Walter Laqueur Guerrilla Warfare

Guerrilla
Warfare
A Historical and
Critical Study
Walter Laqueur
Copyright © 1998 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Originally
published in 1976 by Little, Brown and Company.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No

part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage
and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All
inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers, Rutgers—The StateUniversity,
35 Berrue Circle, Piscataway, NJ. 08854.
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 97-29417

ISBN: 0-7658-0406-9
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Laqueur, Walter, 1921- .

Guerrilla warfare : a historical and critical study / Walter Laqueur
with a new introduction by the author, p. cm.
Originally published: Boulder, London : Westview Press, 1984. Includes
bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7658-0406-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1.
Guerrilla warfare—History. I. Title. U240.L37 1997
355.02'18—dc21 97-29417
CIP
ght
These problems (of guerrilla warfare) are of very long standing, yet
manifestly far from understood — especially in those countries where
everything that can be called "guerrilla warfare" has become a new military
fashion or craze.
— B. H. LIDDELL HART, Preface to the second

edition of Strategy, 1967
Contents
Introduction to the Transaction Edition ix

Preface xv
1 Partisans in History 3
2 Small Wars and Big Armies 50
3 The Origins of Guerrilla Doctrine 100
4 The Twentieth Century (I):
Between Two World Wars 152
5 The Twentieth Century (II):
Partisans against Hitler 202
6 The Twentieth Century (III):
China and Vietnam 239
7 National Liberation and Revolutionary War 278
8 Guerrilla Doctrine Today 326
9 A Summing Up 382 Notes
411 Chronology of Major Guerrilla Wars 441 Abbreviations
443 Bibliography 446 Index
451
Introduction to the
Transaction Edition
Every book has its history and Guerrilla Warfare is no exception. Together with
its sequel Terrorism and two companion volumes (The Guerrilla Reader and The
Terrorism Reader) it was part of a wider study such as had not been attempted
before—to give a critical interpretation of guerrilla and terrorism theory and
practice throughout history. It did not want to provide a general theory of
political violence nor did it give instructions on how to conduct guerrilla
warfare or terrorist operations. It was read in various countries and established
itself as a text. I hope it contributed to the clarification of certain issues not
widely understood at the time among the public at large. The book certainly
failed to bring about greater semantic clarity; there had been a widespread
tendency in the media and our public discourse to equate great war with small
war, guerrilla, terrorism, civil war, and banditry (social and asocial), and this
has not changed since this book first appeared in 1976. On the contrary,
unsuspecting readers consulting major public libraries for guidance on the
subject of guerrilla warfare will find under this heading books on the theater,
on business practices (especially sales strategies), on education, and on many
other fields of human endeavor. The term guerrilla has become very popular;
but in the same measure as the application has multiplied, the meaning has
become even more diluted. In addition there has been the widespread use of
the unfortunate and misleading term "urban guerrilla" as a euphemism for
terrorism. Guerrilla has a positive connotation, by and large, whereas
terrorism has not, hence the misapplication.
While the word guerrilla has been very popular, much less attention has
been given to guerrilla warfare than to terrorism even though the former has
been politically more successful: Most terrorist groups have failed; many
guerrilla movements have succeeded. The reasons for the lack of attention are
obvious: Guerrilla operations, in contrast to terrorist, take place far from big
cities, in the countryside, in remote mountainous regions, or in jungles. In
these remote areas there are no film cameras or recorders. This fact has been
recognized early on by some guerrilla leaders who decided, unwisely in some
cases, to transfer their activities to the big cities. As an Algerian militant put it,
if his fighters killed thirty soldiers in a village, this would be reported in a few
lines on the back page of the world press, whereas the noise of even a small
bomb in a big city would reverberate throughout the world and make
headlines.
Has there been more or less guerrilla warfare during the last two decades?
The days of the classic, major guerrilla wars seem to be over, no new Mao or Ho
Chi Minh, no Tito and no Castro have appeared in our age. The gradual
liberation of territories, the establishment of counter institutions and the
transformation of guerrilla bands into regular army units has been rare in our
time. The war in Afghanistan is probably the only major exception; the list will
also include Chechnya (1994-95), but one cannot think of many others. On the
other hand, there is a long list of guerrilla wars which have not led to victory:
This includes the Kurds in Turkey, the Karen in Myanmar, the rebels in
Tajikistan and Southern Sudan, the Tamil in Sri Lanka, the EZLN (the neo-
Zapatistas) in Mexico, Sendero Luminoso in Peru, Hizbollah in Lebanon, the
various guerrilla groups in the Horn of Africa, various small Punjabi and
Kashmiri groups, to mention a few. Some insurgents have used both guerrilla
and terrorist strategies; this is true, for instance, with regard to Algeria. In other
cases, regular armies have not been strong or well equipped and for this reason
were compelled to apply, on occasion, guerrilla tactics as in the former
Yugoslavia. The same is true with regard to civil wars as in Rwanda and Zaire.
In fact, "pure" guerrilla warfare has become fairly rare. If Mao or Tito were to
reappear they would probably not approve of the actions of their descendants,
but it is not clear what advice they would offer to cope with conditions quite
different from those in which they operated at the time; there is no big war in
progress which provided welcome cover for the guerrillas sixty years ago.
A review of strategies and the fate of guerrilla movements during the last
two decades shows certain common features. In their great majority they
consisted of nationalists fighting for independence
whether against foreign occupants or against another ethnic group in their
own country. Communism or Maoism did not play a key role as in the 1940s;
true, Sendero Luminoso and the Mexican EZLN are social movements, but at
the same time they are ethnic rebellions of Indians against the white upper and
middle classes. The only exception is the Colombian FARC which at one time
gave up armed struggle, but following its electoral defeat in 1992 it resumed it.
However, the Colombians became involved with some of the drug cartels to
improve their financial condition and while this might be justified from their
point of view by pragmatic reasons it has nothing to do with the Marxist-
Maoist tradition. Virtually all other conflicts are ethnic in essence except those
carried out by Islamic fundamentalists (such as in Algeria) or against
fundamentalist regimes (as in Sudan).
Only in two major cases have guerrillas been successful, in Afghanistan and
in Chechnya. Victory was achieved because the rebels faced an enemy which
had the power to smash the guerrilla but not the political will. These two
guerrilla wars happened to coincide with the collapse of the Soviet empire; the
Soviet Union had, of course, the power to destroy its enemies but the war was
as unpopular as the Vietnam War was in the United States, nor was the regular
army prepared for a guerrilla war. Topographical conditions in Afghanistan
favored a guerrilla war and in addition there was a tradition of such a war in
this country. The war had lasted for years until it was ended by an armistice
which provided for the evacuation of all Soviet troops in 1989. However, there
was no common front of Afghan resistance fighters which could have effected
a smooth political transition. In these circumstances, facing a population tired
by war and antagonized by the ambitions of rival war lords, the
fundamentalist Taliban, with massive help from Pakistan, occupied Kabul (in
October 1996) and large parts of the country.
In most other instances guerrillas were less successful; they caused
considerable harm to their enemies (as in Sri Lanka, Turkey, Algeria, Israel,
and some other countries) but failed to gain decisive victories. In some
instances guerrillas transformed themselves into political parties (as in
Nicaragua and San Salvador) without, however, making significant political
progress. The PLO and the African National Congress were more successful
but they had not been primarily guerrilla organizations; to the extent that it
had been a guerrilla organization the PLO had been totally defeated and
compelled to leave Lebanon for Tunis. But it still made a political comeback
not as the result of terrorist attacks but of mass action.
Most guerrilla movements had substantial help from abroad and it is
doubtful whether they would have been able to continue their struggle but for
this assistance in money, arms, and by other means. This refers to the Afghan
rebels and the Palestinians who received large amounts of money from the
Arab states. The Tamil Tigers were supported by Tamils in India; the Chechens
received Turkish help; the Algerian fundamentalists were helped by
fundamentalists in the Arab world and Iran. Hizbollah in Lebanon receives its
budget from Tehran. Taliban received not only arms but also money from
Pakistan. Not much is known about the financial sources and resources of the
Latin American guerrillas; they did not have much foreign help and were
among the proletariat of the global guerrillas. But even they probably did get
help from abroad even though they got most of their money from internal
sources.
Historical experience shows that guerrilla movements have prevailed over
the incumbents only in specific constellations: If Chiang Kai-chek's government
would not have been weakened by the Japanese invasion, if the Germans in the
Second World War had been able to deploy more regular units in Yugoslavia,
neither Mao nor Tito would have entered history as the great victors. There are
exceptions such as Cuba under Batista where a regime in time of peace collapses
as the result of its lack of popular support. But these are the exceptions, and in
the current state of the world there have been few such exceptions. While the
weapons of the guerrillas have only marginally improved, modern means of
observation have become more sophisticated and effective. They still do not
offer panaceas, whatever the advocates of modern technology may claim; much
still depends on the terrain, the fighting spirit of the guerrilla, and other factors
which cannot be quantified. But while small units can move as effectively as
they could fifty or a hundred years ago, it is far more difficult for bigger units to
assemble and operate. They have become more vulnerable than in the past,
hence the great difficulties guerrilla movements have faced in seizing and
holding territory and establishing a standing army. It could well be that the
classical model of guerrilla warfare is no longer applicable in the modern world;
even Mao admitted that what could be done in China might not be feasible in
Belgium. Now it might not be possible in China.
All this does not mean that tactics akin to guerrilla warfare have no future,
but it signifies that they will probably be modified in accordance with
technical developments. We may witness a combination of political warfare,
propaganda, guerrilla operations, and terrorism, and, in some cases, this could
be a potent strategy not in
the most developed and densely populated countries but quite possibly in the
rest of the world. It is too early to write off guerrilla warfare, despite the trend
of urbanization all over the world, and the range of possibilities is almost
endless. We may witness small groups of sectarians, religious or political,
directing their aggression not inwards, that is to say, committing collective
suicide, but outwards, against the rest of the world. We have certainly not
seen the last of separatist guerrillas, provided topographical conditions favor
this kind of warfare. A new criminal guerrilla cannot be ruled out for instance
in collaboration with drug producers especially in Southeast Asia and Latin
America. Such guerrillas may eventually have at their disposal very
sophisticated weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, which would
open new and dangerous prospects.
These are trends and possibilities, not certainties. But it all means that in
some parts of the world, at the very least, small wars will continue, even if big
wars have become too expensive. And it is useful to remember that
historically and etymologically guerrilla means precisely this—small war.
Xvi GUERRILLA WARFARE
Preface
The present volume is the first part of a wider study which, I believe, has not
been attempted before — a critical interpretation of guerrilla and terrorist
theory and practice throughout history to the present age. This book deals
with guerrilla warfare; it does not aim at presenting a universal theory, for
such a theory would be either exceedingly vague or exceedingly wrong. The
author of an excellent book on the Cuban revolution noted some years ago
that in view of its unique character the events in Cuba were a subject for the
historian rather than the sociologist. The same is true of most guerrilla wars: a
tank is always a tank, but guerrilla wars differ greatly from one another.
Throughout history unconventional warfare has been affected far more by
indigenous political, social, cultural, and economic factors and, of course, by
geography than has conventional warfare. But though one eschews sweeping
generalizations there still are common patterns to be found and it is to the
search for these patterns that this study is devoted. Hence the comparative
approach, which has been used in this study in full knowledge of its
limitations.
My original intention was to write a general essay on the subject without
dealing with details of guerrilla theory and practice. But the more I became
interested in the subject, the more I became aware of how much spadework
remained to be done. Excellent monographs1 exist on some guerrilla wars,
others have been neglected hitherto, and there is no critical review of guerrilla
doctrine available.
The facts of guerrilla warfare have been covered by a vast over-
growth of mythology, and I have regarded it as one of my main tasks to
distinguish the facts from the myths. The present study is therefore an attempt
to demythologize guerrilla warfare, without belittling its importance. Fiction
should not be disparaged; Balzac's Les Chouans, Tolstoy's Hadji Murat and
Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls perhaps convey a better picture of what
it meant to be a partisan than many volumes of military history. But these
novels deal with the fate of individuals; for an understanding of guerrilla war
as a political and military phenomenon, fiction is of little value.
A study of this kind faces considerable difficulties. It was necessary to go
back to the sources, a laborious task since some of the material is no longer
available even in the world's leading libraries: copies of Carlo Bianco's
Trattato, of Le Miere's pioneering work, of J. Most's Revolutionaere
Kriegswissenschaft, and other important sources quoted in this book are not to
be found in either the British Museum or the Library of Congress. The search
for rare books is arduous but it has its compensations. In any case, this was
not my main problem. The guerrilla phenomenon, unless one regards it as a
mere technique of warfare, has innumerable aspects and facets; so that even
proposing a definition of the subject is exceedingly difficult.
The term "guerrilla" was originally used to describe military operations
carried out by irregulars against the rear of an enemy army or by local
inhabitants against an occupying force. More recently it has been applied to all
kinds of revolutionary wars and wars of national liberation, insurrections,
peasant wars, and terrorist acts (such as hijacking airplanes or kidnappings). It
has been applied to happenings in the theater and the arts, to certain activities
in universities and even in kindergarten. In short, the term has become almost
meaningless, partly as the result of indiscriminate use but also because there
are, in fact, some real difficulties. Regular armies may use guerrilla tactics, but
so may bandits; guerrilla movements have transformed themselves into
regular armies but the opposite has also happened. Not all unconventional
warfare is "guerrilla" war, nor should it be used as a synonym for revolu-
tionary politics, civil war (such as in Lebanon and Angola), or terrorism.
The tactics of guerrilla warfare are not very complicated, nor are they
shrouded in mystery — they have been more or less the same, with slight
variations, since time immemorial. Typical guerrilla operations include
harassment of the enemy, evasion of decisive battles, cutting lines of
communications, carrying out surprise at-
Xvi GUERRILLA WARFARE
XVli PREFACE
tacks. Guerrilla tactics are based on common sense and imagination; they vary
from country to country, are affected by geographical conditions, by social
and political processes, and also change as the result of technological
innovation. These developments are examined in some detail in the following
pages. It is in the analysis of the political background to guerrilla warfare that
most difficulties are encountered.
Over the last two decades there has been a tidal wave of guerrilla literature.
Some has been straight propaganda or hagiography bearing little, if any,
resemblance to reality. Other books provide useful advice on how to conduct
successful guerrilla warfare or, alternatively, how to combat it effectively. But
they are of little help in explaining why guerrilla wars break out in certain
circumstances and not in others, why some wars succeed and others fail. On
the other hand, there have been a great many sociological and psychological
studies of guerrilla motivation and behavior, often with a ponderous
emphasis on methodology. This approach may perhaps one day produce
some interesting new insights but that day has not yet arrived and it is not
certain that it ever will. Thus, after a great many detours, the student of the
guerrilla phenomenon finds himself back at his starting point: in order to
explain guerrilla warfare one has to write its history.
According to widespread belief, guerrilla warfare is a new way of
conducting unconventional war, discovered by a stroke of genius by Mao in
the Yenan period, and later successfully applied to other parts of the world by
left-wing revolutionary movements. Observers with a longer memory point to
T. E. Lawrence as the great pioneer of modern guerrilla warfare; some go even
further back recalling the Spanish resistance against Napoleon. In actual fact,
guerrilla warfare is as old as the hills and predates regular warfare. Primitive
warfare was, after all, largely based on surprise, the ambush and similar
tactics. But too little is known about the subject and I have not burdened
myself with an attempt to search for the roots of guerrilla warfare in
prehistoric times.
The political context of guerrilla warfare has been and continues to be the
subject of much confusion. Thus it has been asserted that before the 1930s
guerrilla movements were usually parochial, not nationwide in character, that
they had little more than nuisance value, and that they were ideologically
conservative. Recent guerrilla movements, on the other hand, are said to be
revolutionary, no longer spontaneous outbursts but part of a nationwide (or
international) political movement, and it is this that gives them greater
xviii GUERRILLA WARFARE
cohesion than in the past. There is some truth in these observations, but it is
certainly not correct that until recently guerrilla movements were all of local
importance only. Nor are "wars of national liberation" a twentieth-century
innovation. Guerrilla movements of the early nineteenth century were indeed
"right wing" in character, intensely patriotic, monarchist, religious-
fundamentalist, whereas modern guerrilla movements do appear more often
than not to be left wing, revolutionary in inspiration. But on closer inspection
it transpires that the issues involved are not that clear-cut. It is not difficult to
detect strong populist, antiaristocratic elements among the nineteenth-century
guerrillas in Spain, Ireland, Italy, Latin America, and even in the Vendee. On
the other hand there were and are many movements which simply do not fit
into the obvious categories of "right" and "left." Quite frequently their ideology
has encompassed extreme "left" and "right" components (as among the
"Fighters for the Freedom of Israel" [the Stern Gang] and Dr. Habash's
"Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine"). The IBA and the Macedonian
IMRO at various times in their history had connections with both Fascism and
Communism (or Trotskyism). Latin American guerrilla movements manage to
combine a bewildering multitude of conflicting ideological attitudes, and even
in Communist-inspired guerrilla movements, nationalism has almost always
been the single most important factor.
How much importance should be attributed then to the political orientation
of guerrilla movements? Or, to put it differently: are there perhaps certain
basic nationalist-populist-revolutionary impulses underlying their political
programs and slogans, a free-floating activism, which may turn "right" or "left"
according to political conditions and the changing fashions of the Zeitgeist? As
a first step in the right direction a moratorium should be declared on the use
of terms such as "Marxist" with regard to guerrillas in Chad and Zaire (even if
their leaders have attended courses at the Sorbonne) and with regard to
terrorists in places as far afield as Berlin, Beirut, or San Francisco.
The old term "guerrilla warfare" has been used in this study because there
is no better one. Newer theoretical concepts such as "modern revolutionary
warfare" or "people's war" can be of use only with regard to a few countries
and applied elsewhere they are misleading; not all guerrilla movements are
led by a monolithic political party, or a Communist party, or are either a
people's war or a war of national liberation.
The term "urban guerrilla" poses something of a problem for the
XX Xix PREFACE WARFARE
GUERRILLA
student of guerrilla warfare. It is a misnomer and its widespread use is to be

regretted. Insurrections and revolts have occurred in towns and so, of course,
have acts of terror, but urban guerrilla warfare only on the rarest of occasions.
The essence of guerrilla warfare lies in the fact that the guerrilla can hide in
the countryside and this, quite self-evidently, is impossible to do in a city. The
distinction is of more than academic importance; there have been guerrilla
units often thousand men and women but an urban terrorist unit seldom, if
ever, comprises more than a few people, and urban terrorist "movements"
rarely consist of more than a few hundred members.
What is now commonly called "urban guerrilla" warfare is, of course,
terrorism in a new dress. We shall encounter it from time to time in these
pages because it has been advocated and practiced as an alternative to or in
conjunction with guerrilla warfare. But there was no room in this study for a
detailed and systematic analysis of terrorism; I shall return to the subject in a
different context. The political importance of urban terror has frequently been
overrated, perhaps in view of its highly dramatic (or melodramatic) character
and the fact that, unlike guerrilla operations, urban terror usually has many
spectators. The attitude of the media towards the "urban guerrilla" reminds
one of T. E. Lawrence's description of his Arab levies — they thought weapons
destructive in proportion to their noise.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to the Library of the Royal United Services
Institution in London. I have also visited or received the assistance of the
following collections: the Military Library in Helsinki, the Royal Library in
Copenhagen, the National Library in Madrid, the Lenin State Library in
Moscow, the Library of the Ministry of National Defense in Paris, the Library
of Congress in Washington, the Widener Library at Harvard, the Princeton
College Library, the Asaf Simhoni Library at Tel-Aviv University, the British
Museum, the Wiener Library, and specialized collections in Stanford, Vienna,
Madison, Bern, Florence, Aargau, and Berlin.
I received advice from colleagues and friends who provided suggestions
and criticism and read parts of the manuscript. I am grateful to Aviva Golden,
Bernard Krikler, Kimbriel Mitchell and Freda Morrison who provided
editorial and research assistance. Dr. David Abshire, chairman of the Center
for Strategic and International Studies, and my other colleagues there, in
particular, Mrs. Ethel Eanet, my assistant, have helped me in the course of this
study;
so did those who work with me at the Institute of Contemporary History and
Wiener Library in London. Generous support given by the Ford Foundation
enabled me to complete a study that in view of the many difficulties involved
may well have otherwise remained unfinished. Parallel to this volume I have
edited an anthology on the historical development of guerrilla doctrine and
the problem of terrorism will be covered in the third part of what was
intended to be an essay and became a trilogy.
London-Washington, January 1976

GUERRILLA WARFARE
1
Partisans in History
Irregular forces and guerrilla tactics are mentioned, perhaps for the first time
in recorded history, in the Anastas Papyrus of the fifteenth century B.C.
Mursilis, the Hittite king, complains in a letter that "the irregulars did not dare
to attack me in the daylight and preferred to fall on me by night." While
peeved, Mursilis obviously lived to tell the tale.
Guerrilla tactics, of course, predate recorded history, as indeed they predate
regular warfare. In Melanesia, the chosen practice was for the warriors to
attack when the enemy was at its sleepiest and most unwary; the same
approach was used by the Kiwai in New Guinea. The southeastern Indians of
North America liked to be pursued by the foe so that they could lure him into
the hollow of a crescent formation. The mock retreat and the ambush were
also known to many other tribes; a classic description is in Joshua 8.
Generally speaking, primitive people had an aversion to open fighting. 1 But
surprise and deception have their use in every military conflict and there are
basic differences between primitive and guerrilla wars. Far more often than
not, the former consisted of sporadic, unorganized sorties, hit-and-run raids,
the object being either to plunder or to seek vengeance for some grievance
such as trespass, personal injury, or wife stealing. Primitive warfare evolved in
small tribal social groups who had no capacity for any sustained effort such as
protracted war; the scope of movement was quite restricted, andddfiological
issues were certainly not involved.
The Bible mentions guerrilla leaders such as Jiftah and David. Of David, it is
said that "everyone that was in distress, and everyone
GUERRILLA WARFARE
that was in debt, and everyone that was discontented gathered themselves
unto him; and he became a captain over them." (Samuel 1:22) He used the
Judaean desert (Ein Gedi) as a temporary base, engaged in forays in the
Hebron area, imposed tribute on the rural population and, with a force of
between four hundred men (the Caves of Adullam) and six hundred (the
Battle of Ziklag), fought the Amalekites and other enemies. Gideon's night
attack at Ein Harod (Judges 6-8) is a good example of exploiting the element of
surprise. Of the twenty-two thousand men who were with Gideon, three
hundred were chosen and, though there were many more Midianites — "like
locusts, and no one could count the number of their camels" — they spread
confusion in the enemy camp. The sound of trumpets and the sight of torches
(hidden in jugs until the very last moment) created pandemonium and the
Midianites turned against each other. To make the attack even more effective,
it was launched at the time when the guard was about to change.
The Maccabaean revolt in 166 B.C. made use of guerrilla tactics in its early
phase; Mattathias and his sons went into the mountains and, having no arms,
Judah had to pick up the sword of the enemy soldier who fell first. They lived
in secret places in the wilderness, "as wild animals do." Judas Maccabaeus
launched his attacks mainly by night (Maccabaeans 2 :8), while his brother,
Jonathan, the second leader of the rebellion, launched raids from his base in
the Judaean desert, harassing the enemy and evading frontal encounters; his
strength lay in the mobility of his troops and a superior intelligence network.
In the Jewish war against the Romans, guerrilla units did not play a decisive
role; the country was densely populated, and there were no inaccessible
mountain ranges or wild forests which could have provided shelter for the
insurgents. Josephus describes how the retreat of Cestius Gallus, the governor
of Syria, from Jerusalem ended in a rout. Cestius's legions were heavily armed
which greatly impeded their march, whereas the Jews who attacked them were
traveling light. While the Roman forces moved through open terrain they were
relatively safe, but eventually they had to cross a narrow downhill pass where
their horses stumbled and the attackers all but annihilated their columns. 2 John
of Gischala, a military leader in Galilee and a rival of Josephus, is described as
little better than a robber — crafty, cunning, motivated not so much by
patriotism as by the lust for power and spoils. The initiative in these wars was
usually with the Romans, and the internal conflicts in the Jewish camp made
an effective use of guerrilla tactics almost impossible.
20 GUERRILLA WARFARE
The Bar Kochba rebellion (A.D. 132-135) was the last stage in the Jewish war
against Rome; caverns and subterranean passages provided the insurgents
with hiding places. They avoided open battle and from their footholds in the
mountains undertook devastating raids upon the country. When Julius
Severus, one of Hadrian's most capable generals, was appointed to suppress
the revolt, he quickly realized that there would be no open engagement and
that the rebels had to be hunted from their hideouts one by one.3
There are not many examples of guerrilla tactics in Greek military history.
One of the few exceptions was Demosthenes's campaign with three hundred
Hoplites in mountainous Aetolia. Thucy-dides, our main source for this
disastrous invasion, relates that the Aetolian forces were scattered and lightly
armed, having no defensive armor. They attacked the Athenians with their
javelins from a safe distance without much risk to themselves, retreated when
the Hoplites advanced, advanced when the Hoplites retreated, and, generally
speaking, demoralized the enemy by constant withdrawal and pursuit: in the
end the Hoplites got lost in pathless woods and stumbled into ravines from
which they could not climb out. The Aetolians ringed them with flames and a
hundred and twenty of the Hoplites ("the best soldiers of Athens") fell before
their commander decided to retreat.4
Instances of guerrilla warfare are more frequent in Roman military history
— in North Africa, Gaul, Germany, and, above all, in Spain.* Tacfarinas, the
elusive Numidian chieftain, caused a great deal of aggravation to the Romans.
According to Tacitus, he had served in the Roman army, deserted and
collected a group of bandits with whom he undertook his expeditions. Was it a
case of "social banditry," a "war of national liberation against the imperialist
enemy," or perhaps a mixture of both? The Numidians could not resist the
Romans in open battle but they were excellent practitioners of the art of small
war; whenever the Romans attacked, they retreated, only to return and harass
the Romans when these had ended their onslaught. In the words of Tacitus
(Annales, 3:22), the Romans got very tired as a result of these frustrating expe-
riences and it was only when the Numidians left the desert and tried their luck
near the coast that they were beaten. Despite various setbacks, Tacfarinas
continued his struggle; at one stage he even sent ambassadors to Rome, much
to the mortification of Ti-
* The Romans used quadrillage and, generally speaking, had fairly developed techniques
of counterguerrilla operations as described, for instance, in Sallust's account of the
Jugurthan war. For an excellent summary, see S. L. Dyson, 'Native revolts in the Roman
Empire,' Historia (Zeitschrift) (1971), 239-274.
PARTISANS IN HISTORY
berius. It was not until seven years later, when the Romans changed their
tactics to using lightly armored soldiers who knew their way in the desert,
that they succeeded in defeating Tacfarinas decisively. They came upon him at
daybreak with his troops unprepared, horses unsaddled and not even any
guards on duty — and that was the end of Tacfarinas and his band (Tacitus,
4:25).
Arminius the Cheruscan, like Tacfarinas, had served in the Roman army; he
was a Roman citizen, a knight and an ally of the Romans. As Varus set out with
three legions and auxiliaries, constituting a total of twenty-seven thousand
men, for the forest of Teuto-burg, he had every reason to suppose that
Arminius was a friend. But Arminius was motivated by anything but friendly
feelings when he persuaded Varus to move his headquarters from a Rhenish
fortress to the Weser. He assumed, quite rightly, that this move would force the
Roman leader to disperse his troops and his lines of communication would
become vulnerable.5 The first two days of Varus's march having passed
uneventfully, on the third he reached the forest. The undergrowth was thick,
there were no roads, the constant rain made the ground slippery, and
leadership in the Roman camp was deplorable. Suddenly Arminius attacked,
there was a mass slaughter and, while in the subsequent eight years the
Romans avenged themselves in a series of battles, large and small, they never
again succeeded in firmly establishing their rule east of the Rhine.
The Battle of Teutoburg Forest was an example of a successful large-scale
ambush, whereas Julius Caesar, in his conquest of Gaul, encountered
something more akin to full-scale guerrilla warfare. Vercingetorix, king of the
Arverni and military leader of the tribes that rebelled against the Romans, had
no military education and his soldiers were untrained. Having been defeated
by Caesar's cavalry, he changed his tactics; Caesar quotes him addressing his
fellow chieftains:
We have to conduct the war quite differently, to cut off the Romans from their
food and supply, to destroy isolated detachments. All the open villages and
farms from which the Romans can get their provisions will be cut off and the
Romans will starve.6
Vercingetorix realized that, while his own infantry could not face the Romans
in open battle, it had the advantage of speed over Caesar's legions which were
hampered by their huge baggage trains. His tactic was to tempt Caesar to
pursue him through diffi-
cult terrain, to tire him out and thereby compel him to disperse his forces. He
applied this strategy with considerable success for almost six years against
Rome's greatest military genius. It was unfortunate that he had to cope not
only with the Romans but also with the impatience and foolishness of his own
countrymen, who time and again forced him to commit errors against his
better judgment: insisting on his giving battle, for instance, or retreating after
a battle into a prepared fortress. In the year 52 B.C. Vercingetorix was enclosed
by the Romans in Alesia; Caesar beat off a relieving army and took the
fortress by means of circumvallation. Eventually the Gallic leader had to
surrender and was executed.
The elements of guerrilla warfare, such as the evasion of battle, the attempt
to wear down the enemy, to attack small detachments in an ambush by day
and larger units by night, were not of course a novelty to the Roman generals.
They had applied them, more than once, in their own operations. Fabius
Cunctator, who had been made dictator after the disaster at Trasimene Lake
(217 B.C.) had employed the same expedients against Hannibal. He camped on
high ground, nibbling away at the Carthaginians' rear guard, avoiding battle.
While Hannibal ravaged the Campania, Fabius used his strategy of
exhausting the invaders to good effect and this despite the mounting criticism
of his fellow Romans thirsting for a decisive battle. After yet another and even
greater Roman disaster (the Battle of Cannae [216 B.C.]), Fabius's conduct of
war became official strategy until the Romans were strong enough to pass on
to the offensive.
The examples mentioned so far refer to regular armies using 'small war'
tactics because they were not strong enough to apply any others. Guerrilla
warfare in the strict sense of the term was endemic in Spain among the Celtic-
Iberian and Lusitanian tribes. Inevitably it has raised the question of why. The
Roman historians saw the insurgents as mere street robbers and highwaymen
(latro-listes); their leader was latronum dux or listarchos.1 There was a great
deal of unpolitical banditry (bandolerismo) in Spain in ancient times, as in later
centuries, but this hardly explains the emergence of whole armies of
thousands of men who defeated numerous Roman legions. Economic and
demographic reasons, such as the distribution of land and the density of the
population in certain parts of the peninsula, have been adduced to explain this
phe nomenon. For a long time Spaniards served as mercenaries in the ancient
world; to take up arms served as a safety valve. In Hannibal's army which
traversed the Alps, Spanish soldiers seem
to have outnumbered the Carthaginians. The Iberian and Lusi-tanian tribes

had every reason to hate the Romans for the heavy tributes imposed on them
by several generations of praetors and the atrocities committed by Roman
troops; above all, the treacherous massacres carried out by Servicius Sulpicius
Galba (151-50 B.C.) and Lucius Licinius Lucullus. Thousands were killed;
thousands of others were sold as slaves to Gaul.
The fighting in the peninsula, which involved many Roman legions,
reached its climax in the war between Viriathus and Rome (147-139 B.C.). Born
in the mountains of the Sierra de la Estella, between the Tajo and the Duero,
probably of poor parents, Viriathus had been a shepherd and hunter in his
youth, and later a small-time bandolero. Roman historians portray him as a
man of very strong physique, quick, impervious to heat and cold, to hunger
and thirst and without apparently needing sleep. He escaped Galba's massacre
in the year 150 B.C. and, three years later, became the supreme military leader
of the tribes — in Mommsen's words, the "chief of the guerrillas." Soon after
Viriathus had been elected commander in chief, his soldiers were surrounded
by the Romans but he achieved a getaway by use of a strategem that he was to
apply many times in later years.8 This is how Appian described his tactics:
He [Viriathus] drew them all up in line of battle as though he intended to fight

but gave them orders that when he should mount his horse they should scatter in
every direction and make their way as best they could by different routes to the
city of Tribola and there wait for him. He chose 1,000 men only, whom he
commanded to stay with him. These arrangements having been made, they all
fled as soon as Viriathus mounted his horse. Vitelius [the Roman praetor] was
afraid that those who had scattered in so many different directions, but turning
towards Viriathus who was standing there and apparently waiting for a chance to
attack, would join battle with him. Viriathus, having very swift horses harassed
the Romans by attacking and thus consumed the whole of that day and the next,
dashing around on the same field. As soon as he conjectured that the others had
made good their escape, he hastened away in the night by devious paths and
arrived at Tribola with his nimble steeds, the Romans not being able to follow
him at an equal pace by reason of the weight of their armour, their ignorance of
the roads, and the inferiority of their horses.9
A few days later he attacked Vitelius from an ambush, killing four thousand
of his ten thousand men; the rest were no longer capable
of giving battle. Vitelius's successor, the praetor Plautius, fared no better; he

