June 25th: Today in 1876 the most famous battle of the American Indian Wars took place, the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Famous mostly because the Indians won a big victory when they were supposed to just roll up and lose and because the glorious (at least in his own mind) George Custer lost his life there, along with almost all of his troops.

The battle is a classic ‘what if’ battle, the most common being ‘What if Custer had brought a gatling gun with him?’ Rephrased the question is ‘What if the modern army with modern weapons and a huge army backing them up had even more advantages?’ I am sure that at some point if you pile more advantages to the Custer side even with his lack of caution he could have pulled out a win. Hmmm. I wonder how Crazy Horse could have done with some of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers?

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 25th, 2006 at 3:25 am and is filed under History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.