Alternate Generals II

Tarnished Glory: Custer and the Waffen SS Chris Bunch

More than fifty years have passed since the death of Lieutenant General George Armstrong Custer at the height of the Battle of the Bulge, yet the endless array of books and essays continue, analyzing his life, his flaws, and his downfall.

I think I've read them all, and find none exactly delineate the man the press sometimes called "Gloryhound George."

I think I can say that for I was Custer's chief aide from my discharge from an English hospital in early 1944 until his death, and spent many hours with him, both on and off duty.

Those who actually knew Custer seem to fall into one of two camps-those who think he was one of the great tactical geniuses of the Second World War, whose death was an almost-crippling blow to the postwar United States Army; and those who think he was as dangerous an egomaniac and cold-blooded politician as ever held an officer's commission, and his death was a great blessing that should have come years earlier.

So there is no misunderstanding, I will admit I fall into the latter group, even though I also remember Custer as one of the most charming and charismatic officers I've ever known, let alone served under.

His fatal flaws reach far back into the past, which is where, I'm afraid, most of our virtues and vices are rooted.

I can skip over Custer's early years as a small-town farmer's son, born in 1885, for these are all well known, and how he fought hard for an appointment to West Point, personally appealing to one of his state senators, even though the Custer family was staunchly Republican to the point of leafleting during campaigns, and the senator was a Democrat; and how his father sold their farm to give Custer money to attend the Academy.

Custer's grades in high school weren't particularly prepossessing, and his athletic performance was not that remarkable, although his football team was fairly successful. It's been noted that Custer's quarterbacking was frequently at direct odds from his coach's orders, so George's willingness to follow orders he found convenient and to disobey others came early.

Regardless of political affiliations, Custer was given the choice appointment to the class of 1909. Custer said later that he did very well in certain classes, chose to sleep through others, which gave him his standing near the bottom of his class. This is untrue-allof Custer's grades were uniformly low. He preferred his friends and pranks to his studies, and was generally popular.

At this point, he met what I consider the biggest influence in his life, the now utterly forgotten George Smith Patton, Jr.

Patton, four years older than Custer, was everything George was not. He was from an enormously rich California family, and seemed half centaur, with his string of polo ponies and race horses. He was also most reserved, again the opposite of Custer.

It was said that Patton already had the chill eye of a general, a man who could dispatch men to death without a qualm. Such might have been the case but, like many other officers who die young, that quality was never to be shown.

Custer and Patton made an ideal partnership, each having virtues the other did not, although book studies couldn't be considered a prime virtue for either of them. When they chose to work hard at something, they did very well. But mostly they did not, at least not in what the Academy considered productive. One such time-waster was their swearing competition, each trying to come up with the most colorful and obscene set of oaths. Custer told me that before that began, "I was one of the cleanest-mouthed boys in America. Afterwards… " He shook his head, then brightened. "But it surely stood me in good stead when I was dealing with those mule skinners when we were after Pancho Villa."

Patton had already been dropped a class for failing mathematics in his plebe year. But somehow the pair struggled through the Academy, and were given their lieutenants' bars in 1909. They were both commissioned into the glamorous cavalry, in spite of their low standings. Neither, in spite of accusations and sometimes boasts, was the lowest graduate, the so-called "goat."

They were posted to different regiments, but kept their correspondence fresh. Both men wrote long letters, to each other and, later, to their fiancees and then wives.

Custer took leave twice in Washington, seeking a better assignment than the dusty Western posts he was sent to.

Patton also took leaves, to play polo and, in 1912, to compete in the Stockholm Olympics, in the modern pentathlon, placing a very respectable fourth.

The beginning of the Great War found both of them, like most career soldiers, champing to see combat, worried that somehow the Allies would defeat Germany before they would have a chance at action.

But then revolutionary Mexico surprised everyone. General John J. Pershing, after assorted border outrages by the sometimes-bandit, sometimes-soldier Pancho Villa, took 10,000 men, mostly cavalry, across the border.

Patton's unit managed to trap one of Villa's main generals, General Julio Cardenas, and Patton supposedly killed Cardenas. Or so the story has it.

Custer, on the other hand, claimed that a column he led came "close, very damned close" to Villa himself, even though none of the reports from Pershing's expedition mention it. In any event, Pershing retired back into the United States in a bit under a year, the Mexicans probably chastened a bit if hardly defeated in detail.

Then came the real war, and both men went to France. Patton was an aide to Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, while Custer was assigned to a troop of the Second US Cavalry. Patton asked Pershing for a combat assignment, and was put in charge of the first American tank brigade, as a lieutenant colonel.

He looked up his friend, and told him that horses were doomed. Unless Custer wanted to spend his war like the British cavalry, eternally waiting for a breakthrough in the trenches, he'd go with Patton.

Custer refused.

He told me three times, late, in his quarters, after he'd been drinking, that this was "the biggest damned fool mistake I ever made, and thank God he gave me a chance to change things."

This, by the way, brings up another of Custer's meaningless prevarications. He claimed that he'd gotten drunk once, when a young lieutenant, made an ass of himself, and never touched alcohol again. He was, indeed, piously temperate among civilians and politicians, but would have three or four whiskey-and-waters in the officer's club, although I never saw him more than mildly intoxicated. Why he bothered to tell this lie, other than to further set himself apart in a hard-drinking Army, is beyond me.

At any rate, Patton went on to have "a hell of a war," as Custer described it, gaining respect, medals and recognition. He was badly wounded in the battle of Meuse-Argonne. Custer claimed he visited him in the hospital, just as the great influenza epidemic was beginning.

Patton realized he was dying and, again according to Custer, made him swear to pick up the torch of the newly invented tanks and bring the Army into the Twentieth Century.

Custer, like most liars, couldn't leave well enough alone, and told me he was one of the casket bearers at Patton's funeral. Some years after the Second World War, I happened to see an old photograph of the pallbearers as they carried Patton's casket onto the transport that would take his corpse back to the United States. George Armstrong Custer was not one of them.

His oath to Patton is also suspect because, with the war's end, the tanks were given to the infantry, and Custer, rather than go with them, chose to return to the horse cavalry.

Custer's service between the wars was somewhat undistinguished, although he gained a reputation for not suffering fools gladly. Unfortunately, all too often the fools he wouldn't suffer were his commanding officers or post commanders, and he was constantly in trouble.

