D-Day by Stephen E Ambrose

Rating: WORTHY!

This is the second of Ambrose’s books I’m reviewing. The first was called Crazy Horse and Custer wherein he attempted to show that the two leaders at the Battle of the little big Horn led parallel lives and he failed in doing so in my opinion. He does a better job, fortunately confined to a single chapter in this volume, in showing the parallel lives of Erwin Rommel and Dwight Eisenhower.

This book describes events leading up to, and the execution of the D-Day landings on June 6th, 1944 in the effort to retake Europe from Hitler’s entrenched Wehrmacht. The Nazis had swept through Europe with their Blitzkrieg tactics almost effortlessly, but now they faced the combined might of many nations and instead of attacking, they were defending.

Ambrose describes the state of affairs amongst the allies, focusing mostly, if rather arrogantly, on the USA. Out of thirty-two chapters, the rest of the allies (the British, the Canadians, the French) get a handful and are rather cursorily and derogatorily dealt with. He has some rather scathing remarks about the British, as though this was all their fault. At one point he writes: “The poison of pacifism had eaten into the souls of British youth…” (p50) which I found objectionable. Yes, pacifism is a complete failure in the face of aggression, especially such as that mounted by the Nazis and in more modern times by terrorists. If everyone adopted pacifism, none of this would have begun, but of course, humanity is not a pacifistic species. That said, to call pacifism a poison is overdoing it by a long shot.

It was without doubt interesting - although there is a mite too much detail for my taste! I was disturbed not only by the bravery of the men and how badly abused they were by the lethal German defenses, but by how poorly served they were by the people who were sending stuff into the beach behind them. The battle plan called for a sequence of unloading which was adhered to despite the fact that the beach battle was not going according to their plan. They seemed incapable of adjusting to what was really happening. This was poor leadership.

For example, most of the radios the men took ashore in the early waves were lost or damaged severely hampering communications, yet no one thought to send in more radios, evidently. Despite the fact that they did not competently hold the beach until later in the day, the ships were sending in matériel to a rigid plan rather than adapting to what was happening. Trucks, for example, were being sent in instead of tanks and heavy guns which would have been far more useful at that point.

Instead of splitting supplies between landing craft so that some of everything got through despite heavy losses, they loaded up the craft with large amounts of one thing, so that when that particular craft was destroyed, the one thing was lost in huge quantities. This happened to two craft carrying plasma - both were destroyed, hampering the efforts of the medics. There was a similar problem with ammunition.

Worse than this, those who did make it to the top of the bluff continued on inland as best they could trying to follow rigid orders instead of fanning out across the top of the bluff and wiping out the Germans who were firing down on the beach. If they had worked to eliminate that threat immediately, they would have freed up the guys on the beach who could then have come up the bluff and made their way inland to carry out the original plan.

One problem as leadership - or lack of it. The officers were typically the first people off the landing craft and so were shot down with startling efficiency, and the rest of their men were often stuck, not only held down by heavy defensive fire, but also through lack of someone to tell them what to do. It was only through individual initiative rather than cohesive leadership that anything got done, and the major leadership - people like the revered Eisenhower and Montgomery were AWOL.

The fact that the higher-ups didn't know what was happening on the beach or up on the bluffs didn't help, of course. Direct line of sight was obscured by heavy smoke, and there was virtually no radio communication.

So this makes for a sad and irritating read, but it does describe in great detail the hell that these people went through and for that, it's a worthy read.

Crazy Horse and Custer by Stephen E Ambrose

Rating: WORTHY!

When the story first began, I did not realize that Curly was actually Crazy Horse. I thought it was some contemporary about whom the author was talking to give an idea as to how the Sioux lived back then because so little was known about Crazy Horse himself. We don't even have any authenticated photos of Crazy Horse since he was so suspicious of the technology.

Curly's father was known as Crazy Horse, so I was a bit confused. Later, after an impressive exploit against the Arapaho, Curly's father gave up his name to his son. His father became known as Worm, and Curly became Crazy Horse. Yeah, it's that kind of culture!

Custer is often imaged with long, golden curly hair, but he wasn't known as Curly! However, in the same confusing vein, Custer was nicknamed Autie and Ambrose uses this name throughout the early part of the book, but switches to Custer later, and uses Autie to describe one of Custer's relatives. Custer changed that curly look quite often, beginning when he arrived at West Point, so this account relates. When his classmates started calling him Fanny because of his long hair, he cut it really short, but then became embarrassed by the shortness and took to wearing a toupee for a year until it grew again! Once it was a little longer, he took to styling it with cinnamon oil, whence he got the nickname Cinnamon! This volatility and capriciousness was to be a hallmark of Custer's

This book is some 480 pages and has extensive notes. It's rather poor quality, printed on cheap paper, the photographs printed on the paper rather than on special photo pages. The images are almost sepia, and the text by each is so badly printed that it runs off the page and is unreadable. The book takes seemingly forever to arrive at the stories of Crazy Horse and George Custer, but it does go into immense detail about the everyday lives of the Sioux Indians, and that was a lot more interesting than anything written about Custer.

When people think of native Americans, they tend to think of the best known names, of which Sioux is one, but they seldom realize that this tribal name described a very broad and loosely cohesive society which was in fact composed of smaller units identified through language, culture and locale. The three major divisions were Lakota, itself divided into Northern, central, and Southern, Santee divided into Santee and Sisseton, and Yankton-Yanktonai, which name gives its own sub-divisions. This overall umbrella (or tipi!) includes further sub-units, some of which are better known than others, such as Hunkpapa, Minniconjou, and Oglala.

