i find it ironic that none of this would have happened if Custer had not split his command... so lets don't be too hard on his officer's. the hero of the day seems to be Sitting Bull
Frankly, I'd like to know the rest of the 3 column's make up, Terry, Crook ,and Gibbons. Terry detached the 7 th, what all did he have left ? I've seen different counts.
Por lo que he visto, el general Custer era un hombre inteligente, arriesgado cuyas órdenes no se discutían, aparentemente el único problema en esta batalla fue la falta de información precisa, pues se nota que no tenía ni idea de contra cuántos valientes nativos iba a enfrentarse, eso fue lo que influyo en la derrota del general, cuando se dio cuenta ya era demasiado tarde, lógicamente los nativos tenian la razon en todo lo concerniente a su territorio, los soldados solo obedecen ordenes aunque no les parezcan justas algunas situaciones.Es de admirar la lealtad de muchos hombres del general, y más de admirar la de los nativos que estaban en desventaja tanto en armamento como en tácticas de guerra, que los militares estudiaban en renombrados colegios Como dijo un hombre sabio -El respeto al derecho ajeno, es la paz-,pero el dinero , el poder, la codicia, nos vuelve irracionales.
I would have got the party started at ford D And had Myles Keogh take Reno’s place for the village charge at Reno’s crossing with 3 companies and instructed them to go THROUGH THE WHOLE VILLAGE…. if Custer was so hell bent on a full on charge through the village …why did he not do it himself ?
Trying to piece the fight together, it goes by Indian testimony.Every Commander makes mistakes. We learn from the mistakes made.Custer had to do something. Yates moved to Ford B. Indians then Surrounded Custers men. Benteen and Reno said they did not hear the shooting. At Calhoun Hill, They were low on ammunition. Custer divided his command again. The warriors focused their attention on the wings of the command. At Battle Ridge, the Keough Wing was being squeezed. There is some discussion on what happened at Deep Ravine.Company’s E And F at Last Stand Hill, were running in all directions. Soldiers were desperate. Soldiers were running for their lives. There was no cover. Deep Ravine fighting was not the end.
Pictures of Crazy Horse?? Photographers of that time asked him to pose for them but he answered "Why would you want to steal my shadow?" Such widom! Check your old albums or your own electronic photo files & reflect upon the unreality of your own "shadows." "shadows
I have a lot to say about the battle & like many of the commentators & video presenters I too am an amateur. I'm just starting to dig into Gardner's ...All That Lasts book & it's a hefty read. The first thing I did was check his index & was dismayed to find that he makes no entry for Robert Utley & this is a serious omission! It may have been 15 yrs. ago that I read his book ...The lance & Shield... Which to this day represents a touchstone for me & unlike the rest of us amateurs is a respected historian. I take exception to your treatment of the principle actors in this compelling drama: especially regarding Benteen & Reno. It's Nearly impossible for us to imagine Reno's command facing the on slot of warriors charging them. Dismounted their command would have been wiped out! His scramble into the bushes, across the river & up the imbankment saved at least some of his men's lives. Benteen made a cascading number of stupid decissions, halts & misconceptions. As for Custer's 'hurry' the bottom of West Point's class had only one strategy " Charge." This was summed up as"Custer's Luck." The presidental election was to be held next month in July & The Republicans had nominated him as their leader. Yeah! he was in a big hurry. Vainglorious, impetuous and disreguarding of how many men he would. I'll leave it at that... Warriors charging Reno's command
They are still buried in the ravine. The burial detail that arrived later knocked large chucks of earth down upon the bodies for a hasty burial. Afterwards, rainstorms came through, bringing more earth down upon them. By the time all the other bodies were exhumed for the mass burial, I assume the bodies in deep ravine were under so much earth it was decided to leave them where they were.
Can’t help but think that if old Reno had thrown up a proper rear guard and not ferociously charged away like a scalded cat the battle may have turned out very differently.
Being a Vietnam War veteran I saw first hand the awful mistakes and their results first hand. Not having senior military involved in planning by non professional politicians is unexcusable. Still true today.
Read "With Custer on the Little Bighorn" by William O. Taylor........Custer was a fool and a martinette. Bloody Knife was right......there were enough Indians to keep Custer fighting for two or three days.
