This lecture was presented at the Spring 2025 meeting of the American Society of Arms Collectors. It was given by Doug Scott, who ran a series of archaeological surveys of the Little Bighorn battlefield and coauthored a book on the results. You can find his book here:
I reviewed this book on the web site back in 2013; you can read that review here:
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/book-review-archaeological-perspectives-on-the-battle-of-the-little-bighorn/
You really have to respect the scholarship and attention to detail of these researchers, while they try to maintain a sense of decorum and objectivity about it all.
I will say that the research is about 150 years too damn late; the work should have been done back in the 1880s, in order to feed into the decisions about small arms for the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. We also very badly need to do exactly what was done here, on a modern battlefield. Preferably, one that we already have a lot of the data for.
The biggest lesson I took away from my tour as an Observer/Controller at the National Training Center was just how badly participants do at actually understanding the battles they’re in. Eye-witness usually equates to “I assumed…” more than anything else; rarely did you see anyone with the self-awareness to recognize just how tiny a slice of the battle they were seeing.
As an O/C, you’d usually wind up playing “gotcha” with the player units; they would have the most insanely distorted views of what happened, and never know it. Hell, oftentimes, you’d be the guy with access to all the “one over the world” data from the Tactical Analysis Facility, and you’d still be surprised by what actually happened. It’s really bad when the engagement took place in the “badlands” where there was mostly broken terrain and bad visibility. In those areas, player unit delusion could take truly monumental scales, and the arguments over what actually happened would be interminable.
From that experience, I’ve taken that most “first-person” accounts of battle actions are almost certainly delusional, no matter how objective the observer. You just can’t tell what’s going on overall, when all you are seeing is the tiny little pipestem you’re looking through while trying to stay alive and inflict hell on the enemy.
What would be fascinating is if you could somehow get an idea of what the troopers around Custer thought was happening, as it happened, and then compare that to the record. Aside from “Yeah, we’re getting our asses handed to us around here…”, what were their perceptions of the fight, and did they recognize that they were in trouble before it became abundantly clear that they were about to die?
It would be nice if we had this sort of archeological depth backing up engagements that we did have first-person accounts of. From what I’ve read, we really don’t, which is a loss to both the historical and military science communities.
Wellington was asked why he had not written the definitive account of Waterloo. “One can no more write the history of a battle than of a dance ball.”
Which is a truth that all too many historians just breeze on by, on the way towards “proving” their little fairy-tale perfect explanations for things.
Battle of the Bulge was always a favorite of mine. Everyone focuses on the big picture crap like Patton, but the reality is that Peiper got himself bound up and effectively stopped by a bunch of rear-echelon types that stepped up and did the necessary out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Engineers blew the bridges; supply personnel enthusiastically blew up the fuel storage sites the Germans had hoped to capture, and somehow overlooked until they went up in flames.
People overlook the foundations for that; the Engineer units that did a lot of the work were ones that had gone through a famously rigorous and outright abusive training process that elevated them to a level of combat training that rivalled a lot of actual front-line formations. This is a forgotten detail, and it’s telling that when one of the units assigned to a totally non-combat role, that of logging and lumber mill operation for the winterization program, wound up in front of Peiper’s “elite (by that point in the war, not so much…) formation of panzers”, they got their act together, picked up weapons and then proceeded to T-totally f*ck the German timetables up. Mostly with minor little actions like stopping them for the night with an impromptu bazooka ambush backed up by… Nothing.
All of this is documented, but it’s rarely highlighted in any of the “Big Picture” histories. It’s something that testifies to the ever-present “random factor” that will completely screw up the best-laid plans and operational intents.
I was the Observer/Controller for a support team, at the National Training Center. Had to accompany a maintenance contact team going out to recover some armored vehicles, and while we were forward doing that, the OPFOR guys rolled over us. Two guys from the contact team got away up into the rocks with a radio. The two of them somehow established contact with the brigade headquarters, and then proceeded to call in artillery fire that totally destroyed the OPFOR attack. OPFOR never figured out what the hell was going on; they’d done everything right, and could not figure out where the observers were that were calling in fire on them. Two guys with a radio… Mechanics, actually. They knew what they were doing, did it, and the fact that turned the battle was that the OPFOR had overrun their little contact team and driven them up into the rocks. Had they not done that…? Likely, OPFOR would have rolled up the brigade.
And, typically… At the After-Action Review, the unit completely ignored what those two mechanics did to win the battle for them. It was all about the commanders and so forth… Reality that they’d have been taken up the literal ass of their defenses had those two not done what they did completely escaped everyone but the Observer/Controllers and the Tactical Analysis Facility.
Rule of thumb for anyone in the military: Good squads/small units will pull the worst plan in history out of the filth of failure; lousy squads and small units will turn the Best Plan Evah(tm) into a sh*tshow of epic proportions.
I don’t think any other US Frontier battle would provide the volume of artifacts that Little Big Horn has. Think number of combatants and number of projectiles (bullets or arrows) launched. Then factor in preservation and discovery rates. Nothing will ever compare to this battle.