However, he saved his career by becoming an intensely political officer, making close friends with high-ranking Republican politicians, or at least as much as a soldier and a politician can be friends.

Needless to say, this did not endear him greatly to his fellow officers. But in the tiny peacetime Army, one learned to keep one's mouth shut, particularly as the Depression roared around the gates of the camps, and the advantages of a civilian career looked very bleak.

Then Custer was chosen for his first staff post, and his behavior changed. Now there was no one smoother, more ready with a colorful story of what it was like "out in the field," or to agree with a superior's opinions. Custer was now considered a man who was headed for the top.

There were also murmurs from his conservative political friends that anyone this handsome and well-spoken might, in time, make an interesting senator or representative.

He married well, to the beautiful and flamboyant Reynolds-tobacco widow Libby Holman. But she was hardly the perfect Army wife, especially in those days, with her loud espousal of such causes, radical to the military, as civil rights, black music and the arts. Their relationship has been written about extensively, particularly considering Holman's suicide in the late 1940s, and I feel no need to invade their privacy, in my speculations, since I never met Libby. I do wonder, if Custer had lived through the war, if the marriage would have survived, given the different directions their lives would almost certainly have taken.

In late 1939, with war again ravaging Europe, Colonel Custer was given a battalion of tanks, although half of them were no more than trucks with signs proclaiming their tracked status.

Then came the huge 1940 war games, in Louisiana, that ended some officers' careers and made others. Custer had been commanded to hold a flanking position for an infantry division's attack. Instead, he led his «tanks» in a long, looping maneuver around the "enemy," and romped through the rear lines, bringing havoc.

The blitzkrieg and the destruction of the Polish army by the Wehrmacht was much in the headlines, and George Armstrong Custer became a bit of a hero, enough so those who muttered about his disobedience or behaving as if he were leading a saber charge did so quietly, especially after Custer was summoned to the White House, congratulated by President Roosevelt, and given his first star.

Two days after Pearl Harbor, Custer was ordered to form the Second "Hell on Wheels" Armored Division, and given his second star.

He took the Second into combat in North Africa. Where other generals hemmed and stumbled, Custer and firebrands like Terry Allen, Lucian Truscott, Ernie Harmon and others smashed into combat as if it was what they'd been born for.

Custer loudly thought just that. He was beginning to become a reporter's darling, always ready with a controversial quote or interesting perspective.

He said he believed in reincarnation (as, interestingly enough, had George Patton). Custer thought he'd been first a caveman, defending his tribe; an infantry commander in ancient Atlantis; a centurion at Cannae; a Crusader in the Holy Land with the Knights Templar; and most recently a subaltern in the Indian Wars, dying when the Seventh Cavalry, under Major Marcus Reno, was wiped out by the Sioux at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

Custer fought the Second Armored like it was a cavalry squadron, hitting the Germans when and where they least expected it. The vastly more experienced German Panzer soldiers were impressed by Custer, dubbed him the "Cavalryman From Hell."

Custer became the best-known general of the African campaign, although there were whispers that he was too ready to fight, taking his tanks and men into head-on assaults when he could have saved many lives by waiting until a flank opened, or until the enemy's intentions were more clear before he attacked.

But he won every battle he fought, and people spoke of "Custer's Luck."

He and General Eisenhower had a few disagreements during that campaign, but nothing serious. Eisenhower made him Commander of the Western Landing Force for the Sicily invasion.

Custer took his Seventh Army north and west, and the Germans and Italians retreated steadily east, toward the Straits of Messina and the short passage across to Italy.

Then Custer almost ruined his career again. He had always been a little loose with his mouth, particularly as his fame grew, and now was more than willing to comment on what he thought of the British Allies-"Our Brit brothers seem to have two speeds, slow and stop."

He and British General Montgomery became bitter enemies when the British forces became stalled at Catania. Custer said, "The only thing good about General Montgomery is that he had the balls to stand up against Churchill at El Alamein until Winnie gave him enough troops to have ten-to-one odds when he finally attacked Rommel. Frankly, he doesn't appear to me to be the bravest of men when he doesn't have those kind of odds on his side."

Eisenhower told him to hold his tongue and attack west, giving him various units for small amphibious landings along the north coast.

In a little over a month, the Seventh Army took Messina. However, almost all the Axis forces managed to escape to the Italian mainland.

Now Custer made his first large-scale rewrite of history. He claimed that he hadn't been able to stop the Germans because Montgomery was moving so slowly, and he knew better than to leave a flank exposed to the Germans.

Also to blame were the new divisions arriving from America-"There's nothing wrong with our fighting boys," he said in an interview. "I just wish their damned generals would get some of their spirit."

In fact, Custer split his forces, trying to not only hold to the coastal route as ordered, but to clear the mountains to the south, the same mountains holding up the British.

The Germans, always masterful in the defense, would fall back, counterattack again and again, ridgecrest by ridgecrest, and Custer's units were badly battered, even as the advance slowed.

But finally the campaign was over, and plans were made for the Italian invasion. Eisenhower, newly named Supreme Commander of Allied Expeditionary Forces, decided he would have enough prima donnas in the Mediterranean, between Mark Clark, Montgomery, other British Generals like Alexander and Leese, New Zealanders like Freyberg, and took Custer with him to England, to prepare for the Normandy Invasion.

In Britain Custer busied himself, building what he called "An Army that's the way it's supposed to be,"-Third Army.

As for me, Captain James Casady…

I'd graduated from the Point in 1942 and ended up as a tank platoon commander in the muddy nightmare as we slogged up the Italian Peninsula toward Rome, in a campaign noted for not just the bravery of the soldiers, but the stupidity of the Allied Commanders.

I had three tanks left when I was ordered to support the Fifth Army's crossing of the Volturno River in October of 1943. Clark and his staff, luxuriating in their villas, never considered that it was raining in the mountains, and all the Italian rivers were flooding.

The Germans held the far bank of the Volturno, and were committed to keeping it. We attacked and attacked again, each time being driven back.

I went forward with my tracks to support a retreating company pinned down in the muddy swamps by a German machine-gun nest. My Shermans' 75mms took care of the Spandaus, and then the Germans unmasked two of their deadly 88mm cannon.

Before I could order a pullback, two of my tanks were hit. I stayed in the open, bringing fire on the 88s, long enough for the infantry and my surviving tankers to get out. I thought I'd gotten away with it, and then the world exploded. The aviation-fuel burning M4 was well, and correctly, known as a "Ronson lighter," lighting up every time.

