched and well argued, this book is worth reading to get a better insight into why so few Nazis ever made it into a courtroom, and why those who did rarely got what they deserved.


Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Little Bighorn Special Part Two - E Troop, Documentaries, Mitch Boyer and Archaeology

Killing Custer : the battle of Little Bighorn and the fate of the Plains Indians by James Welch with Paul Stekler

New York : W.W. Norton, 1994                                ISBN 039303657X


The mystery of E Troop : Custer's gray horse company at the Little Bighorn by Gregory Michno

Missoula, Montana: Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1994         ISBN 0878423044


Archaeological insights into the Custer Battle : an assessment of the 1984 field season by Douglas D. Scott and Richard A. Fox, Jr. with a contribution by Dick Harmon

Norman, Oklahoma : University of Oklahoma Press, 1987       ISBN 0806120657

Custer's last campaign : Mitch Boyer and the Little Bighorn reconstructed by John S. Gray, Foreword by Robert M. Utley

Lincoln, Nebraska : University of Nebraska Press, 1991            ISBN 080322138X



As is often the case, one book leads to many others - my reading of Red Sabbath has taken me on a bit of a Little Bighorn odyssey. Having a childhood love of "Cowboys and Indians", which grew into a more mature interest in military history, the Custer Battle is something that I've long known about in a general way, having read a few treatments over the years. In 2003 I had the fortune of visiting the battlefield, and from time-to-time I've revisited my photos, and the material I got from the visitor centre, which includes a fridge magnet of the famous Cassily Adams painting Custer's last fight.

James Welch has a little to say about that painting, in his personal reflection on the Last Stand and what it meant in Indian as well as White Man history in Killing Custer. Welch is an Indian himself (Blackfeet), and brings that cultural base to bear on his writing. In the early 1990s he was hired as a scriptwriter by Paul Stekler to write a documentary for PBS that Stekler was filming. Stekler wanted to look at the Little Bighorn battle from a "new" perspective, balancing the White view with that of the Indians.

Welch, although having lived in Montana most of his life, had little interest in Custer before taking on this project, and had only been to the battlefield once (when he was admonished for eating at a National Monument!). While Welch is known for his novels that deal with the Indian experience, he recalls early in Killing Custer going to the movies in his youth and cheering the Cavalry, along with all the other Indians in the audience, which is an indication that this book is not a "standard" history.

And it's not - Welch intersperses writing about the battle with scenes from the making of the documentary, and the modern politics of the Little Bighorn battle and site - and it is a site with meaning for many. The Indians that now own the area, the Crow, were on the side of Custer at the time of Little Bighorn, as the Sioux had dispossessed them of these lands. That they were naive in thinking that by supporting the US Government they would get their land back is beyond doubt. Many of the Sioux were less naive - Welch shows that Sitting Bull and some of the other Sioux Chiefs called together the "Big Village" with the foreboding that this would be a grand finale to their way of life. When writing about the making of the documentary Welch describes interviewing Indians about the battle, and the thing that stands out from the exchanges is how close Custer and the Little Bighorn are to us: many of these Indians were talking about their Grandfathers, who had been in the thick of the fighting.

The Indian narratives of the battle historically  have been discounted as being too episodic and contradictory to be of any use to historians trying to recreate what occurred on that June day 138 years ago. In 1983, a grass fire at the battlefield led to a series of events that threw new light not only on the archaeology of the site, but on the relevance of Indian accounts of what occurred on that day. Gregory Michno has used the results of those digs, and a clear-headed look at the Indian and White oral/written evidence to try and clear up a mystery that had surrounded what happened to 28 bodies that were said to lie in the "Deep Ravine" of the battlefield. If you go to the field today, there are no markers in that place, and it was a mystery that intrigued Michno, who has made a valuable addition to the burgeoning literature of Little Bighorn.

His book is an excellent synthesis of available evidence - especially useful is the comparison of Indian evidence, which when read one after the other seems, if anything, less contradictory than that of the White witnesses. Gray's Custer's last campaign clearly shows that the much belittled testimony of Curley, one of the Indian scouts with Custer and the only survivor from his troops, is actually quite accurate. When read together, it is possible to piece together a fairly accurate picture of what happened on Battle Ridge that afternoon. The archaeological digs after the fire have allowed historians to more accurately chart the flow of the battle - it seems that the final stand was in fact on Custer Hill, after skirmish lines thrown out around the hill were driven back onto the troops on that feature.

Many other old controversies have been put to rest by the archaeological work that has continued beyond the initial 1984 excavations. The Indians were fairly well armed with modern weapons - given how many fighting Indians there were on that day, even a ratio of 25% of Indian combatants with firearms means Custer's men were out-gunned. The number of armed Indians increased as the battle progressed when they took arms from the dead soldiers: the evidence indicates more than one trooper was shot with his own - or a comrades - weapon. The last stand was most probably on Custer Hill, with the last survivors making a doomed dash for Deep Ravine and being cut down on the way.