was defeated twice by Viriathus, who again pretended that he was about to
abscond when he was in fact preparing for an attack. Plautius was so
weakened that, in the words of the Roman historian, he "retired to his winter
quarters" — and this in the middle of summer. Viriathus also defeated another
Roman praetor, Claudius Unimanus, but, after the year 145, his position
became precarious inasmuch as the Romans had realized the seriousness of
their situation on the peninsula and, after the victory over Carthage,
dispatched larger forces to Spain. A consul was sent — Fabius Max-imus
Aemilianus, Scipio's brother — with an army of seventeen thousand
preponderately new recruits. They were at first more successful than their
predecessors; Viriathus continued to attack small detachments as the Roman
general preferred to train his troops before launching a major campaign. In
144, Viriathus lost two cities in southern Spain, but his luck changed when
Fabius was called back to Rome and when several tribes, hitherto in league
with Rome, joined him in his struggle. A new Roman offensive was
undertaken after the arrival of Fabius Maximus Servilianus in the year 141; but
the forces at his disposal (twenty thousand men, ten elephants, and some
African cavalry) were not sufficient to defeat the enemy.
Despite several setbacks and the loss of some more cities, Viriathus
attacked the Romans almost without interruption. The following year he cut
off and encircled the main body of the Roman forces and disaster seemed
inevitable when, instead of pressing home his advantage, he engaged in
negotiations that led to a peace treaty, with the Romans for the first time
recognizing Viriathus, who became amicus populi Romani. The reasons for his
seemingly inexplicable behavior have been the subject of a long and inconclu-
sive debate on the part of latter-day historians. According to the Romans, he
was guided by generosity; others argued that his army was simply tired —
and he was under pressure to bring the war to a speedy end. Yet others saw it
as a psychological enigma; Viriathus could have put the whole enemy army to
the sword and thereby ended the war, for the Romans would never have
retrieved such a loss.10 Against this, it could be argued that Viriathus must
have known that, in the long run, he could not maintain himself against
Rome, that the Romans would not accept defeat, that new and stronger
legions would be sent against him, and that formal recognition and semi-
independence was the most for which he could hope. In any event, the treaty
remained in force for less than
GUERRILLA WARFARE
a year; the war party in Rome had been opposed to it from the beginning and
tried to provoke Viriathus into breaking it. When this did not succeed, Caepio,
the new Roman leader in Spain, renewed the conflict. There was, however, no
victory for him in the military sense, the war ending only after the
assassination of Viriathus in his tent by three Roman emissaries who had been
sent to renegotiate with him. The Romans were glad that their dangerous foe
was dead; they were less than happy at the manner of his dying. Caepio was
not awarded a triumphal return and Viriathus's murderers did not receive the
promised reward. Tantalus, Viriathus's successor, capitulated soon afterward.
Viriathus's conduct of war was, in all essential respects, identical to the
campaign waged in the peninsula nineteen hundred years later.11 He made
optimal use of the terrain and established/oci in inaccessible places. He
provoked the Romans to pursue him until he had maneuvered them into an
ambush; he cut off their supply lines, harassed them ceaselessly with minor
attacks. His principle was to attack quickly and to retreat with equal speed so
as not to give the enemy an opportunity to discover the strength of the attack-
ing party. While he preferred arms to be used from a distance, the weapons
used by his troops in close battle were no less effective — the paraxiphis in
particular, a lance with a strong barbed hook which caused terrible wounds.
The Roman historians praised his personal integrity and his military
leadership; he was a just and unselfish man who had nothing but contempt for
pomp and ostentation. Thus the dux latronum turns into the vir duxque magnus
(Livy) and the national hero of Portugal, glorified in Camoes's patriotic epos. 12
Fifty years after Viriathus's death there was a revival of guerrilla warfare in
the peninsula. The insurgents were led by Sertorius, a Roman nobleman of
Sabine extraction, who received his military training in Marius's army, was
wounded and lost one eye. Sulla barred his election to the tribunal and later,
when appointed governor of Hispania Citerior, had him proscribed. Sertorius
escaped to Mauretania, where Lusitanian emissaries reached him and asked
him to become their leader in the struggle for independence. At the time there
were two thousand Romans and seven hundred Maure-tanians with Sertorius;
after his return to the peninsula his little army had grown to eight thousand
and although Sertorius had to face the greatly superior armies of Pompeius
and Metellus, he was never defeated. However, his deputies were not of the
same caliber; on one occasion, in the midst of the war, he dissolved his army
be-
cause he was dissatisfied with its performance and enlisted and trained new
units to continue his campaign. He attacked the supply lines of the Roman
legions and devastated the villages in their rear, compelling the legions to
retreat to Gaul in the winter. He had an alliance with the pirates who attacked
the Roman forces from the sea. Plutarch, who notes his quickness and
dexterity, commented upon Sertorius's strategy:
. . . Sertorius vanished, having broken up and dispersed his army. For this was the
way in which he used to raise and disband his armies, so that sometimes he would
be wandering up and down all alone, and at other times again he would come
rushing into the field at the head of no less than one hundred and fifty thousand
fighting men, like a winter torrent.13
Sertorius was a master both of regular and guerrilla warfare; with inferior
forces he kept many legions constantly on the alert. Like Viriathus, he was
assassinated: he was killed during a meal in the home of Perperna, one of his
aides. This, to all intents and purposes, was the end of the revolt against
Rome, for Perperna's qualifications as a military leader, in contrast to those of
a conspirator, were nonexistent.
Sertorius no doubt more than once regretted his decision to become head of
the Iberian tribes. He could rely on his soldiers only while the going was good;
in adversity they were easily discouraged and they lacked staying power.
There was a romantic streak in his character; at one stage he planned to sail to
the mythical Isles of the Blest. He had far-fetched political ambitions and, for
all one knows, planned, like Caesar, to conquer Rome and establish the rule of
his party, the moderate democrats. He tried, without much success, to
conclude an alliance with Mithridates and other enemies of the Roman Empire
such as the pirates. Yet deep down he remained a Roman patriot — one of the
most gifted and most attractive personalities of his time, a tragic figure who,
owing to the intrigues of his enemies, had to die far from his native Rome for
which he longed forever. Mommsen says of him that he was one of the
greatest, if not the greatest man produced by Rome up to that hme, one who,
in happier circumstances, might have been the leader of a moral and political
revival.14
The Roman legions were superior to the enemies facing them in the west
and the east owing to their discipline, their military Prowess, their sound
tactics based on the maniples and above all
27 PARTISANS IN HISTORY
their engineering feats (road networks, fortress building and siegecraft). On
the other hand, these forces were dispersed over a wide area and their lines of
supply and communications remained often unprotected. It is therefore
surprising that guerrilla tactics were not used against the Romans with greater
success. There was not that much to choose between the arms used by the
Romans and those used by the "barbarians"; no major war industry was
needed to keep either army supplied. But while Roman rule provoked
resentment and, on occasion, active resistance, there was no unity and no
common purpose among Rome's enemies. The Romans were fighting tribes,
not nations, and in the heyday of the Roman Empire a policy o f "divide et
impera" helped to maintain the Pax Romana and military power had to be used
but rarely.
The armies of the nomadic or seminomadic peoples, who brought about the
downfall of Rome, applied new tactics, putting greater emphasis on cavalry
and the use of missile weapons. Guerrilla warfare played little if any role in the
early Middle Ages during the campaigns of the Vandals and the Ostrogoths, of
the Huns and Byzanz, of Muhammad and the Mongols. In all these wars the
fate of peoples and continents was decided in battles between large armies.
Thus the Middle Ages are, on the whole, an unrewarding period for the
student of guerrilla warfare. There was as much fighting as in former or later
ages, but its character changed. In Europe, Christianity constituted a common
religious and cultural framework with the Pope as ultimate arbiter. The Church
did not seek to suppress war but to humanize it. According to the Treuga Dei,
promulgated by successive church councils, it was forbidden to attack women
and children, to rob or kill peasants, to use the arbalest against Christians,
because its radius of action was a hundred and fifty meters and it was therefore
considered too murderous. Fighting was legally permitted only for some one
hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty days throughout the year. These
decrees were not, of course, always observed and were certainly not adhered to
in the wars with non-Christian armies. But in principle, feudal warfare was
diametrically opposed to the concept of guerrilla fighting; reading Don Quixote
will help one to understand why. The knights jealously saw to it that the art of
war remained their and their vassals' (the squires, les ecuyers) monopoly;
they would not tolerate any other fighting men next to them.15 True, swords for
hire appeared in Italy by the eighth century but this remained largely an
isolated phenomenon, which became widespread in Germany and France only
in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries. In northern Italy, the condottieri extended their
activities — the Visconti in Milan, the Scala in Verona, the Este in Ferrara, the
Malatesta in Rimini — but the tactics used in their depredations and raids
were very different from those used by guerrillas; they certainly did not have
the support of the local population. In France and Germany small private
armies were organized by the feudal lords and gradually became a major
nuisance. In order to get rid of them, the popes tried, quite unsuccessfully, to
dispatch them on a new crusade, but they preferred greener pastures nearer
home.
Elements of guerrilla tactics can be found in the peasant uprisings of the
Middle Ages and among the bandits roaming Europe's border areas. The war
of the Swiss against the Austrians, however, and the Dutch war of
independence against Spain were of a different kind. The Swiss were not, as is
often believed, a peaceful tribe of peasants and cowherds; they had a long
martial tradition. In their battles (Morgarten, Sempach, Nancy), they used
regular army tactics; they were superior in number to the other side, but, in
contrast to the Austrian knights, they thought it a waste of time and effort to
take prisoners. In the Dutch struggle against the Spaniards, guerrilla warfare
was well-nigh impossible for geographical reasons; Dutch resistance was
concentrated in the cities, there were no mountains and forests to retreat to,
while naval power played an important role.
In the Hundred Years' War between Britain and France, originally a
dynastic conflict, which developed by degrees into a people's war, guerrilla
tactics were occasionally used by the French, above all by Bertrand
Duguesclin, Constable of France. He refused to attack the English, but,
fighting in distinctly un-chivalrous fashion, raided them by night, ambushed
their convoys and in general engaged in a guerre d'usure, with all its familiar
vexations. The English gradually lost what they had without so much as an
opportunity of meeting the foe on the field of battle. Duguesclin is first
mentioned in the chronicles at the Siege of Rennes (1356-1357) when, at the
head of a hundred men, he penetrated the enemy camp and seized a wagon
train of two hundred carts loaded with food and war supplies. 16 Duguesclin
was among those who pioneered the technique of using the cavalry as
mounted infantry; quickly transferred from one place to another, the soldiers
dismounted once the battle had started. This was the French answer to the
longbow used by the English. Subsequently the technique fell into disuse, only
to be rediscovered in the eigh-
teenth century. Duguesclin and his raids were mentioned more than once as a
shining example of partisan warfare in the manifestos of the French
Resistance in World War II.
The history of warfare in early modern times offers a great many examples
of the technique of petite guerre. These were actions intended to damage the
enemy while avoiding major battles. The element of surprise often played a
central role, as in Prince Eugen's capture of Cremona (1702) which ended in a
defeat, or the victory of the Austrians over Frederick the Great at Hochkirch
(1758). This battle took place in wooded country with the Prussian king
laboring under the delusion that he was facing merely another by now almost
routine nightly raid by Austrian irregulars, whereas in fact Marshal Daun, the
Austrian commander, had moved thirty thousand men to within two hundred
yards of the Prussian forces, which were in consequence completely routed.
Even before, in the Thirty Years' War, Wallenstein used raiding parties of
Croats to pursue Mansfeld, and Gustav Adolf had special light brigades of
about five hundred men for similar purposes. The main practitioners of the art
of raiding parties were Johann von Werth in the last phase of the Thirty Years'
War and the Austrian commanders Trenk and Na-dasdy with their Croats and
Pandurs who caused considerable trouble to Frederick the Great. The units
consisted of anything from two hundred to two thousand horsemen and in
their raids, which sometimes lasted for weeks, they covered hundreds of miles
to the enemy's rear. But they almost always acted within the framework of a
regular army.
Between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries, peasant revolts
periodically swept throughout Europe (Flanders in 1323-1327, the Jacquerie in
1358, Wat Tyler's rising in 1381, the war of the Taborites in Bohemia and the
German Peasant War in 1525). It was not so much the absence of a clear
political program, inefficient leadership or inferior armament that led almost
invariably to the quick defeat of the peasant armies, but chiefly the fact that
peasants were incapable of engaging in a sustained effort; the Jacquerie in the
Paris region, for instance, was crushed within a mere two weeks. The peasants
would congregate for a big battle or a major campaign, presenting an easy and
convenient target for their opponents. They lacked organization and
discipline: after a few weeks or months they would disperse and their armies
would simply melt away. There was nonetheless the occasional exception:
while the French peasants were defeated with such ease, the struggle of the
Tuchins in the Auvergne lasted for twenty-one
years. It was an early and successful case of social banditry; they robbed
travelers and attacked small English and French detachments.17 The rebellion
of the Remensas in Catalonia went on for over ten years (1461-1472) and there
was another upsurge in the 1480s. The Taborites, more a national than a
social movement, effectively used a new military technique (the Wagenburg)
which, though known in the early Middle Ages, had been totally forgotten in
the centuries between. The Taborites did not, however, evade confrontation
with their enemies; they could more than hold their own on the battlefield and
their military exploits do not therefore belong to the history of irregular
warfare.
The Balkans were the main scene of banditry from the fifteenth to the late
eighteenth century. Although they had been occupied by the Turks in the
fifteenth century, local resistance had continued, sometimes in the form of a
struggle for national (and religious) independence, but more often as banditry.
The most successful of the opponents to Turkish rule was George Castriota-
Skanderbeg. A Serbian by birth, he had served with distinction with the
Turkish army for many years and was governor of a sanjak. In 1442 he moved
to Albania and at the head of some three hundred local warriors raised the
banner of national revolt. He proclaimed himself a Christian and, temporarily
uniting the Albanian tribes, defeated countless Turkish generals such as Fizur,
Mustafa, Hamza, Balaban, Yakub Arnaut, as well as the great sultan himself.
Skander-beg was a military leader of remarkable talent. Never defeated in
battle, he mastered both regular warfare and guerrilla tactics. When the sultan
attacked him with a strong army ( a hundred and thirty thousand men
according to the chronicles), he wisely evaded battle and, instead, intercepted
the sultan's convoys, cut off his communications, wiped out small Turkish
detachments, harassed the Turkish flanks and rear by day and by night, and so
fatigued them by constantly changing ruses and stratagems that the sultan
decided that the game was not worth the candle and retreated from this
inhospitable country. After Skanderbeg's death (1468) his movement
collapsed. He has become the national hero of Albania, the subject of countless
histories, novels and even a film, which usually gloss over the exceedingly
cruel character of these wars. Pardon was never granted, treaties and promises
were broken, women and children were indiscriminately slaughtered; it was,
in brief, a war of extermination which was far removed from the restrictions
imposed by feudal chivalry on medieval Europe.
Successive generations of Balkan freedom fighters could resist
l6 GUERRILLA WARFARE
the Turkish armies for comparatively short periods only, and then only if they
had the support of some outside power. Thus Skander-beg was assisted in his
struggle by the Venetians and the Pope (Paul II) with men, weapons and
money. The Serbians were supported by the Austrians; the great Serbian
revolt known as the Insurrection of St. Sava lasted for thirteen years (1593-
1606). When the Austrians made peace with the Turks the rebellion dis-
integrated.18 The Greeks in their freedom struggle had the support, moral and
material, of the whole of Europe.
Alone among the Balkan peoples, the Montenegrins continued their
struggle from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century almost without external
help; but even they could not have fought forever had they not had the supply
line from the harbor at Cattaro, on the Adriatic, to their capital, Cetinje. In
later years they had the active support of the Russians. They were further
favored by the inaccessible nature of their Black Mountains (Chernagora). The
country was exceedingly poor, roads were all but nonexistent; thus it held
altogether no particular appeal for the Turks. A small Turkish army
constituted no danger to the local inhabitants and supply difficulties
prevented a large army from staying for any length of time in so uninviting a
land.
The Montenegrins, like Skanderbeg and the Greeks, committed acts of great
brutality, though it has been argued that this was the natural reaction to the
barbaric oppression to which they were subjected. However, while the Turks
were not exactly paragons of humanism, it is difficult to find in the annals of
Ottoman history up to the nineteenth century many incidents like Danilo's
massacre of the Turks in 1702 or the mass murder of Turks (and Jews) in
Greece in 1821. 19 In some cases there was the deliberate intent of provoking the
Turks to countermassacres; without the atrocities in Morea, Philhellenism
would not have attracted so many supporters. The Turks, nevertheless, had a
bad press in Europe; a British nineteenth-century traveler, with no axe to
grind, noted, with some surprise, that there had been a mistaken tendency in
Europe to invest the southern Slavs with almost supernaturally noble qualities.
In actual fact, the Turks, "whether it be from a consciousness of their own
decrepitude or some other reasons," behaved on the whole better. 20 He also
noted that the Montenegrins greatly exaggerated their successes against the
Turks, and that "they forget that they owed their present position not to their
own prowess, but to foreign intervention."21 Such exaggerations frequently
occur in the reports about their struggle against the Turks; the Christians usu-
ally did not face Turkish elite troops and, more often than not, they had
numerical superiority.
Brigandage was no less widespread in the Balkans in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. Many ballads celebrated the daring exploits of Haiduks
and Klephts — both terms meaning robbers. It has been said that, given the
severity of Turkish rule, a young Christian villager could either become a
cleric, emigrate or turn to robbery. This is a somewhat simplified analysis of
the opportunities open to the Balkan Christians, quite apart from the fact that
the Turks and Albanians were at least as numerous among the Haiduks. Paul
Ricaut, an attache at the British embassy in Constantinople, who chose the
overland route on his way home, reported that even the strongest convoys
were attacked by the Haiduks in the forests, and that rocks thrown in narrow
passes did as much damage as an artillery salvo. 22 According to the Haiduk
sagas, many of them were shepherds, underpaid and bored, who knew the ter-
rain extremely well and were lured by the romanticism and the material
rewards of brigandage. There was also a fair proportion of escaped criminals
among them. The gang was usually led by a voivode; the second in command
was the bairaktar, the standard-bearer, in charge of accounting, which meant in
this context the distribution of the booty. Their work was seasonal; since there
were hardly any travelers to rob during the winter, these months would be
spent preparing a camp and storing provisions at, if possible, a reasonable
distance from their summer field of action. 23 Judging by accounts, they kept
their weapons (rifles, pistols, yata-gans) in excellent condition. They did not
rob the peasants in their immediate neighborhood, since they had to rely on
them for intelligence, and they also needed their help for a quick escape in an
emergency. As it was mostly strangers they robbed they became the object of
something like a Robin Hood or Rob Roy cult, not only on the part of the
village population but, in later years, among town dwellers as well. The
orthodox clergy blessed their weapons and gave them absolution for murder.
As the popular poets saw it, the Haiduk was the only free man in an empire of
slaves. Whether they were really rebels against Turkish oppression is doubtful,
but it is certainly true that, while they did not discriminate between Christian
and Muslim insofar as robbery was concerned, Christians had a better chance
of escaping alive whereas Turks, including women and children, were killed
without compunction. The Greek Klephts, particularly those in the Morea,
showed less national spirit; they lived mainly at the expense of poor Christians
and
"rarely ventured to waylay a rich Greek primate, still more rarely to plunder a
Turkish aga."24 To kill compatriots, to burn a Greek village, caused them not a
twinge of conscience. Koloktronis, who was the leading Klepht of his age, later
became commander in chief of the Greek army and a member of the
government. Even the Philhel-lenes were appalled by the savagery of the
Klephts and the Greeks in general. One of them wrote: "Whatever national or
individual wrong the Greeks may have endured, it is impossible to justify the
ferocity of their vengeance, or to deny that a comparison instituted between
them and the Ottoman generals . . . would give to the latter the palm of
humanity."25
Large-scale banditry was not, of course, limited to Europe. To provide but
one example: during the last two decades of the Ming dynasty, from 1628 to
1644, guerrilla warfare was endemic in northern China, particularly in Shensi,
which was the birthplace of two of the main gang leaders of the period, Li
Tsu-cheng and Chang Hsien-chung. With the cooperation of many smaller
bands of army deserters and peasants, they virtually divided the country
among themselves. Gradually these bands became armies, headed by war-
lords. The central government, far too weak at the time to defeat these internal
enemies, tried to buy them off, or integrate them into the Chinese army. The
generals sent to fight them usually preferred to let them escape. On the whole
it was a fairly lackadaisical guerrilla war, despite the fact that it profoundly
affected Chinese history and that a great many people perished in the recur-
ring combats.26
Partisan warfare played a notable part in the American War of
Independence. It was certainly not a crucial factor in the eventual outcome but
it did have a delayed influence on military thinking; Clausewitz and the many
theoreticians of the petite guerre frequently referred to it.27 In some important
respects it was different from previous wars. American soldiers did not have a
good reputation; Wolfe, at Quebec, had called the American rangers the worst
soldiers in the universe. They had little training and no discipline; another
contemporary European observer wrote about a "contemptible body of
vagrants, deserters and thieves" fighting on the American side. A recent
historian has drawn attention to the fact that the American settlers were
anything but noble savages — they belonged to a wealthy and sophisticated
society with a high standard of living; they were willing to defend their homes
but it was difficult to make them serve outside the militia area. 28 They were
not very useful as regular soldiers. Circumstances made them choose
a kind of warfare more congenial to their upbringing and more suited to their
territory. They acquitted themselves well in the small enclosures and narrow
lanes near Bunker Hill. This became the general pattern of the war; the Duke
of Wellington was one of the first to point out that military operations were
impractical by large bodies in North America (a thinly populated country,
producing little food) except where there were navigable rivers or extensive
means of land transport. Though their discipline was lamentable, the
Americans were good shots and skilled horsemen and had learned about
scouting from the Red Indians, whom they had fought for years around Fort
Ticonderoga, at the Susquehanna River, and elsewhere.
Partisan warfare began in earnest in 1780, after the fall of Charleston; this
was the time of Benedict Arnold's conspiracy, when Washington wrote about
the "inevitable ruin of our cause." Threatening plunder and confiscation,
Cornwallis tried to compel South Carolina to take the oath of allegiance.
Among the patriots who retreated to the swamps and the mountains of the
interior was one Francis Marion, aged forty-eight at the time, who became the
most successful and most famous partisan commander of the war. 29 Marion
was of Huguenot parentage, a small thin man, hardy and taciturn, whose
favorite drink was a mixture of water and vinegar. He wore a scarlet outer
jacket and leather cap. In the beginning he commanded a mere twenty men,
among them a few boys and several blacks. Dressed in rags, miserably
equipped, their appearance caused great hilarity among regular troops. They
shot with bullets of pewter, buckshot and swan shot. Their swords had been
fashioned from saw blades; they had neither tents nor baggage trains. "We had
not seen a dollar for years," Marion was to write later. As the raids continued,
the number of men under his command grew to a hundred and fifty, and
eventually to several hundred, but there was a constant coming and going; he
seldom had the same people serving under him for as long as two weeks at a
stretch.30 With the beginning of winter many recruits returned home. The
raiders had continuously to be taught the essentials of partisan warfare. Some
of them were desperate characters who were out for plunder and would
change sides from time to time. "Many who fought with me, I am obliged to
fight against," Marion sadly wrote on one occasion. Nevertheless, Marion
constantly engaged platoons vastly superior to his own, broke up British
recruiting parties, cut off Cornwallis's supplies and forever eluded Tarleton,
who had been sent out to catch and destroy his forces. The mobility of his units
was impres-
2.0 GUERRILLA WARFARE
sive; there were days on which they rode sixty miles and more. He instructed
his men in the skills of night attack and in the techniques of small war.
Whenever a bridge was to be crossed near the enemy camp, it was to be
covered with blankets, so that the clatter of hooves on loose planks would not
warn the foe. His scouts, frequently posted in the thick tops of trees, were
taught a distinctive shrill whistle that could be heard at great distance.
Sometimes his men went into action with only three rounds of ammunition
apiece; they obtained rifles and cartridges from their prisoners or the enemy
soldiers killed. He never informed his men of the anticipated length of a raid.
When he established camp in the midst of the swamps, he had all boats in the
vicinity burnt but his own. When the British forces burned the houses of the
patriots, Marion retaliated by shooting enemy pickets, a practice that was
considered unethical according to prevailing military convention. By his tactics
of constantly retreating, he exasperated the British, who called him a robber
and challenged the "Swamp Fox" to "come out and fight like a Christian."
Marion did not deign to reply. He suffered defeat and setbacks: on one
occasion, one of his recruits betrayed him; on another, the British discovered
and devastated his main base at Snow's Island. Toward the end of the war, his
raiders came under increasing pressure by the British, who had meanwhile
mastered his tactics. But by now the tide had turned in favor of the colonists;
Marion returned to civilian life, married a woman of means and became a state
senator.
Among the other generals who engaged in partisan warfare, Andrew
Pickens, Williams and, above all, Thomas Sumter ought to be mentioned.
Sumter, like Marion, was a man in his forties when the war broke out. He had
been a sergeant in the campaign against the Cherokees in 1762 and
subsequently a captain in the mounted rangers. At the beginning of the war,
he raised a militia force in Carolina. Unlike Marion, who took infinite pains
over detail, he tended to neglect preparations for an assault, failed to
reconnoiter and to coordinate his forces, and was forever becoming embroiled
in quarrels with fellow officers.31 A courageous and imaginative soldier and a
man of great physical endurance, he would attack when the odds were
overwhelmingly against him, sometimes against Marion's advice. He lacked
strategic sense and, more often than not, his campaigns ended in defeat. The
practice established in his units — "Sumter's Law," according to which his
militia was recruited for a period often months and paid in plunder taken
from the Tory loyalists — did not work too well; there was periodic discontent
among his troops. He retired from military life before the
end of the war and died in 1832 at the great age of ninety-eight. General
Daniel Morgan was a greater strategist than either Marion or Sumter but he
was not primarily a partisan leader. He employed irregulars of the militia in
conjunction with the territorial army — with considerable success, as in the
Battle of Cowpens.32
It has been argued that Washington did not win the war but that, owing to
the terrain rather than to the enemy, Britain lost it.33 Washington had realized
early on that the war must be defensive in character, that the colonists — even
with the help of the French — were not capable of facing the British in open
warfare. Thus, the Americans developed their own style of conducting war,
and partisan operations became frequent in the South, where the brutal
behavior of the British forces had antagonized the local population.
Furthermore, only relatively small detachments of cavalry could be deployed
and there was only limited scope for artillery in the punishing terrain — wild
and mountainous, with impenetrable woods and swamps, with no roads or
negotiable rivers.
The leaders of the Southern irregulars were almost all veterans of the
Cherokee campaign of 1761; in the war against the Indians they had learned
the importance of taking cover, of moving silently, shooting accurately and
other essentials of the petite guerre.34 Their main weapons were the firelock and
the saber; except for a short time in 1780, they had no artillery. Marion,
considering it a burden, preferred to be free of it to retain his mobility. On the
other hand, they occasionally used wooden dummies with good psychological
effect. The partisans were mounted although the actual fighting was usually
done on foot. In Marion's hit-and-run attacks, frequently carried out at night
or at dawn, some of his men charged on horseback, but most would use their
firelocks and muskets after dismounting. 35 The irregular forces used multiple-
pellet loads (buckshot) for their smooth-bore weapons because there was
always the chance of hitting more than one man with one discharge.36 But the
Americans were also among the pioneers of accurate, aimed shooting, a
practice that was not yet widely accepted in the military manuals of the
period. Marion applied tactics which Viriathus had so often used in his wars
against the Romans: a small detachment would attack the superior enemy,
then retreat in apparent disorder and lead the pursuers into an ambush.
Furthermore, especially in the early days, the irregular forces would scatter in
every direction after an engagement, making effective pursuit quite
impossible, and would then meet again after a few hours or days to prepare a
new attack.
Partisan activities in the South caused considerable losses among
the British and weakened their resolve (which was not very strong anyway) to
pursue the war. It has been argued that the Southern partisan forces were the
salvation of the American cause since, if the British and Tories had had only
the Continental regulars to contend with, "they would have won a complete
victory in the summer of 1780."37 But this argument ignores the fact that, by
1780, the British had already given up the North, their aim thenceforth being
to preserve what they could of the Southern regions of their former colonies.
Moreover, the decisive battles in the South, such as Cowpens and Guildford,
were fought mainly by regular troops. Lastly, the tactics of the Southern
irregulars were used more than once by their British and Tory opponents.
While partisan tactics played an important part in the American War of
Independence after 1780, they by no means won it.
THE VENDEE
Fighting in the Vendee broke out in 1793 and, after some initial setbacks, the
Vendean army was defeated with relative ease by the forces of the Republic.
But this was not the end of the affair, for the second phase of the revolt, the
Chouannerie, lasted for three more years and there were further, albeit short-
lived risings in 1799, 1815 and 1832. The fighting affected large sections of
western France, the marais and the bocage, the marshes and the forests on the
left bank of the Loire; it also spread to Anjou and Haute Poitou. The rising has
entered the annals of history as a classic manifestation of a
counterrevolutionary movement, consisting of the most backward, ignorant
and fanatical elements among a population that had not yet broken the
shackles of their feudal masters, and the clergy, obscurantists unaware of the
benefits of the revolution. The army, as the Republicans saw it, consisted of
"deserters from all European armies, smugglers, gamekeepers and poachers."38
These men, living in darkness, were manipulated by the royalists and the
Church, which had joined forces in a giant conspiracy against the forces of
reason and progress.39 This, very briefly, is the traditional interpretation of the
Vendean rising and it is, of course, correct in so far as the movement was
directed against Paris and the new revolutionary authority. Religious
inspiration was strong, stronger, in fact, than royalist influence. But there was
no conspiracy; the risings were largely spontaneous, and had more to do with
the un-
willingness of young people to serve in the army and with the traditional
conflict between town and country than with the speeches of Robespierre and
the program of the Jacobins. The peasants bitterly resented the attempts of the
bourgeoisie to dominate their communes. Aristocrats were prominently
represented among the military leaders of the rising but there were even more
commanders of very humble origin, more, actually, than among the generals
of the Republic; the "nobles," moreover, were not dukes and viscounts but
usually mere country squires. Finally, there was the resentment of local people
against foreigners speaking another language, heirs to different traditions. The
Vendee uprising was, in short, a bloody civil war, cruelly fought on both
sides; it devoured about a hundred and fifty thousand victims, more than
French losses in Russia.
From a military point of view, the campaigns are of considerable interest
because the Republican army, itself the practitioner of revolutionary new
tactics, had to face a new mode of combat which disconcerted it greatly.
"Amid fire, skirmish lines, the exploitation of difficult terrain, rapid
concentration of force, unhampered by any logistic straitjacket." 40 According
to Joseph Clemenceau, who was captured by the Vendeans, their generals
could never form the Vendeans into a permanent army or keep them under arms; it
was never possible to make them remain to guard the cities they took; nor could
anyone make them encamp or subject them to military discipline. Accustomed to an
active life, they could not stand the idleness of the camp. They went to battle
eagerly, but they were never soldiers.41
There had been a wave of unrest in western France, inchoate, without clear
direction, even before the Revolution; a first small-scale armed rising took
place in August 1792, near Chatillon, but the general attack started on 10
March 1793, when the tocsin was sounded in six hundred villages throughout
the Vendee. At first the Vendean generals, such as Cathelineau, Bonchamp,
Stoffet and d'Elbee, succeeded in making some headway against the Repub-
lican forces, of which there were not many in western France. They were
beaten, however, at Lucan and Cholet in late autumn. By the beginning of
1794 they had lost their best officers and soldiers as well as most of their war
material. Instead of avoiding direct confrontation and the siege of big cities,
the Vendeans committed all the obvious mistakes; instead of retreating after
their defeats into
GUERRILLA WARFARE
the interior of Brittany, where the Republicans could have followed them only
with the greatest difficulty, they again went to battle against superior forces
equipped with artillery which they themselves lacked. If, despite the capable
leadership of Hoche, Ber-thier, Kellermann, Marceau and other famous
generals, the armies of the Republic did not defeat them more quickly, the
main reason was that the troops at their disposal were untrained and of
inferior quality. Even more to the point, there was no unified command,
political commissars sent out from Paris interfered constantly and gave orders
which were, at best, unhelpful.
Paris had assumed at first that the Vendeans would be defeated in a matter
of days, whereas the generals on the spot soon realized that they faced a mass
insurrection and that pacification would be at best a long drawn-out
undertaking. Kleber bemoaned that the Vendeans were always much better
informed about the movements of his forces than he was about theirs, that
they were constantly sending out patrols and attacking small Republican
detachments. From the very beginning, Hoche stressed that pacification was a
political rather than a military problem: "For the twentieth time I repeat," he
wrote to the Directoire in Paris, "if one does not grant religious tolerance, one
has to give up the idea of peace. This country needs civil administration —
military administration does not suit it."42 And, on another occasion: "If you are
not tolerant, we shall go on killing Frenchmen who have become our enemies,
but the war will not end." The Paris authorities were loath to show clemency to
the enemies of the Republic, nor were they as yet fully aware of the extent of
the revolt. Instructions were that all rebel leaders and soldiers were to be
executed as well as anyone trying to evade conscription or who was found
bearing arms. Since there were no game laws in the Vendee, everyone had a
rifle, and thus could be shot without trial. Subsequently more lenient orders
were issued. Only the leaders of the revolt were to be executed, a ruling more
honored in the breach than the observance. When the Vendeans, for instance,
killed their prisoners at Cholet, Westerman countered by killing prisoners and
civilians and, from 1793, there was a vicious circle of terror and counterterror.
In punitive raids women were raped and tortured, children killed, houses and
crypts systematically burnt.43 Relatives of Chouans were seized as hostages
and executed. All over the west of France "traitors" and "enemy agents,"
however innocent, were sought out and arrested. Far from breaking the
popular movement, such measures made it only more popular. The manifestos
issued in Paris, claiming that the insurgents were creatures of the British, never
gained credence.
The generals and the political commissars had reported to Paris as early as
October 1793 that the "Vendee no longer exists." Such confident reports were
correct to the extent that the rebels were no longer able to raise an army of fifty
thousand, as they had done in the beginning. But for all that, they remained in
effective control of the country and their guerrilla tactics made it far more
difficult to attack them; Hoche needed more than a hundred thousand men,
including the whole army of Mayence, to suppress the rebellion. Three years
later, in July 1796, he could report with greater justification that the Vendee
had been pacified. But even this was not final victory, for though all the major
leaders had been taken prisoner and executed, and their troops decimated,
unrest on a small scale still continued. Two thousand peasants attacked Nantes
in 1799. The Vendean army was royalist in its sympathies, but the last thing
the Comte d'Artois (the future Charles X) wanted was to accept the
generalship that was offered to him. The leaders of the insurgents were a
mixed lot; Chouan was apparently the nickname given to the four Cottereau
brothers (Jean being the best known), who were smugglers at the little city of
Laval, but they played no leading role in the war. The first generalissimo was
Cathelineau, a wagoner and church sexton and son of a mason. He was a
native of Anjou; intelligent and fearless, but no great master of strategy. He
was killed in the very first months of the uprising and was succeeded by
d'Elbee, a former captain of the cavalry, and La Rochejacquelein, a very young
lieutenant, who is mainly remembered for having admonished his followers:
"Let us find the enemy. If I retreat, kill me; when I advance, follow me. If I am
killed, avenge me."
Bonchamp, also a former army captain, was killed early on in the campaign.
One of the two principal leaders of the revolt was Stoffet, who had been a
corporal in the army and subsequently a gamekeeper, an Alsatian by birth and
son of a miller. A good leader of men and a capable officer, he had nothing but
disdain for the nobles and always stressed that he fought for religion and the
Church, "which makes all men equal."44 He had the reputation of being a cruel
man and many atrocities were ascribed to him. Mer-cier du Roche, who fought
against him, wrote that he would have been a good general of the Republic.
The other important military commander was Charette, a former naval
lieutenant, who, like Stoffet was hunted down in early 1796, captured and
executed. Napoleon is said to have thought highly of him. To repeat, the
notion that the Vendean revolt was a movement inspired and commanded by
feudal chiefs is not borne out by the known facts. Caillaud was a
locksmith, Forestier, the son of a shoemaker. There were not a few

adventurers in their ranks, the outcasts of all classes. By and large, it was a
popular movement with anticapitalist undertones; the operations of the
Chouans struck terror among the bourgeois of the cities.
The popular character of the rebellion has to be stressed because it provides
the key to an understanding of the roots of the Chouan-nerie. It was a
movement of national liberation of sorts, even though its ideology was
diametrically opposed to the ideals of the French Revolution. The enthusiasm
of the Chouans surprised and mystified Republican observers. One of them
commented: "One goes to battle like to a fete — women, old people, children
aged twelve to thirteen, I have seen them killed in the front line."45 Hedonville,
who commanded the Republican forces in the later stages of the rising,
reported to Bonaparte that the local population invariably gave the army
wrong information about the whereabouts of the Chouans. There was no such
solidarity among the Republicans. "We never lacked ammunition because
your soldiers sold it to us," Coquereau wrote mockingly to the leaders of the
Convention in Paris. Contemporary observers noted the prominent role
played by women, both in the preparation of the rising and the actual fighting;
they urged their sons and husbands to go to war, and many accounts have it
that they were the most fanatic proponents of a guerre a Voutrance.
The tactics of the Chouans have been described by many eyewitnesses.
Thus Joseph Clemenceau:
They fought without order, in squads or crowds, often as individual

snipers, hiding behind hedgerows, spreading out, then rallying, in a
way that astonished their enemies, who were entirely unprepared for
these manoeuvres; they were seen to run up to cannons and steal them
from under the eyes of the gunners, who hardly expected such audacity.
They marched to combat, which they called aller au feu, when they
were called by their parish commandants, chiefs taken from their ranks
and named by them, centurions, so to speak, who had more of their
confidence than did the generals chance had given them; in battle as at
the doors of their churches on Sunday, they were surrounded by their
acquaintances, their kinfolk and their friends; they did not separate
except when they had to fly in retreat. After the action, whether victors
or vanquished, they went back home, took care of their usual tasks, in
fields or shops, always ready to fight.46
Hoche, in a letter to Aubet-Dubayet, noted that the Chouans had friends

and agents everywhere and always found food and ammuni-
tion whether it was given voluntarily or taken by force. Their principal object
was to destroy the civilian authorities, and to that end they intercepted
convoys, assassinated government supporters, disarmed Republican soldiers
and even tried to foster unrest among the town dwellers. Their tactics were to
disperse silently behind hedges, to shoot from all directions, and at the
slightest hesitation on the part of the Republican forces to attack them while
shouting their war cries. Encountering stiff resistance, they would retreat and
renew their attack on another occasion. A Chouan leader addressed the
following warning to the Republican authorities:
The Chouans will demolish all the bridges, intercept all communications, destroy
all mills which they do not need, cut the knuckles of all cows and the hocks of
the horses employed in transporting supplies, kill every state employee
performing his duty, kill everyone obeying requisitions; they will force the
population under threat of the death penalty to follow them . . . they will not
lower their arms until they have made France a great cemetery. 47
The Chouans were organized on a local basis with assembly points in every
village. The peasants kept their own arms and brought food along for three to
four days when they went into action. Some of them wore uniforms — green
coats and pantaloons with red waistcoats and a white cockade. They
frequently attacked at night and they were past masters at ambushing small
detachments in a country which favored such operations. They were less
inventive when fighting involved larger units on each side. Kleber observed
that their plan of battle was always the same:
It consists in greatly extending their front so as to envelop us and throw disorder

in our ranks. . . . When they advance on us they generally take care to dispose
their army in three columns whatever the character of the ground . . . their right
column is always the strongest and made up of the best men. The center column,
strengthened by a few cannons, moves forward, while the other two open up
into skirmish lines along the hedges, but the main effort almost always comes
from the right.48
Republican commanders noted that it was the practice of the Chouans not
to attack unless their force was greatly superior. When forced to retreat, the
Chouans would rally at a distance of a few miles and immediately
counterattack the unprepared enemy. On certain occasions they would appear
on the battlefield with Republican hostages in front of them; at other times
they would wear
Republican uniforms so as to surprise the enemy. They were men hardened

by long winter nights, men who could jump over hedges and ditches, could
see in the dark and hear the slightest noise.49
In the jaundiced view of their Republican enemies, the Chouans were little
better than untamed animals. In actual fact their approach was quite
sophisticated, when engaging in psychological warfare, for instance. Early in
the war the Catholic army was given orders not to rob and to show leniency
toward prisoners. These were released and given special passes on condition
that they gave their word of honor not to fight again in the Vendee. Among
the Chouans there were detachments of French, Swiss and German deserters;
these were not very strong, but their very existence helped to demoralize the
Republicans. In a leaflet signed "Les Brigands," the Chouans addressed the
Republican soldiers as "nos amis et freres." The city dwellers who had grown
rich (it said), were those culpable for the bloodshed. The Republican soldiers
were mere dupes, exploited (like the Chouans) by the common enemy. 50 On
more than one occasion the Chouans attacked, caught, and executed gangs of
bandits to dissociate themselves from criminal elements and to help the
peasants who had suffered from them. In the end the revolt of the Chouans
was put down because the Republic concentrated vastly superior forces
against them and used effective counterguerrilla tactics both on the military
and the civilian level. A network of entrenched camps was established which
the Chouans could not bypass. The Republican soldiers systematically combed
the area, seizing the peasants' cattle until they surrendered their arms. All
suspects were arrested in the course of these operations, which were carried
out in great secrecy with the help of the local police. In the instructions to his
officers, Hoche always stressed the importance of establishing a good intelli-
gence service and of deceiving the enemy about their intentions.
But Hoche also understood that this war could not be won by arms alone.
He insisted on strict discipline on the part of his troops; severe punishment
threatened those who assaulted civilians and did not respect their property. In
an appeal to the civilian population, he announced that, unlike the rebels, the
soldiers of the Republic would not answer cruelty with cruelty, terror with
coun-terterror: "You will find in these soldiers zealous protectors just as the
brigands will find in them implacable enemies. Peaceful and honest citizen,
stop believing that your brothers want your ruin; stop believing that the
fatherland wants your blood, it merely wants to make you happy through its
beneficial laws." In his correspon-
dence with Paris, Hoche emphasized the importance of treating the clergy
well. He saw the priests as the main instrument for regaining the confidence
of the population. They could be made to understand that the continuation of
the Chouannerie meant war without end, with all the human suffering and the
material losses that involved. A victory by the Republic, on the other hand,
would restore peace and religious tolerance. Hoche's moderate course of
action did not make him any more popular among the Chouans, while in
Paris he was suspected of being too soft and thus ineffectual. A tribute was
paid to him only in 1796 after the pacification had been completed, when
Carnot, the president of the Directoire, expressed the thanks of the Republic
to the "Army of the Ocean" and its commander.
The Chouans received some supplies from England but this assistance was
at no stage decisive. Of the nobles who had left France, only few were inclined
to return and fight. Those who did despised the peasants and their conduct of
war. They wanted to fight according to time-honored tradition — and were
quickly wiped out by the armies of the Republic. Since the Chouans did not
hold any major port, supplies were neither substantial nor regular and in the
last resort they could rely only on their own resources. The Chouans had no
guerrilla doctrine; they were simply adapting their war to local conditions
and, after their initial setbacks, fought the only way they possibly could. 51 The
Russian partisans under Denis Davydov were regular soldiers, engaged in
raids to the enemies' rear. The Spanish guerrilla fighters received substantial
help from Wellington and the various local juntas, which also provided
political leadership. The Chouans, in contrast, had no government, no politi-
cal advisers. Of all the early guerrilla movements, it was the most
spontaneous, the most isolated, and thus, in many ways, the "purest"
specimen of the lot.
SPAIN
The Spanish war against the French (1808-1813) not onry produced the term
guerrilla but remained for many years the guerrilla war par excellence.
Napoleon had badly misjudged the situation, assuming that with the defeat of
the Spanish regular annies the war in the peninsula would come to a speedy
end. But popular resistance continued and tied down substantial French
forces. Taken in iso-
lation these activities were mere pinpricks, but they had a cumulative effect.
Furthermore, they provided inspiration to the anti-French forces all over
Europe.
Spain at the turn of the century was a backward country ruled by the
largest and most useless aristocracy in Europe. 52 The smalltown bosses, the
poderosos, were an important factor, often employing armed gangs or
cooperating with them. Spain had a long tradition of banditry and guerrilla
fighting of sorts. In a proclamation, the Empecinado, one of the leading
guerrilla chieftains, invoked the memory of Sertorius and Viriathus. 53 The
Spanish establishment and the liberals were on the whole pro-French; the
former because they had realized since the lost war of 1783-1785 that
resistance against their powerful neighbor in the north was hopeless, the latter
because France was the country of the revolution. The attitude of the liberals
gradually changed, largely because in Spain Napoleon supported the most
reactionary forces — Ferdinand and Godoy. Sections of the Church were more
popular in character than they were usually credited with being; the lower
clergy was quite poor, their contact with the peasantry was close — most of
them were, in fact, of peasant origin. The peasantry, or at any rate a militant
minority among them, turned against the French with the same slogans that
had been used previously in the Vendee, and later in Russia: in defense of
Church and monarchy — though not necessarily the king. There was a
genuine patriotic upsurge provoked by invasion and conquest — the Spanish
regular forces were beaten, but, in marked contrast to the political and military
tradition of the age, the people would not accept the fact. There was also a
great deal of xenophobia — foreigners had no business to be in Spain. Thus it
was essentially a war carried on by le petit peuple with an admixture of
students, monks, local notables, a few officers, doctors and lawyers. But the
backbone of the movement was rural, very much in contradistinction to
Garibaldi's "Thousand," among whom there were no peasants at all. As in the
Vendee, there was a strong populist bias, and the French mistakenly assumed
that this would drive the men of property into their camp. It was the "mob,"
not the establishment, which in Saragossa demanded arms and patriotic
resistance and the same happened in many other places. The performance of
the Spanish army had been disastrous; true, there had been the victory at
Bailen, and Saragossa resisted for ten weeks — to the admiration of all
enemies of Napoleon. But these were followed by the calamitous Battle of
Ocaha and the Spanish flight at Talavera. "I have never known the
Spaniards do anything, much less do anything well," wrote Wellington.
By 1809 the Spanish regular armies had virtually ceased to exist and it was
in that year that the guerrillas first appeared on the scene. Nominally, they
were subject to the supervision of the central junta which had retreated from
Madrid to Cadiz via Seville, and the various provincial juntas — in Castile,
Asturias and elsewhere. But these bodies were often paralyzed by internal
dissension, and they helped the guerrillas only in a small way, monetary for
the most part. Since they were chased by the French from town to town, they
could not act as an alternative government. The first major guerrilla bands
appeared in Aragon and Galicia; in the beginning the insurgents were ill
trained, shot poorly, kept unreliable watch and were given to panic. Only by
trial and error did they learn caution, and also learn not to fight except in the
most favorable conditions. Soon much of Castile and Leon was in their hands,
which made it impossible for the government to collect taxes. Originally the
French had stationed garrisons only in major cities such as Burgos, Valladolid,
Segovia, Guadalajara, but the guerrilleros' activities compelled Suchet, the
French commander, to leave some units in every town and major village.
Thus, the French army was forced to spread its forces very thin on the ground.
Every messenger had to be given a substantial escort and the smaller garrisons
were by no means safe from attack. The central junta had called for a people's
war (corso terrestre) in a decree published in Seville in April 1809, promising
awards for special feats of heroism and support for windows and orphans of
fallen soldiers. It called on the population to give food, supplies and
information to the guerrilleros, who, however, had not waited for official
appeals. There had already been attacks against French soldiers by isolated
individuals who had hoped that others would follow their example and that
as a result the country would be saved from the invaders. 54 Gradually small
bands of guerrilla fighters came into being, to increase in strength over the
years. The most important were those headed by Espoz y Mina and the
Empecinado.
Espoz y Mina was born in a Navarrese village in 1781, "the son," in his own
words, "of honest farmers of that province."55 He raised sheep and cattle,
having taken charge of the family's farm after his father's death. "I lived in
deepest peace," he wrote in his autobiography, until the convulsions of 1808
put an end to the rural idyll. He enlisted as a soldier in Doyle's batallion in
February 1809 to fight the French and later joined a small guerrilla band
which had
been formed by his nephew Xavier, nicknamed "the Student." The younger Mina
engaged in a number of daring actions, such as storming the town of Tafella, but
was captured by the French in March 1810, whereupon the seven remaining
insurgents elected Espoz their chief. Since, again as recorded by Mina, no one
belonging to the rich classes appeared on the scene to hoist the banner of resis-
tance, he rallied the patriotic elements, notably the youth. Among his first
operations was an attack against a rival gang led by one Echeverria who had
become the scourge of the villagers, robbing, plundering and in general making
himself very unpopular. Though his own forces were inferior at the time — Mina
had only four hundred men under his command — he attacked Echeverria and
had him and three of his aides shot.
In April 1810 Mina began his raids which were to harass the French for the
next four years. One of his major accomplishments was to attract large sections
of the French Ninth Corps to Navarre — about twenty-six thousand men
according to his own account, eighteen thousand according to other sources — a
force badly needed by Massena at the battle of Salamanca:
Mina's lot during this period was no enviable one: he was beset on all sides
by flying columns, and was often forced to bid his band disperse and lurk
in small parties in the mountains, till the enemy should have passed on.
Sometimes he was lurking, with seven companions only, in a cave or a
gorge; at another he would be found with 3,000 men, attacking large
convoys, or even surprising one of the blockhouses with which the French
tried to cover his whole sphere of activity.56
Mina was chased simultaneously by several French generals — Reille, Caffarrelli,