I was burned badly enough to be evacuated by hospital ship to Britain, where the best burn specialists in the world were. They laboriously rebuilt the skin of my chest, arm and the right side of my face, made me a major and said I could go back to combat duty if I wished.

I did wish. There were still Germans fighting, and I figured I owed them. But instead of being given a company of tracks, I was offered the chance to become one of Lieutenant General George Armstrong Custer's aides. It was, frankly, less of an offer than a command.

A soldier follows orders and so, somewhat dreading things, I reported to Custer's headquarters in April of 1944.

When I met Custer, he was just short of fifty-five years. He was a bit taller than the average, of good build, which he didn't seem to have to work at. Years before, he'd been known for his curly hair, which he wore a little longer than customary in the Army, more like officers of an earlier age. Now, his hair had darkened from blond, and was receding, and he was a bit sensitive about it. He wore a unique hair oil that smelt highly of cinnamon.

He was most friendly and outgoing, and I relaxed a bit, feeling that this assignment might not be as onerous as I'd feared.

I found it odd that Custer kept two pictures of generals on his office wall-one was of Douglas MacArthur, who he'd made friends with through his political friends, the other of himself. But then, most generals are a bit egotistical. Custer was just more so than the others. There was also a third, very small, very battered, sepia-tone print, dimly showing two lieutenants in campaign hats, one grinning at the camera, the other looking most solemn. It was, of course, Custer and George Patton.

Custer drove himself and his men hard, preparing for the invasion. They loved him, with some justification, for he was very solicitous of their welfare, always inspecting mess halls and the tent cities we lived in. He was a holy terror with higher-echelon supply officers, wanting the latest and the best in arms and equipment, and accepting no excuses.

Another reason Custer was popular with the enlisted men was he was hardly a spit-and-polish soldier, unlike some others in the European Theater of Operations. He required only that his men be clean and in good fighting order. Beyond that he cared little what they wore or the arms they carried. The only exception was no one was permitted German uniforms or helmets, for obvious reasons.

He himself, in the field, always wore an old slouch hat, such as the cavalry wore on the border, and a leather belt with the cavalry emblem and an old-fashioned.45 Colt Peacemaker.

His enemies… beyond other, possibly jealous, generals, the British and some Democratic politicians… were all commissioned. I noted, with interest, that some of his bitterest foes were those who'd served under him since the landings in Africa, and took good note of that fact.

One of his divisions, the Fourth Armored, was scheduled for the second wave at Omaha Beach, backing the 28^thInfantry.

Some of Custer's tanks had been modified to be amphibious, given extended exhausts and canvas skirts extending from the hull to the turret, a British invention. Custer thought these tanks would be unlikely to make it to the beach, and cozened and bullied several Landing Craft Tanks with conventional M4 Shermans and M10 tank destroyers as far forward in the landing order as possible. Behind them were larger Landing Ship Tanks with more of the Fourth.

No one could ever slight Custer's courage. He should have stayed on a command ship, as most other generals did, to keep the clarity of distance, at least until D-Day Plus One. Instead, he, and certain elements of his staff, including myself, were aboard one of the LSTs.

As he'd predicted, the amphibious DD (Dual Drive) tanks were almost useless, only a handful making it ashore. The issue on Omaha Beach was very much in doubt, and Custer ordered his tanks in, ahead of the landing schedule.

The Germans had emplaced artillery behind the beaches, and the guns struck at our tanks hard. The sand was littered with smoking, burning Shermans, their crews sprawled in death behind them, or pinned down by the German machine guns.

The day was a blur of incoming artillery, screaming soldiers, chattering MGs, the flat blast of mines. The Navy came in close, bringing direct fire on artillery positions, and the tanks kept pushing on. By dusk, we held the plateau behind the beach, and were reforming to move inland. The casualties, both in tanks and men, were terrible and, later, there were mutterings about Custer's ambition. No one at Normandy on that Sixth of June talked much, then or later, about "Custer's Luck."

Custer rode a tank to the top of the ridge, with me standing on the back deck behind the.50 caliber turret machine gun, watching for snipers. He looked back at the beachhead and the troops swarming ashore, and said in a low voice, "How's that, George?" I pretended I didn't hear.

The lead elements of the Fourth were decimated, almost destroyed, and it took several weeks before they were rebuilt and could join the rest of the Division as it pushed on, into France. Their exploits on D-Day and later gained them the nickname, from the Germans, of "Roosevelt's Butchers."

Then the slow battering began, as we pushed the Germans out of Normandy. Custer seemed almost delighted when Montgomery was handed a bloody nose at Caen, was angry when we went on the defense to give Joe Collins and his Seventh Corps the supplies and reinforcements to take Cherbourg.

The Allies regrouped and, while Omar Bradley's First Army took St. Lo, Third Army was finally unleashed on the right of the Allied Line. We smashed through the Avranches Gap, cleaned Brittany out, then headed south, to the Loire River. Somewhere in the blood and the mud, I got my silver leaves, and Custer was made Lieutenant General.

General von Kluge, under Hitler's direct orders, struck back hard, hoping to isolate the Third Army and wipe it out. We fought them to a standstill, then, with the Canadian and Polish forces, sent them stumbling back, trapping them near Argentan, the famous "Falaise Gap." Our tanks and fighters savaged the cornered Germans in a nightmare of steel and fire.

It was impossible to walk down any road in the area without stepping on German corpses. Allied pilots flying hundreds of feet overhead could smell the stink of the corpses. The statistics were numbing: 50,000 Germans captured, 10,000 dead, and those who survived left their tanks and vehicles behind and walked out. But there were those who sniffed, and said it wasn't enough: «only» one German division had been completely wiped out. Of the twenty others, eleven divisions had to be withdrawn to be rebuilt, and the other nine, including the deadly SS Panzer Divisions, were held on the front and rebuilt as they fought.

There was also our butcher's bill-we took 20,000 casualties, and a cynical journalist said, "as far as I can tell, General Custer is even better than Hitler at killing young Americans."

When Custer heard this, he went into a rage. "Goddamit, Jimmy (a nickname I'd always loathed), what do these shitheels want? First they're pissed that I wasn't able to lock the Krauts up at Messina, now I'm supposed to win this frigging war by myself!