Of course the controversies about Custer and his character will probably simmer on for ever: certainly he can be held accountable for not reconnoitring the village before his attack, but once committed, it now seems that the 7th Cavalry fought the way it knew how: the only problem was that the Indians were too many and too mobile a force to succumb to Army tactics. the question of whether Benteen could have changed the outcome by obeying Custer's order to advance is moot: he didn't, and his explanations of why he didn't must always be viewed through the prism of self-vindication. However, if Gray's estimate of  over1800 Indian warriors thronging the field that day is correct, perhaps Benteen chose wisely.

What is beyond dispute is that Custer's men - including his brothers Tom and Boston, his nephew and his brother-in-law - died, along with Mitch Boyer, who I haven't really mentioned in this review, but as described by Gray was a fascinating product of the age. While we'll never know Boyer's exact words, it seems he knew when he ordered Curley to leave the fight that no-one in the command would survive that day. Standing on the battlefield, knowing that, is a sobering experience.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Little Bighorn Special Part One - Red Sabbath : the Battle of Little Bighorn by Robert Kershaw

Red Sabbath : the Battle of Little Bighorn by Robert Kershaw

Hersham, Surrey : Ian Allen Publishing, 2008 (2005)            ISBN 9780711033252


With some reservations (which I'll get into later), I can recommend Red Sabbath as the one book to read if you want to know what happened at the Battle of Little Bighorn - "Custer's Last Stand". Robert Kershaw has given us an up-to-date and accurate description of what was the US Army's greatest disaster in its wars against the Plains Indians.

Something has always fascinated me about Custer's last battle: given the amount of paper and ink given over to it, it seems that I'm not the only one. The tragedy of his demise along with most of the 7th Cavalry attains Greek proportions - hubris, courage, disaster - they are all here. I've had the fortune to visit the battlefield, and it's a very moving place, with grave markers scattered around the field indicating where the men actually fell (there are not many Indian markers on the battlefield, partly owing to lack of intelligence about where they fell, but also - as Kershaw points out - while over 260 US servicemen, civilians and scouts lost their lives at Little Bighorn, the Indian deaths probably numbered just over 40).

Red Sabbath is a book that is oriented more at the military side of affairs, with a detailed look at the command and control aspects of the battle, and more focused on the Government rather than the Indian side. The first chapters set the scene, with a detailed account of the Fetterman Massacre 11 years before Little Bighorn, and briefly taking us through the Laramie Treaty, and the underhanded way the US Government broke that treaty, which led to the three columns under Generals Terry, Crook and Gibbon entering the Powder River Country during May 1876.

By taking us through the details of the Fetterman engagement, and the "Wagon box fight" of 1867, Kershaw points out that the way for the Army to defeat Indians was to combine, stand, and fight: not disperse, scatter and run. In retrospect, that seems obvious, but in the ten years between those events and Little Bighorn, most Indian engagements involved the Army making contact and the Indians fleeing, so the strategy had developed of splitting Army forces - one force to engage, and the others to attack the fleeing enemy. Engagements since 1867 had been with small forces of Indians - usually less than 100.

The summer of 1876 was different. The Indians - usually moving in small tribal bands - had decided to take a stand. They called as many groups as possible together, both to provide safety in numbers, and to attack the Army en masse if they could. Another key development on the Indian side was their ability to gather together a large number of modern rifles, including many repeating rifles such as Henrys and Winchesters. These key facts had eluded the intelligence gatherers for the Army.

The vaunted 7th Cavalry was not what some of the old movies would have us believe. The Army was a last choice occupation in the 19th Century, and many of the regular soldiers were recent migrants, wastrels, or joined up only to desert when they had made it out West. Many of them were not great horsemen, and while their Springfield rifles were mostly reliable, accurate and had a long range, they were single shot (breech-loaded), and most of the soldiers were very poor marksmen, with only 15 practice rounds  per year allocated to each soldier.

The Army had other problems that summer as well: while we all know Custer as a General, that was a brevet rank given during the Civil War, and he had reverted to his substantive rank of Captain on the cessation of hostilities (he again held a brevet rank of Major General at the time of his death, but was a substantive Lieutenant Colonel). He was not the only officer in that situation, and with the size of the army greatly reduced after the Civil War, promotion was difficult to obtain. For a man with Custer's personality, that was hard to take, and he leaped at the chance to battle the Indians with the hope of a jump in his substantive rank. The officer over him, Terry, was aware of his chafing, and gave him a pretty free reign in carrying out his orders, which was not a good idea. In fact communication was a problem for this whole campaign, with Crook's forces severely tested at the Battle of the Rosebud some days before Custer's battle - if Crook had passed on some crucial facts such as the number of enemy gathered in the area, and their firepower, Custer may not have made some fateful decisions on the day of his battle.