I ran across your channel by accident and really like your content. Not many people would put in the work you do so kudos for that. My wife and I took a vacation to Yellowstone in 1998 and I had the opportunity to see the Little Bighorn site and tour a little. We left Yellowstone and came back through Coty and Buffalo. Made a short trip to the Black Hills and Deadwood. We were so taken with the area we did another tour with my son and two grandsons in 2022. That was the flood at Yellowstone so we went to Glacier instead. Great trip. I'm an amateur history buff, mostly Civil War but some others including the Little Bighorn. I'm a Vietnam Veteran and served 5 years in the 1/155 armored bde in a mech infantry unit. So glad I found your channel. I apologize for writing a book.
September 2024 - Sorry, but way too many pre-video ads to wait on to see your videos. Looking for other sources. Glad I looked at a few before RU-vid embedded non-blockable ads. Good luck.
Hello from Omaha, home of the HQ Dept of the Platte at Fort Omaha and Ft Crook, located inside Offutt AFB. One of my Air Force coworkers is a decendant of Red Cloud. Excellent presentation as always.
The SS were just SCUM and that’s that! The atrocities that they committed were disgusting and therefore forfeited their right to remembered throughout history…They were not soldiers, they were murderers.
Hey TDM, thank you for the strategic details from the high-level ideas of leaders to the low-level details of the ground; many videos only present the blow-by-blows. One improvement for almost all videos is guided by the rule: if you mention a place, mark it on the map. Most videos violate this and display near-useless map images that cannot orient the audience. The app 'Snag-It' is an industry-standard for quickly modifying images.
A “victory dance” while dressed in foreign clothes, riding foreign horses adorned with foreign saddles, speaking English, entertaining foreigners. It’s kinda like Germans celebrating the day France surrendered.
Regardless of whatever criticisms people may have about Custer, Reno, and Benteen and the decisions they made, it's the tactical disadvantages that stick out to me. This was not Virginia, Tennessee, or Georgia and they were not fighting the CSA. The US military should have upgraded its cavalry doctrines that would have made them better suited to engagements in open areas against this new enemy. Natives were not organized, and every warrior fought independently. Many were also mounted and very skilled at fighting while on horseback. What good is a dismounted group of troopers in a skirmish line when warriors are swarming in from every direction, using their repeating rifles to full advantage over those single shot Springfields. Gibbon and Terry were better armed, but they did not arrive until the fight was over. And note that General Terry expressed disbelief that so fine a regiment could be wiped out, but it was Terry himself that had headed the military committee that adopted the single shot Springfield as the standard issue rifle. What a fateful choice that was when you consider how outgunned the soldiers were against repeating rifles. It's interesting to note that after this, the US Army included Hotchkiss guns with future expeditions to make sure they did not suffer this same disadvantage again.
I've seen other maps of Reno's initial skirmish line superimposed on current day maps and it cuts across the present day freeway. Wondering why there are no markers down by the river, there must have been casualties in that initial engagement?
When Reno realized they had "bitten off more than they could chew," that was the moment that exposed at least two fatal flaws. The first was out-dated cavalry tactics by ordering his men to dismount and form a skirmish line. If he had ordered his troops to stay mounted and withdraw to a more defensible location, Reno could have saved a lot of the men lost to that skirmish line. As it was, the skirmish line was ineffective against highly mobile, mounted warriors. I realize that ordering troops to dismount and form lines was the military doctrine of the day, but therein lies the problem. The US military had not assessed the new demands placed on their cavalry units in open country against a new enemy. The dismount and skirmish doctrine was fine during the civil war when facing opposing armies formed into units much like your own. But in the open Dakota and Montana territories, they faced natives that swarmed, fought independently, and presented a threat from multiple directions. The US army needed a new doctrine for defense in open country, and it needed troops trained to fight from their horses to keep them on equal terms with the native warriors. The second flaw exposed by this engagement was the difference in firepower between the US troops and the warriors. The single shot Springfields were a poor match for warriors carrying repeating rifles. The trapdoor was adopted for two reasons - it was cheaper to manufacture and it had a longer range than a repeating rifle. But on this day, mounted warriors carrying repeaters closed the distance and were able to pour withering fire into the ranks of the troops while they struggled to reload their single shooters. In a bit of irony, it was General Alfred Terry who headed up the military selection board that adopted the 1873 Springfield, and it was Terry himself who was the senior commander of the Centennial Campaign, and his two other columns were the first to arrive and discover that Custer and his men had been wiped out. Reno made his own mistakes, but I don't think Reno deserves as much criticism as he received in the aftermath. First, it was Custer who ignored the warnings of his native scouts that a large number of combatants awaited them. For him to hear that report and still order Reno to take a relatively small force headlong into the village was sheer madness. Reno had even less men after they were forced into a panicked retreat, so any attempt to re-organize or charge was never going to work.