"Next time, the hell with what they want me to do. I'll do it… and go another ten or fifty miles, and there won't be any of these rear echelon second-guessers to piss in my ear.

"I've learned my lesson, Jimmy, learned it well, although I'll bet they're still going to make me pay!

"The way things are going, they probably won't even let me take Paris!"

They didn't. For sensibly political reasons, Custer's Third was kept in pursuit of the retreating Germans, while Free French General LeClerc's Second Armored Division, with the US Fifth Corps in support, was the first to rumble down the Champs Elysees.

Custer was even angrier when Eisenhower gave Montgomery permission to take Antwerp-we were running beyond the range of the French ports we'd captured. That meant the gas that Custer felt should've gone to his tanks, that would've taken him to the Rhine River, went to the British.

Montgomery took Brussels, then Antwerp, but evidently didn't look at his maps and realize the Belgian port was sixty miles from the ocean. That land was firmly held by the Germans, not to be taken until that winter.

Third Army crossed the Meuse River and sat there, out of gas, watching the Germans retreat and then build up defensive positions.

Custer cloaked his bitterness with humor, or what he called humor, and was always on the move, from Command Post to Command Post, cheering his men, telling them they were the best, and the rest of the Allies couldn't, as he said, "… pour piss out of a boot with a 1:50,000 projection map printed on the heel." I wondered how wise this sort of talk was, either for the men's morale or for his own good, but kept silent.

Custer got into the habit of having a nightcap-a cup of strong coffee with cream-with me, and telling me his real thoughts.

He spoke a lot about Patton: "Before I go into any battle, after I make my tentative plan, I always try to figure out what George would've done.

"Poor sorry bastard, to have to die so damned young, only having fought with those boiler-plate tanks in pissyass quantities. I tell you, Jimmy, he would've been in hog heaven if he'd lived.

"Hell, he probably would be where I'm sitting right now if he had."

"And," I once chanced, "where would you have been?"

Custer grinned. "If I was unlucky, I'd be his Chief of Staff. If I was lucky… who the hell knows. Maybe running Fifth Corps.

"Now, that would've made a combination, wouldn't it? Two generals with their eyes on the ball… we'd be in Berlin by now!"

All the Army knew Custer was ambitious, that he would have loved to see Eisenhower and Bradley die in a plane crash and he picked to take over Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force.

But his ambition ran beyond that.

Several times he sat staring at his picture of MacArthur, and musing what would come after the war: "We beat the Krauts by the end of this year, then we'll go to the Pacific, invade Japan, and the war'll be over, except for mopping up, by late 46 or 47, I figure.

"MacArthur comes home covered with glory, and the Party (that always meant the Republicans) will need somebody strong.

"Roosevelt will be dead by then… my friends in Washington say he's hanging on by his fingernails, hoping to see the end of the war… and one of his weak-ass Vice Presidents will take over, and get run for the Presidency in 48.

"Mac goes against him… and he'll need a running mate."

I once said I thought America might be a little sick of following military men around.

"Not a chance, Jimmy," he said. "People get used to doing what they're told, and start liking it. You think they're going to vote for some damned war profiteer if they've got a couple of war heroes on the ticket?" He snorted laughter. "Plus we'll have people like Taft on our side.

"Life'll be interesting then, Jimmy. MacArthur's not exactly a spring chicken, and maybe 1952 will be my year."

He had pronounced ideas on what the postwar world should look like.

"Another reason we'll need another strong man like Roosevelt… except Republican… in the White House is we're going to have to deal with the damned Bolsheviks sooner or later.

"Stalin's our buddy now, because he's killing more Krauts than we are. But the minute peace breaks out, there'll be some hard looks at things.

"We'll have to rebuild Germany and Poland to be able to stand against the Russians first thing. Then we'll have to step in and make sure Italy and France have strong governments.

"Britain? The goddamned Limeys are a thing of the past, and we're going to have to learn that, first thing.

"Naturally, we're going to have to keep a strong Army, once the war's over. Anybody who thinks we'll just go home and bury our heads in the sand like we did after the last war is a fool.

"Just like we'll have to deal with those damned Commies we've got at home. There'll be enough enemies in the world without worrying about being stabbed in the back. We soldiers will know how to give them a short sharp shock. Send those who won't recant back to Russia, like Palmer tried to do, and the muffleheads wouldn't let him."

Listening to Custer and his grandiose plans, I remembered what my father had said: "We should thank the Good God that American soldiers mostly aren't politicians. Politics is nothing but shades of gray, and no soldier worth a hang sees anything in colors other than black and white."

Perhaps being Irish and Catholic gave me a better perspective on Custer's ambitions. I'd grown up hearing enough tales of having British soldiers in Ireland always riding up your lane with their bayonets and torches to shiver at the notion of America putting any political authority in the hands of its military.

Ideas like this, I think, are one reason that Custer has become an icon to the radical conservatives in the Constitutionalist Party. "If only he'd lived…" is something I've heard again and again, and am most tired of.

One thing Custer was not, which many of the racist Constitutionalists would prefer not to hear, was a bigot. He'd never liked serving in the South, seeing the way African Americans were treated and, now, despised the Germans for their treatment of the Jews.

"From what I've heard, the Krauts are trying to kill off all the Jews wherever they go. As soon as the Nazis run up the white flags, we'll have to deal with them.

"I think the Commies have the right idea on what to do with the Nazi Party. We don't need any kind of trials like some people are talking about. Walk 'em all, from Adolf down to the last goddamned SS man, down a corridor, like the MVD does, and put a bullet in the back of their necks and throw 'em in unmarked graves."

I asked if that might not leave Germany a little short of politicians.

"Screw 'em," Custer said. "That's another reason we need a strong army. These AMG units that are hanging about back of the lines… we'll use them to run Krautland for twenty, thirty years, and let the Army train the kids how to think right."

Eventually Eisenhower realized Montgomery'd run his course, and unleashed the American armies. But by then, summer was creaking past, and it was fall before we were closing on the German border.

And Hitler had one great surprise waiting.

In October, we began operations against the Siegfried Line, on Germany's border, and in November Eisenhower ordered the November Offensive, intended to smash all German units west of the Rhine and then cross the great river into the heart of the Nazi homeland.

It was bitter going as the weather grew colder. Ninth and First Armies smashed themselves against the Hurtgen Forest, and even battle-loving Custer told me he was very damned glad none of his divisions had been sent into that frozen hell.

We pushed on, south of the Hurtgen, and by mid-December we'd taken Metz, not thirty miles from the German border.

"Now," Custer rejoiced. "Now, let Ike turn us loose, and we'll bust across the border and have the Rhineland before Montgomery has time to pin his beanie emblems on and have a cup of tea."

The next offensive would take us across the Saar River, into Germany.

And then Hitler moved first.

Twenty-four German divisions, ten of them armored, attacked to the west, through the supposedly tank-impassable Ardennes, on 16 December. At their head was Sixth SS Panzer Army, under Hitler's pet thug, Sepp Dietrich. Hitler's insane orders were to cross the Meuse, then continue on to take Antwerp. Hitler thought this unexpected attack would shatter Allied cohesion, and in the confusion he could find a way to end the war victoriously.

It was nonsense, certainly, but the Germans, as they almost always did, obeyed their orders.

They had utter surprise on their side-Hitler somehow felt German codes were penetrated (they were, of course, by ULTRA, but almost no one knew that). The first wave, eight Panzer divisions, broke the Seventh Corps. The 106^thDivision was destroyed, and the 28^th, one of Custer's former units, broken.

The weather was terrible, and our invincible fighter bombers couldn't get into the air.

The Panzers pushed on, past St. Vith, taking back most of Luxembourg.

Eisenhower threw in his reserve divisions, including the 101^stAirborne, which took and held the road hub of Bastogne.

In the meantime, Sixth SS Panzer moved steadily on to the west, killing civilians and US prisoners as it went.

Eisenhower, after a few befuddled days, put Montgomery in charge of all troops to the north of the «Bulge» the Germans had created.

Eisenhower called a conference at Verdun on 19 December, giving Custer new orders: Take charge of Seventh Corps, and relieve Bastogne.

Custer smiled grimly, and said he'd do it.

Ike appeared unshaken by the German surprise. "I think this is an opportunity for us, actually."

"Exactly, sir," Custer said eagerly. "Let's let them run us all the way back to the Atlantic, then slam the door on the bastards and destroy them in detail. Assuming we've got the nerve."

Eisenhower smiled, a bit frostily. "I have the nerve, and I know you do, as well. But I doubt if anyone in Paris, London or Washington would appreciate it if we did that."

"The other option we could do," Custer went on, unfazed, "is have me keep pushing past Bastogne, right on up until I run into the limeys. Cut off this damned Bulge, and all the Krautheads in it, like it was a boil."

"General," Eisenhower said, "remember your Shakespeare, and the lion hunter who kept thinking about what he'd do with the lion's skin, when the animal was still alive. You just relieve McAuliffe at Bastogne, and then we'll worry about the next step. Understood?"

"Yes, sir," Custer said, but I noted his voice was grudging.

Custer, his assistant Chief of Staff, Colonel Paul Harkins, and I, in the battered old staff car he preferred to a jeep, went back to our headquarters and, the next day, visited seven of his divisions, and told them we were changing the axis of their attack through 90 degrees, moving north against the Germans instead of west.

Custer may have been a braggart, but there have been very few generals who could turn 350,000 men in a single day without panic and utter confusion, which he'd done.

"I wonder what Patton would think of that," he said, as we pulled into his headquarters at Nancy. I was bone-exhausted, but he seemed untouched by the day's freezing weather and the bouncing miles over icy, rutted dirt roads.

"Now," he said gleefully as he bounded up the steps toward his quarters, "now we'll see what we shall see about that famous next step."

I managed a salute, told the driver we were through for the night, reported our return to one of his staff officers, and fell into my sleeping bag across a camp cot, knowing I'd have to be awake and alert before dawn the next morning.

One of my unspoken duties was to keep Custer and the press separated, especially when Custer was either bouncy or angry, for that was when he wasn't as careful with his words as he should be.

The next morning, I was getting Custer a cup of coffee and a croissant from a basket an old Frenchwoman had brought to us. It was black outside, with flurries of snow tapping on the windows. I thought of the poor bastards who were out there on the line, crouched in icy foxholes, looking for movement, waiting for a bush to turn into an SS man in a white camouflage cape, aiming a burp gun at them.

I was starting out of the general's mess with my tray when Colonel Harkins hurried in. He was angry and upset.

"Good morning, sir."

"I'm not sure if it is or not. I just got a call from Beetle Smith, and he's pissed."

I waited. Major General Walter Bedell Smith was Eisenhower's Chief of Staff.

"Last night our noble boss, after we thought he was headed for bed, ran into Ed Kennedy of Associated Press."

"Uh-oh," I said.

"Uh-oh is right. He told Kennedy what he said to us last night, about turning almost half a million men around. And then he kept talking. He hopes that Ike can hold the course, and not let his mind get changed by the next general he talks to… good thing Omar the tentmaker Bradley didn't get this assignment, or it'd be spring before he started moving… Montgomery's in the right spot, being the anvil and sitting on his ass, rather than having to figure out how to maneuver.

"Naturally, Kennedy called SHAEF to get comments on what General Custer said, and naturally the shit has hit the fan.

"Beetle said that Ike's about as angry as he'd ever seen him, and told me that Custer had better pull this one off in roses, or his ass is liable to be running a replacement depot in Scotland somewhere."

"Oh brother," I managed.

"Now, the question I've got," Harkins went on, "is, do we tell Custer?"

I thought about it.

"I don't think so, sir," I said. "I know Kennedy pretty well. He's a good man and won't hold back his story, and there's no way we can change what he said."

"That's what I thought," Harkins said. "And we've got a battle to fight, and our George needs to have a clear head and not worry about other things. Go take the General his coffee."

Custer was awake, and in his comfortable, if rather civilian, fur-lined pants and knee-top boots. There were maps pinned on the walls, with arrows and markings. I glanced at one, which had Bastogne in its center, and saw, with a sinking feeling, that the arrows went on beyond the besieged city.

Custer saw my expression.

"Now's our chance, Jimmy. I'm tired of taking pissant chances, when there's a war to be won here! Hitler's got his ass out there in the wind, wiggling at us, and we're going to run a division or two right up it, and see what he thinks of a little blitzkrieg himself!"

"Yes, sir," I said neutrally, thinking that, with what he'd told the reporter, this could either be the icing on the cake, or else Custer's salvation. Oh well, I thought. I'd always been curious to see the lochs and if I'd look good in a kilt.