And so we come to the 25th of June 1876. Custer and his troops were weary before the day began, desperate for a victory to end their constant marching. With no serious reconnaissance, Custer divided his command before heading out to do battle. The first surprise for Custer was the size of the Indian encampment. The second surprise was that they were standing and fighting rather than fleeing. The third surprise was that Custer's plan to circle around and support Reno was denied him by topography which had not been fully scouted before the plan was formulated. Custer then further divided his forces, refusing it seems to believe that the Indians could and would stand and fight against Army troops. To be fair to Custer he did think support was on its way. But that support was halted before it could get to Custer, with its inexperienced men, and officers not used to what was happening in front of them, both unwilling and unable to bridge the - what now seems almost unbearably short - gap between themselves and Custer's dwindling force.

The end came very quickly for Custer, as the Indians spared no-one, and made sure their bodies were useless in the spirit world by mutilation. This cultural practice made the discovery of the disaster the next day all the more horrific for Terry's men, and for the public as news of the disaster spread. What was to have been a great centennial victory over the savages had turned into a horror story.

Kershaw's description of the Battle is first rate: he has used some up-to-date research and Indian testimony to refute some of the earlier theories on how the battle progressed. His general style is easy to read and informative, and rarely slips into hyperbole. He does however sometimes slip into jargon, most noticeable when he is comparing the Plains Wars to modern warfare, and in particular modern peace-keeping missions. Why he felt he had to do this is a mystery, as in my view it adds nothing to the book, either in helping the reader understand Custer or modern peace-keeping.

This problem is an indicator, yet again, that books published under the Ian Allen umbrella lack a serious editorial presence. Kershaw would have benifitted greatly from that, as his  repetitions of key themes can verge on the tedious (how many times do we have to have explained in detail that the Indians tactics resembled that of a buffalo hunt?). Another criticism that I'd make is that the Bibliography seems a little odd - I'm not sure that it's a full one.

However those criticisms are minor in the wider scheme of this book - if you are interested in Custer and his final days, this book is well worth finding and reading. Recommended.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - The American Civil War by John Keegan

The American Civil War : a military history by John Keegan

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2009                             ISBN 9780307263438


What a strange and disappointing book. John Keegan was a well known military historian; one of his books, The Face of Battle, broke new ground in the description of the experience of fighting, from generals to the humble private. Unfortunately, the book under review does not attain the standard of that earlier work.

I picked up this book after watching the film Lincoln, which I enjoyed immensely. I realised while watching the film that my knowledge of the American Civil War was pretty sketchy at best, so I thought I'd remedy that and Keegan was close at hand.

Keegan calls his book a military history, yet the first description of battle does not appear until the reader is one third of the way through the book. The hundred pages or so before our first taste of battle is filled with a confusing mash of discussion  - a brief and inconclusive foray into the causes of the war, and then a description of the armies involved which actually tells us more about what was going on in Britain at the time rather than America, and a treatise on the "Military Geography of the Civil War", which is simplistic and repetitive.

Repetition is in fact the bane of this book - Keegan is forever jumping forward or backwards in the Civil War chronology to make a point, most annoyingly referencing battles that are yet to occur to illuminate a point about the one he is currently writing about. He continually makes the same points about the advantages and disadvantages of the rivers in the battle areas, and of the railroads. It almost seems as though the chapters of this book are a collection of separate essays that have been brought together, without any editing process.

For a war that had, "By common computation, about 10,000 battles, large and small", the book intersperses the major battles sparsely throughout the text, with much intervening material. The reader gets no feel for how close in time battles might have been to each other, or how wins or losses affected the public at large, apart from brief glimpses.

Once Keegan actually gets on to the fighting, he takes us up to the Fall of Richmond, and then proceeds to wander off the chronological path again, with chapters on Black Soldiers (which restates much he has already stated), the Home Front, Walt Whitman, and chapters on Generalship, Battles, and on whether the South could have survived (which again is a re-hash of earlier sections of the book). Only after this 50 page foray does he get to the final climax of the War, which is then followed by a very strange section which purports to show how the Civil War inoculated the American worker against Socialism!

This book is really all over the place, and the good points - some of the battle descriptions, the pen portraits of the major Generals - are overburdened by the meandering repetitious nature of much of the rest of the book.

The maps are sometimes helpful (although there are not enough of them), and the apparatus is OK (although there are some gaps in the index), but overall, I'd have to recommend not to read this book if you want to be any clearer on the American Civil War. In fact I've found it difficult to write about in any coherent way. One for aficionados - if only to pick holes in.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell