Custer instructed the troopers to leave their sabers behind (highly unusual!) because he wanted stealth...he felt that the sabers might clank while on the ride, make noise, and alert the Indians to the column's approach. They would have been helped out some in that fight if they had had the sabers...a weapon which the Indians did not relish fighting against in close combat.

Custer specialized in surprise attacks on sleeping villages, generally launched in the pre-dawn hours or just at dawn. He didn't do that because he was a coward, by the way, he did it because it worked. It had worked very well in the past at the Washita, for instance. Because of these sudden, vicious dawn attacks one tribe named him "Son of the Morning Star". Another named him "Creeping Panther Who Attacks at Dawn". I trust the names did not contain as many syllables in the Native tongues! ;-D

He had hoped to creep up on the Lakotas in a similar manner, but it didn't work out that way. If it had, he might well have won the ensuing battle...but that's a matter of pure speculation.

In any case, when they did find the village they were not close enough to launch an attack until around midday. Custer further made the error of dividing a force which was only barely adequate for the task into three separate groups which could not support each other. This was his truly fatal error. The first column, under Major (?) Reno, did hit the camp by surprise, but given the fact that hundreds of warriors were in the vicinity, fully awake and ready to fight at a moment's notice, Reno was first stopped in his tracks and then driven back in total confusion by the Indian counterattack, which was mostly on foot. Reno's column was lucky to survive at all, and took heavy losses. They dug in in a wooded area and hung on. Benteen, meanwhile had been sent on a fruitless reconaissance way off to one side, and did not join the fighting until some time later. They too were forced to dig in to save themselves.

Custer led the third column in an assault on the center of the camp. The fight with Reno had already erupted before Custer's column reached the river, and this had alerted several thousand veteran warriors to the presence of white troopers. Custer's attempt to cross the river was repulsed...some (disputed) sources suggest that Custer himself fell to a shot at the edge of the river, and that this stopped the charge in its tracks. If so, he was gravely wounded, but not yet dead. Crazy Horse and Gall led Native horsemen in a counterattack that enveloped Custer's column from in front and from both sides and drove it up the hills to the "last stand" area. In that place Custer's entire column were surrounded and wiped out to the last man.

Reno's and Benteen's troops held out under siege in their dug-in positions for the next 24 hours, and the Lakota then packed up their stuff, struck the camp, and moved out. They had exterminated Mr Custer and about half his troopers, but they had won a pyrrhic victory in so doing, because it made the entire American white society determined to crush them once and for all in vengeance for Custer's death and the presumption of mere "savages" who would dare to wipe out an army column. That was accomplished in its inevitable fashion in the next couple of years. The free days of the Lakota were over and done after that.

Custer was a bold, reckless, flamboyant man...rather like the character that Flynn depicted in the movie, and he went out in the fashion that suited his nature perfectly. It was just the way an Indian warrior would have wanted to go. They were flamboyant and reckless too.

Custer had remarked before the mission that he was on his way to "a brevet (promotion) or a coffin". He seems to have had a fatalistic streak, and he may have had a presentiment that he was not going to survive the battle.