d'Agoult and Dorsenne — with forces five or six times as strong as his own. In
recognition of his services, the Regency made him commander in chief of the
guerrilleros in Navarre. The French, on the other hand, were exceedingly
frustrated by the tiring, costly and ultimately pointless marches through almost
impassable territory; they burned villages and shot all captured guerrillas. Mina
retaliated in kind, threatening to execute four French officers for every Spanish
officer, and twenty French soldiers for each Spanish one. When the French shot
four members of the Burgos provincial junta, the Curate Merino, another
guerrilla commander, had eighty French soldiers shot. In October 1811, after the
French governor in Pamplona executed several civilians, including some priests,
for having helped Mina, Mina avowed "war to the
death" to every French soldier and officer, including the French emperor. 57 But in
1812 both sides, by mutual agreement, stopped this indiscriminate slaughter.
The most important military action conducted by Mina took place in March-
April 1812. About thirty thousand French troops were massed in pursuit of the
guerrilla leader who at that time had some three to four thousand men under his
command. Caffarrelli invaded the Pyrenean valley of Roncal where Mina's
hospitals and supply depots were located. Mina escaped into Aragon, much to
the chagrin of the French who were, however, consoled by the thought that even
though he had again escaped, he would need many months to recover from the
blow that had been inflicted on him. But a mere two weeks later Mina was back
in action and scored one of his greatest successes, attacking and destroying a
great convoy in the Pass of Salinas. Five thousand Polish soldiers were killed or
wounded, four hundred and fifty Spanish prisoners were freed, and immense
booty fell into the hands of the guerrilleros. Once again major French forces were
sent out to capture this elusive man, whose boast was that he was never
surprised, but who, on 23 April, found himself nevertheless encircled. 58
Malcarado, one of his chief lieutenants, had betrayed his whereabouts to the
French general Pannetier. For once the element of surprise was on the side of the
French; five Hussars appeared on Mina's doorstep. His men were dispersed
through the village of Robres; some had already been taken prisoner. Mina
counterattacked with a few orderlies, rescued some of his officers and men, and,
having escaped in a hazardous march to the Rioja, executed the traitor on the
way. Like most guerrilleros, Mina was given to magnifying the extent and the im-
portance of his exploits; it is unlikely, for instance, that the French, as he
claimed, suffered forty thousand casualties in the battles against him, and that
he took fourteen thousand prisoners (total French casualties in the Peninsular
War from 1808 to 1814 were ninety thousand). But there is no doubt, as he
maintains in his memoirs, that at a critical time for Wellington's army he
distracted large sections of the French army of the north which, if employed
elsewhere, might have been of decisive significance.
Mina received two heavy siege guns in late 1812; they had been landed on the
Biscay coast and were put to good use in the siege of Pamplona in February 1813.
Mina proceeded to expel the French from Navarre. In late March of that year he
all but destroyed two French batallions in open battle. A last effort to pursue and
destroy his forces was made in May 1813 by General Clausel with the help
of four French divisions. Mina countered with the stratagem used so often
before when facing superior forces: he dispersed the units until his command,
and the small detachments easily filtered through the enemy net. But Clausel
also attacked Mina's chief supply base, gambling on the assumption that the
guerrilla leader would not surrender his vital strongpoint without a fight. The
gamble paid off in part; one thousand guerrillas were killed or captured in the
battle that ensued and Mina had to escape posthaste to eastern Aragon. Once
here, however, he rallied some of his scattered troops and enlisted fresh
volunteers. During the following months, Mina's forces gradually became part
of the new Spanish regular army; they were among the first units that entered
France in pursuit of the French troops. In this last phase of fighting on Spanish
soil, Mina no longer evaded battle as in his early guerrilla days. General
Buquet wrote Berthier: "Mina's troops are now so hardened that, when forces
are equal, they accept battle quite gladly. He has now at least 7,000 men
ready to give fight, including a cavalary of 1,000, which is not at all to be
despised."59
Next to Mina, the Empecinado (Juan Martin Diaz) was the most notorious
guerrilla fighter of the Peninsular War. The forces serving under this Castilian
peasant were smaller than Mina's, but his daring attacks harassed the French,
gave fresh courage to his countrymen, and made him a legend in his own
lifetime.60 Diaz was born in September 1775 in a village near Valladolid; his
parents were peasants and he himself, in the words of his biographer,
"acquired great bodily strength working in the fields." At the age of sixteen he
ran away from home and joined the army, but his parents persuaded him to
return. Later on he rejoined the army and, after serving for a while as a
private, returned to his farm work and married. Then in March 1808 he
cajoled two neighbors, one a lad of sixteen, into going along with him in a
challenging enterprise; they intercepted first one, then another French courier,
and killed them both. Several more acquaintances volunteered their services
and a small guerrilla band was formed which became active southeast of
Madrid. The Empecinado claims that his unit killed six hundred Frenchmen in
the summer of 1808, well before Mina appeared on the scene; the figure is no
doubt greatly exaggerated.
In these early days the Empecinado gave no quarter to prisoners because
there were no facilities for transporting and detaining them. Like other
guerrilla leaders, he offered his men both daily pay and a share of the plunder,
but he also claims that, when on one occasion early on in his guerrilla career
he seized a great sum of
money, the larger part of it was given to the junta. His contemporaries
described him as a man little above middle stature, firmly knit and of
muscular frame, with a dark complexion and black and animated eyes. He
was calm but could react quickly when circumstances demanded it. Steadfast
in adversity, he was, according to his friends, a modest man who sought no
rewards for his activities.61
The Empecinado was arrested by Spanish government forces in November
1808 following a denunciation. He broke his handcuffs and escaped from jail
just as the French entered the village in which he was being held. Pretending
to be a stableman, he waited on the French dragoons, picked one of their best
horses and made off on it. His second guerrilla career began with small
operations in the Madrid and Salamanca region carried out in collaboration
with his three brothers, one of them only fifteen at the time. By the spring of
1809 his little band numbered forty-eight men and he received some money
from General Moore to keep it going. The Empecinado (the name is derived
from the black soil of his native region) attacked gendarmes and small French
garrisons. Flying columns were sent out to destroy him, and the villagers were
threatened with dire punishment if they helped him; even his aged mother
was arrested and faced with execution by the French. In order not to endanger
the villagers, the Empecinado launched sham attacks against them to obtain
food and other supplies. On several occasions he abducted the alcaldes, the
village elders. Like Mina and other guerrilla leaders, he engaged in almost
constant hit-and-run assaults; he suffered numerous defeats but was never de-
cisively beaten. With a hundred and twenty men he entered the fortress of
Pedraza, then withdrew to the Avila mountains where seventy of his men
deserted. Made captain of cavalry by the junta, he harassed the troops of Soult
and Ney at the time of their temporary retreat from Galicia in 1809. Shortly
afterward, he briefly enlisted four thousand peasants armed with firelocks
and fowling pieces. He attacked Salamanca, but some of his soldiers again
deserted and he had to restrict his activities for several months. On one
occasion he fought a duel with a French commander, whom he killed. The
junta dispatched him to the Guadalajara area, where he evaded a trap set for
him by twenty-five hundred French troops. By this time he was treating
prisoners according to the rules of war; like Mina, he had detachments
consisting of Polish, Italian and German deserters. There were even a few
German officers among them. According to the Empecinado's own account, he
induced about six
thousand men to desert, again no doubt a greatly exaggerated figure. But it is

true that the French commanders regarded these defections as a serious
problem.62
At one stage of the Peninsular War robbers became scarcely less of a
menace than the French occupiers, and the Empecinado, "scrupulously
attentive to the interest of the laboring class," destroyed the gang of one Don
Bernardo Mayor.63 By 1810-11 he commanded a thousand infantry and four
hundred horsemen; he went through the pretense of forcing young villagers
to join his units so as not to subject their families to French acts of retaliation.
Like Mina, he had to face treason and mutiny in his own camp and he
suffered more than one setback. The provincial junta gave him bad advice and
two hundred of his men were taken prisoner in a French surprise attack while
in church on Good Friday, 1811. Hugo, the French general who had been sent
out to capture him, offered a deal: why would he not enter King Joseph's
service? The Empecinado's answer was, "Would you kindly stop writing
me. . . ."
In May 1811 he received three pieces of artillery, but there was renewed
trouble among his officers and he was beaten by the French at Cuenca. Having
commanded forces almost equal to a divison, his effective strength following
these reverses was again down to four hundred men. The new junta, however,
helped him rebuild his forces and in lower Aragon he took "thousands of pris-
oners" over a period of several weeks. After these successes, there was once
more a sudden defeat; attacked by renegade Spaniards, he was surrounded
and could save himself only by jumping down a precipice. Severely wounded,
he was out of combat for some months. By March 1812 he had recovered, and
he entered Madrid with Wellington; Guadalajara surrendered to him.
The setbacks encountered by the Empecinado were the result of inattention
to orders, to disobedience and, perhaps above all, to lack of punctuality. But,
as the chronicler of the Empecinado's campaign notes, the strict observance of
military discipline was impossible to enforce in a corps formed amidst the
bayonets of the enemy. The guerrilleros were officered by people whose minds
and habits were not those of professional military men. 64. Furthermore, there
was always the danger that those who had been punished would desert. It
was only toward the end of the war that the rudiments of military discipline
became firmly implanted in the Empecinado's little army. He claims that he
never let his men be idle; when he seized funds that had been extorted from
the townspeople by the French, they were returned to the owners. Even with
the French, relations were almost friendly toward the end; on one occasion
General Suchet handed over to him twenty Spanish officers who had been
taken prisoner.
Espoz y Mina and the Empecinado were but two of a whole host of
guerrilla leaders. There was Merino, a goatherd in his youth who became a
curate, but who spent more time hunting than attending to his clerical duties.
His base of operations was in the Burgos and Soria region where he had his
own musket factory. Among his early recruits there were many young law
students; one of them, Santi-lan, later became Minister of Finance. At the end
of the war he had three to four thousand men under him. Merino, too, was
made a general by the junta but he usually wore his black surtout, which he
preferred to his general's uniform. Those who knew him intimately described
him as a man of small build but iron frame, of vindictive and cruel
disposition, but truly disinterested; he never claimed any part of the booty.65
Among the other guerrilla leaders, Julian Sanchez deserves mention; a
former professional soldier, he collected some hundred horsemen, and
attacked French convoys in the neighborhood of Avila. Later his forces
became part of Wellington's Anglo-Portuguese army. The French thought
more highly of Sanchez (whom they referred to as "chef de parti") than of Mina
and the Empecinado who in their eyes were no more than bandits. Camilo
Gomez, a wealthy Castilian farmer, and Lucas Rafael, a young clergyman,
gathered small bands around them; in each case members of their families had
been killed or molested by the French. In old Castile a guerrilla leader
nicknamed El Medico ("short, ferocious, dark eyes, lots of hair") raided the
countryside up to and including the suburbs of Madrid. In Zamora Province,
el Capu-chino (Jean de Mendietta) was the main guerrilla leader. At one time
he captured the French general Francheschi, but very soon released him.
When he was in turn in French captivity and fell ill, he appealed to
Francheschi's wife for help and obtained it. El Mar-quesito was made captain
general in Asturias and Francesco Longa was another prominent leader of the
insurgents.
Reference should also be made to the Miqueletes and the Soma-ten
(Honrados), local Catalan militias, which had existed since time immemorial.
The Somaten, divided into partidas of a hundred men, were more loosely
organized; the Miqueletes consisted of smaller units of mountain peasants.
The Miqueletes took a prominent part in the defense of Gerona, while the
Somaten were mostly employed on guard duty.66
The subsequent fate of the guerrilla leaders was not, on the
whole, a happy one. The war years had whetted their appetite for power or
adventure or both. As far as they were concerned, fighting did not end in 1814.
The younger Mina was executed as a rebel by Spanish forces in Mexico in 1817;
his more famous uncle survived him for many years, a not very effective
general in the Carlist wars. Most of his later life he spent in exile — in
England, Switzerland and, longest of all, in France; the very country against
which he had declared "war to the death" provided a shelter. Merino, the
curate, and the Empecinado were on opposite sides in the Carlist wars, the
former allying himself with the French party, the latter joining the
constitutionalists. Neither distinguished himself in the fighting; it was one
thing to attack foreign invaders, but another, much more difficult task to face
one's own countrymen, who knew the countryside equally well. The
Empecinado was made prisoner and hanged. The Marquesito was executed by
the Spanish authorities in 1814. The Capuchino plotted against King
Ferdinand and was hanged one year later, in December 1815. 67
While most guerrilla leaders were eager to be recognized by the central
junta, and to receive military rank, their contact was mainly with the
provincial juntas; and even more often with the local communes. When
financial assistance failed to arrive, the guerrillas sent out their own tax
collectors, much to the chagrin of the French. Mina had a yearly income of
some three hundred pounds from a customs house he kept at Irun, near the
French border; the French authorities, needless to say, greatly resented such
impertinence, but gradually a modus vivendi nonetheless developed between
the customs officers. Mina's excellent spy network throughout the Pamplona
region was based on the information received from government officials who
kept him informed of French troop movements. The guerrilleros expected such
help from the local population. When it was not forthcoming, they were not
slow in displaying their anger. On one occasion Mina had three alcades, who
had not warned him of the presence of enemy units, hanged. 68 Mention has
been made of the fact that the major guerrilla bands had their own hospitals,
workshops, ammunition factories and mobile workshops for the manufacture
of clothing and saddlery. Mina maintains that he never imposed contributions
on the town population (excepting only "collaborators" with the enemy), and
that he took nothing from the peasants but bread, meat and wine, and barley
for his horses. The rural populations nevertheless suffered from the guerrillas;
the small bands often plundered indiscriminately, and the larger ones needed
provisions which the peasants could ill afford to
spare.69 But this, as the guerrillas argued, was inevitable in a popular war of
national liberation. On the whole, they could count on the sympathy of the
local inhabitants, even though they were as much feared as loved.
Their relations with the Spanish regular army officers were not too
amicable. To the professionals, Mina and the Empecinado were mere peasants,
lacking military training, experience and discipline— little better than
brigands. The guerrillas for their part, hardened in countless skirmishes, made
short shrift of such criticism. "I was several times wounded, had four horses
killed under me, still have a ball in my thigh," wrote Mina, but to the profes-
sionals "I remained a mere guerrillero. . . . To be sure, we learned the art of war
not in the military academy, but on the field of battle." 70 The guerrillas had
little respect for the personal courage of the regular army officers whose
record against the French had not been impressive.
The attitude of the British commanders toward the guerrilla was
ambiguous. Wellington hardly ever mentioned them in his dispatches, Napier
wrote that these "undisciplined bands" had been as dangerous to their own
country as to the enemy, while Sir William Vane asserted that the rural
population was more afraid of them than of the French because they
plundered everyone who fell into their hands. In reality the guerrillas helped
Wellington's army in more ways than one. The French had a four-to-one
superiority in regular soldiers on the Peninsula and it was the guerrillas' diver-
sions that prevented a mass concentration of these forces against Wellington,
with what well might have been fatal results.71 They intercepted many
messages between the French commanders and delivered them to Wellington's
headquarters. Dispatches of political interest were sent to the free Spanish
press in Cadiz for publication, providing grist for the mills of psychological
warfare. At the time of the Battle of Salamanca the French armies were situated
a mere fifty miles from each other, but, owing to the activities of the guerrillas,
they failed to realize it and did not unite against the enemy. By attacking the
forces of Soult and Suchet in Andalusia and Valencia in the spring campaign
of 1812, the guerrillas prevented them from sending reinforcements to
Marmont for his battle against Wellington. The following year, Wellington, by
coordinating his actions with those of the guerrillas, kept two French armies
apart in central Spain, defeated one and forced the other to retreat to France.
Britain supplied Spain with millions of pounds and tens of thousands of rifles,
guns, powder and uniforms; much of this
went to regular Spanish units, but a substantial part was either allocated to or
fell into the hands of the guerrillas.
In purely military terms the importance of guerrilla warfare has been
overestimated both by the guerrilla leaders and by some other writers. Mina
may have insisted that he was never surprised and the Empecinado that he
never lost a battle. ("When the French pressure gets too hard, I retreat. . . . The
French pursue me and get tired, they leave people behind and on these I jump.
If a man remains one step behind the rearguard he is not seen again.") 72 But in
the event, the guerrillas were beaten by the French forces time and time again.
Toreno claims that by 1810 the French needed some 108,000 men to keep their
lines of communication clear.73 The figure is, of course, exaggerated;
furthermore, these were in the main not French units but inferior troops from
other parts of Europe. It is also true that most attempts to coordinate the strug-
gle of the guerrilla bands, let alone to integrate them, failed completely. But
what matters in the last resort is that the guerrillas had a considerable
nuisance value; even the most determined attempt to stamp them out in early
1812 came to nothing. Oman describes the situation at this critical turning
point in the Peninsular War:
Large forces have been put into motion; toilsome marches have been executed
over many mountain roads in the worst season of the year; all the bands of the
insurgents had been more than once defeated and dispersed. But the countryside
was not conquered: the isolated garrisons were still cut off from each other by the
enemy, wherever the heavy marching columns had passed on. The
communications were no more safe and free than they had been in December.
The loss of men by sickness and in the innumerable petty combats and disasters
had been immense. The game had yet to be finished, and the spare time in which
it could be conducted was drawing to an end.
The guerrillas achieved no brilliant or major victories, but this was never their
intention. Their purpose was to weaken the French army by incessant
unpredictable harassments. At the start a small detachment was enough to
protect a French courier, later a company or even a batallion were not
sufficient. A Prussian officer serving with the French recorded in his diary an
observation that reflects what successive generations of regular soldiers were
to discover from their own bitter experience of fighting guerrillas: "Wherever
we arrived, they disappeared, whenever we left, they arrived — they were
everywhere and nowhere, they had no tangible
center which could be attacked." 74 The French always had to be prepared for
an attack; the mood is perhaps best depicted in a picture by Colonel (later
General) Lejeune who, for a time, was one of the guerrilla's prisoners. His
canvas, Attaque d'un convoi par une guerrilla, was exhibited in the 1819 salon.
The guerrillas could have been destroyed by the French had the area to be
controlled been smaller, the mountains more accessible. In the plains of
southern Spain there were no guerrillas in this campaign, nor in earlier nor
subsequent wars. Without Wellington's army and Napoleon's defeat in Russia,
Spain would not have been liberated. The real achievement of the Spanish
guerrillas was political and psychological, the fact that popular resistance
continued and that it constituted a serious problem for the occupiers. The
French image of invincibility suffered as they proved incapable of imposing
their will on the Spanish nation. Thus the little skirmishes and ambushes of
Mina and the Empecinado ultimately had repercussions far beyond Spain.
They provided comfort and inspiration to the enemies of Napoleon
throughout the length and breadth of Europe.75
THE TYROL
The year that guerrilla warfare broke out in Spain witnessed a rebellion
similar in character, though less successful, in central Europe. Austria had
been defeated by Napoleon, but Andreas Hofer and the peasants of the Tyrol
continued to resist the invaders. By the terms of the peace treaty, their land
had ceased to be part of Austria and become Bavarian territory. The uprising
of the Tyroleans has been attributed not very convincingly to a reaction
against the malpractices of the Bavarian administration. The Tyrolean
peasants were royalists and deeply religious and, like the Vendeans, put
Church above state. Their leaders called on them to attack the infidels in the
name of the Holy Trinity, a somewhat inappropriate rallying cry considering
that the French and the Bavarians were also good Catholics; a shared faith in
no way diminished the Tyroleans' hatred of them. It was, in essence, a
struggle of the natives against foreigners, for tradition against the imposition
of new, alien rulers.
The Tyrol rising lasted from April to November 1809. The first battle took
place at the Isel Mountain south of Innsbruck, which was also the scene of
much of the ensuing fighting.76 Andreas Hofer
GUERRILLA WARFARE
and his lieutenants made good use of the difficult mountain terrain; the
peasants always tried to command the heights and they invariably attacked
enemy forces in narrow mountain passes. In the battles for Mount Isel, some
seventeen thousand Tyroleans faced about the same number of Bavarians,
with the one advantage to the peasants lying in their superior strategic
position. They had no artillery other than some wooden cannon, but the
Bavarians had to storm uphill and once they approached the insurgents' lines
they met with deadly fire. The peasants were organized in companies of a
hundred and fifty to two hundred men all hailing from the same valley; each
company had some ten to twelve subsections (Schran-nen).
Like northern Spain, the Tyrol was ideal guerrilla territory, but it was much
smaller and could more easily be controlled by the invader. It would have been
difficult for partisans to hide anywhere for any length of time. Besides, the
Tyrolean peasants were not geared for extended guerrilla warfare; they wanted
to liberate their country at one stroke. In some other respects the similarities
with Spain were striking: the revolt took place after the regular Austrian
armies under Chastelet and Hormayr had been defeated. It was only in the
month of May that Hofer, originally the commander of a partisan unit in a little
valley, became the military leader of all Tyrol. 77 Relations between the
Tyroleans and the regular Austrian army and civil authorities were strained.
The professional soldiers, most of them aristocrats, considered war an
occupation for gentlemen and looked with contempt on the amateurish, crude
and often savage warfare waged by the peasants. Atrocities were committed
by both sides; the peasants threw Bavarian soldiers alive into burning houses,
the Bavarians cut off the tongues and noses of captive Tyroleans. The priests
told their flock that no Tyrolean above the age of twelve would go to heaven
unless he (or she) killed at least three Bavarians. 78 After the first liberation of
Innsbruck there were scenes of drunkenness and widespread plundering; in
the evening there was a pogrom against the local Jewish community.
Patriotic historians later contended that the peasants showed moderation
and magnanimity and that there were no excesses, but this is not borne out by
contemporary documents.79 Not that the peasants acted without provocation.
Napoleon had sent two divisions to the Tyrol not so much to occupy the
country as to spread terror and to discourage local resistance. Villages were
plundered, houses burnt, and the attitude to the local population was
anything
but friendly. It is interesting to note, however, that the main resistance

originated in the southern region of the Tyrol which had not borne the main
brunt of invasion. The Austrian authorities gave Hofer some money, and
regular army units took part in the initial fight for the Isel Mountain, only to
leave before the second Isel battle (4-15 August), which Hofer and his men
had to fight alone. On 12 July, after the Battle of Wagram, the Austrians agreed
to a ceasefire which called for the Tyrol to be evacuated by their forces. In the
circumstances, fighting without cavalry and artillery, Hofer did astonishingly
well in the August battles, first against Napoleon's German troops (many of
them Saxons), and subsequently against Marshal Lefebvre. This led to the
retreat of the French and the third liberation of Innsbruck. Hofer became
regent of the Tyrol and his peasant armies were jubilant, but for the French
this was, of course, only a temporary setback. It was merely a question of time
before the insurgents were to be crushed by overwhelming military forces. In
October the Austrian emperor signed the treaty according to which the Tyrol
was no longer part of Austria; Hofer and his men were advised not to prolong
the resistance but to make their peace with Napoleon. But Hofer fought on,
was captured, betrayed by one of his own men, and eventually executed in
Mantua.
It is possible that the Tyrolean resistance would have lasted longer had it
refrained from open battles with the French and their German satellites. The
final result, however, would not have been different, for the Tyrol was
surrounded by enemy forces and, once it could no longer turn to the Austrian
authorities for help, the fate of the rising was sealed. The unwillingness of the
Tyrolean peasants to engage in a protracted guerrilla campaign has already
been remarked; after each battle they could not get home fast enough. Hofer
had to implore them time and again not to leave his army at a critical
moment.80 In the strict sense, there was not one but three risings in the Tyrol
in 1809; between times the peasants made for home to work in the fields or to
participate in religious pilgrimages. They had, in short, no intention of
becoming full-time guerrillas. This has been a phenomenon peculiar to
guerrilla warfare the world over, but nowhere was it more pronounced.
Andreas Hofer was forty-two when the insurrection broke out, an old man
by the standards of those days. His education was only of the most
elementary, but he was widely traveled and a man of considerable native
cunning; an innkeeper by trade, he engaged alongside in a modest import-
export business and had connections well beyond his native valley. He was
the main driving force in the
preparation of the rising, but left its execution to others; Joseph Speckbacher
was the major military talent among the insurgents, and Haspinger, a
Capucine priest, who went into battle bearing a large crucifix, also took a
more active part than Hofer in the actual fighting. His contemporaries hold
that Hofer had no burning ambition to be the leader but was carried to the top
by the popular will, almost against his own desire.
His units consisted of peasants, excellent sharpshooters and accomplished
scouts, but quite innocent of any military training; their patriotism could not
compensate for the lack of even rudimentary discipline. The townspeople
sympathized with the rebel commander but did not join him. A unit
composed of professors and students of Innsbruck University was set up in
May 1809, but it saw no action and was disbanded after only a few days.
Andreas Hofer has nonetheless long since been enshrined as one of Austria's
great national heroes, for all that the uprising of the Tyrolean peasants was a
mere symbol of resistance, no more than a minor episode of the long
Napoleonic wars.
THE RUSSIAN PARTISANS: 1812
Partisan warfare in Russia was of short duration; it started in earnest after the
Battle of Borodino (7 September 1812) and it came to an end by late October,
when the Russian army went on the offensive and retook the area west of
Moscow in which the partisans had been active. It was carried out by
relatively small regular units of the Russian army operating in the rear of the
enemy.81 Although the Battle of Borodino ended with a Russian retreat, the
French victory had been very costly. The general mood in Russian military
circles was gloomy; Kutuzov's Fabian tactics were not widely appreciated.
Five days before this battle, Lieutenant Colonel Denis Davydov had an
interview with General Bagration, whose aide-de-camp he had been for
several years. Davydov was deeply pessimistic; maybe the Russian army
could not escape destruction, but it should at least make a stand on its native
soil rather than become Napoleon's satellite to be used as a tool for the
conquest of India. He submitted a plan for operations in the French rear by
mounted units and asked for a thousand men to implement it. Bagration
transmitted the project to Kutuzov but the generalissimo was by no means
convinced of its merits. Davydov was given a mere eighty
Cossacks and fifty Hussars. Bagration, who conveyed the message with
regret, said that he would have given Davydov three thousand men ("I do not
like to fumble things"), but the ultimate decision was, of course, with the
commander in chief.
Denis Vasilevich Davydov, who was "the first to realize the significance of
this terrible weapon" (Tolstoy), was a friend of Pushkin, and himself a minor
poet. In his early verse he described and glorified the attraction of Hussar life.
His father had also been a military man but was compelled to resign from the
army and the family was impoverished. Denis Davydov's extracurricular
activities were followed by the court with suspicion though he was anything
but a wild revolutionary. He had to quit the army temporarily in 1804 but
participated in all important campaigns from 1806 onward.
Having concentrated his checkered little army after Borodino, Davydov
chose the area due west of Moscow as his field of operations. At first his men
were attacked by the villagers, who thought they were French. To prevent any
further such misunderstandings, Davydov decided to wear a peasant's caftan,
let his beard grow, carried a large picture of St. Nicholas, and tried to talk to
the peasants in their own language.82 He attacked marauders, of whom there
were a great many constantly molesting the villages, and in addition taught
the villagers how to cope with the menace themselves; they should make the
marauders drunk and kill them at night. Their bodies and their uniforms
should be buried in the far depths of forests so as to avoid detection.
Davydov's units liberated convoys of Russian prisoners, seized French
supplies, cannon and ammunition. On 12 September, near Viazma, he took
two hundred and seventy prisoners including six officers; on the fifteenth he
captured two hundred and sixty. Of the released Russian prisoners, two
hundred and fifty joined his troops, besides which he also mobilized the
peasants so that for special occasions he could count on the assistance of
twenty-five hundred men. By trial and error he learned the essentials of
partisan warfare; while camping, some horses had always to be saddled,
guards had to be changed every two hours, and he was alert to the great value
of information to be gleaned from the local population. He wrote with a
certain sarcasm that some of his lieutenants had not yet mastered the art of
guerrilla warfare but behaved like old generals in the tradition of Austrian
military textbooks. The ideal position for a partisan was to be perpetually on
the move, the enemy should never know one's whereabouts; the best slogan
was ubit-da-uiti
(kill and get away).83 On one occasion he captured a Belgian colonel who was
out hunting ("O malheureuse passionl" the poor man moaned), on another he
seized a giant load of shoes. He also arrested and punished traitors who had
collaborated with the enemy. He noted in passing that the peasants as a rule
killed every enemy soldier they laid hands on; these had a chance of surviving
only if one of Davydov's soldiers was present. In late October the French
began to retreat and Davydov wrote: "Even if I had ten times as many
Cossacks, even if everyone had ten arms, we could not have taken the tenth
part of the booty."
In due course Davydov's forces united with those of Figner and Seslavin,
two other partisan chiefs. Figner was a very brave man but a sadist who killed
French soldiers even after they had surrendered. Such cruelty was abhorred
by most Russian officers, who refused to serve in his unit. 84 The peasants, on
the other hand, as already indicated, were not beset by such scruples; one
Russian village elder reportedly asked the partisan leaders whether he could
advise him of any new way to kill the French — all known methods had
already been used on them.85 Seslavin was also a daring officer but prone even
more than the others to exaggerate the importance of his operations. He was
the first to report to Russian headquarters that Napoleon was advancing to
Maloyaroslavets. Commenting on his discovery, he wrote in his dispatch: "The
enemy has been forstalled, the French destroyed, Russia saved, and universal
peace concluded . . . " — all this as the result of his report. The bureaucrats
also engaged in similar rodomontade; the local police chief of the Sytch region
wrote in a report to the minister of police: "In 36 days the partisans have
killed 1,720 French soldiers for the loss of only 93. " 86
Nor was Davydov free from such weaknesses, but he disarmingly admitted
that in all armies the number of those killed on the other side are
exaggerated.87 He had no illusions about the limits of partisan warfare; as he
put it: "Even on the retreat from Moscow, Napoleon's Old Guard went
through the Cossack crowd like a warship with a hundred guns through a
flotilla of fishing boats." Davydov made some interesting comments on
partisan warfare both in his "diary" and in a theoretical essay published in
1836. 88 Partisan warfare, as he saw it, was neither the burning of one or two
granaries nor a major frontal attack against the enemy's main forces but
something in between. He referred both to the Spanish guerrilla experience
and to the Suvorov tradition, to the importance of surprise and flexibility. "The
partisan acts more through his skill than his strength." General staff officers
and bureaucrats were
quite unsuitable for this kind of warfare. The partisan needed enterprise,
sagacity, strictness, unselfishness. He should not be fussy, should be ready to
sleep on straw in the open. His life was a daily encounter with death.
Davydov made the important point that large modern armies had become
especially vulnerable to the effects of partisan warfare. They needed
ammunition and food, hospitals, clothes; their supply lines could easily be cut
by light cavalry units. The partisan could also destroy bridges, collect
important intelligence and, in general, demoralize the enemy and give a moral
uplift to one's own side.89 He polemicized against foreign military theorists
who maintained that cavalry units should only be used as mounted infantry
in the general battle. The Russian cavalry, he claimed, was exceedingly mobile
and courageous, and could operate independently.
Davydov was not taken quite seriously by many of his contemporaries; he
felt himself forever persecuted by enemies and not entirely without reason.
The great partisan leader whose fame had spread all over Europe was only
slowly and with great reluctance given promotion, and this despite the fact
that General Ermolov, his cousin and protector, was one of the leading
Russian commanders of the day. He was pensioned off in 1823, but at his own
insistence was permitted to rejoin the army, took part in the Polish and
Turkish campaign and died in 1839 of a stroke at the age of fifty-five.
Davydov's unit was active between Gzhatsk and Viasma, about a hundred
miles from Moscow; Seslavin and Vadbolski raided the countryside between
Mozhaisk and Moscow; Kudashev operated in the direction of Serpukhov,
Figner near Zvenigorod; while there were others, like Benkendorf and
Dorokhov, who also took a prominent part in partisan warfare. Napoleon later
maintained that he had not lost a single courier, and not a single convoy, a
claim anything but supported by his correspondence with his generals. In a
letter to Berthier, for instance, Napoleon wrote that Marshal Ney was losing
more soldiers in providing protection for his supply convoys than on the field
of battle. Of course, if the accounts of the various partisan leaders themselves
are to be believed, each of them had defeated Napoleon single-handedly. Only
a few displayed modesty and a sense of proportion. One of them was Prince
Volkonsky, the future Decembrist, who was to write in his memoirs: "In
describing the actions of my guerrilla detachment, I shall, unlike many
partisans, refrain from mystifying my readers with stories of unprecedented
exploits and dangers. Thus, by scrupulous avoidance of the exaggerated
accounts of other partisans, I shall
inspire confidence in my notes."90 The fantastic accounts of the partisan
leaders, the quarrels between them as to who had committed more heroic acts
(and who should be given the higher orders and distinctions) made the public
doubt whether partisan activities had played any significant part at all.
Regular army officers returning after victory over Napoleon had finally been
won also denigrated the role of the partisans. It was Soviet historians who,
later on, were inclined to put the emphasis on the role of the peasants in the
war against France.
That the partisan leaders performed acts of great individual heroism has
been fully established. Figner — "a Northerner by birth with a round face,
bright eyes who knew half a dozen languages"91 — went alone into occupied
Moscow, and with the help of some urban ruffians killed French stragglers at
night. Disguised as a muzhik, he even tried to enter the Kremlin but was
stopped by the guards. Another time, dressed in a French officer's uniform, he
entered an enemy camp without even knowing the password. With an air of
authority he ordered the sentinels to stand to attention. Figner was killed
when the Russian army crossed the Elbe in 1813. Seslavin on one of his
reconnaissance raids crept up to a French sergeant, lifted him onto his saddle
and bore him off to his unit. Similar tales of bravery were related about
Dorokhov who appealed to the peasants to "arm yourselves and unite with us
for the destruction of the enemy of the faith and the fatherland who destroys
our churches."92 Soviet historians have uncovered the valiant action of a
peasant woman, Praskovia of the village of Sokolovo, who allegedly defended
herself with a pitchfork against six Frenchmen including a colonel, killed three
and put the others to flight. Chetvertakov, a former private in the Russian
army, reportedly gathered a detachment of three hundred partisans which
was joined on occasion by several thousand peasants and defeated an entire
French batallion. Other peasant partisan units were headed by Samus, Stepan
Eremenko, Ermolai Vasilyev.
There was some resistance in the villages and the exploits of individuals
were magnified by patriotic historians. The attitude of the authorities toward
such manifestations of patriotism was ambivalent. On the one hand there was
the appeal of Rostopshin, the governor of Moscow, calling for a people's war;
on the other, there were orders not to arm the peasants — even to disarm
them. For there was always the danger that in the end they would turn against
their masters.
If the war against Napoleon became a people's war, it was in part
the French themselves who were responsible. During their invasion of Russia
they burned villages, killed civilians and prisoners. "Is this the civilization we
brought to Russia?" Caulaincourt complained in a letter to the emperor.
Napoleon was defeated, according to Russian historians, by the combined
resistance of the Russian people; the war on two fronts caused great losses to
the French and the attacks in the rear compelled Napoleon to withdraw forces
from the front. But partisan warfare, in actual fact, only began on a substantial
scale, as already pointed out, after the Battle of Borodino. Since the French
order to retreat from Moscow was given a mere six weeks later, it becomes
clear that partisan warfare could not possibly have been of decisive influence.
Some partisan units continued to pursue the retreating French army, rounding
up stragglers. But these would have been picked up anyway by the advancing
regular army units. The peasants were chiefly preoccupied with protecting
their own villages and later on with seizing the supply trains of the retreating
French army. One of the earliest Russian appraisals of partisan warfare was
perhaps the fairest: the partisans were as yet inexperienced, they did not take
a single town. But their operations were useful, and caused some harm to the
French; above all, their very appearance in the enemy's rear kept up morale
among the Russian population. This, in the final analysis, was the main
contribution of partisan warfare in Russia in 1812.
2
Small Wars and
Big Armies
The century between Napoleon's fall and the outbreak of World War I saw a
notable spreading of military conscription and the steady growth of large
standing armies. Firepower increased enormously, while the revolutionary
changes in the means of transport made for the first time for the rapid
assembling and moving of vast contingents of men. Armies became highly
organized and specialized bodies complete with their general staffs, their
logistic support and supply departments. Military doctrine everywhere
developed along parallel lines and strategy was taught as a (more or less)
exact science. Militarists and antimilitarists disagreed strenuously about
virtually everything, but on one point there was grim unanimity, a universal
recogniton that the coming war would be a war of masses, with the outcome
hinging on which side could get fastest with the greatest quantity of men and
materiel to the particular area of operations. Pacifists, such as Jean de Bloch,
argued that the immense improvement in the mechanism of slaughter and the
unbearably high cost of modern war would lead to its abolition. The
militarists put their own firm faith in the decisive value of bold leadership and
maximum organization.
In the light of all this, it is hardly surprising that scant attention was paid to
the possibility of guerrilla warfare; it seemed that, with the invention of the
machine gun and the swift evolution in communications, the age of partisan
warfare had come to an end. Small bodies of soldiers, or of civilians acting
behind the enemy lines, could perhaps have a certain nuisance value, but it
was unthinkable that they could effectively influence the result of a battle, let
alone
a campaign or a war. European armies, in short, prepared for nothing but

regular warfare.
Such single-minded concentration on war between great masses of men
and the unwillingness to consider any other possibilites seems nonetheless a
little curious in retrospect, for between 1815 and 1914 there were only very few
major wars but a great many guerrilla campaigns. Even the major wars (such
as the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871) had
been accompanied by partisan operations. Most of the campaigns throughout
the British Empire and in Latin America were waged against (or sometimes
between) irregular forces. Guerrilla tactics figured prominently in the Polish
insurrection, the Italian and Greek wars of independence, as well as in the
Spanish civil wars, in the resistance of the Caucasians against the Russians
and of Abd el-Kader against the French in North Africa. This list, though by
no means complete, shows a discrepancy between military reality and
strategic doctrine. All the stranger considering that the regular armies
unprepared for irregular warfare had themselves suffered nasty surprises on
more than one occasion: the Germans in 1870 were convinced that the war
was over after they had defeated the regular French armies; the British in
South Africa had similar illusions after the capture of Bloemfontein and
Pretoria. In the event, the Germans and the British found it more difficult to
cope with the irregulars, and this despite the fact that partisan warfare was
almost unplanned and uncoordinated. Surely such experiences should have
induced military leaders and theorists to give at least a passing thought to the
possibility, however remote, that guerrilla warfare still had something of a
future.
One does not have to look far for the reasons for such blindness. There was,
to begin with, instinctive resistance to the employment of forces that could not
be fitted into the framework of organized and disciplined armies. Guerrilla
warfare was erratic, unprofessional, unpredictable; it violated all established
rules. It might dovetail neatly with right- or left-wing anarchist thinking, but it
was altogether alien to the makeup of the military mind. To conduct guerrilla
warfare was a counsel of despair, an ultima ratio, to be applied by a weaker
army in the case of occupation; to prepare for such an eventuality was
tantamount to defeatism. It could be argued, in addition, that most nineteenth-
century guerrilla wars had taken place outside Europe, between or against
backward nations that were as yet incapable of conducting any other form of
warfare. It seemed only natural to assume that with the spread of
67 SMALL WARS AND BIG ARMIES
civilization — or, to be precise, with the spread of modern technology—

guerrilla warfare would disappear even in distant and underdeveloped lands.
Finally, there was the indisputable fact that, with very rare exceptions,
partisans, guerrillas and franc ti-reurs had invariably been defeated in the end,
however brave and well led, unless they had fought in conjunction with
regular armies. If in later perspective the nineteenth-century strategists were
mistaken in belittling or altogether ignoring guerrilla warfare, there were
certainly weighty enough reasons at the time to bolster their attitude.
But even if guerrilla warfare was deemed a thing of the past, it was still
very much in evidence, and it is to its more important manifestations in the
last century that we next have to turn. Among the many guerrilla wars of the
period it is impossible to find two that were identical; each had its own
specific character and political context. In Italy and Spain, in Poland and
Greece, regular and irregular warfare were intermingled, professionals
applying unorthodox tactics, and guerrilleros playing regular soldiers.
Guerrilla campaigns in Latin America differed in basic respects from jungle,
mountain and "savage" warfare in Asia and Africa. There were some striking
resemblances between Shamil's and Abd el-Kader's campaigns — and not
alone because both leaders were pious Moslems — but the political, cultural
and physical backgrounds had little in common; one war was conducted in
the mountains, the other mainly in the desert, of necessity making the tactics
used by and against the guerrillas in each case markedly dissimilar. The
history of guerrilla war, in brief, varied from country to country, and
sometimes even from province to province. To attempt in these circumstances
to formulate a definitive theory of guerrilla warfare is a vain undertaking.
LATIN AMERICA
Latin America is the guerrilla continent par excellence. In the entire history of
Central and South America it is difficult to point to more than a handful of
full-scale, regular wars; on the other hand, there were countless external and
internal guerrilla wars, too many, in fact, for enumeration. This can be laid, to
a certain extent, to their own particular history and geography — the wide-
open thinly populated spaces, the governments which were too poor to afford
sizable
regular armies. It had long been the Latin American military disposition in
any event to incline more to the convention of small flexible fighting units
than to large, rigidly disciplined armies. Moreover, army and politics have
been traditionally closer linked in Latin America than in other parts of the
world; the armies were on the whole more politically oriented, and political
life more militarized than elsewhere. The dividing line between guerrilla war,
banditry, the regular army and politics was, in fact, altogether blurred.
The Latin American tradition of guerrilla warfare predates the wars of
independence. In the Andean regions a small white minority ruled the
exploited and mistreated native Indians who periodically revolted against
their masters. The most widespread risings were those of Tupac Amaru (1781-
1782), who claimed to be of royal (Inca) descent, and of Pumacahua (1814-
1815) — also apparently of Inca ancestry.1 Tupac Amaru's revolt, which almost
two centuries later inspired the Uruguayan urban guerrillas, began with a
successful ambush in which twelve of his men captured the local corregi-dor
and seized a quantity of guns. His following soon swelled to forty thousand
and later to sixty thousand men who were, however, not much of a fighting
force; undisciplined and poorly equipped, careless and often drunk. Tupac
Amaru made a halfhearted, if somewhat unavailing, attempt to attract a few
whites and the Negro slaves, and with his nonetheless still growing army,
tried to defeat the enemy in frontal assaults by sheer numbers (the siege of
Cuzco). But these operations failed and in the end the Indians were decisively
defeated by a slow-moving seventy-year-old Spanish general commanding
untrained troops, numerically far inferior to the Indians. 2 Tupac Amaru was
sentenced to death and his body dismembered, he first having been compelled
to watch the execution of his wife along with all his relatives. After his death
the rebellion continued under Diego Tupac Amaru. This was the bloodiest
period of the rising, the policy of the Indians being to kill all whites and
mestizos. They besieged La Paz and Puno but could gain no major victory.
These were curious battles accompanied apparently by more noise than actual
fighting; the operations were stopped from time to time by agreements which
neither side had any intention of keeping.
The same pattern recurred in the Pumacahua rebellion; he had been a
commander in the Spanish army in the campaign against Tupac Amaru. His
one advantage was that he had Creole support, and his force, unlike that of
his predecessor, succeeded in oc-
SMALL WARS AND BIG ARMIES
69
cupying several important towns such as La Paz, Arequipa and Puno. But
discipline among his troops, too, was lamentable, and once the Spanish had
managed to concentrate a small force, they defeated him with the greatest of
ease.3 There were other risings but they all failed, primarily because the
Indians made the same mistake as the European peasants in the Jacqueries;
they were moderately successful while fighting in small groups, but the mo-
ment they tried to concentrate their forces and to imitate regular armies, they
became a target that could only too easily be out-maneuvered and destroyed.
The Indians fought bravely, but they needed the Creoles for military
leadership and organization. In general, whenever Indians and Creoles made
common cause, the prospect for victory was immeasurably greater.
What has been said about the Indians applies a fortiori to the Negro slave
revolts of which there were several, especially toward the end of the
eighteenth century, partly under the influence of the French Revolution. 4 With
one famous exception they all collapsed for lack of internal solidarity, lack of
weapons, insufficient military know-how and, above all, the absence of
effective military leadership. The striking exception was, of course, Toussaint
l'Ouverture's rising in San Domingo. It succeeded because it had a leader of
genius, and because the general level of education under French rule was
higher than elsewhere; no Indian leader would have been able to compose
beautiful declamations in the style of the French Revolution. Toussaint also
received foreign help, mainly from the British, and the French forces sent out
against him were decimated by tropical disease. But insofar as guerrilla
warfare is concerned, the war waged by the "Black Jacobins" offers little of
interest; they did not, as a rule, conduct guerrilla warfare but defeated the
French precisely because their leaders were able to establish a fairly effective
regular army with all its trappings.
The officers called themselves generals, colonels, marshals, commanders, and the
leaders decorated themselves with scraps of uniforms, ribbons and orders, which
they found on the plantations or took from the enemy killed in battle. . . . The
insurgents had developed a method of attack based on their overwhelming
numerical superiority. . . . They placed themselves in groups, choosing wooden
spots in such a way as to envelop their enemy, seeking to crush him by weight of
numbers.5
Hedouville, the French commander, was a veteran of the Vendee

campaign, and if he found coping with the insurgents so difficult, it
still stemmed principally, their greater numerical strength notwithstanding,

from their not behaving like Chouans. After Toussaint's treacherous arrest by
the French, the movement degenerated into a race war culminating in the
massacre of the white inhabitants of the island.
The Latin American wars of independence involved much guerrilla
fighting; "pure" guerrilleros were rare, but then regular warfare was also quite
irregular by European standards. More often than not the campaigns consisted
of a mixture of regular and guerrilla warfare. Among the more prominent
guerrilla bands were the montoneros of the La Plata region, the Almeydas of
New Granada, the guerrilla bands of Central and Upper Peru, and the units
commanded by Jose Antonio Paez in Venezuela. 6 They varied greatly in
outlook and social background; the montoneros were mostly gau-chos following
their local leaders, the Almeydas were the private army of a Creole clan, while
the guerrillas of Central Peru consisted similarly of middle-class Creoles and
Mestizos whose property and families had suffered at the hands of royalists
and who sought revenge. "They were joined by delinquents, by bandit chiefs
and their followers . . . who used guerrilla operations as a means of personal
plunder."7
Paez, one of Bolivar's most able commanders, started his military career in
mid-1809 when, while driving a herd along a highway in Venezuela, he
encountered a slave revolt. He joined them, became their leader, and
eventually had some two thousand lancers under his command. These savage
bands were held together by no ardent idealism or ideology but simply by the
prospect of plunder, a fact freely recognized by their leaders. Bolivar
temporarily dominated the guerrilla bands by promising them land after
victory, but they still went on robbing and plundering without waiting for
war's end.8 Slogans such as "independence" meant not so much national
independence and unity, but independence from Spanish law and taxation; it
was a rebellion against authority in general and it resulted in the transitory
emergence of dozens of small, short-lived, semianarchist republics. Their
revolutionary convictions were not always very deep; the great guerrilla
leader Bores went over to the royalists from one day to the next without much
compunction. The contribution of the guerrilleros to the war effort was on the
whole a modest one, with the possible exception of Venezuela, where Bolivar
succeeded in coordinating their operations during the crucial years. What the
guerrillas lacked was not so much arms and provisions — the Spaniards were
not much better equipped — but
71
staying power, elementary discipline, cohesion, and leadership. They
operated haphazardly, and whether, on balance, more for harm than for good
remains debatable. Looked at in historical perspective, their chief significance
lay in their setting a pattern for many years to come. A few hundred peons led
by their hacendado or a local caudillo armed with machetes would rise against
the local government; there were many variations on this theme, but usually
those who followed him were mainly out for plunder. The political label was
of importance, for it provided immunity against capital punishment. 9
European commanders quickly adjusted themselves to local customs.
Garibaldi's biographer notes, quite matter-of-factly, that his hero "remained
for 36 hours in Gualeguaychu [in 1845]. For the inhabitants, they were 36
hours of terror, about which their descendants still speak to day. Garibaldi's
men looted the town, causing great destruction." 10 In Italy, Garibaldi would
have shot soldiers found looting.
Guerrilla warfare frequently was the high road to political and economic
power; yesterday's brigand could well become tomorrow's government
minister, amassing a fortune on the way. The spoils were, of course, shared
with his followers and the great prize was always land. This is not to say that
patriotism or social protest were totally absent as motivating forces; as far as
the leaders were concerned, political goals and ambitions always featured
prominently. But, on the whole, political motivation played a lesser role
among guerrilla movements in Latin America than in Europe.
There were some signal exceptions, above all the Mexican revolts between
1810 and 1815 led by two clergymen, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and Jose Maria
Morelos.11 They fought not only for national independence, but also for far-
reaching social reforms, such as the abolition of the tribute paid by the
Indians, and the establishment of a republic. While the bulk of the army—
"Generalissimo" Hidalgo had an army of sixty thousand — was Indian, the
leadership was Creole (native-born of European descent), and the religious
element was a factor of considerable importance. (The battle cry was "Long
live our Lady of Guadalupe, death to bad government.") Hidalgo and Morelos
were eventually captured by the royalist forces and executed. Both were
posthumously rehabilitated; Hidalgo has forever been inscribed in the history
of his homeland as the "father of Mexican independence," Morelos had a pro-
vince named after him, which one hundred years later was to become the
scene of Zapata's operations. Great popular leaders, their genius was not in
the military field, and it is doubtful whether it is
really permissible to regard them as guerrilla commanders at all, as some

historians have done. They would, in fact, have fared much better if they had
applied guerrilla tactics instead of besieging (or defending) big cities. The
forces under them, however, were more numerous than the enemy's and the
temptation must have been great to defeat the other side in a few decisive
battles rather than in protracted partisan warfare. But irregulars cannot as a
rule seek conclusive battles; the failure to accept this simple truth has spelled
doom time and again to popular movements in Latin America just as in other
parts of the world.
Fifty years later, Mexico again became the scene of a major war. The Spanish
and French armies which invaded Mexico in 1861-1862 encountered
resistance from Mexican irregulars almost from the beginning (the blockade of
Santa Cruz by Juarez's forces). The French contingents were led by veterans of
the North African campaigns such as Bazaine, and before long
counterguerrilla units were set up under the command of Stoecklin. Their
anabasis to Mexico City was beset by every manner of hazard — rain, bad
roads, shortage of supplies, yellow fever — but the capital was taken in June
1863, and by the end of the following year about three-quarters of the country
was in their hands and they controlled all major cities. Only the state of
Guerrero was still held by Juarez. Juarez's forces, weak as they were, adhered
to time-honored guerrilla tactics, harassing the French lines of
communications, refusing to accept battle, always retiring, biding their time.12
The subsequent course of events need not be retold in detail. Napoleon III
decided to withdraw his forces in January 1866; poor Maximilian, a charming
man but weak and vacillating, lost control and was eventually captured and
executed. Napoleon's decision came not because his army had been defeated;
their losses had been insubstantial. The Mexican forces improved somewhat
in the course of the war and they received considerable help from the United
States, while Escobedo, one of Juarez's generals, was the first to use the
machine gun in battle. But the Mexican soldiers, often unpaid, lacked both
training and fighting spirit, the various guerrilla units would not coordinate
their efforts, and individual marksmanship was poor. Not that French morale
was very high either; Porfirio Diaz, subsequently president of Mexico, had
three hundred French deserters in his little army. During the last phase of the
war there was a tacit understanding between the French and Profirio Diaz that
the former should not be molested during the
73
evacuation. The French, in short, suffered no military defeat and the Mexicans
were lucky in that the French emperor changed his mind in midcourse about
what was anyway for him no more than a minor adventure. Maximilian could
have fortified his position by calling for equal treatment to be granted to the
Indians and by building up a new regular army, but he failed to do either.
Having outlasted the enemy, Juarez returned in triumph to his capital.
It would be tedious to enumerate the long series of armed conflicts in Latin
America during the second half of the nineteenth century. There was much
guerrilla activity in Venezuela in the 1860s; when Crespo entered Caracas in
1892, his forces were composed mainly of guerrilla units. Again, in the
Brazilian civil war in the 1890s, guerrilla warfare was the rule rather than the
exception; passing reference need only be made to Gumercindo's hit-and-run
attacks, and his raid of seven hundred and fifty miles to Santa Cater-ina.
The Peruvian general Andres Caceres fought a three-year guerrilla war
against the victorious Chilean army in the Andean regions of Peru from 1881
to 1883 (Campana de la Brena); this campaign was later studied in the Austrian
war academy as an excellent illustration of successful mountain warfare. 13 But
the most protracted guerrilla war took place in Cuba; it lasted from 1868 to
1878 and again flared up in January 1895, leading eventually to war between
Spain and the United States. In the Cuban war more than national
independence was involved; the neglect of the smaller farmers was an
important issue, the question of slavery being another. Like all Cuban
guerrilla wars including Castro's campaign, Oriente, the eastern province of
the island, was the central scene of operations. The rebels numbered some ten
to twenty thousand men and, unable to face the Spanish army in open combat,
engaged for the most part in acts of sabotage. "It was less a war than a
breakdown of order . . . a formalization of the violent banditry that had gone
on through much of the early 19th century."14 Two outstanding leaders
emerged, the mulatto Antonio Maceo, and Maximo Gomez. This inconclusive
war lasted for a decade; despite some initial successes, the rebels failed to raise
the standard of revolt in prosperous western Cuba. As the war continued,
dissension spread in the guerrillas' ranks, and by concentrating strong forces
and conceding some of the rebels' demands, the Spanish induced them to
accept an armistice.
When, two decades later, fighting broke out again, the old military leaders
Maximo Gomez and Maceo were still very much to
the fore. But the inspiration for the independence movement now came largely
from the ideologists, from Jose Marti most especially in his North American
exile. Nonetheless, the moment fighting started, effective control passed into
the hands of the guerrilla captains. As in the 1870s, the insurgents depended
to a great extent on money and arms from the United States. In contrast to the
desultory fighting of 1868, the guerrilla war in 1895 was far more ferocious;
the insurgents were stronger—numbering about thirty thousand men
organized in some thirty bands. They threatened to burn down the plantations
and to make the island uninhabitable. Eventually, some forty thousand
guerrilleros faced eighty-five thousand Spanish troops, of which, however, only
about half were battle-ready, the rest suffering from yellow fever and other
diseases. (About two thousand Spaniards were to die in battle but many more
of this or that tropical sickness.) The war went badly for the Spanish until
General Valeriano Weyler, the toughest and most effective Spanish soldier of
his time, was made commander in chief. Weyler responded to terror with
counterterror, sealing off the eastern part of the country more or less
effectively by means of ditches, walls and blockhouses; he used
reconcentraciones (concentration camps) to remove civilians from the battle
areas. From a purely military point of view, Weyler was winning the war by
1896, but it was by no means total victory and, as far as Spain itself was
concerned, the war had gone on for too long already and become too costly.
The economy of Cuba, above all the sugar crop, was in ruins under the double
onslaught of guerrillas and the government troops. There was anti-Weyler
campaign in Madrid, and, more damaging yet, he had an exceedingly bad
press in America, preparing the ground for U.S. military intervention in Cuba.
Eventually Weyler had to go and Blanco, his successor, was easily defeated by
the American expeditionary force in 1898. Antonio Maceo was killed in the
fighting, but Gomez lived to become a general and to enter Havana at the head
of his troops. As peace came, the politicians once more took over and the
guerrilla army was disbanded.15
Guerrilla warfare in Latin American history took many forms: wars of
national liberation; struggles of landless peasants and small farmers against
large landowners; fighting between local chieftains for political power. A
remarkable example of the Vendean type of guerrilla warfare against political
and social change with strong religious undertones is the affair of Antonio
Conselheiro in Ca-nudos.16 Conselheiro was a primitive mystic who fell out
with the Church authorities and attacked the Brazilian Republic because it
75
had arrogated to itself jurisdiction over marriage and burial. He regarded the
victory of the Republic in 1889 and the proclamation of religious tolerance as
the work of Satan in the guise of Masonry, Protestantism and Positivism,
about which admittedly, he had only the haziest notions. In 1893, at the age of
sixty, he decided to seek refuge in a little place in the Brazilian hinterland
about two hundred miles from Bahia where the police would never be able to
find him. This was Canudos, formerly an old cattle ranch which had become a
miserable shantytown of several thousand inhabitants virtually cut off from
the outside world. Two Italian Capucine monks who visited Conselheiro and
his followers in May 1895 reported that it was the hotbed of a dangerous
political as well as a religious sect. The Rio de Janeiro republicans came to look
on it as the center of restorationist plots which had to be destroyed. 17 In truth,
Conselheiro's followers, the jaguncos (a term originally meaning ruffians),
were not so much fanatic royalists as adherents of a messianic folk movement,
caring only about their "simple-minded, visionary religion, a crude mixture of
Catholic rites, African witchcraft and Indian superstition." The population was
made up, according to da Cunha, of the most disparate elements, ranging
from the fervent believer who had voluntarily given up all the conveniences of
life elsewhere, to the solitary bandit who arrived with his blunderbuss on his
shoulder in search of a new field for his exploits. "Under the spell of the place,
all these elements were welded into one uniform and homogeneous
community, an unconscious brute mass."18
The clash with the authorities began with a quarrel about cheap building
material for a church which the jaguncos had appropriated; a small force of
about one hundred soldiers sent out by the governor of Bahia was surprised
by the rebels and routed. The governor asked for federal help, but a second
expeditionary force of some five hundred and forty men fared even worse.
They were ill prepared for a long march through unfamiliar country and faced
the accurate fire of snipers whom they could not even see in the impenetrable
undergrowth:
The army has come to feel that its very strength is its weakness. Without any
maneuverability, in a state of continual exhaustion, it must make its way through
these desert regions under the constant dread of ambuscades and be slowly
sacrificed to a dreaded enemy who does not stand and fight but flees. The conflict
is an unequal one, and a military force is compelled to descend to a lower plane
of
6i SMALL WARS AND BIG ARMIES
combat; it has to contend not merely with man but with the earth itself; and,
when the backlands are boiling in the dry summer heat, it is not difficult to
foresee which side will have the victory.19
The greatest disaster was the defeat of the third expeditionary force under
Colonel Moreira Cesar, a tough soldier subject to epileptic fits. His force
included a squadron of cavalry and a battery of artillery. For the first time
there was a clear military plan but it was a crude one — "to hurl a thousand-
and-some bayonets against Canudos in double-quick time" (da Cunha). The
enterprise was carried out in great haste, and all the past mistakes were
repeated. Meanwhile, the people of Canudos had dug an elaborate system of
trenches in and around their small capital; they were not badly armed for
guerrilla warfare with their scythes, "scraping knives," muskets, shotguns and
blunderbusses. Gunpowder they had bought in the neighborhood or
manufactured themselves. They received reinforcements from all over the
province — the "badmen" from the backlands congregated in and around
Canudos. The expeditionary force managed to reach the town, but in the
ensuing assault it got literally lost in the labyrinth of lanes and alleyways.
Cesar was mortally wounded in the attack and soon his soldiers were in full
flight, rifles abandoned. The insurgents seized a great quantity of arms,
including four Krupp field guns. The jaguncos took no prisoners — wounded
soldiers were beheaded; later on the army retaliated with similar acts of
cruelty.
This defeat caused a major crisis in Brazilian politics. "Patriotic passion was
verging on insanity," is the way da Cunha put it. The fourth expedition was
headed by General Artur Oscar who had been previously engaged in guerrilla
warfare along the Rio Grande. But neither his own past experience nor the
lessons of the previous campaigns against Canudos were heeded and on his
first major encounter with the rebels he was surrounded and lost almost all
his reserve supplies. Another army column saved him from complete
destruction; but this force, too, had to retreat, decimated by hunger, thirst and
disease. To vindicate his defeat, General Oscar claimed that the insurgents
were armed with the "most modern weapons" which had allegedly been
smuggled from Europe. Eventually, Canudos was destroyed but only after all
the country's military resources had been mobilized and after it had been
besieged from every side. Conselheiro died on 22 September 1896; on 5
October the fighting was over. "Canudos did not surrender. . . . It held out to
the last man. Conquered inch by inch, in the literal meaning of the
words, it fell on 5 October, towards dusk — when its last defenders fell,
dying every man of them. There were only four of them left: an old man, two
other full-grown men and a child, facing a furiously raging army of five
thousand soldiers."20
EUROPE
Guerrilla warfare in post-Napoleonic Europe was limited mainly to the south

and east of the continent; more often than not it occurred in the wider context
of wars of national liberation or civil wars. This applies, for instance, to the
first and second Carlist wars in Spain (1833-1840 and 1872). These dynastic
wars were at one and the same time conflicts between a backward countryside
resentful of change and the modern town, and between the clergy and the
freethinkers. The Basques' desire to maintain their traditional privileges
against central state power was also a factor of some importance. The Carlists,
broadly speaking, were fighting for tradition and the old Spain, and the
Cristinos (with the help of a British legion and other foreign volunteers) for
change and modernism of a very moderate variety. The larger cities usually
supported the Liberals, while much of the countryside sympathized with the
Carlists. It may be recalled that the guerrilla leaders of the war against
Napoleon found themselves here in opposite camps, Merino, the priest,
fighting with the Carlists, Mina throwing in his lot with the government
forces. But these were no longer the prime leaders; the military command was
by now in the hands of men of another generation. Two of them in particular
distinguished themselves — Colonel Tomas Zumalacarreguy, who had begun
his military career under a minor guerrilla leader in 1810 and led the Carlists
until his death in 1835, and Ramon Cabrera (the "tiger of Maez-trazgo"), who
then took over; having married an English woman, Cabrera was to spend his
declining years as a liberal country gentleman near Virginia Water.21
Zumalacarreguy, who had at the start no more than a mere few hundred ill-
armed adherents, forged them gradually into an effective fighting force. He
subdivided his little army into battalions, which would occasionally meet for
some major action, but most of the time acted independently. By 1835 he was
strong enough to engage in regular warfare and force a decision, but Carlos,
envious of his general's popularity, ordered him to seize Bilbao rather than
march on Madrid. Zumalacarreguy was wounded in the fighting for Bilbao

and died soon after from his wounds. With the demise of its most gifted
soldier, the Carlist cause, already undermined by internal intrigues, suffered a
lasting blow. Cabrera, his successor, had been trained as a priest, but even his
closest friends would not claim that Christian charity was his outstanding
virtue. Under his leadership, acts of atrocity became ever more recurrent in a
war which had been cruel from its inception. Prisoners were frequently shot,
and after the Cristinos had killed Cabrera's mother, he no longer showed any
restraint whatsoever. His skill as a guerrilla leader was undoubtedly
considerable. If he suffered a reverse, he would send his troops to rest for a
fortnight "to change their shirts. Soon afterwards they would reassemble and
fight again."22 His aides, Batanero (yet another priest) and Miguel Gomez,
would engage in long penetration raids from Biscay to Old Castile or even to
Gibraltar and back. But apart from showing the flag and engaging in
brigandage, these ventures were militarily without value and they clearly
pointed to the limitations of guerrilla warfare. Defeated by the Cristinos,
Cabrera crossed in 1840 into France with the remnants of his forces. In 1848
fighting in the mountains of Catalonia, he made a short-lived and ineffectual
comeback. Once more he had to leave his native country and toward the end
of his life, much to the disgust of the diehard Carlists, he made his peace with
the Spanish government.
The Carlist wars were demonstrable proof that the guerrilla tradition had
become deeply rooted in Spain; it was no mere coincidence that its principal
bases of operations were yet again in the northern regions such as Navarre,
Catalonia and the Basque mountains. But despite superior leadership,
guerrilla tactics were in the last resort less than effective in this prolonged
conflict. In the Greek War of Independence they proved on occasion more
successful, and this for all the absence of good commanders. Applying
guerrilla methods, the Greeks contrived to liberate part of their country in the
early phase of the war (1821-1822). Later on they tried to transform their
bands into a regular army with the help of some European well-wishers. The
results were disastrous; they suffered an almost unending series of defeats.
The discipline, the drill, the organizational effort were not to the liking of the
Greeks who were saved in the end from almost certain defeat only by the
intervention of the European powers.23 But nor is it certain that they would
have fared any better had they stuck to their initial tactics. They succeeded in
the first stage of the war because their
attacks took the Turks by almost complete surprise. Once the element of
surprise was gone and the Turks had dispatched new forces to the field, the
Greeks simply had no answer. Happily for them, their war differed in one
essential respect from other such campaigns and this helped to some extent to
restore the balance. The distinctive element lay in sea power; whatever their
weaknesses on land, the Greeks proved more than a match for the Turks at
sea.
If the Carlist wars were scarcely marked by compassion, the Greek War of
Independence was almost genocidal in character, the Greeks' premise being
that if they exterminated the Turkish communities in their midst, they would
eventually be masters in their own home. As in the Iberian peninsula, the
clergy took a prominent part both in the fighting and the atrocities. The Greeks
had the enthusiastic support of most of Christian Europe, and there was a
steady flow of volunteers and money. Later, many of their erstwhile
supporters turned against them, some even to become their worst enemies.
The Greek intellectuals living in exile who had first lifted the banner of
independence were not military men, and the leadership in the war passed to
Klepht chieftains like Kolokotronis who were no budding Napoleons either.
That brigands were potentially excellent guerrilla leaders is a well-known fact,
but an analysis of the battles of the Greek War of Independence (such as Kaki
Skala, Elaphos and Trete) makes plain that the Klephts never really had any
coherent policy on what kind of war they intended to fight. They had no plan
or general strategic concept, nor were they very good at improvising. Their
experience was limited to the command of smaller bands; they were simply
not accustomed to cooperating within a larger framework. Much of their time
was spent quarreling, both with the government and with each other. Many of
them had been reluctant to join the rising in the first place, preferring the
certainty of an arrangement with the Turkish authorities to the doubtful
proposition of a civil war.
Kolokotronis, who was the most prominent of the Klepht leaders, came
from a family which had engaged in officially licensed brigandage for several
generations. A historian of the Greek Revolution wrote of him that he could
never distinguish very clearly right from wrong, and that he had an
instinctive aversion to order and law. "His patriotism was selfish and his
occasional acts of magnanimity cannot efface the memory of his egotistical
ambition and sordid avarice during the period of his greatest power." 24 At the
head of a band of some three hundred warriors, Kolokotronis enlisted the
local peasants at Karitena and eventually had some six thousand
6.5 SMALL WARS AND BIG ARMIES
men under his command. But this formidable force could still not resist the
onslaught of five hundred Turkish horsemen and Kolokotronis even lost his
rifle in the affray. These and similar such encounters left him with a great deal
of contempt for the military qualities of the peasantry, ascribing all the
successes in the war to the prowess and the fighting experience of the brigands
and armatoli. But this judgment has not been generally accepted. "A careful
study of the history of the Revolution has established the fact that the perse-
verance and self-devotion of the peasantry really brought the contest to a
successful termination. When the Klephts shrank back, and the armatoli were
defeated, the peasantry prolonged their resistance, and renewed the struggle
after every defeat with indomitable obstinacy."25 The Greek War of
Independence was essentially a series of uncoordinated operations carried out
by irregular troops. The Peloponnese (Morea), where most military actions
took place in the early phase of the war, had been classic brigand territory
since time immemorial; hilly northern Greece offered even better protection to
large guerrilla units. It was in the north that under Karaiskakis, a former
officer of Ali Pasha of Janina, some of the major guerrilla operations took place
in the later years of the war. But, whereas in the early days the Klephts had the
sympathy of the rural population, the depredations of the bands antagonized
so the peasants that when the Turks returned to Central Greece in 1824 they
were frequently welcomed as liberators.
Attention has been drawn more than once to the often decisive importance
of intervention by outside powers: what happened if other powers would not,
or could not intervene is well illustrated by the Polish example. The three
Polish insurrections (1793, 1831 and 1863) were a blend of regular and
guerrilla warfare. In some measure they were a people's war, but the support
of the peasants waned in the course of time. Many thousands of peasant
scythemen in their white cloaks fought under Kosciusko in 1793, but peasant
participation in 1831 was lukewarm at best, and in 1863 only the cities, broadly
speaking, responded to the revolt. This erosion of peasant support was the
result of the reluctance of the "Whites," the Polish aristocratic party, to carry
out any agrarian reform. In Galicia, the Austrian authorities effectively
thwarted a rebellion by inciting the peasants to kill the landowners and to turn
against the middle-class revolutionaries. There was not much guerrilla fighting
in the 1793 rising save for some sniping from Warsaw windows and rooftops.
Kosciusko, the military leader, based his strategy on the experience of the
revolutionary war in France — massed attacks
and bayonet charges.26 Politically the Poles were isolated; the French stayed
clear of any active help, Austria took a benevolent attitude but left it at that.
The international constellation in 1831 and 1863 was, if possible, even worse.
Britain and France made perfunctory representations to the Russian capital,
but the Prussians, alert to the direct and decidedly undesirable repercussions a
Polish victory could have in their eastern districts, closed the borders to the
rebels. The Russians always had numerical superiority; there had been some
hundred thousand Russians against the Poles' sixty thousand in 1793.
Diebitsch, in 1831, had 127,000 men at his disposal, and in 1863 the Poles were
much of the time outnumbered by as many as ten to one. But the Russians had
to keep their forces dispersed over the entire country for fear of the revolt
spreading; there were local uprisings in 1863 in distant Polish Lithuania and
Livonia. In 1831 the Russian forces were reduced to half their strength by
hunger and disease. Polish leadership was bad in 1831 and indifferent in 1863;
furthermore, there were unending internal squabbles among the
insurrectionist leaders. Many Polish officers serving with the Russian army
refused to join the rebellion in the first place because they saw no possible
chance of their country winning independence in an armed struggle against
Russia.
Large parts of Poland are quite flat and provide little effective cover for
guerrilla operations. Only in the east and the north were conditions more
favorable and it was there that small Polish units caused considerable damage
to the Russians in 1831 (Worcell near Lutsk, Puschet and Selon in the forests of
Augustowo, the partisan bands in the Bialowicza forest on the road to Brest).
In 1863 Augustowo again became an important theater of guerrilla warfare,
but there were also sizable operations in the Radom district (under the
command of Langiewicz who had fought with Garibaldi in Italy) and near
Wengrow.27 The insurgents were on the whole meagerly armed, "raw and
undisciplined levies, no more conversant with war than are English yeomen
and shopkeepers."28 Only few had muskets, most of them having to make do
with pikes, scythes and sticks. The Poles would launch a surprise attack
against the Russian units from the forests, then disperse and return to their
hideouts. These small skirmishes were often successful, whereas the major
battles were always costly and usually ended in a Polish defeat. A hostile
observer noted that it was one of the primary mistakes of the Poles that they
did not stick to small-war tactics but tried to act like a regular army. In the
process, he went on, good partisans became
bad soldiers who fled whenever they suffered a setback. Following the Polish
concentration of their forces, the Russians were able to withdraw their units
from various parts of the country and to crush the insurrection by delivering a
massive blow to the Polish force. 29 The Polish leaders were ambivalent in their
attitude to guerrilla tactics. Mieroslawski, one of the leaders of the "Red"
party, who for a short while in 1863 served as "dictator" of Poland, wrote that
it was dangerous to stick too rigidly to partisan warfare, that it should always
be closely coordinated and should never clash with the general, overall
strategy.30 He "hated" partisan warfare, he wrote, but nonetheless did not deny
that it could be very useful, given political control and good leadership. After
the failure of their insurrections the Polish veterans saw action in
revolutionary wars all over Europe — Mieroslawski in Baden and Sicily,
Dembinski and Bern against Austria in 1848, the poet Mickiewicz in the short-
lived Roman republic. Usually they were on the losing side and were
employed as general military experts rather than as specialists in guerrilla
warfare which they regarded as of marginal importance only. Their
inclination was to apply Napoleonic tactics in wars of national liberation, and
for this reason, if for no others, they stood no hope of winning.
The Italians, in contrast to the Poles, had a base for their military operations
— Piedmont. Victor Emanuel II and Cavour had grave reservations about
Garibaldi's exploits; they never gave him all he demanded to launch his
spectacular, if not always well-conceived campaigns. When Garibaldi
returned to Italy in 1848 from a long stay in South America, he already had
the reputation of a great guerrilla leader as well as a daring naval commander.
He certainly was a brave man and a born leader; whether his guerrilla
reputation is entirely merited is a moot point. For the kind of cavalry charges
he had specialized in, with the lance as the favorite weapon, was not really in
true guerrilla tradition. During the next two decades he emerged as Europe's
most dashing and admired revolutionary hero, but it was only on rare
occasions that he engaged in battle against forces greatly superior to his own,
applying guerrilla tactics. The exceptions were the retreat from Rome in 1848
and the battle for Palermo when his forces were greatly outnumbered.
Commenting on Garibaldi's exploits in 1848 in Upper Italy (from a base in
Switzerland), a critic wrote that he was not really a good guerrilla leader,
because he exhausted his men by long, pointless marches, made inadequate
provisions for feeding them, and when he found a good, defensive position,
waited there for the enemy to attack, in-
stead of attacking the enemy.31 It is only fair to add that, like the Polish
insurgent leaders in their combats, Garibaldi found little patriotic enthusiasm
among the rural population. The peasants were reluctant to cooperate or even
to provide food. Nor was the quality of his soldiers outstanding; more than
once he was to complain that his Italians were not as good as the Latin
American gau-chos. The first Italian legion of 1849 was composed chiefly of
artisans, shop assistants and a great many students. There were also a few
convicts for—shades of Fanon! — "to fight for Italy would cure all moral
diseases."32 The composition of the "thousand" with whom he conquered Sicily
and Naples was similar. There were a hundred and fifty lawyers, a hundred
doctors, a hundred merchants, half were workingmen, but there was not a
single peasant.33 The Qaribaldini about to enter Palermo looked like scarecrows,
"resembling in appearance a Boer commando towards the close of war"
(Trevelyan), limping, and their clothes in tatters. They had bad weapons
(smooth-bore muskests which were just about accurate at fifty yards) and
antique artillery. But they were enthusiastic young men, they had a leader who
had learned from previous mistakes, and the morale of the Neapolitan soldiers
facing them was very low indeed. Twenty thousand Neapolitans evacuated
Palermo, unable to resist the onslaught of a far smaller attacking force.
Garibaldi had the support of some local squadri, but they were only of scant
use because they lacked the sang froid to participate in a bayonet charge and in
any case preferred to return home after a few days.
Garibaldi's military career, after the March of the Thousand, came as an
anticlimax. In Mentana in 1867 the better equipment of the French forces was
telling, and at Dijon in January 1871 he and his sons fought the Germans
without conspicuous success, even though Victor Hugo wrote that Garibaldi
was the only French general (he was holding a French command at the time)
not to be defeated in the Franco-Prussian war. His soldiers were not consid -
ered guerrillas by the Germans, who drew a distinction between franc tireurs
on the one hand, and the Garibaldini on the other. The former when captured
were to be shot, the latter were treated as prisoners of war.34
The element of political propaganda and indoctrination in Garibaldi's
campaigns foreshadowed guerrilla wars of a later age. But Garibaldi's
inclination to give battle and to attack frontally rather than to harass the
enemy in less forthright ways was hardly in the guerrilla tradition. Garibaldi's
conspicuous white poncho and the
red shirts of his soldiers would have been shunned by a true guerrilla. Needs
of necessity vary with the circumstances, and customary Spanish guerrilla
methods would not have been feasible in Italy; the Spanish guerrilleros of 1809
had their cardinal support in the countryside,with the urban population on
the whole anything but enthusiastic. In southern Italy, to the contrary, the
"reactionary" peasants were slaying the "liberal" landlords just as sixty years
earlier they had attacked urban republicans and democrats. In addition, the
Italian clergy was deeply hostile to the insurgents, while the Spanish
guerrillas had the solid encouragement of the priests. In general, then,
Garibaldi could not expect much assistance in or from the villages. He was,
however, in a more fortunate position than the Poles who received only a
trickle of supplies via Cracow, whereas his forces had the direct support of the
Piedmontese, and indirect aid from Britain and other European powers. The
political situation, in brief, was more auspicious than in Poland in 1831 or
1863, and in view of the different social character of the movement,
predicated a strategy different from the guerrilla war in Spain.
EMPIRES VERSUS GUERRILLA
During the period of imperialist expansion the European colonial powers

faced resistance frequently in the form of guerrilla warfare by native tribes or
peoples. Russia, expanding in an eastward direction, and the United States,
opening up the West, both fought wars on their frontiers. It usually proved
easier, however, to conquer new colonies than to hold them against a hostile
population; the occupiers were few, the natives many, climatic conditions
were adverse and the Europeans had little immunity against indigenous
diseases. In retrospect, it is surprising that the imperialist powers suffered in
the event only temporary setbacks. But then, more often than not, they faced
disunited tribes, lacking modern arms and reliable supply lines. Guerrilla
warfare waged by them was usually of the most primitive kind, deficient in
leadership, direction and endurance; it was only seldom that an inspired
leader would emerge in Asia or Africa to offer effective defiance. Our
knowledge of these wars is mostly based on accounts by the invaders, which
does not necessarily mean that it is one-sided; Shamil and the Boers were folk
heroes all over Europe, and the French had considerable respect for Abd el-
Kader.
The two longest and in many ways most interesting guerrilla wars were
those waged in North Africa and the Caucasus. France had had its eye on
Algeria for a long time and in 1827 an expeditionary force of twenty-seven
thousand was sent to the country by Charles X. The French behaved with scant
regard for local customs and mores, occupied land, seized property, and soon
found themselves under attack by the tribes of western Algeria led by Abd el-
Kader, the newly elected twenty-four-year-old emir of Mascara. The North
Africans would lead the invaders on wild-goose chases into mountainous
country or the desert; the French would never even spot the enemy, and thirst
and exhaustion would claim countless victims. They were not mobile enough
and had no system for controlling the country they had seized. Abd el-Kader's
columns would appear suddenly and hit at them. Small French detachments
were surprised, escorts carried off,-depleted garrisons destroyed, provisions
were cut and there were no regular communications even between the
principal towns. Victory bulletins were dispatched to Paris, but at the same
time there were constant requests for further reinforcements. Thus, the
Algerian war proved to be far more costly than the French had bargained for.
A static fortifications system a hundred and twenty miles long and consisting
of a hundred and sixty blockhouses and ditches was built, but it proved to be
ineffective. The situation changed only with the arrival of General (later
Marshal) Bugeaud in 1836. In his first address to his officers he told them
bluntly, "Messieurs, vous aurez beaucoup a oublier." He was new to Africa, but it
was immediately obvious to him that their methods of pursuing the Arabs
were wholly unsatisfactory. He had campaigned in Spain in 1812 and found
many analogies between the war there and in Algeria. The French columns
would have to be broken up, disencumbered of artillery and heavy baggage.
In sum, the French troops would have to be free in their movements. 35 There
was some muttering among his lieutenants — their men would lose
confidence without artillery — but Bugeaud made short shrift of these
objections.
He requested mules rather than horses for desert warfare and divided his
army into eighteen flying columns, each consisting of two battalions of
chasseurs, a battalion of Zouaves, one or two squadrons of native levies
(Chasseurs d'Afrique) and two pieces of small mountain artillery. Bugeaud
taught his soldiers to travel light; instead of the old heavy campaigning bag,
they should pack their few belongings in a piece of canvas (which, joined to
similar pieces, would form a tent), dress in loose clothing, not take along
spare shoes. The columns would start well before daybreak and make a halt
every hour.36
A French officer provided a vivid account of guard duty while on a razzia:
Passing the night on guard, to one who knows not by experience what war is,
especially partisan war, awakens only the idea of a certain number of men sleeping
at 200 or 300 paces distance, with a small band in advance, one of whom walks
up and down with a musket on his shoulder. It is thus that we are represented in
the theatres at Paris; but in Africa the night guards are as unlike this picture as
possible. No one sleeps, everyone watches. If the rain falls, if the north-wind blows
ice in your face, there must be no fire to warm the limbs fatigued by the day's
march. A fire may betray the post. Everyone must be on the alert constantly, close to
his arms; and those who are on sentry, crouching like wild beasts among the bushes
spying out the slightest movement, listening to catch the slightest sound, are glad to
do all this to keep their eyes, heavy with sleep, from closing. The safety of all may
depend on their wakefulness. Further, should the enemy attack, no firing; the
bayonet is for defence; no false alarms; the sleep of the bivouac must on no account
be disturbed. Such is the point of honour.37
Bugeaud clearly recognized that strategies appropriate for European