"Look," Custer said, and took me to another map, very large-scale, that was a little less scrawled than the others. I decided this showed his final battle plan.

"Bastogne here," he said, pointing. I nodded. "And look at all these little roads to the west. I'll bet a good man, like Bill Roberts, could push CCB through them. All that he'd be facing are those punks of Fifth Parachute Division, who haven't fought worth sour owl crud so far."

"Little roads are right, sir."

"If the goddamned Heinies could do it to start this mess, so can we."

We'd fallen into the practice of setting up Combat Commands within a division, composed of armored infantry, tanks, tank destroyers, engineers, and so forth, each able to fight independently.

"Yessir," I said skeptically.

"We put Tenth Armored over here, to the west of Bastogne, heading up the road from Neufchateau.

"Then you and I ride with CCR and CCA straight on up the Martelans road to Bastogne. We relieve the Battlin' Bastards of Bastogne, link up with CCA and the Tenth north of the city, keep going north and give the Sixth SS a big fat bite in the ass.

"They should be running low on gas, and if we hit 'em hard, immobilize 'em, then we can tell Ike to get Monty off his butt and come on down to finish them off.

"Or maybe," Custer said, and he licked his lips, "we'll be able to hit them hard enough so there won't be anything for Monty to police up.

"I'd like that. I'd like that a lot.

"Plus I've got a little plan to keep anybody from screwing the deal up for us, like the Brits did last time around by hanging on to all the gas."

I looked at the map carefully. I could see Custer's temptation. If all went perfectly, there was a chance we'd not only relieve Bastogne, but break the back of the German offensive. Without the SS Panzers, the rest of the Germans, name-only paratroopers and volksgrenadier units made up of recruits and middle-aged men for the most part, could well fall apart.

If everything went perfectly.

In war, nothing goes perfectly.

But lieutenant colonels, if they wish to stay at their present rank, aren't recommended to tell lieutenant generals that they are, in the words of the popular song of the time, "Wishing on a Star."

"Call the staff, Jimmy. I want the troops in the saddle by noon."

We were, in a driving snowstorm, wheeled vehicles skidding in the slush and ice. At least no one was afoot. The infantry was either in 6x6 trucks, halftracks or on the backs of tanks. That sounds grim, but the rear deck of an M4 Sherman, with its gridded ventilation ducts, is a lot warmer than a lot of other places.

Custer's secret was that he'd gotten every gasoline tanker that Third Army had filled to the brim, and following us in a guarded convoy. If I felt sorry for the men in the foxholes, I felt doubly so for those incredibly brave drivers in the thin-skinned tankers with no armor, thousands of gallons of explosive fuel behind them, and no protection except an occasional ring-mounted antiaircraft machine gun above the cab.

Custer's driver ditched the staff car after five miles, and we stopped an M20 armored car, and squeezed into the open troop compartment. The rest of the staff was, sensibly, already riding halftracks to our rear.

We were moving fast, almost five miles an hour when we could, and the roadblocks the Germans threw up were smashed aside.

The weather got worse, but we kept moving. It became a pattern: make contact, the infantry drop off and move forward under covering tank or tank destroyer fire, smash the strong point, remount and move on.

But each time, there were a few less infantrymen and tanks. The stink of burning men and tanks pulled at my nostrils as we'd pass some motionless figures in olive drab, blood staining the snow beside them.

We went on until dusk, made crude laagers, ate half-frozen K rations, stayed on 50 % alert, started off again before dawn.

CCA and CCR were moving steadily, but Tenth Armor was running into trouble from the Panzer Lehr division and, to our east, CCB was not only having trouble with the icy, narrow tracks, but Fifth Parachute Division had suddenly changed their style, and were fighting like German paratroops had on other fronts.

But, slowly but surely, we ground west, toward Bastogne.

To our north, the Sixth SS Panzer Army's offensive was bogging down against tough stands by Custer's old commands, the Second Armored and the Fourth Infantry. Its general, Sepp Dietrich, was plaintively asking Hitler for permission to turn south, and find another way toward the Meuse and Antwerp.

And the Panzers were running low on fuel…

I've made my dislike for Custer clear, but I'll never forget, on Christmas Eve, his giving me a tiny bottle of schnapps someone had liberated in one of the villages we passed through. I tucked it in my parka, determined to drink it when we relieved Bastogne.

On the day after Christmas, we broke through, and the 101^stand the other, less famous but equally hard-fighting units, were safe.

Custer ordered us to stay the night and refuel and rearm. He hoped that CCB and the Tenth would join us the next day, but they were still being held back by stiff German resistance, the roads and the weather.

Colonel Harkins asked if we shouldn't hold in Bastogne until the other two columns reached us.

Custer thought for a moment, then shook his head.

"We stooge around here, and sure as hell Ike'll hear about my plan and pull the plug.

"No, Paul. We move out at dawn."

"The roads look pretty terrible, General."

"I've got confidence in my boys," Custer said. "They've done okay so far on the cowpaths. The Tenth and CCB should link up with us…" and he checked his map "… at this place called Houffalize, if not sooner."

Custer had gotten away with splitting his forces in Sicily and, so far, here. But luck only holds for so long.

And so we were on the road at dawn, Colonel Creighton Abrams' 37^thTank Battalion on point. I drank my little bottle of schnapps before we moved. I wonder if I sensed something, and figured I'd better drink it then, rather than not be able to drink it at all.

That day, heading toward Foy and on north, was a horror as we moved past burned-out US vehicles abandoned in the retreat toward Bastogne when the battle began, and saw the unburied bodies of our soldiers scattered everywhere, and the destruction of the farms and villages on either side.

I'll never forget seeing a jeep, parked beside the road. Its driver was turned to his passenger, a colonel, who held a map in his lap, possibly asking for instructions. But both of them were headless, the Panzerfaust that had blown the jeep's engine out neatly guillotining the two.

German resistance was light, but determined, and we drove them back from the roads into the snowy wasteland.

"Another two days, maybe three," Custer promised, "and we'll be hanging some SS scalps on the lodge pole."

For the first time since Sepp Dietrich had joined the Nazi Party and the SS, in 1928, he disobeyed an order of Hitler's. He ordered his Sixth Panzer Army to turn south, toward Bastogne.

