Harry Turtledove (Editor) - Alternate Generals II

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 Of the twenty others, eleven divisions had to be withdrawn to be rebuilt, and the other nine, including the deadly SS Panzer Divisions, were held on the front and rebuilt as they fought.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.

Third Army crossed the Meuse River and sat there, out of gas, watching the Germans retreat and then build up defensive positions.

Custer cloaked his bitterness with humor, or what he called humor, and was always on the move, from Command Post to Command Post, cheering his men, telling them they were the best, and the rest of the Allies couldn't, as he said, "… pour piss out of a boot with a 1:50,000 projection map printed on the heel." I wondered how wise this sort of talk was, either for the men's morale or for his own good, but kept silent.

Custer got into the habit of having a nightcap-a cup of strong coffee with cream-with me, and telling me his real thoughts.

He spoke a lot about Patton: "Before I go into any battle, after I make my tentative plan, I always try to figure out what George would've done.

"Poor sorry bastard, to have to die so damned young, only having fought with those boiler-plate tanks in pissyass quantities. I tell you, Jimmy, he would've been in hog heaven if he'd lived.

"Hell, he probably would be where I'm sitting right now if he had."

"And," I once chanced, "where would you have been?"

Custer grinned. "If I was unlucky, I'd be his Chief of Staff. If I was lucky… who the hell knows. Maybe running Fifth Corps.

"Now, that would've made a combination, wouldn't it? Two generals with their eyes on the ball… we'd be in Berlin by now!"

All the Army knew Custer was ambitious, that he would have loved to see Eisenhower and Bradley die in a plane crash and he picked to take over Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force.

But his ambition ran beyond that.

Several times he sat staring at his picture of MacArthur, and musing what would come after the war: "We beat the Krauts by the end of this year, then we'll go to the Pacific, invade Japan, and the war'll be over, except for mopping up, by late 46 or 47, I figure.

"MacArthur comes home covered with glory, and the Party (that always meant the Republicans) will need somebody strong.

"Roosevelt will be dead by then… my friends in Washington say he's hanging on by his fingernails, hoping to see the end of the war… and one of his weak-ass Vice Presidents will take over, and get run for the Presidency in 48.

"Mac goes against him… and he'll need a running mate."

I once said I thought America might be a little sick of following military men around.

"Not a chance, Jimmy," he said. "People get used to doing what they're told, and start liking it. You think they're going to vote for some damned war profiteer if they've got a couple of war heroes on the ticket?" He snorted laughter. "Plus we'll have people like Taft on our side.

"Life'll be interesting then, Jimmy. MacArthur's not exactly a spring chicken, and maybe 1952 will be my year."

He had pronounced ideas on what the postwar world should look like.

"Another reason we'll need another strong man like Roosevelt… except Republican… in the White House is we're going to have to deal with the damned Bolsheviks sooner or later.

"Stalin's our buddy now, because he's killing more Krauts than we are. But the minute peace breaks out, there'll be some hard looks at things.

"We'll have to rebuild Germany and Poland to be able to stand against the Russians first thing. Then we'll have to step in and make sure Italy and France have strong governments.

"Britain? The goddamned Limeys are a thing of the past, and we're going to have to learn that, first thing.

"Naturally, we're going to have to keep a strong Army, once the war's over. Anybody who thinks we'll just go home and bury our heads in the sand like we did after the last war is a fool.

"Just like we'll have to deal with those damned Commies we've got at home. There'll be enough enemies in the world without worrying about being stabbed in the back. We soldiers will know how to give them a short sharp shock. Send those who won't recant back to Russia, like Palmer tried to do, and the muffleheads wouldn't let him."

Listening to Custer and his grandiose plans, I remembered what my father had said: "We should thank the Good God that American soldiers mostly aren't politicians. Politics is nothing but shades of gray, and no soldier worth a hang sees anything in colors other than black and white."

Perhaps being Irish and Catholic gave me a better perspective on Custer's ambitions. I'd grown up hearing enough tales of having British soldiers in Ireland always riding up your lane with their bayonets and torches to shiver at the notion of America putting any political authority in the hands of its military.