theaters of war were not suitable in North Africa. It was pointless to seize the
centers of population, of trade and industry in Algeria, because there were
none. The right approach, as he explained in a speech in the French
parliament, was to keep a flying column of seven thousand well-led soldiers
operating razzias near the desert. This was sufficient to beat the largest possible
collection of Arabs who were nothing but a "tumultuous gathering," a multi-
tude of very brave individuals without the capacity for united action. He
would give orders to his commanders not to pursue the fleeing tribesmen —
which was useless — but to prevent them from sowing, reaping the harvest
and pasturing their cattle. "The Arabs can fly from your columns into the
desert, but they cannot remain there, they must capitulate." 38 Bugeaud's
predecessors had been in a constant state of alarm, whereas the new
commander, in the words of an admiring junior officer, Saint Arnaud (who
was to command the French forces in the Crimean war), "se bat quand il veut, il
cherche, il poursuit Vennemi, I'inquiete, il sefait craindre." Abd el-Kader's tactics,
in a nutshell, were turned against him, although it still took quite a while
before the new approach was to
show results. Another junior officer serving at the time under Bugeaud,
Trochu (the future commander of Paris in 1870-1871), wrote that "this
campaign has not been the most fruitful in dangerous and brilliant combats,
but the most extended, the most active and the most effectual. . . . Marches and
counter-marches, crushing fatigue, unheard-of efforts, were exacted from all;
but no one had any serious fighting with the enemy, for not having any
organization they remained invisible and could not be caught." In the event it
was by sheer accident that one of the flying columns consisting of six hundred
soldiers stumbled on Abd el-Kader with five thousand of his men at Temda
and inflicted a crushing defeat on him from which he was not to recover. Abd
el-Kader crossed into Morocco, which provided a temporary sanctuary. But
then Bugeaud routed the sultan of Morocco's army at Isly. (He was
subsequently made due dTsly.) Again on the run, Abd el-Kader eluded the
French for three more years, but he was no longer a serious threat.
There was less cruelty in the campaigns of North Africa than in most
colonial wars. The French esteemed Abd el-Kader as a fighting man; Bugeaud
once met him during a short truce and reported to the Minister of Foreign
Affairs that the rebel chief was "pale and a good deal resembles the portrait
often given of Jesus Christ."39 When he finally surrendered in December 1847,
he was exiled to Damascus, given a pension and toward the end of life made
his peace with the French, saving many Christians at the time of the Damascus
riots of i860. The unexpected resistance the French encountered in North
Africa was motivated by Muslim fundamentalism, a rudimentary form of
patriotism, and hatred of the foreigners who had appropriated the best parts
of the land. Brigandage was also a factor of some importance. Some native
tribes supported Abd el-Kader but others opposed him, there was no close
cooperation between Arabs and the Kabyles, this lack of unity contributing its
share to his ultimate defeat.
If it took the French some fifteen years to "pacify" Algeria, the Russians had
to fight twice as long to subdue the Caucasian tribes from the time of Kazi
Mulla's first appeal for a holy war in 1829 to Shamil's final capitulation in
1859. 40 The conquest of the Caucasian mountains began with the arrival of
General Ermolov (a cousin of Denis Davydov) in 1816, but Russian military
occupation was limited at first to the main strongpoints. General Paskevich,
like Bu-geaud's predecessors in Algeria, had proposed a network of forts and
blockhouses to control the area, but since the fighting tribesmen were not
confined in their operations to the main roads (of
which there were very few), it was clear that this system was not well suited
to local conditions. The Russians were fully conscious of the soldiering
qualities of the enemy. "The mounted natives," wrote General Velyaminov,
"are very superior in many ways both to our regular cavalry and to the
Cossacks, they can ride between dawn and sunset one hundred miles. They
are born on horseback, their weapons, carefully selected, were private
property and kept in excellent state." Ermolov's tactics were ruthless; when he
commanded the Russian army, many mountain villages (auls) were destroyed
and the inhabitants killed. These outrages precipitated a general rising of the
mountain people against the Russians; Ermo-lov "conquered the mountains
but the forests defied him."41
The Shamil rebellion coincided — and was to a large extent connected —
with the rise, in the Daghestan mountains, of Muridism, a revivalist
movement derived from Sufi'ism, an Islamic religious trend. Shamil, who
became the leader of the movement, strictly enforced the Shari'at, the law of
Islam. His reputation both among his fellow tribesmen and some of the
Russians was that of a superman. He could make himself invisible, and on
several occasions is said to have jumped with ease over a ditch twenty-seven
feet wide, which, if true, would have stood as the world broad jump record
for more than a century. In 1839, after the surrender of Ak-houlgo, a costly
battle for both sides, the Russians thought the war was over, but Shamil
escaped from the besieged fortress and most of the fighting was still to come.
There were years in which the Russian forces lost up to twenty thousand men
in the struggle against this invisible enemy.42 Exact figures do not exist; Allen
and Muratoff maintain that the Russians lost some five thousand men in
1840-1842, but they counted only battlefield casualties, not those who
succumbed to disease.43 Ermolov had been the first to use flying columns, but
this strategy was given up because the Russian soldier, accustomed to fighting
in the plains, proved to be inept in mountain warfare. He needed to see his
neighbor and was short on initiative if left without explicit orders from his
superior officer. Marksmanship, too, was bad — the Russians all too often
fired without even bothering to take aim. It was only in the later years of the
war that General Voronzov again reinstated the mobile columns with greater
effect. By that time the Russian army had adjusted itself to the technique of
mountain warfare, it was better equipped and it had even greater numerical
superiority (a hundred and fifty thousand). Voronzov and Evdokimov, unlike
their forerunners, realized that the intelligent course was to exhaust Shamil
GUERRILLA WARFARE
gradually, rather than seek to destroy him with one numbing coup. The new
Russian strategy frustrated the Caucasians. "When time after time they found
that in fact they could never come to blows, their weapons fell from their
hands. Beaten they would have gathered again on the morrow. Circumvented
and forced to disperse without fighting, while their villages were occupied
without opposition, they came in next day and offered their submission."44
The Shamil movement has remained a bone of contention to Russian and
Soviet historians to this day. Some praised him as an opponent of feudalism
and imperialism, a revolutionary democrat and a fighter for national
liberation. After 1947, there was a reversal in the party line and Shamil was
condemned as a religious obscurantist, a reactionary and a hireling of foreign
imperialism. In the post-Stalin period a compromise was reached: Muridism is
still considered essentially reactionary, but while the Caucasian aristocracy is
said to have been opposed to everything Russian, the masses had great love
for the Russian people; that, despite the involvement of foreign intrigues, their
struggle was anti-Tsarist, not anti-Russian in character. As a compromise
formula the new version had much to recommend it; whether it corresponds
to historical truth is a different question altogether.
In 1846, at the height of his power, Shamil had some twenty thousand men
under him, subdivided into units of either a thousand or five hundred
warriors. All of them were horsemen, who could be assembled and dispersed
in a very short time. There were no baggage trains, every mountaineer carried
with him what he needed. The men wore yellow robes and green turbans, the
officers black robes with cartridge cases of silver sewn across their chests. The
Circassians' rifles were of better quality than those of the Russians, and the
Caucasian shashka was superior to the Russian sabre. In 1847 Shamil acquired
some artillery, most of it captured from the Russians, but it was of no great
service to him; it may, in fact, have hampered his movements. He was at his
best in surprise attacks against small Russian depots or forts, in disrupting
their lines of communications, and denying them local supplies until the
Russians, in the words of a historian, "might as well have been in the middle
of the Sahara. Shamil had taken or destroyed everything eatable by human
beings for miles round."45 He was a superb commander of five hundred
raiders; five thousand he found unwieldy to handle and coordinate. With his
primitive religious fanaticism he showed surprising sophistication in
conducting political warfare, encouraging desertion from the Russian ranks;
deserters were well received, joined his small army, and those who had fled
because they were ill treated by Russian officers became the staunchest and
most implacable of fighters. From time to time Shamil ventured into the plains
in an effort to raise the Kabardins and other tribes, without, however, any
pronounced success, the "lowlanders" being too exposed to Russian reprisals
to dare join the revolt. During the Crimean War Shamil was Turkey's ally and
indirectly also that of Britain and France, if the help he either obtained or
himself gave here was all but negligible. On the other hand, he was never
entirely cut off from the outside world, and arms and supplies continued to
reach him all along. Shamil surrendered in August 1859, lived in fairly
comfortable exile, first in Kaluga, later in Kiev, and died in 1871 while on a
pilgrimage to Medina. Some of his followers emigrated to Palestine and
Jordan and settled there. Shamil's regime was harsh, even despotic; perhaps it
was the only possible way to spur the mountain people into battle, though in
the long run it certainly did not make for unity in his ranks, or for solidarity
between the mountain tribes. But Shamil's warriors, however brave, would
have been defeated in any case because the odds were too heavily against
them. Russia was so much stronger both in numbers and materiel and it could
not possibly be deflected from expansion. The wonder is not that Shamil was
vanquished, but that he held out for so long.
Compared with the battles for the Caucasus, the Russian expansion in
Central Asia was a walkover. True, the Turcomans occasionally put up stiff
resistance. A correspondent of the Neiv York Herald has given the following
account of the kind of skirmish General Kaufmann encountered on his march
to Khiva:
"Gotovo, charge," shouts the Prince and we are down on them like an avalanche.
A cloud of dust, the panting of horses, the rattle of harness, a flash of sabres and
we are there.
But the Turcomans are not. Three hundred yards further on we see them, they
are going in a gentle canter, not seeming to be in the slightest hurry, and
evidently not in the least apprehensive of our overtaking them. We continue the
chase a short distance with no result. It is exasperating. We may as well charge a
flock of wild geese and we give things up.46
The Russians were exasperated, but not for very long. The Turco-men were
excellent horsemen, brave in individual combat. But like the Red Indians,
indeed like all primitive people, they were incapable of fighting in large units,
and since guerrilla operations, no
less than regular warfare, called for an overall strategy and careful
organization, they never had a chance.
During most of the nineteenth century Great Britain engaged in what some
contemporaries termed, crudely but not altogether inaccurately, "nigger
bashing" — small, and not so small colonial wars in various parts of the
empire. Each of them came into its own due share of publicity at the time; there
are many streets in London named Magdala, Gwalior, Cawnpore and
Khartoum after the sites of notorious battles fought there, and as many after
the generals who led the British troops. (There are four Outram streets in the
British capital, five were named after Kitchener, three in honor of
Brackenbury.) Up to about 1860-1865, the majority of these wars took place in
Asia, subsequently the scene shifted primarily to Africa. Most of them were not
really guerrilla in character; the Afghans whom the British fought thrice had a
regular army, so had the Egyptians, and even the Zulus, and the Mahdi in the
Sudan. The native armies were ill equipped and their leadership was usually
not very competent, but they nonetheless practiced regular, not guerrilla
warfare; the British commanders were frequently surprised by the lack of
enterprise they displayed. In the Abyssinian campaign, as an example, the
British expeditionary forces under Sir Robert Napier eventually reached
Magdala, a seemingly unassailable fortress, Napier himself writing later that if
old women had been at the top and, hiding behind the brow, had thrown
down stones, they would have caused any force a serious loss. 47 The British
were still, however, defeated on more than one occasion — in the Afghan wars,
for instance, the Zulu wars, and against the Boers at Majuba Hill — this usually
as a result of underrating the opposition's numerical strength or fighting
qualities. During the Indian Mutiny there were incidents of guerrilla warfare,
such as Tantia Topi's raids, especially in the later stages of the rebellion. The
talukhdars attacked British convoys, surprised small detachments and engaged
in general brigandage. But this was the exception, not the rule, and many
observers, including Marx and Engels, expressed astonishment that guerrilla
warfare had not been more widely applied by the insurgents; in view of the
wide spaces of India and the small number of British troops, guerrilla warfare
would have been infinitely more effective than sieges and open field battles.
But the mutiny lacked a broad popular base, and the precondition for a
successful people's war did not exist.48
The forces facing the British in India were numerically quite strong —
perhaps sixty thousand men in the second Sikh war; the
British had to fight fifty thousand dervishes near Omdurman, and forty
thousand Zulus. But invariably the natives were subdued in the end, again for
the standard reasons of poor leadership and the needed discipline for fighting
in large platoons. They were incapable of carrying out any complicated
maneuvers once the battle had started. Whenever, on the other hand, a
colonial army had to cope with guerrilla tactics, the war was likely to be
undramatic, costly and prolonged. The Pathans went on fighting in the North-
west Frontier region for many decades, while the French needed a long time
to "pacify" Indochina until at last Gallieni and Lyautey hit on the right tactics
in the 1890s — surprise raids by converging columns along with
simultaneous doses of political warfare, aimed at depriving the rebels of the
support of the local population. Often the colonial armies were hampered by
adverse conditions. Wolsely, for one, found the going rough in the steaming
jungles of Ashanti-land, what with the Ashantis harrying the British lines of
communications, and the Black Watch prone in the confusion to mistake the
Welch Fusilliers for the enemy.
The Maori wars in the north of New Zealand went on for twelve years from
i860 to 1872 and, more perhaps than any other, bore the characteristics of a
guerrilla war. It had begun, strictly speaking, even earlier, with the Wairam
incident in 1843 when white surveyors were killed as the result of an incident
which they had unnecessarily provoked. The white settlers bitterly
complained about the "brutal tortures of the cruel Maoris," but the war had
certainly not been started by the Maoris. It was a conflict over the ownership
of land, and the local whites were far more avid to attack the Maoris than
were the military authorities and the British government. The Christian
missionaries, too, sympathized with the Maoris. The British troops soon found
that regular army tactics such as fixed bayonet charges were of little avail in
this war. The Maoris skillfully used the high grass as cover and built
ingenious fighting positions in the form of trenches (pas), access to which was
barred by felled trees and other obstacles, and designed not as fortresses but
to impede the advance of the British troops and to inflict losses on them. 49 The
Maoris were led by a gifted chieftain, Tito Kowaru, "the De Wet of the
Maoris," who still could not prevent his followers from being gradually
pushed back.
British soldiers saw combat in the jungle, the bush and in mountain passes;
the Shundur Pass which was the scene of much fighting in the Clitral
campaign (1895) is situated twelve thousand feet above sea level. The Dutch
encountered armed resistance in Su-
matra (Achim), the French in Tonkin (1882-1895), in Madagascar (1884 and
1895), and in Tunis, the Germans in Southwest Africa (the Herero revolt), the
Spanish in Morocco (1892-1895), the Americans in the Philippines (1899-
1902). There were many other armed conflicts, some involving small
detachments, others, thousands of men. Sooner or later these insurrections
were suppressed, sometimes by brute force, on other occasions pacification
coming about as a result of combined military and political action.
These exotic wars frequently caught the contemporary imagination, stirred
by what seemed like nothing so much as glorious adventure, laced even with a
certain romanticism, at least from a distance. The same applies, a fortiori, to the
Indian wars in the United States. But they were only seldom guerrilla wars,
and sweeping statements such as "the Apaches were in fact guerrillas,"50 are of
not much use toward an understanding of the specific character of these wars.
It is perfectly true that the Indian braves showed great resources of courage,
that they engaged in hit-and-run attacks, that they were past masters in
woodcraft, and at ambushing. But in other essential respects they were
anything but guerrilleros. They hardly ever operated in the enemy's rear, cer-
tainly not in any systematic way; whenever they could, they refrained from
night attacks; their frontal assaults, in wave after wave, were often suicidal
owing to the far greater firepower of the enemy. With a few exceptions,
Tecumseh paramount among them, the Indian chiefs were quite incapable of
leading sizable contingents in their campaigns. The Red Indian tactics, as
Fletcher Pratt has noted, were those of the squad — they could not combine
their operations and were unable to think in larger terms. The U.S. Army, like
the British in Asia and Africa, met with the occasional defeat, as on the banks
of the Little Bighorn in 1876, when Custer made the fatal mistake of sending
out units that were too small and when he declined to take his Gatling guns
which might have made all the difference. In the early decades of the
nineteenth century, when the Indians were not yet outnumbered by the white
man, such reverses were less uncommon. Major Dade's whole force was
massacred by Seminole Indians in the swamps of Florida in December 1835.
But the forces involved at the time were small; there were altogether only 536
U.S. soldiers in the entire state of Florida. 51 The Seminole wars are of interest,
be it solely because they cost in their seven-year span more U.S. soldiers' lives
than all the other Indian wars of the nineteenth century put together, plus the
staggering sum of forty million dollars.52 In the end some eight
thousand men and naval support ships had to be concentrated to subdue the
Seminoles. Patrolling, "blind raids," and bloodhounds had proved
unproductive; the campaign succeeded only after the troops were ordered to
persist in their efforts throughout the summer as well, the great heat
notwithstanding, and after their blows were directed no longer against a
forever elusive enemy, but against their villages, crops and food supplies.
Deprived at last of their sustenance, the Seminoles had no alternative but to
surrender.
With the opening of the West to white settlement and the spread of a
railway network, the Indians were still further depleted and their remnants
herded into reservations. Dissension had always been rife in their ranks; there
was not, after all, one cohesive Indian nation, only a disparate collection of
many tribes, frequently on the warpath against each other. Their arms were
inferior in quality and they had no powerful outside ally. Their foe gradually
became as adept as they were themselves at woodcraft and scouting.
THE SMALL WAR IN THE BIG WAR
In three of the four major wars of the nineteenth century, guerrilla warfare
played a certain, albeit minor, role — the American Civil War, the Franco-
Prussian War, and the Boer War. Differing as greatly in almost every respect
as these wars did, the guerrilla activities in each warrant individual
examination. Considerable claims have been made about the impact of the
Confederate guerrillas; according to Virgil Carrington Jones, the war would
have ended in 1864, eight to nine months earlier than it did, but for the
operations of the raiders who prevented Sheridan from clearing up the Shen-
andoah valley so that Grant could pursue his campaign. 53 But even if this
claim is accepted, the guerrilla activities merely prolonged the agony of the
South. Leading Confederate generals had misgivings about the irregulars
from start to finish. "I regard the whole [partisan] system as an unmixed evil,"
was General Lee's own unvarnished way of putting it. Perhaps it was simply
the resentment of the regular soldier against an unconventional manner of
warfare, and snobbism vis-a-vis its practitioners who were not always
gentlemen. Not that it was snobs alone who objected to William Quantrill, the
gang leader who captured Independence, Missouri, and plundered Lawrence
(1862-1863). He was a vicious murderer,
and his men consisted chiefly of cutthroats like Jesse James and his brothers. 54
They developed a strange ritual (a black flag and a black oath), but their
prime object, as far as can be ascertained, was to pillage and to destroy, with
no great pains taken to distinguish between friend or foe.
True, it would be unjust to regard Quantrill and his men as the typical
Confederate guerrilla; Mosby, Morgan, Johnson, Ashby, Stuart Sheridan and
their raiders were men of quite different caliber. To single out only the two
most famous and effective among them, Morgan was a businessman in
Lexington, Kentucky, thirty-six when the war broke out — a daring
cavalryman and lover of thoroughbred horses who had seen action as a
captain in the Mexican campaigns. Mosby was a twenty-eight-year-old
lawyer, who while a student at the University of Virginia had killed a fellow
student in an unprovoked duel, and had read law while in prison. 55 Morgan's
raiders came from the best families of the South — deep-rooted gentry as for
instance the Bullitts, Colemans, Breckin-ridges — and were themselves
lawyers, physicians, merchants, journalists for the most part, drawn at the
time to what one Richmond newspaper called "the most attractive of the
services for all young men of a daring and adventurous nature." In equipping
his troops, Morgan discarded the saber in favor of pistols and carbines; every-
one dressed according to his taste — broad-brimmed hats, the pants stuck into
high boots, a pair of pistols buckled around the waist. Mosby later denied that
his men habitually wore blue overcoats to mislead the enemy; they did so only
when they could get no others. 56 The question was of more than academic
importance, for the Northerners were not at all sure whether captured
partisans should be shot or treated as prisoners of war — and those in civilian
clothes, it was argued, had forfeited all rights. Mortan was the first to stage
long-distance raids into the enemy rear in the cold winter of 1861-1862 after
the South had sustained some unexpected defeats. When about to enter battle,
the raiders dismounted and fought as if they were an infantry unit.
Of Morgan's four major raids which took him to Indiana, Ohio and
Tennessee, the first and third were the most successful. In the first raid he
covered a distance of a thousand miles in twenty-four days and for the loss of
a hundred of the eight hundred men with him, did much damage to the
Union forces and captured (and paroled) twelve hundred prisoners. In the
third raid, this time with four thousand men, he took over eighteen hundred
prisoners for the loss of only two men, and destroyed two million dollars'
worth of property.57 The fourth (Ohio) raid in July 1863 was the most spec-
8i SMALL WARS AND BIG ARMIES
tacular but also the most pointless. With some twenty-five hundred men he
ventured far afield from his base; on one occasion in Indiana he covered
ninety miles in thirty-five hours. 58 But eventually his force was surrounded
and destroyed and Morgan had to surrender. A new raid into Tennessee
ended in total disaster; at Greene-ville he was tracked down by Union troops
and killed.
The composition of his band had changed greatly toward the end. The
Southern aristocracy was replaced by Southern riffraff; bank robberies as well
as petty thieving became quite common. Morgan was a courageous,
impulsive, and impatient commander, conspicuously lacking some of the
essential qualities of a guerrilla leader. His great achievement was to tie up to
thirty thousand Union soldiers with a force which never extended beyond a
few thousand men, but usually was far smaller. He excelled in public
relations; newspapermen were always welcome at his camp and he had a
good press, except, of course, in the North. But his victories, however
dashing, never influenced the issue of a campaign, let alone the war.59
Mosby's rangers, who numbered only two hundred, began their actions on
a small scale, cutting telegraph wires; later on they hung around enemy
camps, shot at sentinels and pickets, intercepted couriers and supply wagons
and forced the Union army to move only in large bodies. On one occasion
Mosby captured a Union general in his bed (General Stoughton, not one of the
outstanding leaders of the North); on another he seized a payroll of $173,000.
His activities were given wide publicity and many Southern soldiers of the
line asked for a transfer to this unit or to another raider command.
Among the generals and colonels in charge of these units, Nathan Bedford
Forrest was considered by many to be the greatest. According to some, he was
the most accomplished fighter to emerge in the war, and this despite his
having had no previous military training.60 A wealthy businessman from
Tennessee, he had raised a battalion at his own expense in 1861. In a major
raid with a thousand men in July 1862, he overpowered an enemy brigade,
destroyed railway bridges and captured a load of supplies. His second raid in
December 1862, into Kentucky with twenty-five hundred men, was less
successful, but in the Atlanta campaign, during the second half of 1864, he
played a considerable role, diverting major enemy units for a dismayingly
long time with a force of between two to five thousand men. Sherman was
brought to the point of saying that the devil Forrest must be hunted down and
killed if it costs ten thousand lives and bankrupts the treasury." 61 His
operations resem-
8.3
bled those of Denis Davydov in the War of 1812; deep-penetration raids into
the enemy's rear rather than guerrilla warfare.
By mid-September 1862, partisan rangers had been organized into six
regiments and nine battalions in half a dozen Southern states, and units of
company size existed in Florida and Mississippi. The North, too, had a few
rangers, if their activity was mainly confined to the Leesburg area. But the
strong opposition partisans and their operations had aroused from the
beginning tended to increase rather than diminish in both North and South
and cannot readily be explained away, exist though it may well have done at
times, as simple professional jealousy. General Heth, commanding the West
Virginia military district, wrote that the partisans were just organized bands
of robbers, that they were more ready to plunder friends than enemies
(because it was less dangerous), that their leaders were unable to enforce
discipline and that their interpretation of fighting was roaming over the
country, taking what they wanted— and doing nothing. 62 Seddon, the
Confederate secretary of war, wrote President Davis in 1863 that they (the
partisans) had not infrequently caused more odium and done more damage
with friends than enemies.
The treatment of guerrillas by the North varied from state to state. Assistant
Secretary of War P. H. Watson wrote that they were the "common enemies of
mankind" and should be shot without challenge. Generals McClellan and
Halleck issued orders instituting the death penalty for insurgent rebels
apprehended in the act of destroying bridges, railway and telegraph lines.
When Northern forces threatened to execute two Confederate officers, Lee
warned McClellan in a letter that he would retaliate and the Union Command
did not carry out its threat (on a previous occasion, after the execution of six of
Mosby's men by Custer, Mosby had retaliated by killing six of Custer's
soldiers). Grant thought that guerrillas without uniform should not be treated
as prisoners of war. Washington consulted Francis Lieber, professor of law at
Columbia, about the status of the guerrilla in international law. His treatise,
learned and fair as it was, did little to elucidate the issue. Partisans (he wrote)
were entitled to the privileges of the law of war provided they opposed the
invader openly and in respectable numbers and operated in the yet uninvaded
portions of the hostile country; on the other hand, no army and society could
allow unpunished assassination, robbery and devastation.63 But this left many
questions open. What was "open resistance"? What were "respectable
numbers"? And what if the front line was not clearly delineated?
As resistance against guerrillaism grew, the Confederacy in early
x864 repealed the act which had authorized the formation of partisan units.
Some nevertheless continued to operate, and a few continued to fight on even
after the South had surrendered. The Union generals responded to the raids
during the last year of the war with the systematic destruction of farms, crops
and livestock and the carrying off of all men under the age of fifty; in this
way, Grant had told Sheridan, "you will get many of Mosby's men."
The subsequent fate of some of the leading partisan commanders is not
without interest. Mosby tried his luck in politics, made his peace with the
North, and was helped by President Grant, much to the disgust of his fellow
Southerners. He became consul general in Hong Kong and eventually acted as
an attorney for railroad companies. Duke became a congressman and
published a number of books about his experiences in the war. Forrest, who
had been a millionaire before the war and lost his property, became a planter
and apparently also the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. "Flying Joe
Wheeler" also became a congressman, and a general in the U.S. Army who
was to see action in the Philippines against another partisan, Aguinaldo, three
decades later. General Adam R. Johnson outlived them all; blinded in battle,
he settled in a new town which he had founded on the shores of the Colorado
River in Texas; he died in 1922.
The question of the effectiveness of partisans and rangers in this war has
remained, as noted initially, a matter of dispute to this day. That the guerrillas
were a "hornet's nest" and that they caused damage to the North is beyond
doubt. But Union retaliation could be telling; if the rangers attacked their
supply lines, they would live off the land, much to the detriment of the South.
The rangers were at their most potent when operating among a friendly popu-
lation, their deep-penetration raids frequently taking them into hostile
territory where they could not count on the valuable goodwill of the civilians.
Some of the large-scale raids involving thousands of men were quite
successful, but they were also far more risky and liable to end in disaster. The
smaller units, such as Mosby's, were more elusive and therefore, for that very
reason perhaps, on balance more effective.
PARTISANS IN THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR
The war between France and Prussia began in mid-July 1870; two months
later the French armies were beaten, the emperor had abdi-
8.3
cated, Paris was under siege and Moltke, the German commander in chief,
was reasonably certain that he would be back on his farm in Silesia in October
in time for the hunting season. But outside Paris a government of national
defense had taken over with the ringing slogan, guerre a Voutrance, and a huge
new army was mobilized by Gambetta and his military deputy, Freycinet. The
underlying concept was that this new army should act as a vast guerrilla force,
harassing the enemy rather than engaging in frontal attack. Memories of the
Vendee and of Spain were conjured up; some of the partisan units were
commanded by officers who were descendants of leading Vendee rebels such
as La Rochejacquelin. The guerrilla concept did not lack plausibility; the
Germans had an efficiently organized fighting machine, but they might well
find themselves hard pressed to adjust to an unfamiliar type of war. It was
thought, furthermore, that guerrilla warfare would give the French soldier a
chance to exhibit his real prowess. In the first phase of the war the soldiers had
fought well, whereas the higher command had failed. Guerrilla warfare,
however, demanded no staff experience and planning; it could be carried on
by zealous citizens even if they had no profound knowledge of strategic
theory or its practice.
The new government nevertheless decided on 29 September 1870 to put the
franc tireur units under the general command of the army. In all, some fifty-
seven thousand officers and men enlisted in the free corps {corps francs); some
small units of perhaps two to three thousand men had been in existence even
before then.64 But the original enthusiasm for a vast chouannerie did not last,
for several reasons. Above all, Gambetta realized that it would take time to
organize a people's war, longer time than was available to lessen the pressure
on the besieged capital. Hence, priority had of necessity to be given to the
establishing of a new regular army which could be readied more quickly to
help relieve Paris. Secondly, there was passive resistance on the part both of
army officers and the civil administration. There were reports that the franc
tireurs were misbehaving, scandalizing the population by their brigandage,
and that they were none too eager to engage the enemy.65 New measures were
proclaimed to intensify control over the free corps; each such unit was to be
directly responsible to the local military command, every officer had to report
twice weekly on the activities of his unit. On 14 January 1871 it was
announced that no new free corps would be established.
The opposition to franc tireur operations stemmed partly from the innate
conservatism of unimaginative army officers who feared
that with the spread of partisan units the line between soldier and civilian
would be blurred.66 But their aversion was not entirely unjustified, for the
franc tireurs indeed lacked discipline, they were incapable of carrying out
sustained military operations, joining or absenting themselves from their units
as it suited them. Lastly, patriotic enthusiasm was strongest in the towns and
weakest in the countryside. The peasants did not receive the Germans with
open arms, and more often than not they refused to collaborate, but neither
was there any great willingness on their part to leave home and farm to join
the franc tireurs. There was a general feeling of apathy, and since the Chouans
lacked enthusiasm, there could be no chouannerie.
The franc tireurs were badly equipped, their leadership was indifferent and
they missed countless opportunities. Even their two most spectacular
operations were of no military significance. By the time they mined the
viaduct of Fontenoy (22 January 1871), the railway line was no longer of vital
importance for the Germans.67 And the capture of the village of Le Bourget,
north of Paris (the site long since of a famous airport), by Parisian/ranc tireurs
on 27 October 1870 provided a psychological boost but little more; the
Germans took it back four days later.
And yet, uncoordinated and badly executed as partisan warfare was, it
produced some startling results. As the war progressed — and as it emerged
once it was over — the Germans had to deploy some hundred and twenty
thousand men, a quarter of their total force, to protect their lines of
communication, mainly the railways. The people's war between the Seine and
Loire caught the Germans altogether unprepared, both politically and
militarily. Politically, because Bismarck feared that the longer the war lasted,
the more likely the diplomatic intervention of the other European powers,
which would deprive the Germans of at least some of the fruits of victory. On
that count alone, Bismarck had every incentive to bring the war to a speedy
end. Militarily, the Prussians were superbly prepared to fight against a regular
army, but an elusive enemy was not that easy to destroy. France is a big
country, the German armies combined numbered fewer than half a million
soldiers and the farther they advanced, the more thinned out they became, for
garrisons had to be left behind in every town and strongpoint that was
occupied; not too small garrisons either since an attack or an insurrection
could never be ruled out. Altogether the Germans lost more than a thousand
men in franc tireur warfare, a not insubstantial figure in terms of casualties in
general. Of more import was the
pervasive atmosphere of insecurity generated by franc tireur operations, and

German commentators freely admitted after the war that the irregulars had
caused them serious problems.68 A people's war conjured up the specter of a
revolution. The Germans would have greatly preferred to make peace with
the emperor; instead, they had to deal with a republican government, and
there was the danger of further radicalization.
The war was conducted cruelly on both sides; the franc tireurs committed
acts of individual terror, the Germans retaliated by executing hostages and
burning villages. French publicists, including Victor Hugo, called blatantly for
total war, the extermination of every last German; Frau Bismarck was not
alone in suggesting to her husband that all Frenchmen should be shot and
stabbed to death down to the smallest infant. But Bismarck and the old em-
peror, despite occasional expressions of violent anger, were sober and
farsighted enough to reject such advice. They rightly feared the incalculable
consequences for the future relations between France and Germany if these
atrocities should spread and become common practice.
The franc tireur war consisted of innumerable small actions such as
destroying railway lines and bridges; the French irregulars also tried to blow
up tunnels but lacked the know-how and sufficient quantities of explosives.
On several occasions they succeeded in freeing transports of French prisoners
of war. Thus, on the road from Soissons to Chateau Thierry, between three to
four hundred prisoners escaped during a. franc tireur attack.69 Telegraph lines
were cut and supply columns attacked. The scope o f franc tireurs activities
would have been wider but for the lack of cavalry which restricted their
movements on the whole to forests and other inaccessible regions. They
engaged in night attacks on small German garrisons, as at Chatillon in
November 1870. 70 In this instance the Germans lost 192 officers and men.
Many of these were taken prisoner and the French threatened that they would
be executed unless the Germans treated captured irregulars as prisoners of
war. Auxon, near Troyes, had to be evacuated temporarily under franc tireur
pressure, and a first German attempt to enter the city of St. Quentin and to
arrest the local prefect was beaten back. The Bavarians and the troops of the
Grand Duke of Mecklenburg ran into difficulties near Orleans, on the road to
Chartres and in the Dijon area, and almost invariably in hilly or wooded
country.
The franc tireur units, hastily established, were a mixed bag and it is almost
impossible to generalize about their composition, politi-
cal orientation and military efficiency. Some bands had only a handful of
members, others several hundred. Most were set up on a local basis, with the
men fighting in the vicinity of their homes, but there were also partisan units
from Bretagne, from Nice and from North Africa, not to mention Garibaldi's
irregulars. They wore every kind of fantasy uniform, and some wore no
uniform at all. Some were radical left wing in inspiration, a number had a
conservative and monarchist bias. Some were relatively well organized and
disciplined and operated to all intents and purposes as small military units
would have done. Others, wandering aimlessly from village to village,
showed greater proclivity for marauding than fighting the German enemy.71
After all the initial enthusiasm for a people's war, French resistance
collapsed during the early months of 1871. France was not the Vendee or
Spain; the great majority of Frenchmen, much as they hated the Germans,
lacked the fanaticism and the stamina for the guerre a Voutrance which had
been so loudly proclaimed at the start. The psychological shock of the defeat
had been immense; for two centuries, if not longer, Frenchmen had believed
their country to be militarily superior to all other European powers, and the
surrender of their armies had destroyed their self-confidence — it was not just
a crisis but a national disaster, the collapse of a whole world. To prolong
resistance now, was the despondent attitude, would be but to devastate their
towns and villages further, to no conceivably different end. It is idle to
speculate what might have happened if resistance had continued for six more
months or even a year. Moltke and the war party were only too eager to carry
on the campaign, but domestic pressure on them to end it was growing. It was
not only Bismarck's apprehensions about diplomatic intervention, but the war
was becoming increasingly expensive, and daily more unpopular at home.
Even the front-line troops were weary and the war minister, Roon, wrote that
it might take years to occupy the whole of France. But the years were not
called upon: French resistance faded and died away first. Guerrilla warfare, as
the average Frenchman saw it, would never bring about the liberation of his
country, whereas peace would perhaps open new perspectives and
possibilities for a national recovery. Which all points up the more strongly
that the operations of the franc tireurs neither could nor did change anything
insofar as the military results of the war or — even less — the conditions of
the peace treaty were concerned. German demands certainly did not become
more moderate as the people's war continued. It was political considerations
at the
last, however, quite unconnected with events on the battlefield, that fairly
narrowly circumscribed the terms that Germany could finally impose on her
defeated neighbor.
COMMANDO
In May 1900 there was every reason to assume that the end of the Boer War
was in sight. Cronje had surrendered, the siege of Mafe-king had been raised,
Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, had been taken and in early
June the British troops entered Pretoria. Field Marshal Roberts, commanding
the British forces, predicted the impending collapse of Boer resistance; the
Burghers had become, in the words of one of their commanders, a "disorderly
crowd of terrified men fleeing before the enemy." He let his men go home, for
"I cannot catch a hare with unwilling dogs."72 When President Kruger
announced that the war would begin only now, the British generals were
inclined to dismiss this as idle talk on the part of an old man, a civilian who
lacked understanding of military realities.
At the start of the war, in October 1899, the Boers had at first beaten the
British. But as massive reinforcements streamed into South Africa, the tide
began to turn despite poor generalship on the British side. The Boers were
excellent horsemen and crack shots. They knew the terrain and used it very
well in their operations. Above all, they were fighting for their homes and
national independence. According to Boer common law, every Burgher
between sixteen and sixty had to be prepared to fight for his country at any
moment; he had to have a riding horse, saddle, bridle, a rifle, thirty cartridges
and food for eight days. They went to war in their working clothes. But they
lacked military experience and discipline and were unaccustomed to receive
and carry out orders. It was truly a citizens' army; on more than one occasion
their elected generals were outvoted by the corporals and the privates. Their
forces were subdivided into commandos of between three hundred and three
thousand men. Joubert and Cronje, who led them in the early phase of the
war, were old and overcautious men; having scored a victory, they failed to
press it home and make it complete. They lacked any overall strategic concept;
they were capable of carrying out daring raids and surprise attacks, but there
was little coordination between the commandos, and no general plan. This is
not to say that they
could have won the war with better leadership and a well-trained regular
army; the contest was too unequal. Thus they would score some remarkable
victories, such as Magersfontein, Colenso and Spionkop, but in the end the
British would get fresh reinforcements, whereas all the Boers got were
messages of sympathy from various parts of the world.
The British were at first exceedingly bad at reconnoitering and in general at
adjusting themselves to local conditions. But as the war continued, they
improved; they had guns in plenty, while the Boers had only a few and did
not make good use of their artillery. It was during the second phase of the
war, which lasted from, roughly, March 1901 to May 1902, that guerrilla
tactics were more and more often adopted. 73 In the beginning it had been the
"last of the Gentleman's Wars"; the Boers usually released their prisoners after
a day or a week, if only because they had no facilities for keeping them, and
the British, too, acted with restraint. But in the guerrilla phase of the war the
British began to burn farms on a massive scale; the women and children who
had lived on these farms were evacuated to refugee camps, known also as
concentration camps. Similar practices had been employed by General Weyler
in Cuba. These camps had nothing but the name in common with the con -
centration camps of the Nazi era, but by the standards of a more civilized
period these measures were considered barbarous in the extreme; there was
an outcry in Britain, the Boer resistance became even stiffer. Patriotic feeling,
however, was running high in Britain, and for all the sense of outrage at this
inhumanity toward civilians, not everyone by any means was happy with the
relatively lenient treatment meted out to members of the Boer commandos
who were exiled to St. Helena or Bermuda. Maguire, the guerrilla theoretician,
wrote that if it became generally known that guerillas or irregulars would be
treated like the guerrillas or irregulars in South Africa were treated, "there will
be plenty of guerrillas and irregulars in every future war. It will be the most
prosperous career possible."
The second guerrilla phase of the Boer War was highlighted by the
commando raids of de Wet, Smuts, de la Rey, Botha and Viljoen. At the
beginning of the war, the British garrison consisted of a mere 12,000 men, by
the end of December 1901 there were 388,000, and when the war ended
448,000. About 46,000 of them were killed or wounded during the war, or
died of disease. There had been some 60,000 soldiers in the Boer army at the
beginning of the war, but their number shrank to fewer than 20,000 in the
guerrilla stage.
Despite the numerical superiority, the British commanders faced the
silent disability of a regular army in contest with a horde of guerrillas

manoeuvring about their own country. Seldom in the course of the whole
campaign in South Africa was it possible for the British Commander-in-Chief or
any of his lieutenants, to select their own sites for battle or ground for
manoeuvre. Well-nigh invariably these spots were dictated by the enemy,
insignificant numbers of whom led great armies whither they would.74
Boer tactics were not, of course, decisive, but it was "exceedingly humiliating
to be thus bandied about at the will of handfuls of evasive freebooters." 75 Even
by early 1902 full control had not been reestablished in the Orange River
Colony:
There was not a convoy whose safe arrival could be counted on, not a garrison
that did not stand continually to arms, not a column which even whilst it
marched against the enemy had not to move with the strictest precautions of the
defensive.76
Hardly a day elapsed, according to another well-known chronicler of the Boer