Custer's feared presence on the battlefield, and his reaching Bastogne and continuing his attack had been reported by German scouts. Dietrich decided he couldn't chance having the mad cavalryman in his rear. No one knows if he heard of the pot-sweetening convoy of tankers trundling along behind CCA.

His decision, and disobedience, was reported to Hitler in Berlin. The Fuhrer went into one of his typical screaming rages, then quieted, and examined the map.

"No," he is reported to have said. "Perhaps my Sepp is right in this. Perhaps, when he smashes the American Third Army, takes whatever fuel they might have, and then renews the attack… perhaps this might be the real surprise that turns the tide."

Of course, he didn't communicate his semi-approval to Dietrich. Hitler never admitted he might be wrong.

The SS was on the move-four armored divisions, about 30,000 men, First SS Panzer "Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler," Second SS Panzer "Das Reich," Ninth SS Panzer "Hohenstauffen," and Twelfth SS Panzer "Hitler Jugend," plus one division of paratroopers, Third Parachute Division.

They were heading south, toward us… and we didn't know it.

The first sign of trouble was in a nameless little village. We took fire from well-positioned heavy machine guns and some light cannon. The infantry came off the tanks, and started forward, using the shattered building walls for cover.

Then three Panthers ground into sight. They'd been hiding, hull down, in a covert just below the village, a scattering of panzergrenadiers covering them. Two Shermans exploded as they opened fire, then an M10 blasted one and a second with its 90mm. The third German tank had time to reverse back for cover, and somebody hit its turret in the rear with a bazooka round. The round exploded, doing little damage, and the Panther was gone. The German soldiers were quickly gunned down by our machine gunners, and scouts darted forward to check the bodies.

In a minute, Custer's radio cracked.

"Curly Six, this is Arrowhead Six."

Curly Six was Custer's call sign, Arrowhead Six Abrams.

"This is Curly Six," Custer said.

"Those troops who just hit us were SS," Abrams said. "They've got the sleeve tabs of the Twelfth Division."

The troops of Hitler Jugend Division were known for their ruthlessness, as well as suicidal fanaticism in combat. And, as far as we knew, they were supposed to be miles away, to the northeast.

Custer looked worried, told Abrams to push on, then ordered his commo officer to make contact with Tenth Armored and CCB. "Tell them hubba-hubba one time," Custer said. "The game's afoot."

We went on, the road winding past small farms and fields. To show how memory is tricky, I remember it being deathly quiet, with the only sound the low rumble of engines and the ominous grinding of treads on the frozen ground, but of course this is absurd. There would have been shouts, the occasional blast of gunfire as a machine gunner reconned some building he wasn't sure was empty by fire, the crackle of radios and other sounds of an army on the move.

We approached another village, little more than a dirt crossroads with a scattering of walled farmhouses around it, trees not yet torn apart by shellfire around the farmhouses.

The land opened on the other side, climbing through virgin snow to trees and a second group of buildings that appeared abandoned.

Then German 88 shells exploded around us, too fast for us to hear their approach, greasy black against the snow.

"Son of a bitch," Custer said. "They're up there, in those buildings."

Foot soldiers were coming off the tanks, finding any cover available. More 88s came in, airbursts in the trees, and I saw men pirouette, go down, be scattered like bowling pins. Inexperienced soldiers went flat, experienced ones stood close to the trees, giving a narrow target to the overhead bursts.

Abrams didn't need any orders. He put the 37^thon line, and the M4s went up the hill, men stumbling through the deep snow behind the tanks.

There was another explosion… a 75mm, I think… against the brick wall our armored car sat beside. The driver stood up, turned back to us without a face, fell dead, and the engine died.

"Unass this pig," Custer shouted, and the surviving crew obeyed.

A staff halftrack rumbled toward us, Paul Harkins standing next to the driver. An 88 drilled through its engine compartment, and Harkins vanished in the blast. Flames rose out of nowhere, and a Panther rumbled from behind a barn, smashed over the halftrack toward us.

A self-propelled gun had a clear field of fire, and put a 105mm shell into the Panther's belly, and it exploded.

"They're in a damn' minefield," Custer shouted, and I looked upslope, and saw explosions, men falling, a Sherman's track rolling, like a huge rubber band, back downhill as the tank flamed up.

There were men pushing, shoving, some trying to get forward to fight, others to get the hell out of the way. A man screamed, the scream abruptly cut off, as a tank backed over his legs.

Custer ran for an M4, pulled himself up on the deck, grabbed the track commander's mike, got through to the command net.

He gave swift orders-bring the road units up on line, and support Abrams.

"Get those damn' SP guns up here," he ordered.

Custer had a tight smile on his face, was clearly enjoying himself.

I would have thought there was nothing left to burn in this ruined village, but flames crackled, and greasy smoke boiled down the lanes.

Another scream came, this one in terror, and a King Tiger, the Germans' biggest tank, rumbled slowly toward us, tearing the barn it'd hidden in apart.

Its huge 88mm cannon slammed, and a Sherman blew up, turret spinning high into the air, then crashing down on a group of machinegunners.

I was on the Sherman's deck, beside Custer, as he ordered the tank commander to take the Sherman behind a house, and come back in on the Tiger's rear.

The TC obeyed, and the front horns of our tank crashed into the ancient stone of the building, pulling it toward us. I ducked behind the turret, saw, falling from an upstairs window, an old woman in white. She was screaming, waving her arms, but the air wouldn't hold her, and she fell in front of our tank.

The Sherman ground over her, leaving a patch of blood and entrails in the slush, and we were around the corner and could see the Tiger's stern.

"Don't miss," Custer advised. Our tank fired its 75mm cannon, the shell going just over the Tiger's turret. The gunner corrected, and his second shell hit the turret at its base. The Tiger lurched, then smoke poured out. Machine-gun fire chattered from the street as our infantry took care of the crew.

"Good boy," Custer shouted. "Now, let's go get those cannon that're giving Abrams a hard time."

We moved forward, into the open again, and I looked up the slope. The 88s up there weren't cannon, or even SP guns, but more Tiger tanks.

A handful of Abrams' tanks scuttled back toward us, through the smoldering ruin of ten, no, fifteen, M4s on the slope, and the attacking infantry was tumbling back down the hill.

But we had bigger, closer problems. SS soldiers were streaming into the street, and the battle was suddenly swarming hand-to-hand. There was no order, no organization, just a swirling mass of fighting, killing, dying soldiers, Germans and Americans intermingled.

