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.