War, that the railway line was not cut at some point.77
With the beginning of the guerrilla phase a rough division of labor was
decided upon by the Boer leaders; de Wet and Hertzog transferred their
activities to the Free State, Botha to eastern Transvaal and on to Natal, de la
Rey and Smuts to western Transvaal. Operations in the Free State became very
difficult indeed, because the territory had been laid waste by the British.
Smuts's raid into Cape Colony, in the course of which he covered two
thousand miles, was one of the most successful operations of the whole war.
He set out with three hundred and sixty men; evenutally his force swelled to
almost four thousand. He did not succeed in stirring up a general rising in
Cape Colony as he had hoped, but he kept tens of thousands of British soldiers
busy for a long time.78
The Boer columns caused greater damage to the British in this period of the
war than ever before. Their incessant maneuvers and frequent attacks
exhausted the British forces; their horses died by the thousands. There were
daring attacks on such strategic targets as the Bloemfontein waterworks. De
Wet wrote that it was painful for him to see any railway line and not be able to
damage it. At first the commandos used a primitive land mine. The barrel and
lock of a gun connected to a dynamite cartridge were placed under a
GUERRILLA WARFARE
sleeper; when a passing engine pressed the rail to this machine, it exploded. 79
Later on the system was perfected; the gravel was hollowed out, the machine
was placed under a sleeper and covered up again. The British trebled their
guards but there were still explosions, and no trains could run at night.
To isolate the commandos and to prevent a breakthrough, the British built a
network of blockhouses at a distance of between eighty and eight hundred
yards, which were connected by barbed wire entanglements, trenches and
stone walls. To man them and to maintain other garrisons, some hundred
thousand troops were needed. De Wet was scornful about these "white
elephants" and claimed that he always fought his way through, that not a single
soldier was captured as a result of the "policy of the blockhead."80 He found it
more difficult to cope with British night attacks and, like other commando
leaders, was paralyzed and eventually defeated by the British scorched-earth
policy. Kitchener's flying columns sweeping the area beyond the blockhouses
were not effective; if the Boers lost heart, it was not as the result of these drives
but because of the strategy of steady attrition. It was a race against time for both
sides; opposition to the war in Britain was rising and Kitchener was by no
means optimistic. "The dark days are on us again," he wrote in March 1902.
Four months earlier Smuts's column had entered the western regions; at first
they were "hunted like outlaws," but, "today," Smuts wrote, "we practically
held the whole area from the Olifants to the Orange river 400 miles away, save
for small garrison towns here and there."81 But there were some hundred
thousand Boer women and children in the concentration camps, and the
number of Boer prisoners of war (thirty-two thousand) who had been exiled
was by early 1902 considerably in excess of the number of those still in the field
(eighteen thousand). Thus, after heated internal discussions at Vereeniging,
with Steyn and de Wet demanding a fight to the bitter end, the Boer leaders
capitulated. What clinched the matter was apparently an aside by Kitchener in
conversation with Smuts — that in all probability two years hence a Liberal
government would come to power granting a constitution to South Africa
which would meet the Boers' demands for national autonomy.82 The peace
terms were not too harsh; within the next five years Britain was to pay the
Boers some ten million pounds in compensation for the property that had been
destroyed, and in 1910 the Act of Union came into force, the first major step on
the road to an independent South Africa.
The Boer War had certain unique features distinguishing it from
all other wars of the period. Was it a guerrilla war? De Wet did not think so. "I
was always at a loss to understand by what right the British designated us
guerrillas," he wrote. In his view, the only case in which the term could be
used was when one civilized nation had so completely vanquished another
that not only the capital was taken but the whole country from border to
border occupied, and this clearly was not so in South Africa. 83 But de Wet
labored under the misapprehension that brigandage and guerrilla warfare
were more or less synonyms; a deeply religious man, like most Boer leaders, it
was for him a "war of religion." "My people will perhaps say 'our generals see
only the religious side of the question.' They will be right."84 They had begun
the war "strong in the belief in God," because they thought it was the right
thing to do, and the possibility of defeat had not entered their minds.
It was a "gentleman's war" to the extent that nongentlemen — that is, black
people — were not mobilized by either side. The Boers underrated the enemy
in the light of their past experience with the British (their victory at Majuba
Hill in 1882), and the victories in the early months of the war seemed to
justify their optimism. But they underestimated the resources of the British
and, once the war became less gentlemanly (the scorched-earth tactics and the
concentration camps), the Boers found themselves not only without food and
in rags, but having great trouble getting weapons and ammunition. Reitz
relates that he had exactly four bullets left when he joined Smuts's raid into
Cape Colony, and others were no better off. Had there been two or three
million Boers, they could have held out almost indefinitely against the British,
but even their fighting spirit and commando tactics were not adequate
enough substitute for their paucity of numbers.
The war had long been at an end when the leaders of the Boer commandos
were to find themselves on opposite sides of the barricades — like the Spanish
guerrilleros in the Carlist wars, and like many other guerrillas before and since
once their wars were over. When World War I broke out, de Wet and de la
Rey felt the time had come to shake off the British yoke. Hertzog was
wavering, but Smuts and Botha suppressed the rising by force of arms. While
de la Rey was killed in the fighting, Smuts lived to become a British field
marshal and member of the British war cabinet. He commanded the British
troops in German East Africa in World War I, while Botha fought the
Germans in South West Africa. Reitz commanded the Royal Scots Fusiliers,
one of the oldest British regiments, on the Western Front and eventually
became a South Afri-
can cabinet minister. The Boer War generation dominated the South African
political scene for many decades; when the Nationalists at long last broke
Unionist rule in the elections of 1948, the former were still led by General
Hertzog, the latter by Smuts. And when the South African Republic was
proclaimed and in May 1961 left the Commonwealth, there were still some of
those alive who had fought for independence sixty years earlier.
BRIGANDAGE AND GUERRILLA WARFARE
After his return from a visit to the distant provinces of northern China, Eric
Teichman, a British diplomat, wrote in 1917 that the north of Shensi Province
was at the time of his visit in the hands of organized troops of brigands of a
semipolitical character, "robbers one day, rebels the next, and perhaps
successful revolutionaries the next." It was in this very area that the Chinese
Communists established their main base after the Long March. But the
phenomenon was by no means specifically Chinese — in Latin America
throughout the eighteenth century, and elsewhere up to and including the
present time there have been similar phenomena. 85 There is in fact frequently
no clear dividing line between guerrilla warfare, terror and brigandage. No
one, to be sure, thought of nineteenth-century Russian and French anarchists
as guerrillas; their attacks were directed against leading figures of the political
establishment, and sometimes indiscriminately against the public at large. But
in later years the border line between guerrilla warfare and assassination
became hazy; the activities of the Irish rebels and the Macedonian IMRO serve
as an illustration. The demarcation between guerrilla and banditry had all
along been less than clear. For ages past, the world over, bandits operating
from hideouts in inaccessible regions such as mountains or forests used the
technique of the hit-and-run raid and the ambush, they had to be good shots
and good horsemen to succeed in their chosen profession. There were, of
course, important differences, not least on the tactical level; the marauders
usually operated in very small groups and, even where brigandry was
endemic, cooperation was rare between one band and the other. (Outside
Europe, however, bandits sometimes operated in units of many hundreds.)
Above all, they lacked a political incentive, robbery being in the main and
chief objective; the richer the victims, the better. Nonetheless, as with every
rule, the exceptions did
sometimes exist and a political element would enter into brigandage — as,
looking back, with the Haiduks in the Balkans, while the activity of dacoits in
Burma can also not be ignored in this context. After the defeat of King Thibaw
in the third Burma war (1885), armed gangs of patriotic robbers continued to
harass the British for several years. But they also fought their own country-
men, and, of course, each other.
Certain early anarchist and socialist ideologists such as Bakunin and
Weitling set great store by the bandit, the "genuine and sole revolutionary — a
revolutionary without fine phrases, without learned rhetoric, irreconcilable,
indefatigable and indomitable, a popular and social revolutionary" (Bakunin).
Such expectations seemed perhaps only logical, up to a point; the bandits
were a subversive force, undermining existing society — like the early Fas-
cists, they were the outcasts of all classes. But, unlike the Fascists, they were
highly individualistic people, they had no intention whatsoever of
establishing a mass movement and of overthrowing the entrenched order.
They were not even interested in expanding their ranks beyond a certain limit.
Bakunin's fantasy had a revival in the theories (and practices) of some
twentieth-century revolutionaries in Europe and the Americas, as we shall see
in turn.
Banditry has been inherent in all known societies since the beginning of
time, but robbers have differed from each other not less than sociologists and
philosophers. There was, at one extreme, the sadistic outlaw who found
fulfillment in murder for murder's sake, and on the other the noble bandit (or
bandolero) who robbed the rich and distributed some or even most of his loot
among the poor. In times of general political and social disturbance robbers
would become guerrillas, some because they found it convenient to pursue
their old exploits under a new respectable cloak, others because they were
patriotically inclined and capable of disinterested action. Furthermore, most
guerrilla movements included members of semirespectable professions such as
smuggling and poaching; in peacetime these activities were strictly illegal, but
smugglers and poachers were hardly regarded by society as major criminals
and in time of war moral standards were invariably lowered. Smugglers and
poachers knew the countryside better than anyone else, they had a lifetime of
experience of being on the run and were often of considerable help to guerrilla
strategists.
There were other affinities between guerrilla and bandit, inasmuch as the
former, "living off the land," had to appropriate horses, food and other
supplies from the local population, usually without
paying for them. He did this in the name of a cause, whereas the robbers did it
for less elevated reasons, but for those deprived of their belongings, the effect
was all one. In addition to the official requisitions ordered by the guerrilla
chiefs, there was invariably a good deal of private enterprise marauding. It
would be hard to point to a single guerrilla campaign in which looting did not
occur, if only because strict discipline was difficult or impossible to enforce
among dispersed irregulars. It was rare in some guerrilla movements led by
men of integrity such as Garibaldi or the Boer generals, but more often than
not the guerrillas took a share of the spoils as their due, simply because this
was the only kind of payment they had any hope of getting. This was all but
standard operating practice in nineteenth-century Latin America, but it also
happened in the Vendee, in the Spanish rising against Napoleon, in the
American Civil War, among Abd el-Kader's followers and in countless other
instances. The more farsighted guerrilla leaders did what they could to
prevent systematic and too-frequent looting because they knew that, in the
long run, they depended on the goodwill and the collaboration of the local
inhabitants — mention has been made of the extermination of robber bands by
Mina in the Spanish wars —but even they had their hands full trying to
impose a guerrilla order. Mention has also been made of the almost impercep-
tible transition from brigandage (or bandolerismo) to partisan warfare in Cuba
in the 1870s and the same applies, in some degree, to Mexico — Pancho Villa
was perhaps the most famous case of a bandit turned guerrilla, but there were
many others.86 And this leaving out, nearer to our own times, Algeria,
Vietnam, and the Cuban war in the 1950s. In some countries bandolerismo was
a concomitant of the social struggle — this certainly goes for Mexico and for
Andalusia at the end of the eighteenth century — elsewhere, as in Greece, the
armatoli were on the contrary a conservative force forming part of the
established social system.
Pancho Villa turned bandit, so he claimed, only because he wanted to
defend the honor of his mother. 87 Su San, the female gang leader who earned a
unique place in the history of the Tai-ping revolution, had become an outlaw
(and the head of a major bandit gang) after the death of her husband. She
organized a posse to hunt down his murderer, killed him with her own hands
and in time became the chief of a band which had the reputation of robbing
the rich to help the poor. Eventually she joined the Taiping army with two
thousand men, winning immortality in the poems of contemporary Chinese
literati.88
During its guerrilla phase, Communism in China drew not a few of its
recruits from the ranks of robber bands. Writing about the composition of the
Red Army, Mao declared it was not true to say (as the Hunan Provincial
Committee had done) that all the soldiers were elements declasses, meaning
deserters, robbers, beggars and prostitutes, but he admitted that the majority
consisted of such men and women. 89 In principle it was quite true that they
should be replaced by peasants and workers but in practice it was impossible
to find replacements. Hence the necessity to intensify political training "so as
to effect a qualitative change in these elements." 90 The elements declasses (ijumin)
were especially good fighters, they were courageous, and under the right
leadership they could become a revolutionary force. It was surely no mere
accident that the Communist guerrillas appeared precisely in those parts of
China such as the Hua Yin region in which banditry on a mass scale had been
endemic for a long time. In the early phase the Communist guerrillas had
much in common with other armed bands such as the t'u-fei (bandits), and
Mao for one displayed great interest in the t'u-fei tradition.91 In later years the
Chinese Red Armies only tolerated them in regions in which Communist rule
had not yet been firmly established.
The ecology of guerrilla war and banditry is identical to all intents and
purposes. This applies to all the more recent major guerrilla wars — China,
Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam, Greece, the Philippines, Malaya, and so on. Naturally
both guerrillas and bandits looked for hideouts in difficult terrain. But there
was also usually a regional tradition of "young people taking to the hills."
If some bandits would turn to the left, others would join right-wing forces;
the story of the resistance against Napoleon in southern Italy is enlightening
in this respect. As in Spain, the French army of occupation could maintain
itself only in the large towns; the countryside was in the hands of men who
hated the foreign invaders, had lost their jobs or did not want to be
conscripted. They preferred to pursue guerrilla warfare: "too weak for such an
operation, they were still strong enough to turn brigands." 92 But they did not
think of themselves as robbers, almost to a man these brigands died
courageously when apprehended by the French. "1 ladri siete voi" (You are the
robbers), a Calabrian peasant proudly declared when facing the tribunal at
Monteleone. "I carried my rifle and knife for King Ferdinand whom my God
restore."93 Militarily these brigands' gangs were by no means insignificant; the
occupation army could transverse the country only in large units, small
gy SMALL WARS AND BIG ARMIES
detachments were almost certainly bound to be destroyed. Murat's lines of

communication were constantly disrupted, several battalions always had to be
ready to fight the bandits. In the end, ten thousand soldiers were spread over
two provinces. General Cham-pionnet once admitted that Fra Diavolo's band
gave him more difficulty than any division of the royalist army. 94 The French
position improved after they had enlisted the help of Andrea Orlando, himself
an ex-bandit who knew most of the hideouts of his former comrades, and
made him head of a counterguerrilla detachment. The bandit guerrillas
committed innumerable atrocities, to which the French responded with
"extraordinary measures"; since they found it impossible to chase the
brigands, they turned against the villages, compelling them (in the words of a
French officer) "to extirpate the brigands of themselves under penalty of being
regarded as their complices and abetters." (Lettres sur les Calabres, par un officier
frangais, Paris, n.d.)
Fra Diavolo, the most notorious of these robbers, was in fact born Michele
Pezza, his better-known sobriquet indicating the cunning of a priest and the
malice of the devil. It is reported that French officers who fell into his hands
were burned at the stake while the villagers danced around this auto-da-fe.
Like other prominent robbers such as Gasparone, he became the protagonist
of an opera (by Auber, with the libretto by Scribe). 95 He had been made a
colonel by King Ferdinand and after his death — he was hanged by the French
in November 1806 — his family received a royal pension. Mammone, Fra
Diavolo's almost equally famous colleague, had the reputation, perhaps
apocryphical, of a cannibal: "The inhabitants [of his native village] assert that
he hung about the butchers' stalls for an opportunity to put his mouth to the
gashed throats of bullocks and swine."96
In this guerrilla war in the southern Italian provinces, the patriotic forces
consisted of an alliance between the Bourbonists, the nobility, the clergy and
the brigands, while the liberals, the republicans and the French were the
enemy. The reactionary forces were headed by Cardinal Ruffo, who coined the
slogan "Fernando e la Santa Fede"; the brigands, among them many released
convicts, were fighting in the name of the holy faith. Ruffo promised the
citizens faithful to the king exemption from taxes for six years and celestial
delights for all eternity:
The rabble took up its line of march as a disorderly religious proces sion. They tore
down the trees of liberty, set up crosses in their place,
entered villages and visited churches with the most sacred forms and ceremonies
of the Roman Church, the Cardinal in his purple blessing the people and their
arms.97
When the Bourbon forces entered Naples, the republican sympathizers were
lynched and their property looted. It was later bruited about that the British
had first suggested that the government of Sicily should be relieved of the
great burden of maintaining so many convicts and transport them to Calabria,
making them useful to the public cause. Ruffo, according to this version, made
the best of a difficult situation by reeducating the cutthroats with the help of
his chaplains who were acting as political commissars: "He turned this
unpromising human clay into brigadier generals and saints." 98 Ruffo's efforts,
as subsequent events were to demonstrate, were not altogether successful.
Why certain bandits defended the existing order while others fought for the
revolution depended partly on the general character of the gang, partly on the
political and social background, but also on the character of the gang leader. In
many cases this was a matter of sheer accident. Su San, herself turned bandit
and then a leader of the Taiping through unordained circumstances, is
reported by some to have later married Lo Ta-kang, another prominent ex-
bandit. Together with seven other leaders of river pirates, Lo had shown up in
Chin-t'ien, the main base of the Taiping, in 1851 or 1852. He became one of the
most distinguished generals of the movement, and after his death in battle he
had bestowed on him by the Heavenly King the noble title of Fen wang
(Endeavour King).99 The other chiefs of the water pirates deserted the Taiping
and went over to the emperor's army. There is no known way of sociological
or psychological analysis to explain why Lo became a pillar of the Taiping
whereas the other pirates rejoined the antirevolutionary forces, why Mina
fought with the Cristinos and Merino with the Carlists, Fra Diavolo with the
Bourbons and Andrea Orlando with the Napoleonic forces. In a war against a
foreign invader the choice for patriotically inclined bandits was more obvious
than in a civil war.
THE OUTLOOK FOR GUERRILLA WAR: 1901
The days of guerrilla wars seemed to be over as the nineteenth century drew
to its close. One of the few who dissented was that
remarkable Russo-Polish-Jewish businessman and strategist Jean de Bloch,

author of The War of the Future, who claimed that the modern rifle favoring
individual action and sharpshooting and requiring the abandonment of close
formations, was primarily a guerrilla weapon and tended to put the civilian on
a level with the regular soldier. A guerrilla war, he declared on more than one
occasion, would inevitably follow regular resistance in the future. 100 A German
officer, writing in Deutsche Revue, sharply disagreed; it was not true that, as
Bloch had argued, a guerrilla war in Europe would make a decisive result
impossible. The action of the franc tireurs in 1870 had been quite ineffectual.
Futhermore, a highly civilized nation could not carry on a guerrilla war, it
would not have the patient capacity to endure the burdens, privations and
sacrifices of such a war and the longing for peace would become over-
whelming.101 Bloch retorted that the case of the franc tireurs proved nothing,
and that anyway a protracted war with large standing armies such as foreseen
by the leading strategic thinkers of the day could only lead to social
cataclysms and violent revolutions. Both Bloch and his Prussian critic were to
be proved right by the events of the next two decades. With a few exceptions,
the nations of Europe were indeed too civilized for guerrilla warfare, but the
social cataclysms and the revolutions came with a vengeance.
3
The Origins
of Guerrilla Doctrine
In the nineteenth century "small war," partisan and guerrilla warfare fell into
disregard in Europe's more developed countries. When irregular warfare was
rediscovered towards the middle of the twentieth century its antecedents had
been forgotten. It was generally assumed that the history of guerrilla warfare
began with the Spanish insurrection against Napoleon — as if there had been
no wars of liberation and wars of opinion throughout history. But since they
had not been "revolutionary wars" in the fashionable twentieth-century sense
they were thought to be of little interest. It was widely believed, even among
experts, that previous to Mao Tse-tung no military thinker had ever
systematically studied guerrilla warfare — with the possible exception ofT. E.
Lawrence, an amateur of genius, but no military philosopher. In actual fact the
problem had preoccupied eighteenth- and nineteenth-century students of war
in many lands; it is of some interest to establish why exactly their writings
have been forgotten.1
Small-war strategists of the last two centuries have anticipated most
present day guerrilla tactics. Furthermore, already in the 1820s and 1830s
some of them were perfectly aware of the political potential of guerrilla
warfare. To retrace the genealogy of guerrilla warfare and doctrine is not a
purely academic exercise; the assumption that guerrilla warfare in the post-
1945 era is an essentially new phenomenon is not only historically incorrect, it
is bound to give rise to misconceptions about the origins, the character, and
the future course of "revolutionary war."
The theory of small warfare (petite guerre) has its origins in the
seventeenth century. It was mainly based on the experiences of the Thirty Years'
War (which, perhaps more than any other, had been a "war without fronts"), of
the Spanish War of Succession, and the wars of Frederick the Great. These early
reflections deal with the amount of scope to be given to the activities of
relatively small detachments. The American War of Independence provided
more examples of the many uses to which small, highly mobile units could be
put. However, the literature published before 1810 did not accord an
independent role to these units and was exclusively I concerned with the
operations of professional soldiers acting in_j close cooperation with the main
body of the army. This single-minded approach was modified only in the light
of the experience in the Vendee, Spain, Tyrol and Russia. The concept of a
national war, "the most formidable of all," as Jomini put it, emerged (or re-
emerged) only in the Napoleonic age; a war that had to be fought against a
united people (or at any rate against its great majority), determined to preserve
their independence. Every step in such a war was contested, an invading army
only held its camping ground, supplies could only be obtained at the point of the
sword, convoys everywhere were threatened or captured. But Jomini also
thought that popular uprisings without the support of a disciplined and regular
army would always be suppressed, though the suppression could be protracted
such as in the case of the Vendee.2
Eighteenth-century military thinkers were very much preoccupied with
surprise attacks, ambushes and other operations which, by necessity, had to be
carried out by relatively small units.3 A great many ruses and strategems were
listed, such as, to give but one illustration, the despatch of officers and
soldiers, pretending to be deserters, to the enemy camp before an attack was
launched against it. But there was not much in these proposals that had not
been known to the Romans and even before them, and it was perhaps
indicative that the Strategemata of Sextus Julius Frontinus (30104), a collection
of such anecdotes, was republished and studied throughout the eighteenth
and even early nineteenth centuries.4 Specific works on partisan warfare only
began to appear in the mid-eighteenth century and they drew their main
inspiration from the activities of the small, light, highly mobile (and
semiprivate) units which were employed in the Austrian army since the
seventeenth century. These units, composed of Pandurs and Croats, had
amassed considerable combat experience in the areas bordering Turkey. Later
on, albeit on a smaller scale, such detachments became part of the French
army.
117 THE ORIGINS OF GUERRILLA DOCTRINE
In a book published in 1752, de la Croix, a French officer of English origin,

defined the function of "parties" (partis, partidas) as that of moving ahead of the
regular army and gathering information about the enemy's movements. 5 The
author described the many ruses of these "free corps," and defended them
against their detractors. In particular, he stressed the need for caution and dis-
cipline in all their operations. He had himself served as commander of such a
unit and was able to provide many vivid illustrations from his own
experience. The book was published posthumously by his son who had served
under him. Not all his readers were equally impressed; the Prince de Ligne
noted that "every one of our Croats knows as much about war ruses as de la
Croix, and if he only could write, would teach him a few more." 6 For a
considerable period of time the Croats and Pandurs specialized in attacking
isolated enemy outposts, and cutting off supplies. But they did not bother
unduly to differentiate between friend and foe, and though no one doubted
their courage, their reputation was a bad one; they lacked discipline and
hardly ever passed over an opportunity to rob and plunder. A fair example
was Isolano (Schiller's Isolani) who was involved in the conspiracy that led to
Wallenstein's murder.
Among the most influential early authors on small warfare was
Grandmaison, a lieutenant-colonel in a Flanders volunteer corps, whose book
Frederick the Great recommended to his officers. Grandmaison referred to
Hannibal's Numidian cavalry, to the Albanian stachiots, to Louis le Grand's
light units as forerunners whose exploits were of enduring significance.; He
dealt in some detail with the qualities necessary for soldiers engaged in
partisan warfare: they ought to be robust; not too tall ("better five feet than
five and a half"); young but not so young as to be unable to endure fatigue
and various privations.7 Similar observations about the suitability of the
"shortest sized men" were made by the Count de Saxe:
It has frequently been proved that a horse which will carry a man thirty leagues a
day, whose weight does not exceed eight or nine stones, which is usually about
that of a man of five feet, two inches high, will hardly be able to carry one of
from ten to twelve stones, half the same distance.8
Grandmaison recommended muskets, pistols and sabres; the sword {epee) was
only good for the parade ground. Hungarian and Ardenne horses were the
most suitable for this kind of operation. He was a great believer in night
attacks; ambushes at night were almost
always successful, causing confusion out of all proportion to the effort

required from the attackers.9
According to de Jeney, one of the leading early small-war theq; rists, the
successful partisan needed an almost impossible combination of talents: a
fertile imagination, a penetrating and intrepid spirit, a firm countenance, a
good memory, alertness, the gift to size up a situation quickly, and overt self-
confidence.10 De Jeney had served as a captain with the French army on the
Rhine. His book on partisan tactics, which also appeared in German (Vienna,
1785) and English (it was in Thomas Jefferson's library) was apparently the
first of its kind to include maps, sketches, and even advice on first aid. He
complained that partisan warfare was the least respected of all the military
professions despite the fact that it was the most dangerous and fatiguing.
In the 1760s and 1770s many more books appeared on the subject, mainly
in French and German; one was attributed to Frederick the Great, another to
Prince de Ligne, a third to General von Kleist. Some of these books were
translated into the main European languages, and a few remained in
circulation for almost a century. They contained practical advice on the
movement of patrols by night, the capture of prisoners, and gave instructions
on how to act if a small detachment was cut off from the main body of the
army.11 Some of the authors were not paragons of precision and brevity: Ray
de Saint Genie needed six volumes to develop his views on L'Officier partisan
(Paris, 1769) and not all the advice was either original or very helpful. Baron
de Wiist, a colonel of the Hussars who had served in Southeast Asia,
suggested that cats living in haystacks in enemy territory should be caught,
soaked in alcohol and set on fire — on the assumption that they would run
back to their haystacks and so set fire to enemy supplies. 12 But de Wiist also
made a great many sensible proposals: the partisan commander should lead
an abstemious life with regard to both spirits and women ("il doit se mefier de
sexe en general"), he should know several languages, should pay for food (but
not punish his soldiers when they forgot to do so), he should never eat dinner
where he had eaten his lunch and, at night, he should not sleep at either place.
Above all, he emphasized the importance of good intelligence; ideally, the
partisan commander should visit a theater of war three months before an
outbreak of hostilities. The optimal size of a unit was a thousand horsemen
and five hundred infantry, and the commander should have at least the rank
of colonel. Among other studies on small war mention should be made of
Colonel de la
Roche Aymon's Essay sur la petite guerre (Paris, 1770), and Scharnhorst's
Militarisches Taschenbuch (Hanover, 1792). The most interesting works, however,
were books by Ewald, Emmerich, and Valentini's Abhandlungen uber den kleinen
Krieg. Andreas Emmerich (1737-1809) and Johann von Ewald (1744-1813) were
both born in Hesse, took part in the Seven Years' War and later fought on the
English side in the American War of Independence. Ewald joined the Danish
army in 1788, eventually becoming a lieutenant-general; in 1809 he fought
against Major Schill, the Prussian officer, who started a rebellion against
Napoleon. In the same -t year Colonel Emmerich, aged seventy-two, played a
leading part in an anti-French rising in Marburg, and was executed by the
French after its suppression. His book, The Partisan in War or the Use of a Corps of
Light Troops to an Army, was first published in English in London in 1789. 13
Emmerich insisted that a wartime army could not exist without light troops.
He was fairly dogmatic about their number. A unit should consist of not less
than a thousand, and not more than seventeen hundred soldiers, all of whom
should be volunteers. They should constitute the avant-garde of an army on
the march, covering its flanks, and harassing the enemy rear guard. On the
other hand, when the main body of their own army was on the retreat, the
light troops should cover the rear. Emmerich noted that the commanding
officer of such a corps ought to be sober and reliable, a man of initiative and
great endurance. Defeat in battle could never be excluded but his unit should
never, under any circumstances whatsoever, be taken by surprise. The main
danger that faced a detachment of raiders was their own negligence and lack
of caution. As an example of unforgivable negligence he cited the American
attack in the War of Independence at Trenton, Delaware, in which Colonel
Rail, a reliable officer with an unblemished record, was off guard for only a
few moments, with fatal consequences for himself and his troops.14
Emmerich analyzed in considerable detail various situations the partisan
was likely to face, such as night marches and attacks. Infantry, cavalry, or
mixed units could be employed. Drawing on his personal experience, he
described the two months he spent with a detachment of infantry behind
enemy lines in the depths of winter, seizing couriers and enemy officers,
destroying supplies, generally causing damage and spreading confusion. He
had to cross frozen rivers and use snowbound roads. 15 Emmerich, like other
contemporaneous authors, freely offered practical advice: at night, horsemen,
whether on patrol or at rest, should play with the reins of their horses lest they
neigh and betray their presence. It was essential to prevent the raiders from
falling asleep while in the saddle, and to cover wooden bridges with straw so
as to minimize noise when crossing them at night. There were strict
injunctions that patrols never dismount or remove the saddles from their
horses; dogs were not to be kept, for their barking was always a source of
grave danger. Guides from among the civilian population should be em-
ployed only if they volunteered. Again and again Emmerich emphasized that
a partisan officer needed special qualities, particularly the ability to act
independently of his commanding general, who could not possibly give him
orders covering all eventualities.16 He stressed the importance of changing
camps as frequently as possible; he warned against the delusion that bad
weather offered a guarantee against enemy attack, again quoting several
incidents from the American War of Independence (General Matthew's sur-
prise attack on Young's House in 1780). Spies should be well paid and taught
to be punctual; their identity should be known only to the commanding
officer. If a partisan discovered an enemy spy in his own ranks it was always
advisable to "turn him around." 17 He recommended employing women, and
officers who had been dishonorably discharged and who badly needed
additional sources of income. Emmerich repeated his commanding general's
useful advice before one of his first major raids, two hundred miles into the
enemy rear: never offend or mistreat civilians; do not permit plunder; and
treat prisoners of war decently.18
Ewald's contribution to the theory of partisan warfare was at least as
important as Emmerich's; he was frequently quoted by Clause-witz and
subsequent authors, but a detailed review seems unnecessary in this context
because his views overlap with Emmerich's in most essential aspects. His
books survey and analyze the lessons of recently fought wars, in particular the
Seven Years' War and the American War of Independence. In his later works
he also dwelt upon the experiences gained in the war against revolutionary
France in the 1790s. 19 One of the important points made by Ewald was that
officers — especially young officers — all too often lacked even the rudiments
of theoretical knowledge. Any lawyer, doctor or forester would read some
professional literature, but a young officer all too frequently believed that he
could acquire the essentials of his trade at the gambling table, an inn, or
perhaps while he was asleep.20 Ewald described the "ideal officer" pace de
Jeney: a combination of manly virtues, modesty, courage, humaneness and
intel-
lectual curiosity. Like Emmerich, he stressed that there was no excuse

whatsoever for being taken by surprise — but as officers are only human, he
devoted several chapters to the techniques of surprise attacks and ambuscades.
Certain of his suggestions have become part and parcel of guerrilla practice in
succeeding ages: for example, that there are hardly any regions from which
surprise attacks cannot be successfully launched, and that some have suc-
ceeded precisely because they were carried out where least expected — in open
terrain, from behind fruit trees, isolated houses, etc. Not only should dogs and
horses not be employed on an am-) bush, soldiers suffering from a cold and
likely to cough or sneeze should not be a party either. 21 Given the necessity of
relying on the population's goodwill, it was of the utmost importance to
punish marauders severely — either putting them to death or, at least, giving
them a sound beating. It was important to study the psychology of the enemy
leader; if he lacked experience and was impulsive, he would tend to be
hyperactive and therefore a likely victim for an ambuscade. Ewald's experience
in America taught him that however brave the English soldiers, they were not
really suitable for a small war, because they lacked sufficient patience for the
difficulties and arduousness this kind of warfare entailed.22
George Wilhelm von Valentini (subsequently a Prussian lieutenant-general)
was only twenty-four years of age when his book was published, by which
time he was already a veteran of the wars of 1792-1796. 23 He based his book
partly upon his own experience in the field of partisan warfare and also upon
that of others, such as Ewald, although their views were often contradictory.*
Valentini believed that a small war could be decisive in the last resort. The
French tirailleurs had harassed the Austrians like a pack of hounds in the
winter campaign of 1793, compelling them to retreat though not a single
major encounter had taken place. (Almost a century earlier, Maurice de Saxe
had compared an army without light cavalry units to a knight in heavy armor
who has been forced to retreat in disgrace by a crowd of schoolboys throwing
sticks and stones.) According to Valentini, the early campaigns of the
revolutionary
* When Valentini's Abhandlungen first appeared in 1799 they were the most intelligent
and comprehensive guide available on partisan warfare. Valentini's subsequent military
record was not unblemished. He was York's and Billow's chief of staff but they were not
quite satisfied with his performance. He quarreled bitterly with Gneisenau. Valentini had
the reputation of being a highly educated, easygoing commander, a good diplomat. In 1828
he was made chief of the Prussian army education service, an appointment closely
corresponding to his talents and inclinations.
wars were an excellent school for small warfare. The French had employed
small-war tactics on a massive scale, conducting a war of destruction against
the enemy forces. On the other hand Valentini argued not very convincingly
that the fighting in the Vendee and in the Tyrol was not small warfare. 24 He
thought that mountaineers and hunters were the most likely candidates for
partisan warfare; those without such natural training would need to be highly
educated and young. With regard to the essential qualities needed by a
commander of a partisan unit, Valentini agreed with other authors on the
topic that much would depend on his ability to make quick decisions; a brave
officer was able to challenge fortune against overwhelming odds, indeed
against all the laws of probability. Above all, he needed moral force, the
charisma to inspire officers and men in a decisive moment. Of great interest
are Valentini's remarks on surprise attacks. He noted that the Croats were
once past masters of this art but seemed to have lost their talent. He believed
that if surprise were complete the enemy would offer little resistance even
though his forces might be numerically superior. However, well-disciplined
troops were needed for a surprise attack; infantry units should carry out the
attack by night, holding a cavalry detachment in reserve to pursue the enemy
troops in their flight.
Of the leading strategic thinkers of the period, Napoleon paid little
attention to the problem of small warfare. Other French military leaders had
thought highly of partisans; Maurice de Saxe had said that a brave parti with
three hundred or four hundred men could create utter chaos amongst an
entire army. Napoleon's comments on partisan warfare were totally negative.
The affair in the Vendee had been a simple case o f brigandage, very much in
contrast to the Spartacus revolt which had been led by a great man, aspiring to
the human ideal of liberty. The Vendeeans just wanted to rob and destroy,
they had established a veritable republique des anarchistes, while professing to
fight for the Church and monarchy. True, the rising had been popular and
spontaneous to begin with but the insurgents later became the tools of the
British. The rebellion would have been nipped in the bud had the local
administration been any good, and Kleber and Marceau been given a free
hand from the very beginning.
In Napoleon's eyes, the Cossacks were cowards and wretches, the "scum of
the earth"; if he had been defeated in Russia, it was through a series of
accidents, by General Morozov (frost) rather than by Marshal Kutuzov. The
German free corps (such as Lutzow's)
r
ere "hideous militias"; what would the great Frederick have said bout such
soldiers? Napoleon wrote of the Spanish soldiers in 808 that it was
impossible to find worse troops anywhere in the 'orld; they could not fight in
the mountains or on the plains. They ^ere ignorant, cowardly and cruel; the
monks and the inquisition ad destroyed this nation. But in retrospect
Napoleon modified his iews: he wrote in exile that the Spanish en masse had
acquitted lemselves like honorable men. His own subsequent misfortunes ad
their origins in Spain without exception; he had had to divide is forces,
therewith exacerbating all his problems and detrimen-dly affecting his image
throughout Europe. But his Spanish expe-ience did not affect his views
about partisan and people's wars, "he Prussian Landsturm was barbaric in
inspiration; levee en lasse would always cause terrible trouble.25
Guibet, an erratic and unorthodox military writer, who opposed >ig armies
and thought that the role of artillery and fortification had leen much inflated,
nevertheless did not gravitate towards petite .uerre.26 On the contrary, he
regarded light mobile units as uperfluous and an artificial innovation. Since
armies had become o big and unwieldy, something had to be created to give
employ-nent to those who were underemployed, but it was a mistake to ;opy
the Austrian example of employing small, semi-independent, ight cavalry
units. It was a gross exaggeration to claim that these inits were one of the
most useful corps in an army; small war could leverbe decisive.
Dietrich von Biilow, like Guibet, was an eccentric thinker, with )ccasional
flashes of genius. He published his comments on the 'modern system of
warfare" citing Carnot as his main hero and the 3pen formation of tirailleurs as
the key to success. He was among :he first to realize that the old linear drill of
Frederick the Great was not only incompatible with elementary human
dignity, it was also militarily ineffective. He foresaw that all infantry would
become light infantry, and expected skirmishes rather than major battles to
become the main feature of modern war. 27 But again, like Guibet, he saw no
room for partisan warfare in the modern system. Biilow advocated "human
tactics" against the outmoded clockwork practices of the eighteenth century.
The old-style soldier had been treated and had behaved like a slave; modern
war put a premium on individual courage, intellect and initiative. But at the
same time he saw the mobilization of the masses and numerical superiority as
the only decisive factor in a future war; hence his disregard of small warfare.
The experience of the American War of Independence, as he saw t, had

been unhelpful. He wrote scathingly about the lack of dis-jipline among the
North American militias whose soldiers came ind went to war as they saw
fit.28 That the Americans prevailed in he end was mainly due to Washington's
political (not military) ;enius and also to the many mistakes committed by the
British who Angularly lacked initiative.
Mention has already been made of Jomini's observations on na-ional wars.
He had been at the receiving end in Spain on one of the irst occasions when
guerrilla warfare was waged on a large scale in nodern times. He wrote:
The spectacle of a spontaneous uprising of a nation is rarely seen; and, though

there be in it something grand and noble which commands our admiration the
consequences are so terrible that, for the sake of humanity, we ought to hope
never to see it.29
fhe commander of an occupying force in enemy territory could all oo easily

find himself in the position of Don Quixote attacking vindmills, whereas his
opponent knew the most minute, obscure jaths, and had friends and relations
everywhere to help him. He moted illustrations from the war in Spain —
entire companies had lisappeared completely without trace. All the gold in
Mexico could lot procure reliable information for the French, who received
only alse trails that led them into snares:
No army, however disciplined, can contend successfully against such a system

applied by a great nation, unless it be strong enough to hold all the essential
points of the country, cover its communications and at the same time furnish an
active force sufficient to defeat the enemy wherever he may present himself.
It should be recalled, however, that according to Jomini, guerrilla inits

would not succeed in holding out for any length of time with->ut the support
of regular troops. His belief was shared by other authors of the period who
specialized in the study of the art of small vars such as the Austrian Captain
Schels who wrote a multivolume •pus on the subject. 30 Schels and San Juan
offered much useful idvice but their very attempt to provide a system in
minute detail imits the value of their books. Schels was aware that small,
highly nobile units could be as valuable as a whole army, but like many
ubsequent authors he always regarded them as a part of the regular irmy and
did not consider their guerrilla potential.31
CLAUSEWITZ
Major Clausewitz became a professor at the Prussian war academy in 1810 and,
on 15 October of that year, gave the first of 156 lectures, which were spread
over nine months, on the subject "small war" (Kleiner Krieg). His copious notes
— almost four hundred printed pages — were first published in 1966. 32 They
provide a detailed analysis of the methods and scope of operations that had
been undertaken by units of between twenty and four hundred) men. For his
illustrations Clausewitz drew heavily on contemporaneous studies of the
subject (Ewald, Emmerich, Valentini and, above all, Scharnhorst's
Militdrisches Taschenbuch). Like these writers he was not concerned with the
general political context of the "small war," which he regarded as just an
extension of a "big war" by other means. Though he was familiar witir events
in the Vendee and in Spain, he referred only to regular army units in his
lectures, never to insurgents. He was, after all, addressing the lieutenants and
captains of the Prussian army, not Chouans or guerrilleros. Nevertheless, from
a military point of view his observations are relevant to the development of
partisan warfare.
According to Clausewitz, the small war differed from a big battle in that it
involved not only greater courage and temerity but also demanded the utmost
caution. Since in a small war the partisans almost always faced superior forces
they had to avoid danger whenever possible; otherwise their units would not
last long.33 Ideally, such warfare should be carried out by infantry in close
collaboration with mounted units. Whenever possible they should march at
night and should camp in small detachments in a forest during the day. They
should move forward on concealed roads, should obtain food from the most
remote villages, and never reveal the total strength of their detachment. If the
presence of the unit were discovered by civilians, they should be detained
until such time as the soldiers left the area. However, as the raiders depended
in so many ways upon the goodwill of the local population it was imperative
to treat them in a friendly way. In some cases money would buy goodwill, but
it might become necessary to threaten murder and arson. If the raiders could
not pay for the food they needed, they should at least give receipts;
messengers should always be given gifts. 34 Following Ewald (and Sun Tzu)
Clausewitz emphasized that secrecy was of paramount importance; few
people should know about the intention (and direction) of a raid. Clausewitz
pro-
Ill THE ORIGINS OF GUERRILLA DOCTRINE
vided the most detailed instructions regarding patrols and advance guard
duties. The duty of a scout was to observe, not to fight. At night he should not
draw his cap over his ears so that he could note every noise. Only one scout at
a time should water his horse, and half the number of horses should be
saddled at any given moment. Basing himself on the Tyrolean experience, he
suggested that in mountainous territory the detachment should take up
positions on the heights, not in a narrow pass which could be outflanked. 35
Surprise attacks were best carried out at night, or at midday when
the enemy would be cooking in their camps and least prepared to
face an onslaught. Causing false alarms in the enemy camp the
night before an attack was always advisable, since this would result
in less vigilance the following day. Clausewitz was skeptical about
the use of artillery in small wars unless the raiders intended to hold
the position they had gained. It had become less easy to lay am-
bushes because advance parties usually moved in front of the main
body of a big unit. Nevertheless in difficult terrain such as forests or
mountains, there would always be some scope for ambushes —
more likely in one's own territory than in the enemy's. What if a
small detachment found itself encircled? In most cases small
groups of soldiers could fight their way through the enemy lines
more easily than bigger units, hence it was advisable to split up the
detachment in such an emergency. But a new meeting place should
be fixed and every soldier informed accordingly.
,
In dealing with specific assignments for the partisans (Par- v theygdnger),
Clausewitz singled out the following: to collect intelligence; to arrest enemy
couriers; to kidnap enemy generals or other important persons; to destroy
bridges and arms stores; to make roads impassable; to seize enemy funds and
supplies.36 He thought that it woidd be exceedingly difficult to kidnap enemy
generals in an orthodox war between regular armies, as an operation of this kind
called for skill and courage. It was, therefore, more likely to occur in civil and
people's wars, and if such an operation were indeed successfully carried out
would spread despondency in the enemy camp.*
* In Clausewitz's magnum opus one brief chapter (the twenty-sixth) deals with problems
arising out of a people's war. He stressed the moral-political importance of people's war. A
war of this kind, Clausewitz wrote, ought to be protracted to be successful. He stressed the
importance of the terrain; the popular units should disperse, not concentrate and their
blows should not be directed against the main enemy force. But Clausewitz envisaged
mainly a militia-type (Landsturm) resistance rather than typical guerrilla warfare. Worn
Kriege, 16th ed. (Bonn, 1952), 697-704-
H3 THE ORIGINS OF GUERRILLA DOCTRINE
Clausewitz strongly advised against a worst-case-expectation strategy. The

enemy could not possibly do everything at the same time, he was bound to be
more aware of his own weaknesses than his attackers. To take into account all
(theoretically) possible dangers was tantamount to magnifying them.
Clausewitz doubted whether once the commander had taken a decision, his
junior officers should then be consulted since their opinions might only make
him waver. When facing capitulation the commander should weigh up the
alternatives of a last counterattack or an order to disperse, thus giving the
officers and soldiers a chance to escape.37*
SCHARNHORST AND GNEISENAU
The Spanish experience inspired Scharnhorst's and Gneisenau's drafts and