Two Americans sprawled, hit by submachine-gun fire, and an SS man running past them paused, and put a deliberate burst of Schmeisser fire into them.

I was at the.50 on the tank, and cut the bastard in half, swung the big machine gun and slashed through a formation of his fellows.

There was another Tiger coming through the smoke behind the bodies, its commander in the open hatch. Our gunner fired, and his cannon shell hit the solid forward plate of the Tiger, ricocheting off as the Tiger fired.

It took us in the bow, and I was flipped backward off the Sherman as it slewed to a halt, smoke wisping from its hatches.

I looked around for Custer, saw him as he jumped off the side of the destroyed tank, the tank commander's Thompson gun in hand.

"Come on, George," I heard him shout… I think.

The Tiger's turret swung toward him as Custer fired, and the German tank commander slumped. Custer staggered, and an SS officer came from behind the tank, submachine gun firing.

Custer's tommy gun was empty, and he clawed out his antique.45 six-gun, and shot the German down.

Another bullet hit him, and he turned, lifting his pistol, as the monstrous Tiger turret swiveled on him.

Insane, goddamned insane, and he fired at the tank, completely unafraid, and the Tiger's coaxial machine gun chattered, and Custer sprawled in the mud.

The turret swung, looking for another target. I saw a dead panzergrenadier in a doorway, his Panzerfaust beside him.

I ran to it, not letting myself look, not letting myself see that huge turret aim at me.

I had the Panzerfaust, spun, didn't need to aim, pulled down on the firing lever, and nothing happened. I was very calm, able to look down the 88mm barrel as I realized the rocket launcher still had the safety clip in, yanked it out, and pressed the lever down again.

The rocket hit the driver's slit, exploded into the Tiger's interior, and the blast knocked me back into the ruined house. There was no smoke, no flame, only a blackened hole on the front of the Tiger, but it was dead.

I ran to Custer's body. He was very dead, most of his upper body missing from the machine-gun bullets. Rounds whistled past my head, and I grabbed his pistol, rolled twice, saw an M1 rifle in the street, had it and dropped the German who was busy reloading his Mauser for another shot at me.

Then I was up, limping, not knowing when or how I'd been hit, moving back. I shoved Custer's pistol in my belt, found a bandoleer of ammo, shoved clips into the M1, fired when I saw a field gray target.

We pulled back, out of that village, as more and more German tanks, SP guns, and halftracks rumbled toward us along the country lanes.

Custer's luck had finally run dry.

More than Custer's CCA and CCR took a beating that day and the next few. The Tenth Armored Division was bloodied by Second SS Panzer, and CCB was hit hard by First SS Panzer. We couldn't hold, but fell back on Bastogne, Dietrich's Sixth Army on our heels.

They captured our fuel tankers for desperately needed gas, came on.

The 101^stAirborne and its allied units, the bravest of the brave, could only take so much after the siege. The SS hit them hard, and the Division shattered.

They were forced to break up, and escape and evade. There were about 15,000 men still in and around Bastogne. Of those, 8,000 were captured, 3,000 were casualties, and the rest escaped in ones and twos.

Most of the officers, including the acting commander, General McAuliffe, were killed or captured.

In addition to General Custer, Third Army lost General Gaffey, Colonel Abrams, Colonel Harkins, and other fine officers.

Other units in the Bulge were hit very hard, particularly Ninth Division. Its command post was overrun, and the Division Commander, General Craig, and the promising Chief of Staff, Colonel Westmoreland, were killed.

However, Custer's arrogance and disobedience may have actually shortened the war.

Sixth SS Panzer, and other units around Bastogne, including Panzer Lehr and the Fifth Parachute Division, turned northwest again, toward the Meuse, and there was almost no one to stop them.

But then the weather broke, and the Royal Air Force Tempests and American Army Air Force Mustangs went after the German supply lines around St. Vith.

Custer was not the only one who remembered the «mistake» at Falaise. Montgomery noted the extended German lines, and brought the 21^stArmy Corps down, and other American units stopped the SS in their tracks.

Now there would be no suggestion of escape. Tactical air swept the roads and forests, and almost all of the German Panzers and their transportation, support and artillery were destroyed.

Sepp Dietrich was killed in one air raid, and his replacement, Herman Priess, ordered the remnants of the army to fall back toward Germany, in spite of Hitler's raving. But the soldiers trudging through the snow still fared badly.

There were fragments of the 101^stin the forests, and they tore at the Nazis like wolves, getting the last drop of bloody revenge. More than ten Germans moving in a group were asking to be strafed.

Of the twenty-four German divisions ordered into the Watch On Rhine offensive of the Bulge, all were obliterated, and their names stricken from the German rolls. Only a few thousand of the Germans who marched west ever came back to Germany. While not as disastrous as the collapse of Army Group Center in Russia, this debacle definitely shortened the war.

German losses were over 120,000; American just under 100,000.

Other effects of Custer's disaster are fairly well known.

Montgomery, who was almost as incautious in his words as Custer, commented loudly and repeatedly on how, once again, it took the few British divisions in the ETO to save the Allies.

That was the final straw for Eisenhower. He declared it was either Monty or him. Roosevelt went to Churchill, who reluctantly relieved Montgomery. However, Eisenhower was forced to resign as well, and Omar Bradley became Supreme Commander.

There are those historians, particularly recently, who see the effect of Custer's death ranging even further.

They blame Custer for the 1948 Republican presidential debacle, when Vice President Harry S. Truman and his running mate, Omar Bradley, demolished Senator Dewey and Eisenhower.

Still further, they say this positioned Bradley to run in 1952, when he publicly shamed the Republican candidate, Eisenhower, for not squelching the ultraconservative right for, among other things, calling Eisenhower's mentor, General Marshall, a Communist.

This sparked Taft, McCarthy and others of their ilk to flee the party to form the Constitutionalists, and shatter the Republicans so badly that, from Roosevelt's era to the turn of the century, only one Republican has gone to the White House, and that for a single term.

Perhaps.

But I think not.

I don't think any single man can affect history that deeply. Even if Custer had not been in the position he was, and, say, George Patton had lived to see the Second World War, and there had been no disaster in the snow, I don't think matters would have been changed that much.

History, in spite of the popular phrase, is, in fact, a rather constant jade.