Long before "the white man" came onto the scene, the native Americans were feuding amongst themselves in endless inter-tribal 'warfare', but what whites failed to grasp was the nature of this 'warfare' - it wasn't anything like warfare as we think of it. It was more typically a show of strength and bravado with a few individuals testing themselves against a few from the opposing side, and then the combatant parties would go their separate ways, their pride and honor satisfied. There was very little bloodshed in the way we see bloodshed in war today - or even as Europeans saw it back then.

The Sioux became the dominant plains peoples through sheer force of numbers and pressure of their people naturally spreading out, rather than through vast pitched battles and as long as they had what they needed, the 'warriors' didn't have much interest in pursuing the kinds of stressful and time-intensive activities we consider normal today. As a people, they very much lived with nature, not as animals, but in the same way in which animals co-exist with each other.

Lions do not, for example, feel any compulsion to charge around dominating every beast in their purview. They eat when they're hungry and the rest of the time they don't care if a gazelle passes close by. In the same way, the native Americans hunted twice a year and laid up supplies, and occasionally went on horse-stealing expeditions or put on 'war party' shows of strength, but in general, they didn't feel any compulsion to run around like idiots and do any more than was necessary for a comfortable existence. They had no manufacturing 'industry' because they had no need for one. White folks, used to a rigid working week and endless industry simply couldn't grasp this kind if life and it made trading - seeking endless pelts to sell back to the east - something of a nightmare.

Another thing white people didn't get was the native American system of 'government'. They led a very laissez-faire existence, feeling no need to control others or put restraints on them or censure them unless things started looking like they would really get out of hand. The tribal chief wasn't a monarch as we would conceive of one, unless it's a monarch such as exists in Britain now - a ceremonial 'leader' who has very little to do with the real day-to-day governing of affairs.

Tribal leadership was a very diverse and dispersed concept, which was not understood by the east, and which thwarted eastern ideas and attempts at signing agreements. It felt like herding cats because it pretty much was. The Sioux were a very individualistic people, and while this worked perfectly before the easterners came, it robbed them of a cohesive resistance afterwards and eventually brought about their downfall - aided and abetted, of course by the terrible plague outbreaks which befell the natives, chief among them being the cholera pandemic of 1849, and the smallpox onslaught which followed a year later.

The big parlay of 1851 supposedly agreed that the natives would not make any kind of war, not only on the whites, but on each other, and each tribe appointed (or had appointed for them, believe it or not) a chief through which negotiations would be made. In return for free un-harassed passage along the Oregon trail, the natives were supposed to get $50,000 of goods which would be distributed via the various chiefs, which made the unnatural chief a highly important man.

The agreement immediately failed with the Sioux (largely the feisty youthful ones, looking to make a name for themselves) continuing to rob the emigrants on the trail, making for angered whites, and the natives dying from disease and lamenting the loss of the massive local buffalo herds, making for angered natives. Friction arose easily and justice was ill-served since the whites didn't have a clue which offending Indian belonged to which tribe. Consequently, revenge was exacted on the wrong party did nothing to improve relations. Quite the contrary, in fact.

Some of the writing here seemed inconsistent to me. For example, after spending the first four chapters with the Sioux, we start spending time with Custer and get his life history. The author's intent is to show how parallel these two lives were, Crazy Horse and Custer, but they really weren't - other than each had a nickname and they both grew up to become leaders of warriors! With regard to Custer, The author goes into excessive detail in some areas, but none at all in others. At one point we learn that Custer's childhood nick-name was Autie, but the author says not a word about how this came to be. Perhaps he didn't know, in which case it would have been nice to hear him say so!

In another example, the author mentions an intense love affair which Custer supposedly had, but nowhere does he offer any details about this. All it gets is a mention. Contrast this with the endless details of births, deaths and marriages, complete with dates down to the day, and it leads to a rather oddly off-kilter account in many regards.

The most interesting parts for me were the parts describing Sioux customs, beliefs, and behaviors, although the stint Custer put in at West Point was interesting. He was a well-liked cut-up and trouble-maker, who did the bare minimum necessary to get through, graduating bottom of his class, but graduating nonetheless. His class graduated a year early because Lincoln had just won the election and civil war was seen as inevitable as he tried to set the South straight. Custer was a unionist and while he saw many of his friends from the South quit West point to take up appointments in the Confederate army, he stayed and graduated and was commissioned into the union army - although at a lower rank than many of his friends had managed for themselves in the South.

There's a really interesting bit about Sioux marriage customs and divorce customs. Apparently the Sioux women were in some ways treated as property in that there was an exchange of gifts (but note that it was an exchange, not a one-way dowry), including things like horses and buffalo hides, but there really was no ceremony. After the two spent the night together, they were married and that was it. The woman owned the tipi, however, and could divorce the guy by simply throwing his things out of it if she felt she had cause. If a woman was unfaithful with another brave, the marriage was considered dissolved. There rarely were consequences since the Sioux considered it unmanly to pine after a woman.

Virginity was a different matter, however. The genders were quite segregated so it was hard for a guy to get to know a girl, and virginity was highly prized. A woman who lost it was considered a poor marriage prospect, while for the guys, it was considered a bit of a coup if he could sneak into a girl's tent and steal her virginity. The girls were rather strictly chaperoned though, day and night and kept away from the boys, so offenses were very limited and outright punishment of the girl if this did happen was rarely pursued.

So a curiously unbalanced book, but fascinating in many regards. The ending - the actual battle, is disappointingly short, but the details of Sioux life were wonderful, and the story continues after Custer's death with a brief summary of how Crazy Horse met his end. so overall, I recommend this as a worthy read.