memoranda proposing the establishment of a national militia (Landsturm) in
Prussia (1808 and 1811). The aim of the Prussian military reformers was to
hinder the enemy's advance and bar his retreat, to keep him continually on the
move, to capture his ammunition, food, supplies, couriers and recruits, to
seize his hospitals, and to attack him by night, in short, harassing, tormenting,
tiring and destroying him either individually or in his units wherever
possible.38 To that end the militia was to be trained in guerrilla tactics and to
use them so that the main body of the enemy army would be virtually cut off,
without information, unable to send out small detachments to obtain fresh
supplies or patrol the vicinity. They were to pursue a scorched-earth policy —
villages were to be destroyed, food and drink burned or spoiled, horses and
cattle removed. Such revolutionary measures, especially in Gneisenau's
radical version, were anathema to a bureaucracy which regarded order and
obedience as its supreme values; the enemy should be fought, to be sure, but
not at the price of utter chaos. When, after Napoleon's retreat from Russia,
Prussia joined the war against France, the Landsturm was ordered to assist the
regular army in its operations and was given no opportunity to make use of
the tactics proposed by the reformers.
SMALL WAR DOCTRINE AFTER NAPOLEON
The study of small warfare led a modest existence throughout the second half
of the nineteenth century and up to the First World War.
Though not entirely forgotten it was on the whole neglected, surprisingly so
in view of the fact that so many small wars were being fought at that time all
over the world. The Napoleonic wars themselves had generated sufficient
interest for several important studies, the more noteworthy of which were the
works of Le Miere de Corvey, Decker, Stolzman and Chrzanowski (French,
Prussian and two Polish officers, respectively).39
Jean Frederic Auguste Le Miere de Corvey, who was born in Rennes in 1770
and died of cholera in Paris in 1832, was better known in his lifetime as a
composer than as a strategist. He wrote several operas (including La Blonde et
la Brune, [1795]) and symphonies (including La Bataille de Jena), he
arranged Rossini's The Lady of the Lake, based on Sir Walter Scott's poem,
and Tancred; on one occasion he even put a newspaper article on Custine's de-
fense of Mainz into music. But he also had a military career; significantly he
had started as a sub-lieutenant in the Vendee, continued as aide-de-camp to
General Thibaud in Belgium, Germany and Spain, and ended his career as
lieutenant-colonel at the Battle of Waterloo. His work on partisan warfare,
published in 1823, which heavily relied on his experience in the Vendee and
Spain, was in some respects the first truly modern work on the guerrilla.40
Le Miere was struck by the tactics of the Vendeans which, in contrast to
most of his fellow officers, he did not regard as primitive and atavistic but as
essentially novel. He tended, if anything, to exaggerate the amount of damage
inflicted on the French, estimating that they lost half a million people at the
hands of the guerrilleros in Spain. He noted the similarity between warfare in
the Vendee and Spain and argued that far from belittling these lessons (as
almost all other military writers were doing), they should be carefully studied
and drawn upon by others in the event of a foreign invasion. 41^Civilians
normally would not take up amis against regular troops: it was difficult to
imagine, for instance, the merchants of Paris constituting themselves into a
fighting force. But this situation might suddenly alter if the house of a civilian
was destroyed and his wife or children killed. Thus, there was something to be
learned by all European nations from the guerrilla experienceTlTrue, some
areas were better suited than others, especially mountainous regions such as
the Pyrenees, the Alps or the Vosges in France, Scotland, the Tyrol or Greece.
In his work, Le Miere traced partisan warfare throughout the ages and noted
that while partisans were frequently used as a corollary to regular armies, they
assumed far greater importance once the national armies had been, destroyed.
He concluded from a detailed analysis of the Spanish experience
H3 THE ORIGINS OF GUERRILLA DOCTRINE
that it was not sufficient for an invader to seize the major towns since his lines
of communication would still remain open to attack. Traditional military
doctrine was of little use in combating the partisans. Who were the leaders of
the Spanish guerrillas, who defeated the brave French generals in Spain? A
miller, a doctor, a shepherd, a curate and some deserters . . . 42 He noted,
furthermore, that for obvious reasons the local populace would always be the
most adept at defending their native regions. He dealt in considerable detail
with the organization of guerrilla units, their tactics, their weapons, and even
their uniforms. He was less doctrinaire than other au-< thors, recognizing that
guerrilla units followed tactics essentially different from those of light units
attached to regular armies. And in contrast to other authors, Le Miere put
great, perhaps decisive, emphasis on psychological factors. That a guerrilla had
to be courageous went without saying — once he was attacked he could not
look back. Above all, guerrilla warfare/auf un peu defanatisme, for this was a
war of extermination; the enemy armies would use reprisals and treat the
partisans as mere brigands.43 Though the author very much regretted this —for
guerres d'opinion (ideological wars) had terrible consequences — he accepted
this change in the character of war as an unalterable historical fact.
Major (subsequently General) von Decker, the least politically minded of
the four, presented a useful and systematic summary of the topic which, of
necessity, repeated much of the advice proffered by earlier authors; for
instance, he advised guerrillas to change their quarters rapidly, after both
victory and defeat, never to take their safety for granted, to march at night and
to camp in the most remote of villages during a raid. He pointed out the great
importance of maintaining good relations with the local population; the
partisan should be welcome everywhere, he should be considered a liberator,
not a pirate or filibuster. To be thus considered entailed strict discipline, and
the giving of payment for supplies received. Decker's ideal "party" was
smaller than those advocated by the eighteenth-century theorists; at most it
should number a hundred to a hundred and fifty men. Except for high-
ranking enemy officers, no prisoners should be taken whose presence would
only slow down the movement of the raiders. He counseled extreme prudence
when enlisting new soldiers, and stressed the importance of having spies in all
classes. The partisan's appearance should inspire confidence, and it was
particularly important for him to be on good terms with priests and women
("no one will be able to obtain secrets which neither priests nor women can
penetrate").
On some occasions he also emphasized the importance of psychological
warfare: for instance, during the Napoleonic wars when the French general
Vandamme offered a prize of a thousand thaler for the head of the rebel leader
Bork, the latter countered by offering two francs for the head of Vandamme.
Partisan warfare, as Decker saw it, was more difficult than la grande guerre:
even a mediocre talent could make a useful contribution in regular warfare,
whereas partisan warfare called for very special qualities. 44 In a subsequent
study, Decker commented on the war in Algeria; this was one of the very first
attempts to analyze the new military problems beyond the confines of Europe
which faced the colonial powers. 45 Decker did not rate French chances of
success very high, thinking that the French would secure a few towns near the
coast at best. A European army with its baggage trains and other encum-
brances was unsuited to fight in such unfamiliar conditions. It could not come
to grips with the enemy, there were no centers of power to be attacked and the
absence of good roads impeded movement. It was quite pointless in these
circumstances to aim at inconclusive victories; the side which would last
longest would ultimately emerge victorious irrespective of how often it had
been defeated.46 Decker correctly analyzed the problems which would one day
face the colonial powers but his misgivings were premature as regards the
immediate future. The French, under Marshal Bugeaud, developed highly
effective "counter-guerrilla" tactics. Abd el-Kader surrendered only three years
after Decker's book appeared, and for a century French North Africa remained
relatively quiet.
Karol (Charles) Bogumir Stolzman (1793-1854) was an artillery captain
who had taken part in the Polish rising of 1830-1831; later he lived as an
emigrant in France and Switzerland, and he represented "Young Poland" in
Mazzini's Jeune Europe.* His remarkable treatise was the forerunner of a
whole twentieth-century "do-it-yourself" literature; it was reprinted in
Warsaw in 1959. It gave practical advice on how to produce explosives in a
kitchen or garden shed, it provided exact figures on how much powder was
needed to produce land mines, and the required size of a mine for
* Stolzman had fought at Leipzig and other battles of the Napoleonic wars. In the
emigration he was a leading member of the West European radical-democratic un-
derground. The last time he saw action was during the revolution of 1848 when at the head
of a battalion of Polish volunteers he unsuccessfully tried to reach Frankfurt. Eventually
Stolzman made his home in England and married an Englishwoman; he is buried in the
village of Millon in Cumberland.
blowing up a wall or a bridge.47 Like other authors he referred to the historical

predecessors of modern partisan warfare (Skander-beg, Spain, the Caucasus),
stressing the popular character and national inspiration in a modern small war.
Surely twenty-two million Poles were as brave as twelve million Spaniards had
been. They too would make life intolerable for the occupation forces of their
enslaved country. Among the problems which preoccupied him was the
question of maintenance of discipline in an irregular unit, and the advisability
of awarding decorations for actions of special valor. He suggested that after
termination of hostilities a roll of 1 honor should be published, listing those who
had distinguished themselves.48 But much of his book was devoted to advice on
eminently practical issues: how to cross a river; how to defend a house (or
church); how to prepare a code for secret correspondence; how to use scythes
in battle if more effective weapons were not available.
Like Stolzman General Wojciech Chrzanowski (1793-1861) had participated
in the Polish rising of 1830.* His observations on partisan warfare are of great
interest because they contain, in a nutshell, most of the basic ideas of
twentieth-century guerrilla warfare. Sometimes there is an almost textual
overlapping with Mao's doctrine: namely the importance of guerrilla bases, the
idea of protracted warfare and even the gradual transition from guerrilla to
mobile warfare.49 Chrzanowski noted that guerrilla warfare could be suc-
cessful only if the enemy army was not large enough to occupy the whole
territory, but this, he added, was seldom likely to happen. To be effective
partisan warfare had to be protracted; the longer it continued, the better the
chances for victory, for while the guerrillas grew stronger, the enemy units
became weaker and more demoralized. Guerrilla war, as envisaged by
Chrzanowski, would at first be conducted against individual enemy soldiers,
then against small units, and eventually against larger bodies. He stressed,
however, the importance of attacking the enemy only from a position of
marked superiority. Attacks should be launched if possible from the flanks.
* As a young lieutenant he participated in Napoleon's invasion of Russia and was the

first soldier of the Grande Armee to enter Smolensk. He participated in the Russian-Turkish
war in 1828 and was chief of staff of the rebel Polish army in 1831. In 1833 he became an
adviser to the British government on Ottoman affairs, visited Turkey several times and
organized an Arab cavalry regiment in Baghdad. In 1849 he was commander in chief of the
Sardinian army. Chrzanowski died in Paris in 1861. There is an Italian biography: G.
Roberti, II generate Chrzanowski (Rome, 1901).
1 3 2 GUERRILLA WARFARE
Swiss writers on guerrilla warfare developed the idea of the popular-

patriotic partisan war in the same decade. Thus J. M. Rudolph: "Without the
support of local inhabitants even the most gifted partisans will be unable to
succeed."50 Gingens-La Sarraz emphasized in his study the great importance
of the moral factor — the success of an invader, however well he was
organized, would be ephemeral against an insurrectional war conducted with
energy and intelligence. Counterinsurgency would be of no avail against a
total war which denied the enemy supplies and in which no quarter was
given.51 A widely quoted Swiss manual on guerrilla warfare by Major von
Dach, published almost one hundred years later, rests on the very same basic
concept; only the technical details have changed. 52 Partisan warfare was
studied by military men in most European countries in the nineteenth
century, including Spain and even Serbia.53 The nineteenth-century authors
quite often plagiarized each other, but what matters in this context is simply
the fact that the subject was never entirely neglected.
Stolzman's work was one of the last books on partisan warfare of the pre-
railway and pre-telegraph age; two decades later another important book on
the topic was published, the contents of which reflected the far-reaching
technical changes which had taken place in the intervening years. Its author,
Wilhelm Riistow, a former German officer, was a radical democrat who had
taken part in the revolution of 1848. Having settled in Switzerland he was a
respected figure in emigre circles, and was to see military service again in
Garibaldi's little army. Riistow (1821-1878) was a well-known and prolific
writer on military affairs and his book covered a range of issues from high
strategy to minute details on equipment.* He was opposed to high boots, and
came out strongly in favor of short loose shirts or tunics ("Garibaldi shirts" or
Schifferhemden) with dark, not shiny, buttons. He also dealt with the shape of
saddles and the size of rifles and carbines, preferring the small-caliber guns.
He made the sensible point that the partisan should not have to carry more
than twenty-three to twenty-four pounds on his march. 54 Riistow favored the
employment of very small tactical units for a variety of reasons — one of
which was to mislead the enemy about their real strength. He thought that
technical develop* Riistow was a gifted, prolific and controversial author on military
topics. His best-known work was a history of infantry; it induced the young Hans Delbriick
to become a military historian. In 1877 Riistow became the first holder of a new chair for
military science at the Zurich Federal Polytechnic. But his contract was not renewed and he
committed suicide the year after.
merit had made night attacks very risky, but on the whole he believed in
ambushes and, generally speaking, in bold, dare-devil action, even in the age
of the railway and telegraph line, which, needless to say, figured highly on his
list of targets.55
The Prussian wars of 1864 and 1866, and particularly the war with France
in 1870, gave fresh impetus to the study of irregular warfare. A. von
Boguslawski, a German lieutenant-colonel (and subsequently a general) was
perhaps the first to discuss the legal questions involved. He thought it highly
unlikely that there would ever be a generally accepted international
convention with regard to partisan warfare. It had been suggested at a
conference in Brussels that the civil population would no longer be entitled to
continue a war once the country was occupied by enemy forces. 56 Bluntschli,
the famous Swiss expert on international law, had stated in his Modern Law of
War that a popular rising in the rear of the enemy was illegal, and those who
took part in it should be treated as rebels according to martial law. Bluntschli
added, however, that if the insurrection was on a large scale and if it was at
least partially successful this was bound to change the situation and also the
status of those who took part in the insurrection. What, Boguslawski asked,
constituted the effective occupation of a village? Was it the presence of three
soldiers or five hundred? He did not regard an attack by civilians against
regular army units as unethical even if the former were not in uniform. But
what if a peasant killed a passing officer, threw his rifle into the nearest hedge,
and continued to plough his field? A rising in the enemy's rear could be
perfectly justified, but could it still be regarded as legitimate warfare if a
soldier was killed in his sleep by the owner in whose house he was billeted?
Boguslawski argued that there could never be a clear dividing line between
the defensible and the indefensible and that, in the last resort, each civilized
nation would react to partisan warfare as it saw fit; it certainly would not be
bound by international conventions. The author also maintained, somewhat
surprisingly for a Prussian officer, that it was very mistaken to believe that a
soldier needed no knowledge of politics whatsoever.57
Again, in advance of his time, Boguslawski considered the possibilities of
political warfare in combination with military operations. He foresaw that an
invading army might want to incite a popular rising; the Piedmontese had
done so in Lombardy in 1848, and again in 1859. The question of whether
soldiers could be prepared in peace for small warfare intrigued him very
much. He thought that such training did not basically differ from all military
training
THE ORIGINS OF GUERRILLA DOCTRINE
x 1Q
apart, perhaps, from teaching the well-known fact that small war depended to
a much greater degree on the initiative of the individual officer and soldier.
He suggested that it would be helpful if officers, even when on holiday,
scanned their surroundings with a professional eye to explore the possibilities
for a small war. The idea was not entirely original; Clausewitz's letters from
the Silesian spas in summer 1811 to his friend Gneisenau showed that he was
heavily preoccupied with such problems and it is unlikely that he was the first
strategist whose mind continued to function on professional lines even while
on leave.
Boguslawski thought a total war, involving the active participation of
women and children such as had occurred in Spain and the Tyrol, unlikely to
recur because the mass of the population was not composed of heroes.
Nevertheless, as wars had become national ones and were no longer contests
between professional soldiers, such an eventuality had to be taken into
account, especially when geographical conditions favored it. He analyzed in
some detail the attacks of the franc tireurs in the autumn and winter of 1870,
a topic which also preoccupied a French officer, Captain Devaureix.
Devaureix's detailed study of partisan warfare was published in 1880; it
opened with the melancholy observation that this kind of war, which was so
"eminently French" had fallen into disfavor after our "recent disasters." 58 But
had not the lessons of 1870-1871 amply demonstrated the uses of partisan
warfare? The Germans themselves admitted that they had suffered more
losses in the second phase of the war than in the first, despite the fact that the
French army had been routed. Devaureix claimed that the Germans were not
prepared for the privations and fatigues of a lengthy war and he quoted with
approval an observation of Marshal Bugeaud that the way to defeat the
Germans was to cut their lines of supply, keep them on the march and deprive
them of their sleep. Devaureix admitted that the behavior of some of the franc
tireurs had been scandalous, and he made it clear that he opposed free-
wheeling, independent guerrilla activities. Partisans would have to operate
under the command of the regular army. Like other authors he saw the main
task of partisan warfare as disrupting the enemy's lines of communications
and spreading confusion; again like others, he referred to the experiences of
Frederick the Great in Bohemia in 1740-1741, and of Napoleon in Russia and
Germany after 1812, when these military leaders lost contact with sections of
their armies because their couriers were unable to get through to them. The
basic effect of partisan warfare was on morale, but had
not the great Napoleon said that in war three-quarters of the outcome
depended upon morale? He also quoted General Duhesme, author of the
leading infantry manual of the Napoleonic age, that partisan warfare had an
"immense psychological effect." Much of Devaureix's study is devoted to an
excessively detailed historical outline, establishing that real partisan warfare
developed only after the end of the seventeenth century, when Turenne's and
Montecu-coli's last campaigns put warfare on a truly modem and organized
basis. Before that time armies had lived off the land, virtually independent of
lines of communication and supply. With changes in the art of warfare, armies
had become far more vulnerable precisely because their dependence on
supplies had become so much greater. While regular warfare became subject
to rules which were rigidly observed, partisan warfare had no rules and was
by its very essence adventurous and independent. Maurice de Saxe was the
first French military leader to realize the importance of a free corps and to
establish such a unit (the Legion de Grassin). This, however, was not really a
partisan detachment in the modern sense but simply a light cavalry unit
operating within the framework of the regular army.
After the end of the Seven Years' War, under the impact of the victories of
Frederick II, independent light units were abolished almost everywhere only
to re-emerge a hundred years later. Devaureix referred to the popular
resistance encountered by the French in the Tyrol (1796) as well as in Verona,
Venice and the Naples region and, of course, in Spain. He attributed —
wrongly no doubt — the disunity of Napoleon's marshals as the main reason
for France's failure. He cited Napoleon to the effect that the guerrillas came
into being one year after his departure from Spain because of the pillage and
other abuses committed against his strictest orders by several of his generals,
above all Soult, who should have been shot.59
The effects of partisan warfare in Russia were again felt mainly on morale:
the French had nothing to eat and could not get any sleep. The actual military
value of the Russian partisans was very nearly nil. Devaureix quoted the 29th
Bulletin of the Grande Armee, which compared the Cossacks to Arabs in the
desert, always evading any serious battle: "this contemptible cavalry which
makes nothing but noise and is incapable of even breaking through a company
of light infantry. . . ." Contemptible or not, the Cossacks were quite effective
and this was all that finally mattered. Referring to the lessons of the American
Civil War — "as yet insufficiently
studied" — and, of course, the Franco-Prussian War, Devaureix reached the

conclusion that partisan warfare still had a future — and an important one at
that.
This view was shared by another French student of partisan warfare,
Captain Charenton, who, writing in the year 1900, noted that in the next war
the franc tireurs would have to fight against two formidable opponents — the
telegraph and the railways.60 The former made it difficult for tnem to hide
their presence for any length of time, the latter helped the enemy to
concentrate his forces against the partisans. Hence the importance of directing
the first blow against these new inventions. Charenton like Devaureix was
concerned with the operations of semiregular units which were authorized by
the military command and operated under its direction. He quoted as an
illustration of a successful franc tireur raid the destruction on 22 January 1871
of the viaduct at Fontenoy over which all trains from Paris to Orleans had to
pass. The French had used various ruses: scouts disguised as peasants were
sent out to reconnoiter; the raiders wore German Landwehr caps when they
attacked the German unit guarding the viaduct; they made a bayonet charge,
not firing a single shot. Like other authors Charenton stressed the importance
of keeping iron discipline, for otherwise the semiregular units would
degenerate into gangs of robbers "as in the American Civil War." If the free
corps were to be constituted of elite troops, however, and they realized that
they would always have to be on the offensive, such a corps could well play
an important role in any future war. But these unorthodox views were not
favored by the general staff of the main European armies, and it was not
during the First World War but only in its aftermath that the free corps came
into their own again in Central and Eastern Europe.
BRITAIN AND THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
Guerrilla warfare as a legitimate subject of study received a new, albeit short

lease of life in Britain in the wake of the Boer War. Before that war, as an
observer noted, it had not been part of the curriculum of military officers,
although the British army had been engaged in the reign "of our late Gracious
Majesty Queen Victoria" in no fewer than eighty-two campaigns, most of them
small, irregular wars in the bush and desert between "armies" of a few thou-
sand men; wars in which artillery had played no leading role. There
was, in January 1900, according to this witness, not a single work on guerrilla
warfare available in any London bookshop: "some of our statesmen were
amazed that any nation should be so foolish and absurd as to continue any
warfare after the regular armies of the country were defeated or after the
capital of the country were taken. . . ." 61 The author, a barrister of Inner
Temple, was certainly correct in noting the general trend in military thought of
divorcing doctrine and practice.62 Strictly speaking his above-quoted strictures
were exaggerated; there were available Captain Johnson's survey of night
attacks (from Gideon's battles to Napoleon's attack on Mantua), and Colonel
Malleson's book on Ambushes and Surprises ("being a description of some of
the most famous instances of the leading into ambush and the surprises of
armies, from the time of Hannibal to the period of the Indian Mutiny"). 63 In
addition there were the writings of officers of the Indian army who had
frequently encountered guerrilla warfare and who early on had realized that
the objective of a war in Asia was basically different from that which was
being taught in the European military academies. Usually there were no
enemy capitals to be captured, protection of one's lines of communication was
exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, and it was pointless to fire volleys at an
enemy who usually did not launch concentrated attacks.64
Admittedly these studies dealt with the operations of regular armies. But
there was also Callwell's Small Wars, which presented what was certainly the
fullest account of all unorthodox campaigns in nineteenth-century experience.
Captain Callwell saw these campaigns as an inevitable consequence of
keeping order throughout the confines of the British Empire. Far from
romanticizing them, with the Light Brigade charging howling dervishes in the
desert sunset, or the Bengali lancers fighting a treacherous enemy at the
Khyber Pass, he noted time and time again the general rule that the "quelling
of a rebellion in distant colonies means a protracted, thankless, invertebrate
war." He warned that "guerrilla warfare, regular armies always have to dread,
and when this is directed by a leader with a genius for war, an effective
campaign becomes well nigh impossible."65
Callwell's study and Maguire's later work are eminently pragmatic books
devoid of any ambition to develop a general theory of guerrilla warfare. But
from time to time the authors pause for reflection, providing not just practical
advice for counterinsurgency but speculating on future developments. That
guerrilla warfare ought in fact to be met with an "abnormal system of strategy
and
tactics" goes without saying — the rules of the game as played in Europe would
not work: "the inner line principle is not so effective against invaders as it has
been in France, Bohemia and the United States, as the savage has no idea of
strategy. . . ."66 The savage, in other words, did not know when he was beaten.
Callwell and Ma-guire were fully aware of the fact that the more irregular and
dispersed an enemy force, the more difficult it was to pursue once it had been
defeated. The American rangers often could not find the camps of the Indians,
just as the French in Algeria had been unable to locate the Kabyles and the
British had lost tract of the Zulus for a time. On the other hand, the enemy
always seemed to know the movements of the regular army. Hence the
conclusion that it was always better to fight the irregulars than to maneuver
against them — provided, of course, contact could be established at all. Callwell
noted that generalizations about effective counteraction to guerrilla warfare
were always dangerous: in the Maori wars, the British faced an enemy who was
poorly armed and, on the whole, not very spirited (not all observers agreed
with this view), whereas the Austrians in Bosnia and the Turks in Montenegro
fought opponents who were well armed and eager. But, Maguire asked, was
this not the shape of things to come? The native ("the natural man") had better
hardly affected by heat or cold, and was j

eyesight and woodcraft, could manage with less food than the city dweller, was
seldom ill — in short, he was
tougher than his civilized brother, an ideal recruit, superior to him in
everything except discipline and armament.87 Acquisition of the latest weapons
was merely a question of money. In future the European powers would face in
Africa and Asia opponents "individually superior to the vast majority of our
men in all the qualities that go to make a good soldier" and who no longer
wielded swords and spears, but rifles:
If fuzzy-wuzzy be, as he often is, as good a man as Tommy Atkins, or Fritz, or

Jacques, and is even approximately as well armed, numerical superiority,
knowledge of the country, and better health will go a long way to redress the
balance in our favour, which experience and discipline in these days of loosened
fighting may produce. Both sides — nature and civilization — being once more on
an equality, the scale must be turned by better generalship in the future, as it has
been in the past.68
In the writings of these British authors no clear distinction was drawn

between guerrilla and small warfare; perhaps experience
had taught them that there was no clear dividing line. Callwell and Maguire
agreed that a guerrilla war was something to be avoided; it was desultory,
claimed more victims from disease and exhaustion than from gunshot, it was
demoralizing because of the futile marches involved. The way to deal with
guerrilla warfare was to adapt one's own methods to that of the enemy, to use
flying columns, like Hoche in the Vendee and Bugeaud in Algeria had used. 69
It was of paramount importance always to maintain the initiative. Callwell
argued that the strength of the flying columns ought to depend on
circumstances — in Burma three hundred men with one or two guns proved
sufficient. In the fight against Abd el-Kader, Marshal Bugeaud had employed
as many as three to four battalions with cavalry. Infantry alone could be used
in the bush; on the prairie and steppes, however, only mounted men would
stand a chance, their mobility compensating for lack of cover. Again it
depended entirely on the circumstances how severely mutineers should be
handled. Hoche succeeded where his predecessors had failed precisely
because he did not advocate a policy of devastation. In Burma the rural
population supported the British against the dacoits and villages which were
merely victims of dacoitry had to be recognized and spared. Elsewhere the
maxim les represailles sont toujours inutiles would not apply, because
"fanatics and savages would misinterpret leniency for weakness."70
Callwell and Maguire thought that it was dangerous to surround the
enemy completely; it almost always involved heavy losses for the attacker,
since a "savage" would fight to the end. It was as effective, and less costly, to
leave the enemy a line of retreat and then engage in vigorous pursuit. Both
authors had misgivings about night attacks, quoting the Duke of Wellington
to the effect that night attacks against good troops were seldom successful,
and citing Napoleon, who regarded success or failure in a night attack as
dependent on entirely unpredictable circumstances such as the barking of a
dog.
Callwell defined the essential element of success in guerrilla warfare as
surprise, followed by immediate retreat, before the opponent could recover.
Operations were necessarily on a small scale ("petty annoyance — not
operations of a dramatic kind") because surprise would be difficult to achieve
with large bodies of men.71 Maguire, and in far greater detail Callwell, dealt
with many aspects of the technique of guerrilla and partisan warfare, such as
attack tactics, weapons, the blockhouse system for counterguerrilla oper-
ations, blowing up of railways, bridges and viaducts, mountain and
jungle warfare. It is difficult to think of any major omission with one

important exception: political aspects were hardly ever mentioned. Callwell
apparently believed that guerrilla warfare was a transient phenomenon that
was encountered by imperial powers in distant countries. Maguire, who
wrote his book a few years later (and who had the experience of the Boer War
to guide him), did not exclude the possibility that with the change in the
character of war since the eighteenth century, irregular or guerrilla warfare
might increasingly be applied to Europe and America.
Lieutenant Frankland of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, one of the very few
other British commentators on guerrilla warfare, dissented: guerrillas were
doomed in a civilized country, the loss of the capital and other main towns
would paralyze all further action. But in other parts of the world given
effective leadership the guerrillas were virtually insurmountable: "only by
actually capturing or killing each individual can the prospective conqueror, so
long as the patriotism of the inhabitants remains firm, hope to terminate the
struggle." Frankland was fully aware of the cardinal principle of protracted
war:
Guerrilla warfare has as its object the exhaustion of the invader, for the primary
aim of driving him away can only be brought about in this way; unable to bar hi:
progress to any part of their country, or to prevent his occupation of what
territory he chooses, the guerrilla can at least dog his steps, delay his progress
and sap his strength until exhaustion or intervention causes the invader to
withdraw.72
The guerrillas could recede like the tide, they had no organization,
untrammeled by detailed orders they could move hither and thither until
their presence was reported in several places at one and the same time — to
the despair of even the most competent intelligence officer. But despite all
these advantages, Frankland thought that the guerrillas were bound to lose
sooner or later, provided the conqueror applied the correct methods and,
unlike Napoleon in Spain, had the patience and the resources to carry them
out.
PARTISAN WARFARE AND EAST EUROPEAN MILITARY

THOUGHT
The Russian tradition in partisan warfare dates back to the eighteenth

century: a biographer of Barclay de Tolly noted that his
hero was "initiated into the practice of partisan warfare by that well known
Caucasian, Count Tsitsianov."73 But the real hero was the poet-warrior Denis
Davydov whose notable contribution to the theory of partisan warfare is
discussed in some detail elsewhere in the present study. Russian military
doctrine did not entirely neglect partisan warfare, though much of its effort
was directed towards a precise theoretical definition of the subject — an enter-
prise of doubtful promise. According to the Russian Military Encyclopedia,
there was a substantial difference between "small war" and "partisan warfare"
— the latter being conducted by a detachment cut off from the main army.
Partisan warfare, according to this definition, only took place when the rear of
the enemy was vulnerable, and the more vulnerable it was, the more
promising the outlook.74 But there was also a difference between partisan and
popular (i.e., guerrilla) warfare; the latter was carried on at their own risk by
groups of men tied to their native soil.
The same trend towards systematization can be found in much of the
Russian literature on the subject; furthermore the stress was always on big
units operating in close cooperation with the regular army. The very title of an
article by Count Golitsyn first published in 1857 — the most noteworthy
contribution since Davydov — reflects this tendency perfectly: "on partisan
operations on a large scale brought into a regular system." General Golitsyn
(1809-1892), incidentally, was the only infantry officer among Russian writers
on the subject; he is mainly remembered as the author of a fifteen volume
military history and the editor of a well-known journal, Russki Invalid.
Russian advocates of partisan warfare faced a real dilemma, in that
unorthodox practices had to be accommodated within the policies of a Tsarist
autocracy. Partisan warfare put a premium on personal initiative and
independent action unlikely to be adopted by a political system which
regarded such qualities with disfavor and suspicion. While the Russian army
had considerable experience in combating partisans and guerrillas of sorts
(sometimes by adopting their tactics) in Poland, the Caucasus and Central
Asia, Russian military authors ignored the lessons of these campaigns on the
whole, referring almost exclusively to examples from wars elsewhere in
Europe, or America, or of course to the campaign of 1812. Perhaps they
thought in retrospect that their colonial campaigns had little to teach them and
that, anyway, such wars were a thing of the past. This applies equally to the
works of Novitski and Vuich who wrote about small warfare in general, as to
the more specific
studies of partisan warfare by Gershelman and Klembovski. Colonel Vuich, in

a textbook written for the students at the Imperial War Academy, dismissed
partisan warfare in one short chapter and popular risings in one paragraph.75
In his definition small wars were all operations carried out by small
detachments; they were obviously actions of secondary importance which,
unaided, could not possibly achieve the main aim, namely the defeat of the
enemy in open battle. But they could contribute to the attainment of this goal,
and since in every war there would be some elements of small warfare, it was
a legitimate subject of study.
Some three decades later Fyodor Gershelman, a colonel on the general staff
and commander of the Orenburg Cossack officers' academy, criticized Vuich
for not having made it sufficiently clear that there was a basic difference
between a partisan unit and a light detachment. The assignment of partisans
was not to act as scouts and patrols, nor was it correct to argue, as some French
authors (such as Thibault) had done, that a unit should consist as a norm of
two hundred to three hundred riders; in fact it could consist of several
thousand men and deploy field artillery. 76 A partisan unit, according to
Gershelman, was one that had no lines of supply and communications, its task
(and here he followed Decker) was to harass the enemy, without risking too
much, particularly in places where large units could not operate freely. Success
depended largely on surprise: this meant that their movements had to be
unobserved and quick and, to this end, the partisan units ought to be
constituted mainly of cavalry detachments. While a small war has a tactical
connection with big operations, partisan actions have purely strategic
significance. What the author somewhat clumsily and schematically wanted to
stress was that since the partisans operated completely independently, their
contribution to the warfare was, generally speaking, to weaken the enemy
without making a specific contribution to any major battle. While a people's
war (guerrilla warfare) in the rear of an enemy uses the same means as
partisan warfare, the two are quite dissimilar in their scope and character. 77
Gershelman, like almost all Russian authors, did not deal with a war of this
kind, only with partisan units comprised of regular army officers and soldiers.
A small partisan unit consisted of a thousand horsemen, big ones of twelve
thousand or more. Refuting the arguments of the opponents of partisan
warfare, Gershelman claimed that despite the different topographical character
of Central and Western Europe and the relative density of population, partisan
warfare could be conducted there
too; it could even be conducted in enemy territory, against a hostile

population.78 He stressed that since partisans could be made combat-ready
immediately they could play an important role at the very beginning of a war;
regular armies were still taking some six to twelve days to mobilize. German
military observers were aware of this danger and one of them suggested
planting big blackthorn hedges on the border of East Prussia, putting up
barbed wire entanglements and arming the local population against an
eventuality of this kind. (It was also proposed that partisan Cossacks should
be denied the status of prisoner of war.) 79 Gershelman, who also discussed
antipartisan measures, much regretted that the theory and practice of partisan
warfare were not taught in Russia; similar laments by British, French and
German authors have already been noted.
Victor Napoleonovich (sic) Klembovski's work on partisan operations was
published in 1894; he subsequently became a general and was wounded in
the war against Japan.80 Like Gershelman, he was mainly interested in the
activities of big, flying columns and most of his illustrations were drawn from
the American Civil War and the operations of the French/ranc tireurs in 1870-
1871. One of his main heroes was the Russian general Geismar, whose exploits
in France in 1814 tended to fortify the thesis that partisan warfare was indeed
possible in enemy country. He discounted the argument that partisans could
succeed only if they faced young, inexperienced soldiers. When they attacked
an army's rear, the men who covered these long lines of communication were
as likely to be as experienced as anyone in the front line. He believed, like
Gershelman, that partisan warfare was perfectly possible, and indeed likely, in
a coming European war.
Russian comments on partisan warfare were closely followed in Vienna.
The Russian cavalry is trained to conduct partisan activities par excellence, an
Austrian military observer noted in 1885; was it not a matter of elementary
caution to watch these preparations?81 The Austrians had pioneered old-
fashioned partisan warfare in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; J. B.
Schels, of whom mention has already been made, was one of their chief theo-
rists. Another notable contribution was made by Wlodimir Stanislaus Ritter
von Wilczynski, a Pole serving in the Austrian army, who based himself to a
considerable extent on the experience gained in the Polish insurrections. The
partisan units, as envisaged by him, would consist of several units of "scythe
men" (kossiniere), and some light cannon. The various partisan units in a
given prov-
ince would be under the overall authority of a district commander. Each unit
should not be too large but constitute a "family," obeying its head "like a
father."82 The unit commander could appoint (or depose) his officers, and was
entitled to a pension and all the other privileges of a regular army officer.
Unlike the Russian theorists, Wilczynski put as much emphasis on infantry as
on cavalry units within the general framework of partisan warfare, and he
even made provision for the presence of a surgeon and a padre.
As the nineteenth century drew to its close, Austrian strategists, like those
of other European countries, reached the conclusion that the small war had
lost much of its importance — new inventions such as the railways, the
telegraph ("and in future also the balloons") would no doubt shorten a future
war; a mass army of half a million or more soldiers concentrated in a small
space could sleep peacefully, pistol shots no longer would disquieten them. 83
Some of the Austrian writers nevertheless thought that partisan warfare still
had a limited future in view of the mountainous terrain of Austria's border
regions, in the Tyrol, the Carpathian Mountains, and above all in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, where the Austrian forces had encountered guerrilla warfare on
a small scale in 1878/79. Hence the conclusion that it was premature to regard
the small war as a mere game.
Partisan units could be of particular use when the main body of the army
suffered a setback and needed time to recover. Hron's emphasis on ambushes
and surprise attacks offered little that was new, except perhaps in his
comments on the lessons of the war in Bosnia. In this mountainous territory,
which sixty years later became once again the scene of a major guerrilla war,
horses were of little or no use. The partisans had to follow the smallest and
most tortuous mountain paths and employ artillery only in exceptional
circumstances. Hron thought that the ideal size of a partisan detachment ought
to be between eight hundred and a thousand men — if it were larger it would
lose mobility, if smaller, the unit would be aware of its insufficient strength
which could adversely affect its fighting spirit. 84 The lot of the partisan officer
was an enviable one, provided he had "a streak of genius." That his men would
have to be tough and fearless went without saying; it was unrealistic to expect
that such men would have the character of a saint. The 'Southern Slav
character," as Hron saw it, had always proved itself in partisan warfare,
provided that the command was in the right hands.85
The Austrian army, as Hron and others had predicted, did have to
fight enemy guerrilla units during the First World War, especially in Serbia.
Their activities became fairly intensive in 1917. The chief organizer of the
bands was Kosta Vojnovic, a Serbian army captain, later reinforced by Captain
Pecanac who had been parachuted by air from Allied Headquarters in
Saloniki. The Austrians coped with the problem by establishing small flying
columns of about forty men and by organizing Turkish and Albanian
counterguerrilla units. The detachments used by both sides were smaller than
had been anticipated by the theorists, and horses — against expectations —
were widely used. Allied Headquarters prepared a general rising behind the
Austrian and Bulgarian lines in March 1917 which was to coincide with an
Allied offensive. But the enterprise failed, partly because the secret was not
well kept and partly because the insurgents were not sufficiently well armed.86
SOCIALISM AND INSURRECTION
The idea of insurrection played a central role in European nineteenth-century

revolutionary doctrine while the technique of insurrection was very much
neglected. Insurgency was in the air from Babeuf's conspiracy to the Carbonari
and the revolutionaries of the 1830s and 1840s. Philipe Buonarroti provides
the link between the old generation of extreme Jacobins and the young French,
Belgian and Italian revolutionaries of the 1820s and 1830s. But Buonarroti's
legacy did not include any clear, systematic doctrine of how to make a
revolution, except that conspiracy was needed and that after the victory of the
revolution there would have to be a dictatorship for a transitional period. 87
The technique of insurrection became a little more tangible and was discussed
in detail in the works of three nineteenth-century revolutionaries — Blanqui,
Mazzini and Carlo Bianco, Conte di Saint Jorioz; all of whom had known
Buonarroti and were, to a varying extent, influenced by him.
Carlo Bianco (1795-1843) is the least known of the three but it is precisely
in his writing that the link between guerrilla warfare and radical politics was
first established. It was probably no accident that modern political guerrilla
doctrine appeared first among Italian radicals. The resistance against
Napoleon in Spain had been a people's war but the Spanish partisan leaders
were guerrillas by instinct; they lacked the intellectual equipment to draw
generalizations from their experience and to develop a system or a doc-
trine. The French revolutionaries based themselves on the support of the

urban middle class and the workers; this ruled out a guerrilla campaign. In
Italy, on the other hand, the radicals confronted both foreign rulers and
domestic tyrants. Furthermore, Italy was much less urbanized than France.
Carlo Bianco was the son of a recently ennobled Turin lawyer; he studied
law but later joined the army and served in Spain. A radical democrat, he
became a member of the Italian nationalist underground; his last years were
spent in great poverty in French, Swiss and Belgian exile. His main work on
partisan warfare was written in Malta in 1828/29. 88 It was based on a
comprehensive study of the existing military literature, and on the experience
of partisan warfare in many parts of the world, in particular the guerrilla war
against Napoleon and his own experiences in Spain. Bianco began with the
assumption that modern (i.e., Napoleonic) warfare was quite unsuitable for
the liberation of Italy — the insurgents would be unable to collect the money,
obtain the weapons and mobilize the mass armies they needed. On the other
hand, two million Italians could easily be mobilized for a people's war, which
a group of conspirators could organize. Such a war would be most cruel, even
terrorist in character; in this context Bianco referred to the forty-year struggle
waged by Pasquale Paoli in Corsica. It would be a war in which the sacred end
would justify all means, including a scorched-earth policy, and the evacuation
of large parts of the population to the mountains. While putting great faith in
the ardent patriotism of his fellow Italians, Bianco was realist enough to
understand that, given "the present state of the world," one could not ignore
such "ignoble pretensions as the love of money" — hence the necessity to
distribute booty, or at least some of it, among the freedom fighters.
A neo-Jacobin, Bianco believed not just in national independence but
equally in a free, republican Italy. Hence the necessity of a transitional period
of revolutionary terror; once a certain area was liberated, the internal enemy,
too, would have to be purged and even exterminated. It would be a war to the
death. Only in exceptional circumstances should prisoners not be killed, for in
a war of constant movement there would be no facilities to detain them. Every
month bayonets would have to be checked and volunteers whose weapons
were not covered with enemy blood would be publicly disgraced.
Bianco proposed a system of "democratic centralism." For purposes of
organizing the conspiracy and conducting the war, Italy
would be divided into four major provinces, every province into five cantons,
and each canton into ten sub-districts. There would be elections on a regional
basis but the leadership would be appointed. The central junta (Consulta
Suprema) would be responsible to the supreme commander (Condottiero
Supremo) and not to the nation. At the same time, while the war continued,
the leaders of the guerrilla units would have maximum freedom of action.
Guerrilla units should comprise only ten to fifty fighters in the early phase of
the struggle, for units larger than these would be exposed to unnecessary
danger'and could easily be infiltrated by enemy agents.89 Mobility was the
essence of partisan warfare; sudden surprise attacks followed by quick retreat.
In time a true people's war would evolve; women, children and the elderly,
too, would play an active part, preparing ammunition, food and medical
supplies. The peasants would assist in the transport of arms and supplies, and
also help to spread panic through acts of individual terror: one suggestion was
to overpower enemy soldiers after having made them drunk.
Bianco's "infamous" Trattato was followed three years later by another
book in which he partly repeated what he had put forward in his previous
manual.90 There were a few new ideas: volunteers from foreign countries
would join in the war of liberation; during the later stages of the war, flying
columns would be formed and eventually a regular army would come into
being.
ITALIAN-POLISH INTERLUDE
Throughout the first part of the nineteenth century, guerrilla doctrine was
more widely discussed in Italy and Poland than in any other country, and the
reasons are manifestly plain. The writings of Le Miere and Decker were read
all over Europe at the time, and other writers were to borrow heavily from
them for decades to come. But in the last resort these were technical manuals,
devoid of direct political implications. In Poland and Italy, on the other hand,
the questions of national independence and unification were the burning
issues of the day: a search was on for an answer as to which was the most
effective military-political approach to liberate a country from foreign
occupation. In contrast to Decker, the Polish and Italian guerrilla strategists
were deeply preoccupied with the political aims and context of a war of
national liberation. It is for this
reason that, however unsuccessful in practice, they anticipated many of the

