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 28thInfantry.
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.