As far as reliability of first-hand-accounts, decades after the battle —- The Indians were ignored for decades and it was not safe for them or any Army survivors to come forward and tell their story. The Indians risked punishment for their actions and the soldiers would open themselves up for charges of desertion and cowardice from the brass, looking for a scapegoat. So I would not automatically label all decades old stories as lies and self-aggrandization.
On history.net there is an interesting piece called “10 Myths About the Little Bighorn.” What it mostly shows is that almost every eyewitness account by Amerind participants is contradicted by other participants equally authoritative. About the only point of agreement seems to be that UFO’s played no significant role. What gear and bodies were found in what abundance where is the final arbitrator
Anyone’s account of just about anything is going to be suspect. That’s the nature of the beast, when you’re asking someone to give you a purely subjective alliteration as to what they observed or participated in.
And, even with corroborating evidence, you can still be wrong. You can have half a dozen “authoritative” sources, and there’s still going to be error. Look at the sinking of the Titanic… Early eye-witness accounts describe the Titanic breaking in half before finally sinking. “Experts” pooh-poohed such accounts, ridiculing the observers reporting them.
What’d we find, when finally on the scene of the sinking and examining it all? The ship broke in half before sinking.
I would highly recommend that no matter how certain you are about anything, you should probably preface your “certainties” with a bodyguard of caveats, like “From what we know” or “Given this evidence…” Do that, and you won’t be embarrassed if new facts show up. Humility is not just a good idea, it’s a way of life.
Or, should be.
The point I’m making is that my experience argues for more self-deception and wishful thinking being the primary cause of distortions with first-person witness accounts.
You see your little bit of the battle; the bigger picture? Not something you’d necessarily have visible. Hell, you get down to the level of junior enlisted, how many of them actually pay attention to anything outside the narrow limits of their assigned responsibilities laid out in the operations orders?
Trust me on this: The term “tunnel vision” has nothing on a lot of people in the military, and when you factor in stress and trying to figure out what the hell the enemy is doing at the same time? It’s a wonder anyone comes out of it with any sort of idea of what was going on. And, the weird thing is, you talk to guys who were in big battles during WWII, long after the fact? They’ll tell you that most of what they know about the Battle of the Bulge, for example, came out of the history books they later read trying to figure things out. Which, when you consider the bad information and distortions there are in a lot of those accounts, the whole thing becomes a massive self-licking ice cream cone of delusional self-deception.
The point I’m getting at is that while I once took the stuff in the history books as gospel truth… Today? With an idea of how that information got into those books? LOL… I’m going to say that unless you have something like the background physical archaeology that this talk had in it, the best you can say about most descriptions of battle action is that it’s all hearsay.
Which makes it really hard to make good decisions about weapons procurement and design. See NGSW for a bunch of examples, not the least of which is the insane idea about “overmatch” being an issue.
Excellent points. Forget the wars for a moment. Take a snafu in a warehouse. Can we really take “eye-witness and participant” Joe Blotnik’s account of what he said to his boss? “An’ den I tells the Joe College sunuvabitch, youse listen here…” Eye-witness reportage too of the represents a shamelessay sub-genre of fiction
Sworn statements were the bane of my existence as a senior NCO in the US Army. Even the junior officers had trouble writing a coherent, comprehensible narrative of events that they’d just witnessed and/or participated in…
If you’ve ever seen the old RCA ads with the dog whose head is cocked over, looking at the record player…? That was me, more often than not, listening to some of the stuff I was presented with. I’m not saying I’m a great eye-witness, but… Dear God, I can at least string together some linear thoughts and actions into something that won’t leave the reader with more questions than answers about what I’m writing about.
There are reasons I have grave doubts about the state of US education, these days. Good ones, based on personal experience and witnessing some things in first-person mode.
It’s like “Ya know… From what you just told me, so-and-so clearly belongs in a jail. But. From what you’ve written here, I can’t work out whether I ought to put him up on charges, or you; your description of what happened is completely different on paper than what you’ve been telling me, and I can’t do anything with the verbal stuff you’re reporting to me…”
I honestly don’t want to know how many serious crimes and outright treasonous acts have been swept under the rug because the people reporting them were effectively illiterate. Doesn’t bear thinking about, TBH.
[OFF-TOPIC so ignore if you wish]
Recently U.S.Army tested SMASH 2000L https://interestingengineering.com/military/us-army-rolls-smart-rifle-scopes which is supposed to turn common fire-arm into anti-dron weaponry and does allow shooting when bullet will hit target.
Why they elected to mate it with ancient M4A1, rather than new-fangled M7 rifle?
It can be mounted at commonly used rail, but it needs to interact with trigger or hammer or linkage therein, does that require altering host platform? If yes could host fire-arm be used after uninstalling SHMASH 2000L, as it was never place at it?
Cost of the ammo, use of old systems to save money.
Plus, I’m pretty sure that when sanity finally infects the Army, NGSW is going to go away.
Frankly, I think there’s a lot of room for investigation into that whole program, from start to finish. They started out with admirable goals, back when they were looking at things like cased telescopic and caseless, but what it morphed into was more “M-14 Redux” than a real solution to anything other than the profit margins for SIG-Sauer.