Custer's battle sequence can accurately be described as (1) ignoring intelligence reports (2) wrongfully sending inferior forces into a superior force (3) being forced into a panicked retreat (4) dying in an overwhelming counter attack. Custer was NEVER in this fight. There was nothing heroic about it. It was a case of incompetent leadership and suffering the consequences. The rest is just legend that grew out of the public's need for a story of bravery and valor.
Here are the really only important things to know: 1. Custer was trying to abduct the women, children and elderly to use as shield and is without any HONOR 2. Custer killed himself with his own 41 caliber revolver 3. He was not heroic… he was definitely self serving
Benteen and renos actions are irrelevant to the fate of Custer imo. Even if Reno had defended the timber longer, what would the bulk of the warriors have done once Custer was seen at medicine coulee? A small Indian contingent could have pinned reno down, and reno was no longer a unit capable of attack and spooked. The Indian families were already gone. Benteen adapted to the evolution of the battle and size of enemy and shattered renos command. The KEY point is the decision making of Custer (or whoever was in command thereafter) after reaching medicine coulee. Plan A was off. Custers units were not instantly shattered moments after. They formed into skirmish lines on the hills, they split further, they tried to take hostages at the final crossing - new plan A(2). Same plan, new location, split and reduced forces, further away from Reno/benteen, and ravines allowing Indians to move behind his positions. At medicine coulee, on seeing the size of the village, the sharp defence, on hearing from his scouts Reno was in trouble, Custer had two options. Win a victory and personal and political glory with Plan A(2), or retire and adopt a defensive posture, reunite his regiment, help Reno and wait for help - Plan B. In his mind, he might have thought ending the battle by capturing hostages Plan A(2) further up the river might have eased the pressure on Reno. But if this was not in his mind, then Plan A(2) was truly dreadful. If it was in his mind then it was daring and heroic but a last throw of the dice, that if it failed was not going to go well with exhausted horses as he would be fatally cut off from the rest of his regiment. In retrospect, if Benteen had mustered even a feint or diversion attack over weir point with the intention of falling back to their defences, it might have given some of Custers men a fighting chance to escape, albeit it feels unrealistic that any of them would have got out. Custer had ridden too far away from his regiment for them to give support. He should have adopted Plan B but that was not in his personality and neglected his private needs.
Attention should be focused on the job performances by the Crow & Arikara scouts. I mean, here we have about 30-40 Indian scouts in advance of the command feeding them intelligence on terrain and alert Gen. Custer of a massive village of hostile Indians but they decide it’s not their fight and sit it out as spectators. Custer orders Cpt Benteen and his 125 men left oblique on a wild goose chase into desolate no-man’s-land on a valley search. Benteen was smart and brave to work his way back to the main trail contra Custer orders. He barely arrives in time to save the remnants of Maj. Reno’s survivors. Together they fought Indians on the 25th, 26th until Col. Gibbons arrived from the west. BTW he wasn’t fighting Indians, what took him so long? And too, down south Gen. Crook has one battle at Rosebud, gets routed by Crazy Horse, then decides he’s had enough fighting (~6hrs), retreats, parks his force and goes vacation fishing. So when Benteen receives his infamous contradictory order (C’mon on , be quick. Bring packs -ammunition- P.S. bring packs.) what’s he to do? He helped Reno. Let’s recognize Benteen’s smarts and heroism. Truly.