twentieth-century discussions on partisan warfare.
Carlo Bianco has been singled out for attention as a pioneer in the field.
There had been individual publications even before, such as one by an
anonymous Neapolitan author, who stressed the advantages of operations
carried out by very small guerrilla bands of no more than ten to twenty men
acting independently of each other. He also elaborated on the political and
psychological differences between professional soldiers and partisans: the
military man is guided by his honor, the volunteer-guerrilla has no other
guide than the good of the fatherland. The professional army officer is to
brave danger, the duty of the partisan to inflict maximum damage to the
enemy with the least risk to himself. 91 But if Carlo Bianco was not the first to
deal with the topic, no one in Italy had previously provided a systematic and
detailed analysis of the problems of guerrilla warfare in Italy, and his writings
certainly influenced his contemporaries, from Mazzini onwards, whereas the
notes of the anonymous Neapolitan writer remained unnoticed.
Not long after the appearance of the Trattato, an article was published in
the first issue of L'amico del popolo italiano in which the author drew the
attention of his compatriots to the "grandiosi ri-sultamenti" a mere twenty
Corsican partisans (voltigeurs) had achieved: how much more could be
attained by a brave band of men following similar tactics in Italy? 92 Even more
optimistic in vein were the writings of General Guglielmo Pepe: everything in
Italy pointed to the success of an insurrection once it had been started. All
social classes would join it, for the local rulers were universally detested, and
the clergy no longer exercised the influence that had been theirs a few decades
previously under the French occupation. In Pepe's view it was essential for the
success of the popular rising that a "liberated zone" be established in Calabria
early on (and, if possible, a second, in the center of Sicily near Castrogiovanni).
The enemy would no doubt counter by dispatching a major army against these
southern foci, but three-quarters of his forces would have to remain stationed
in northern Italy; and the rest, far away from their bases, would suffer defeat at
the hands of the insurgents fighting according to the rules oiguerra alia
spicciolata, i.e., guerrilla warfare.93 Pepe frequently drew attention to the
lessons of the Spanish experience from which the Italians had much to learn.
Cesare Balbo devoted a whole book to the subject, written in 1817 but only
published thirty years later.94 He had visited Madrid in 1815 accompanying his
father, the ambassador.
Balbo also envisaged an invasion by the Austrian army in the event of a

popular rising but, like Pepe, he emphasized that Austria would have to keep
back many units to forestall similar risings in Hungary and Bohemia. The
Italian irregulars would fight in the cities, the fields and the mountains and,
supported by regular forces, would wear out the Austrian expeditionary
corps. Yet another manual on the techniques of guerrilla warfare was written
by Enrico Gentilini, an early Utopian socialist thinker; it was published in
1848, the year of the revolution. The author was a self-made man, and his
book is mostly derived from the writings of other military men. For the
student of political theory there is more interest in Gentilini's essays in which
he envisaged far-reaching social changes, implicitly regarding guerrilla
warfare as a prelude to a people's war. 95 He thought that such a war would be
a protracted one, and in his scheme the guerrillas would operate without
support from regular forces.
Also socialist in inspiration was the work published in London in 1843 of
Giuseppe Budini, a printer. He addressed himself not only to the spiritual
motivation of the partisans but to the question of popular support, the "mass
basis." He considered that since the uprising would confer material benefits
upon the popular classes, it would receive their support. Ideally the revolution
should break out simultaneously in the Kingdom of Naples and Piedmont;
again the emphasis was on operations carried out by "bande nazio-nale."96
After the defeat of 1848, the general tendency among revolutionary writers
of the 1850s was to de-emphasize the partisan element in the forthcoming
military struggle, though some of them depreciated old-style regular army
tactics even more. This refers, for instance, to General Allemandi who
advocated small-war tactics carried out by militia battalions on the Swiss
model.97 La Masa had in mind a national Italian army of 600,000 men only
one-quarter of which, however, ought to be a voluntary militia of partisans
fighting in mobile units in the hilly regions of the Tyrol and Friuli, 98 while the
regular army would fight in the plains of Lombardy and Veneto. Pisacane, one
of the most interesting figures of the Risorgimento, commented on the
"chimerical idea" that all that was needed were a few groups of bold young
patriots (giovani arditi) who, fighting in the mountains, would successfully
ward off a superior enemy. Pisacane wrote that attack, not defense, was
essential in a revolutionary war. On another occasion he drew attention to the
fact that in Spain, despite the topographical conditions favoring partisan
warfare, it
was the presence of a British expeditionary corps which proved decisive. Don
Carlos's defeat by Cristina was additional proof that partisan war in isolation
could not succeed. Pisacane's central concept was that of a nation in arms
(Nazione Armata); within this framework there would be room for partisans
but they could not possibly replace the regular army." Many basic ideas of
twentieth-century guerrilla doctrine can be found in these writings: the as-
sumption that guerrilla warfare is the first stage in a people's war which
would culminate in the establishment of a revolutionary army (Bianco and
Mazzini); the idea that an armed struggle in Italy would prelude a general
European revolution; the concept oifoci and liberated zones; the importance of
the social struggle and political indoctrination (Mazzini, Gentilini, Budini); the
suggestion that the armed struggle would have to start in regions remote from
the enemy's main concentrations (Pepe). The idea that moral purification and a
re-education of asocial elements could be attained through an armed struggle
first appeared in Bianco's and Mazzini's writings; it was taken up by Garibaldi.
These thinkers did not, of course, see eye to eye on all the details of the
strategy to be pursued. Pisacane thought that it was a fallacy to believe (as did
Bianco and Mazzini) that the townspeople were ideally suited to mountain
warfare; he advocated guerrilla warfare in combination with an urban
insurrection, and the earliest possible formation of a regular force of half a
million soldiers. Bianco's emphasis on terrorism ("cold terrorism of the brain
not the heart" on behalf of all suffering mankind) was not shared with equal
enthusiasm by the others.
From a purely technical point of view, the contribution of the Italian school
of guerrilla warfare was small. But they pioneered certain political-strategic
concepts and they constituted the link between traditional partisan warfare
and modern radical politics, predating Blanqui whose only concern was with
urban insurrection.
Karol Stolzman has been singled out in the preceding pages as a
representative writer of the Polish school of guerrilla warfare. But unlike
Bianco he was not the first military author in his country to address himself to
the subject, nor was his position as pre-eminent. In the year 1800 a book had
been published in Paris which questioned whether the Poles were prepared to
fight for their independence.100 The author was Tadeusz Kosciuszko; his little
book was based on the experience of the insurrection of 1794, and it advocated
a revolutionary people's war against the occupying forces.
But Kosciuszko contemplated a mass army applying guerrilla tactics; up to a

million Poles were to be enlisted against 450,000 Russians, Prussians and
Austrians. While he invoked the examples of Switzerland, the Netherlands
and the United States it was rSbt quite clear how a people of serfs could
possibly emulate a society of free men. Thus the unleashing of a "people's war"
really depended on the degree of patriotism shown by the landowning gentry,
who still dominated the peasantry.
The Polish insurrection of 1830/31 produced a spate of partisan literature by
men fascinated like Kosciuszko with the idea of a mass army or at least a giant
militia. Stolzman thought that Poland could mobilize four million men; more
modestly Bern and Kamienski believed that a million could be gathered. 101 But
opinions differed fairly sharply on the role of partisan warfare within a
general framework of national insurrection. A few writers such as Major
Ludwik Bystrzonowski thought that guerrillas fighting in small formations
would be able to liberate their country single-handed without the help of
regular forces.102 He assigned to Polesie (the area of the Pripet marshes) the
role of an ideal battleground for an "unending" guerrilla war. It is interesting
to note that the author of the thesis of "pure" and "eternal" partisan war was a
monarchist whereas his opponents, particularly Stolzman, Mieroslawski and
Kamienski, belonged to the democratic wing of the Polish national movement.
They thought like Jelowicki that partisan warfare was merely the first phase in
an insurrectional war, and that it was during this stage that the regular army
units should be formed.103 Stolzman envisaged the gradual extension and
enlargement of the partisan units, thereby transforming the actual character of
the war. Bern too advocated a mixture of partisan and regular warfare: first
there should be a general insurrection but most of the fighting would be done
by big mobile columns attacking the main concentrations of the enemy (Mao's
transition to mobile warfare). Chrzanowski was aware of the likelihood that in
a people's war a great many civilians would be killed—"ein National Krieg ist
ein Vernichtungskrieg." Kami-enski's theory was the most explicit: he
differentiated between four phases of the war of liberation. It would begin
with a chaotic insurrection, there would be a gradual increase of coordination
between the local patriotic forces until regular army units were formed to do
most of the fighting according to the principles of modern strategy and tactics
(meaning the French revolutionary wars) without renouncing the experience
gained during the earlier period of partisan warfare. (Again, the similarity
with the Maoist concept is quite
striking.) Kamienski was aware of the fact that this kind of war would be
impossible unless the peasants were liberated. Lastly, there were the skeptics,
Nieszokoc and Mieroslawski in particular.104 Nieszokoc was opposed to
partisan adventures in principle ("ad finitum") while Mieroslawski attributed
them limited importance at best. Following a brief initial phase of guerrilla
war there should be a transition as quickly as possible to "real war," namely
mass armies attacking the enemy. Mieroslawski wrote about Stolzman that
his concept was a mixture of Italian conspirational folly and Polish aristocratic
flippancy.105 In his view Kamienski's theories were an absolute negation of
military experience, and would render the conduct of real war impossible.
Given the political and geographical differences between the two countries
there is astonishing similarity between the views of the Polish and Italian
authors on partisan warfare. To the extent that the Italian military writers of
the period were influenced by foreigners, it was Le Miere's book more than
any other which became their catechism. The Poles, on the other hand, being
cosmopolitans, did follow events in Italy closely. There was something like an
organic link between Poland and Italy at the time: the "Legions" had fought in
Italy, Chrzanowski was the chief of staff of the Piedmont army at one time and
Mieroslawski, too, commanded Italian troops. Stolzman with Carlo Bianco
helped to prepare Maz-zini's ill-fated invasion of Savoy. F. Raquillier, a Polish
general in Italian service, published in Florence in 1847 a "Practical Guide for
the Perfect Partisan" in which he sharply criticized the idea put forward by
some contemporaries that the partisans should fortify themselves within the
main urban centers of the country and defend themselves from there.106
Why were the nineteenth-century theorists of guerrilla warfare so
completely forgotten, despite the fact that their writings preempted twentieth-
century guerrilla doctrine in so many essential points? The short answer is
that the theories were discarded because reality refuted them. The Poles were
backward-looking with regard to weaponry and tactics. The scythes of the
peasants of Ra-clawice, where Kosciuszko had defeated the Russians fifty
years earlier, blocked the progress of military technology. They failed to
provide sufficient motivation to the peasants and they ignored the foreign
political constellation. The Poles were invariably defeated and if the Italian
struggle for unity was eventually crowned with success, it was not as the
result of a partisan war as envisaged by Bianco, Mazzini, Pepe and others. It
was only after many decades
and in distant countries that many of the strategies first voiced in the 1830s
and 1840s were to reappear.
BLANQUI
Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) entered the annals of revolutionary history as

the fearless fighter who always failed; Marx did not take him very seriously,
Lenin regarded him as an adventurer and Trotsky said about him that he did
not know the difference between revolution and insurrection. These
judgments hardly do Blanqui full justice, because most of his theoretical
writings on insurrection were not published in his lifetime and only became
known around 1930. 107 Far from being a blind believer in violent action as the
only way to revolution, Blanqui wrote after 1848 that conspiracy, which he
had thought of as a civic duty under the monarchy, he regarded as a public
offense under the republic, and that only the abolition or the abuse of the
franchise would "compel us to convert the ballot into a cartridge." 108 In many
respects Blanqui was a modern thinker; for instance, he believed in the need of
an avant-garde consisting of declasse intellectuals who would lead the masses
onto the right path to progress. He thought that there was a latent
revolutionary situation in France and that only a spark was needed to set the
whole edifice on fire. His first major attempt at insurrection (May 1839) ended
in total failure. True, there was a crisis, political and economic, the monarchy
was discredited and the people, it seemed, were only waiting to join in an
insurrection. Detailed preparations were made a long time ahead. The rising
was fixed for a Sunday at noon: the army officers would be at the races, the
new regiments just arrived in Paris would not yet have familiarized
themselves with the geography of the city. 109 Some five hundred to eight
hundred insurgents were to attack police headquarters and occupy the Cite;
barricades would be erected all over the town. But police headquarters
resisted the attack and despite some local successes in other parts of Paris, the
soldiers did not go over to the insurgents, nor was there much response from
the population. Within twenty-four hours the coup had failed.
In his Instructions written thirty years later Blanqui drew the lessons from
his failure — and also from the experiences of June 1848. In brief, his
conclusions were that though the political constellation had been most
auspicious, with the government in a state
1 .39 THE ORIGINS OF GUERRILLA DOCTRINE
of disarray and the troops demoralized, the six hundred barricades had been
erected without any proper plan of coordination. Some barricades were
manned by ten, others by a hundred men who had spontaneously assembled.
Some were deserted altogether because those who had built them went to
collect weapons, sleep, smoke a pipe, have a drink in a nearby restaurant, or
perhaps join some other barricade.110 Frequently no one was in command,
everyone acted as he saw fit. There was constant coming and going, based on
the assumption that if everyone did his own job, all would be well. No one
knew what was happening anywhere else, no one came to help defend the
barricades attacked by troops. In fact only thirty of the six hundred barricades
were eventually attacked, but their defeat proved decisive.111 Two or three
regiments would attack one barricade after another and kill the few defenders.
There was no coordination and thus (Blanqui concluded) despite their intellec-
tual and moral superiority the defenders were easily defeated. True, the
insurgents had been successful in 1830 and again in February 1848. But these
had been lucky coincidences: in 1830 the government was totally taken by
surprise and panicked, in February 1848 Louis Philippe made no serious effort
to defend himself. In June 1848 the rising collapsed despite the fact that the
insurgents faced the most miserable of governments which entirely lacked self-
confidence. What if the insurgents had faced brutal, militaristic rulers who
might have used the most recent technical inventions against them? Blanqui,
unlike some other revolutionaries, was not unduly worried by the broad
boulevards built by Haussmann: though they facilitated the movements of
government troops, they also exposed them to rifle fire. According to Blanqui,
the rifle would remain the decisive weapon in street fighting; artillery only
made a great deal of noise, and hand grenades were hardly more effective than
paving stones. But above all, the revolutionaries needed organization,
discipline and a central command. Never again should there be those stormy
and totally disorderly risings of ten thousand men.
Two years after these lines were written, shortly after the outbreak of the
war with Prussia, Blanqui tried his luck again. At the head of three hundred
men he attempted to storm the firemen's barracks in La Villette quarters. But
the firemen refused to hand over their arms and, devoid of any other signs of
revolutionary enthusiasm elsewhere in Paris, Blanqui's men were sent
packing. The next revolutionary rising, the Commune, was only a few months
off. In Blanqui's strategy immediate success or failure
Mi THE ORIGINS OF GUERRILLA DOCTRINE
would depend on the first phase of the fighting. In fact, he only envisaged
street battles of short duration; either the masses and the army would join the
insurgents, in which case the war was won, or the revolutionaries would
remain isolated, in which case they might as well disperse and wait for a more
auspicious occasion. As Bakunin put it in conversation with a friend: even if
the insurgents were defeated twenty times they might receive popular
support on the twenty-first occasion. Each revolt, however unsuccessful, had
its uses; hence Bakunin's theory of "propaganda through action" as the only
possible way to revolutionize the masses, and his glorification of the
Lumpenproletariat and bandits as the social elements most likely to
overthrow the existing order.112* Hence the demand that the professional
revolutionary should be ready to engage in violent, even desperate action at
any time; Satan in contemporary reincarnation is the spirit of rebellion.
Mazzini, like Blanqui, believed in his more sanguine moments that once the
call for a rising had been sounded it would be echoed everywhere: if there
was no response, one had to try and try again until one finally succeeded.
This belief led him into operations that were exceedingly amateurish. On one
occasion he prepared for the conquest of the Kingdom of Naples with the help
of twenty-two men, on another he wanted to invade Italy with two hundred
patriots, despite the fact that all the police forces of Europe were familiar with
the details of his plan. In his writings Mazzini frequently referred to historical
examples that were of no relevance to his countrymen, such as the war of the
Dutch against the Spanish. He never claimed to be a military expert and when
toward the end of his life, he was presented with a sword by his admirers, he
said: "I am not a soldier, and I do not like the soldier's trade."
Nevertheless Mazzini was the author of two detailed blueprints concerning
the establishment of guerrilla bands. In his view, the guerrillas were the
precursors of the nation, which they would rouse to insurrection, but they had
no right to substitute themselves for the nation.113 He assigned the guerrillas a
fairly narrowly circumscribed role: they were not entitled, for instance, to
punish those among the population who were guilty of collaboration; they
had to give account of their operations to a nationwide Center of Action.
* Similar ideas had been advocated even before by the first German theoretician of
Communism, Wilhelm Weitling, in his Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit (1842). The
existing social disorder had to be deliberately exacerbated through organized theft with
the urban Lumpenproletariat as the chief revolutionary agent: the poor were to enjoy the
growing disorder as the soldier enjoyed war.
They had to avert the enemy wreaking vengeance on small localities, and
when they passed through such places they should seek to repress, rather
than promote, a revolutionary demonstration on the part of the population.114
Such political guidelines apart, Mazzini provided detailed advice which he
had, no doubt, gathered from earlier writers on partisan warfare: for example,
that a retreat should always be left open ("A band that is surrounded is lost"),
that attacks should take place in twilight, that a quarter of the band be kept in
reserve at the time of attack, that there be a rifle range of three hundred yards
before shooting at an adversary. "Much may be learned by listening with the
ear close to the ground, and it does not require much practice."115 Critics of
Mazzini would argue that, figuratively speaking, he did not keep his ear
sufficiently close to the ground, and that if Italy was eventually liberated, the
guerrilla bands to whom he freely gave advice did not play a prominent part
in the process.
MARX, ENGELS AND THE ARMED STRUGGLE
Much as Marx and Engels were preoccupied with the problem of

revolutionary violence, they never accepted Blanqui's strategy of street
fighting carried out by a few hundred, or at most a few thousand determined
followers. Insurrection, as Engels wrote in his comment on the German
experience of 1848/49, was as much an art as regular warfare, with its own
rules of procedure that, if neglected, would lead to defeat and ruin. Engels's
basic advice was never to play at insurrection unless fully prepared to face all
the consequences which might ensue. Secondly, once an insurrection had been
started, it was absolutely essential to maintain the offensive. Only thus could
wavering elements be won over, and the enemy dispersed before it could
gather its strength. There should be daily successes however small, since to be
on the defensive was the death of every armed rising.116
The military experience of the revolutionary party in 1848/49 had been
discouraging and Marx and Engels were not to pin their hopes again on
another armed insurrection in the style of those that had failed. Although they
wrote a great deal on military affairs (Engels's comments on contemporary
wars fill several volumes), guerrilla warfare preoccupied them only rarely;
they thought it, on the whole, to be of limited applicability. Commenting on
the Carlist
Mi THE ORIGINS OF GUERRILLA DOCTRINE
wars in Spain for his American readers, Marx on one occasion recalled
Napoleon's experience. He noted that the guerrilla bands had been most
successful while they remained small, and that once they started to "ape" a
regular army they frequently suffered defeat; corps of three to six thousand
men could no longer hide easily and disappear suddenly without being forced
into battle. It was in the first and second stages of the fighting against
Napoleon's armies that the guerrillas posed the greatest menace to the French.
Marx quoted the description of the Abbe de Pradt of how the French forces
were exhausted by the incessant molestations of an invisible enemy who, if
pursued, disappeared among the people out of which he would immediately
reappear with renewed strength: "the lion in the fable, tormented to death by a
gnat gives a true picture of the French army."117
According to Marx, Mina, the Empecinado and their followers were among
the most revolutionized sections of Spanish society. But in the light of
subsequent events in Spain he showed awareness with regard to the dangers
of "guerrillaism":
. . . it is evident that, having for some years figured upon the theatre of sanguinary
contests, taken to roving habits, freely indulged all their passions of hatred, revenge
and love of plunder, they must, in times of peace, form a most dangerous mob,
always ready at a nod in the name of any party or principle, to step forward for him
who is able to give them good pay or to afford them a pretext for plundering ex-
cursions.118
If guerrilla warfare had been effective under specific conditions in the

preceding fifty years, Engels still doubted whether it had a future. His
skepticism emerges from his comments about the Spanish colonial experience
in North Africa: even on broken ground (he wrote), a regular infantry force
should easily gain on irregulars. The modern system of skirmishes along an
extended line, behind which stood support groups and reserves, the tactics of
concentrating troops against a common target, all this entailed, in Engels's
view, certain defeat for the irregulars — even if they had a two to one
superiority. That the Spanish took so long to advance on Tetuan could be
explained by the fact that they had not yet mastered the technique of modern
warfare, and that their army had been dispersed over too wide an area.119
During the later stages of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 irregular
units played a part of some importance. Popular resistance
continued after the regular French armies had been defeated and had virtually
disappeared. New troops and franc tireurs, fighting behind barricades and
embrasures, using night attacks and various guerrilla tactics, prolonged the
opposition to the German invaders. For a few weeks Engels thought that it
might be Spain of 1809 all over again. If real national enthusiasm were revived
among the French, everything could yet be won, he wrote in October 1870; in
November: "In the course of the last six weeks, the character of the war has
markedly changed. . . . The ubiquitous 'four Ulans' are no longer able to ride
into a village or town outside their own lines, demanding absolute obedience
to their orders without incurring the danger of being taken prisoner or
killed. . . . The German positions are surrounded by a belt of no-man's-land
and it is precisely there that popular resistance is most palpably felt." And on
26 November: "Once the spirit of popular resistance is awakened, even armies
of 200,000 men can no longer make rapid progress, they soon reach the point
when their detachments are weaker than the forces opposing them; it depends
entirely on the intensity [the elan] of popular resistance how soon this stage
will be reached."120 What if every citizen became a soldier, every village and
town a fortress? But from the very beginning Engels had doubts whether a
people's war was still possible in Europe of the second half of the nineteenth
century. Once, many years earlier, he had written that a people who wanted to
gain independence could not be restricted to conventional warfare. Levee en
masse, revolutionary war, guerrillas everywhere — these were the only means
by which a small people could defeat a bigger one, an army could resist its
stronger and better-organized opponent.121 But even when these lines were
written, at the time of the Austrian-Italian war of 1849, Engels did not really
expect that a monarchy could advocate "revolutionary terrorism." Engels knew,
of course, about the Vendee, about Spain and Russia, but he preferred to
invoke the shining example of 1793-
Engels sadly concluded that there really was not much hope for a people's
war in Europe: "such fanaticism and national enthusiasm is not customary
among civilized nations. One may find it among Mexicans and Turks but no
longer in money-making Western Europe." The same view was expressed on
another occasion in December 1870: "It is a fact that men have lost all
recollection of a real war . . . the right of real self-defence is granted only to
Barbarians."122 Truly national wars, in Engels's view, had been fought in
Algeria and the Caucasus. It was now expected of civilized nations
that they would not continue a struggle once the "official nation" had
surrendered.
As regards the German armies in France, they considered the franc tireurs
as assassins and robbers. Accordingly, civilians found carrying arms were
shot, and villages were burnt if there was a suspicion that it was from their
direction that German units had been fired upon. The path of the German
armies in France was marked, as Engels noted, with fire and blood. The
Germans had a short memory, for according to Scharnhorst's Landsturm
Ordnung of 1813 the more effective the means used against the French invad-
ers the better. It was stated expressis verbis that the Landsturm should not
wear any uniform whatsoever, so that they could turn civilian at any moment,
thus making it impossible for them to be recognized by the enemy.
Engels's skepticism about the efficacy of guerrilla warfare was based both
on his own experiences in the fighting in Baden in 1849, and on an analysis of
historical precedents. National insurrection and partisan warfare, he wrote in
1857, were possible only in the mountains. In this context he referred to the
Tyrol rising, the Spanish guerrilla war against Napoleon, the insurrection of
the Carlist Basques, and to the struggle of the Cherkessians in the Caucasus. 123
But the Tyroleans and the Spanish guerrillas had only been effective because
of outside help, the Basques were able to resist for so long because of the
almost total disarray of the Spanish army, and the Caucasians, with their
greater mobility, were successful only as long as they attacked the Russian
rear and ambushed their columns. Whenever the Russians counterattacked,
they were victorious.
If the prospects for guerrilla warfare in Europe were not propitious the
chances in Asia seemed a little better. Commenting on the Indian mutiny,
Engels did not exclude the possibility that guerrilla warfare, involving the
dispersion of insurgent units in inaccessible forest and jungle, could cause far
more attrition and losses to the British than a battle or siege. But he doubted
whether the Indians were able to do this. Their military record during the
mutiny had been poor: they had failed to cut the British supply lines and to
organize an active small war. He thought more highly of the Chinese capacity
to inflict damage on foreign invaders. They might not be able to hold their
own against Anglo-Indian forces on the battlefield, but they could poison
food (as they had already done in Hong Kong), launch night attacks, kill
Europeans on board ships and, generally speaking, engage in the most
unconventional warfare. It was pointless to complain about their fanaticism
and barbar-
ity; every nation fought in accordance with its level of civilization, and,
anyway, the British, too, had behaved in a barbaric manner.124
In short, Engels's view on guerrilla war was that it could only succeed in
Europe in conjunction with regular army units; on one occasion he argued
that the Spanish guerrillas had been able to hold out only because of "a great
number of fortresses [sic]" to which they had been able to retreat. Small and
outmoded as these fortresses had been, they could not be captured short of a
regular siege operation.125 Outside Europe he saw the conditions for guerrilla
warfare as more propitious.
Nor were Marx and Engels oversanguine with regard to the prospects of
urban insurrection. While they commented in great detail on the political
lessons of the Paris Commune they did not provide a similar analysis in depth
of the military lessons. But the military experience of the Commune was not
lost on them and it contributed to Engels's skepticism which became almost
total towards the end of his life. He did not, of course, despair of the victory of
socialism nor did he think that future revolutions would necessarily be
nonviolent. Precisely because armies had become so powerful did they carry
within themselves the seeds of their own destruction: they had become so
costly to maintain that they made financial catastrophe virtually inevitable.
Furthermore, the "armies of princes" could be rapidly transformed into
people's armies, thus bringing about the collapse of militarism from within
(Anti-Duhring). Since 1848 the techniques of warfare had completely changed
and the revolutionary socialists would have to adjust their own tactics
accordingly. The main reason for the occasional success of the insurgents prior
to 1848 was that a civilian militia had stood between the army and the
insurgents and either it had taken the side of the revolution or else was so
lukewarm and indecisive as to make the regular army units vacillate likewise.
In every case of revolutionary success the fight had been won because the
troops failed to obey. The effect of the barricade, in any event, was felt mainly
on morale. By 1849 the chances for success in an old-fashioned urban uprising
had already become "pretty poor." 126 The spell of the barricade was broken, the
soldiers saw behind it not so much "the people" but rebels, plunderers and the
scum of the earth. Army officers had learned the art of street fighting, they no
longer tried to take barricades by frontal assault — but outflanked and seized
them with a little skill in nine cases out of ten.
The changes that had taken place were all to the advantage of the military.
Garrisons in the capital cities had become bigger, it was
now easier to concentrate troops, and rifles and heavy guns were proving
more effective. In 1848 sappers had to use pickaxes to break through walls,
fifty years later they had dynamite cartridges at their disposal. On the other
hand the insurgents found it more and more difficult to concentrate their
forces, and almost impossible to arm them. In 1848 it had still been possible to
use homemade ammunition of powder and lead, in the 1890s this was no
longer feasible. The workers' enemies wanted the revolutionaries to engage in
precipitate military adventures that would lead to their defeat; the ruling
classes were far more afraid of the results of elections than of rebellions.
Engels did not altogether rule out street fighting in a revolution but "only if
the unfavorable situation is compensated by other factors": the insurgents
ought to be numerically stronger and would have to opt for attack rather than
passive barricade tactics.
Engels's views were shared by Marx who, though hailing the Paris workers
(after the event) for daring to "storm heaven" in 1871, had warned them
against a premature revolt and was not in the least surprised by the outcome
— the fall of the Commune. The barricade was a mere symbol: only if the
enemy forces yielded to moral (i.e., political and psychological) factors would
the insurgents win. If, on the other hand, the self-confidence of the ruling class
remained unbroken, if it did not panic, the insurgents would easily suffer
defeat. This would apply even if the military were in a minority, because their
better equipment, training, discipline, unified leadership and organization
would outweigh any numerical superiority. The insurgents would win, in
other words, only if at least part of the army joined them, and this could
happen only in a grave crisis, perhaps after a defeat or a split in the ruling
class, a loss of its self-confidence, a failure of the ability and will to exercise the
power in its hands. Engels preferred not to speculate about such eventualities,
nor did he and Marx reveal much interest in such guerrilla warfare as was
likely to occur outside Europe. He was by no means opposed to guerrilla
warfare; he simply believed, like almost all military thinkers at the time, that it
was not likely to be of great practical importance. The same reasons that made
barricade fighting obsolete made guerrilla warfare so much more difficult —
except perhaps in the most distant parts of the globe. He did not belittle the
importance of the colonial wars, but he would have found it difficult to accept
that the fate of the world would be decided in the jungles of Asia or Africa.
The revolution would occur in the highly industrialized countries where he
foresaw no scope for guerrilla warfare.
MOST
It is one of the ironies of history that Marx and Engels, who showed little
enthusiasm about the prospects of guerrilla warfare, nevertheless became the
idols of subsequent generations of guerrillas, whereas Johannes Most, the
nineteenth-century German socialist who provided an elaborate strategy for
conducting "urban guerrilla" warfare, has been virtually forgotten. Born in
1846, a bookbinder by profession, a man of little formal education but of wide
reading, he became one of the most successful Social Democratic
propagandists of his day. He was one of the first German Social Democrats to
be elected to the Reichstag (1874) but had to leave Germany as a result of
Bismarck's antisocialist emergency laws. Settled in London, he became editor
in chief of Freiheit, which gradually departed from Marxism, extolling the
"propaganda of the deed," i.e., terrorism. In 1880 he was expelled from the
German Social Democratic Party. Following the publication of a paean on
regicide, he was sentenced by a British court to sixteen months hard labor. 127
After his release from prison (1882), Most moved to the United States and
in 1884 his Science of Revolutionary Warfare was published with the subtitle
"A handbook of instruction regarding the use and manufacture of
Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Arsons,
Poisons etc."128 Modern explosives, he wrote in the introduction, were to be
the decisive factor in the future social revolution; revolutionaries of all
countries should therefore acquire them and learn how to use them. Terrorist
acts were to be carried out by individuals, or at most by small groups, so as
not to endanger the organization. Bombs should be put into public places such
as churches and ballrooms; the whole "reptile brood" should be extirpated,
and science was providing the means to accomplish this task. But it was not
only the rulers, the nobility, the ministers, the clergy and the capitalists that
Most wanted to annihilate, "pigs" too should be liquidated. Murder, as Most
noted, was defined as the willful killing of a human being and he had never
heard that a policeman was a human being.*
* Most also pioneered the idea of the letterbomb (Revolutionare Kriegswissen-schaft,

1873/4). Dynamite had been invented by Alfred Nobel in 1867; it was first used by Russian
terrorists in the late 1870s. Previously bombs had consisted of nitroglycerine (invented in
1845 by Salvero) or even earlier of fulminate of mercury (discovered in 1805 by the Reverend
Alexander Forsyth but first applied in 1816 by an American sea captain, J. E. Shaw).
For several years Most had a substantial following among American

workers, but after the Haymarket affair he gradually lost influence.
Liebknecht thought that Most was a madman, Eduard Bernstein on the other
hand called him a genius not amenable to discipline. Bebel wrote in his
memoirs that if Most would have remained under the influence of men able to
guide him and restrain his passionate temper, the party would have found in
him a self-sacrificing and indefatigable fighter. But under the antisocialist
laws he went astray and although he had once been a model of abstinence
ended in the United States as a drunkard.
Most's propaganda for "direct action" was based on the assumption that
more and more bombs would have to be thrown and more 'reptiles" killed
before the enemy would collapse. Unlike Blanqui he was not interested in
mass action because he felt that the army and the police would always prevail
in a confrontation of this kind. Unlike other socialists of his time he thought
that the development o f modern science favored the revolutionary terrorist
— provided the fruits of science were correctly applied.
The technique of small warfare hardly changed between 1750 and 1900, nor
did the practical advice given by the military thinkers of the period. The
definition of partisan warfare, in a famous early-nineteenth-century textbook,
covers the Pandurs and Croats, the hanc tireurs of 1870-1871 and the Boer
commandos:
A detachment is partisan, when it operates detached and isolated from the army,
and under the genius of its leader, which is not controlled except by orders given
in a general manner. . . . The profession of a partisan is a hazardous one. It can
only be properly carried out by a skilful, rapid and bold leader, and by a body of
men resembling him. . . . The war which he carries on is piratical. The strength of
his warfare lies in surprise.129
In the period under review a fundamental change took place in the function
of partisan warfare. In eighteenth-century military doctrine, even among the
advocates of the small war, the partisan always appeared in a supporting
role, never at the center of the stage.
The battles of the Spanish War of Succession had been very costly for both
sides. At Malplaquet the losses on both sides, killed and wounded, were
36,000, one-fifth of the total strength of the two armies; at Blenheim the
percentage of casualties was even higher.
The battles of the Seven Years' War were equally bloody; at Zorn-dorf one-
third of the participants were killed or wounded, and at the end of
Kunersdorf, Frederick the Great was left with 3,000 soldiers out of an army of
48,000 with whom he had entered battle. In view of these losses, more and
more critics maintained that a small war was less risky, that it could save a
great deal of bloodshed — and achieve the same result in the end. It was also,
incidentally, a more interesting kind of warfare, allowing greater scope for
individual initiative and inventiveness.
But the advice was not heeded. The French revolutionary armies used a
new system of operations which had been advocated, however, by certain
military thinkers for several decades previously. Its main features were
rapidity of movement, flexibility, the use of tirailleur tactics, dispersing forces
for maneuver and concentrating them for decisive action. Napoleon perfected
the "new warfare"; his genius was in the performance, for the basic rules were
few and simple: "if I were to give my principles formal expression one day,"
he told Saint Cyr, "their simplicity would appear surprising." It was all a
matter of the economic use of force, a concentration of the greatest number of
troops where a strike was intended, a sudden move against the enemy's rear,
cutting off his line of retreat, swinging round toward him, encircling and
destroying him.130 Such tactics had been used by military commanders of
genius throughout history. Napoleon applied them on a more massive scale
than ever before. The armies had substantially increased in number; in the
biggest battle of the Thirty Years' War, Breitenfeld (1631), 70,000 soldiers
were involved, at Malplaquet (1709) the number of combatants was 183,000,
and Napoleon invaded Russia with a Grande Armee of some 612,000 men. In
Napoleonic strategy, there was no scope for small, let alone guerrilla, warfare;
his ideal was Caesar not Vercingetorix. In his comment on Caesar's wars he
wrote: "Every nation which loses sight of the importance of a regular army
always in a state of readiness, and which opts instead for levies or 'national
armies' [i.e., militias] will suffer the fate of the Gauls." 131 In the Napoleonic era,
as the Prussian General Berenhorst noted, the small war was swallowed by
the big war.
The revolution in warfare lay not so much in the application of new
methods and novelty of approach as in the changed nature of war itself. The
regular, professional armies of the absolutist age were replaced by citizens'
armies and the levee en masse. The war between kings became a war between
nations, a people's war. The military system of the absolutist age was based on
pressure, threats
and punishment. Drilled to behave like an automaton on the parade ground,

the soldier fought because he was more afraid of his corporal than of the
enemy. With the wars of the French Revolution a new soldier appeared,
spurred on by patriotic enthusiasm.
Guerrilla warfare in its modern form was first waged not by the armies of
the French Revolution but against them in the Vendee and, later on, against
Napoleon, in Spain, the Tyrol and Russia. It was a system of warfare chosen
instinctively, without the benefit of preconceived doctrine. The guerrilla
detachments in the Vendee, in Spain and in the Tyrol were no longer
operating within the framework of a regular army and subject to its command
but, for most of the time, acted altogether independently. Their war was
insurrectionist and chaotic, revolutionary and subversive, not in its aims but in
its implications for the future. It was, therefore, highly suspect to the European
monarchies. The Russian partisan units were dissolved the moment the French
invaders had been defeated; Gneisenau's memoranda of 1808 and 1811 about
preparations for a popular rising (in which all means to defeat the hated
enemy would be permissible) and the famous Landsturm edict of 1813
remained largely a dead letter.
Yet partisan activities in the Vendee, Spain, the Tyrol and in Russia
remained isolated episodes and the doctrine of the great war continued to
prevail. The emphasis was on large armies and big battles; combat between
small detachments was regarded as the exception. The results were sometimes
unfortunate, as the Prussian General Willisen, author of a theory of grand
strategy, learned to his cost in the war against Denmark (1864). Guerrilla wars
continued to be fought throughout the nineteenth century, not in the main
theaters of war, such as the Crimea, but in a different context altogether: in the
Polish uprisings of 1831 and 1861, the struggle of Caucasian tribes against the
Russian invaders, and the campaigns of Abd el-Kader against the French in
North Africa. Guerrilla war became an integral part of national wars, fought
mainly against colonial powers or other foreign occupiers, by nations (or
tribes) without regular annies of their own. Lastly, there was an abiding
interest in the theory and practice of urban insurrection among socialist
revolutionaries all over Europe. But there were essential differences between
the guerrilla wars on the fringes of the European colonial empires, long-
drawn-out affairs in which quick successes were neither sought nor achieved,
and the revolutionary uprisings in European capitals which could only prove
victorious by rapid and decisive action. They were subject to totally different
THE ORIGINS OF GUERRILLA DOCTRINE
i5i
strategies and tactics: the Circassians and the North Africans could win a
campaign by a series of escapes, by wearing out their pursuers; the urban
revolutionaries would face defeat unless they managed to overthrow the
regime within a few days.
4
The Twentieth Century (I):
Between Two World Wars
The fortunes of guerrilla warfare had reached a low ebb in the early years of
the twentieth century; they did not improve in the period spanning and
embracing the two world wars. Victory in these wars went to the stronger
battalions, the decision determined in massive battles between vast armies. In
World War I guerrilla tactics were hardly applied at all, in the second they
played a certain limited role in some countries in the struggle against the
foreign occupier. The first third of the century witnessed civil wars and
warlordism spreading whenever central state power broke down, as in
Mexico and later in China. But these small wars were quite often big wars
manques, in that the military chiefs operated as though handling regular
armies, imitating with varying success their strategy and tactics. There were
national uprisings in Africa and Asia, such as Abd el-Krim's struggle and the
Palestine insurrection in 1936-1939, but less frequent and intense than in the
nineteenth century.
Guerrilla wars were always patriotic; sometimes they gravitated to the
right, sometimes to the left, sometimes toward Fascism and sometimes toward
Communism, on occasion betraying traces of both. But guerrilla politics were
usually inchoate, unless, as in China, for instance, a political party had
sponsored the struggle in the first place. In the Russian Civil War true
guerrillaism was to be found neither in the Red Army nor among its White
opponents but in the bands of independent freebooters in Siberia and the
Ukraine. The international climate was as yet inclement for a general guerrilla
upsurge; the European powers, though weakened as a result of World War I,
were still strong enough to hold on to their
168 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (i): BETWEEN TWO WORLD WARS
colonial empires. Seen in retrospect, the emergence of guerrilla bases in
northern China in the 1930s foreshadowed the guerrilla upsurge after 1945.
But not much was known at the time about events in these secluded areas, and
the Chinese situation in any case appeared unique, as indeed it was. The
country had been in a state of semianarchy for a long time, small wars had
been going on incessantly and the Communists were just one of the forces in
this imbroglio. Again, the Irish case — "urban guerrilla" — was sui generis and
seemed to offer few lessons to other countries. Guerrilla movements, almost
by definition, could succeed only if the internal or external enemy was weak,
or in the larger framework of a prolonged war. But the state was still
predominant; even in Mexico, after many years of anarchy the guerrillas were
suppressed. Political theory and military doctrine, "bourgeois" and Leninist
alike, accorded to guerrilla warfare only a subordinate role. No new theories
of guerrilla warfare emerged during this period; in fact, the neglect of the
subject was almost total. Military thinkers were almost exclusively concerned
with the Vernichtungsschlacht (Cannae), Blitzkrieg, with tank warfare and the
impact of air power. The new weapons which had first been used in World
War I seemed to tip the balance even farther against guerrilla warfare, leaving
little, if any, scope for it in the future. Armored cars had been used by the
British raiders against the Turks and the Germans in East Africa, though as yet
not widely, and without much effect because of the unsuitability of the
terrain.1 Aircraft were also used for the first time in support of Lawrence's
raiders, the Serbian insurgents, and against Lettow-Vorbeck for
reconnaissance, dropping agents behind enemy lines, and for providing
urgently needed supplies. All this was still, however, on a small scale and the
evidence about the effects was contradictory. Lettow-Vorbeck wrote that the
British planes never really bothered him, and once his forces had entered the
jungles of Mozambique, the reconnaissance flights served absolutely no
practical purpose.2 He himself had no air support; the Germans had tried to
supply their forces in East Africa by air but failed. A Zeppelin with badly
needed supplies was once dispatched from Bulgaria in November 1917, but
was called back after reaching Khartoum. Nonetheless, there was little doubt
that with the improvement in aircraft technology and the perfection of tanks
and other armored vehicles, these new weapons would play a very important
part in future conflicts — and it looked as if the guerrillas would have no
answer against these threats. Airplanes were extensively employed in the
North West Frontier fighting. "It is impos-
169 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (i) : BETWEEN TWO WORLD WARS
sible to overestimate the value of aircraft in tactical cooperation with other

arms. Their presence alone greatly raised the morale of our troops." 3
Information gained through aerial photography was of great value, even
though there were as yet few trained observers. It could surely be only a
question of time before the guerrillas lost their last secrets — their hideouts
would become known, their movements be detected and the element of
surprise, the main source of their success, would evaporate. In 1918, in short,
the prospects of guerrilla warfare loomed less than brilliant.
WORLD WAR I
Apart from some minor actions of short duration, such as the activities of
small bands of Serbian irregulars, guerrilla operations during World War I
were restricted to two theaters of war, the Arabian peninsula and East Africa,
where Lettow-Vorbeck with a minuscule force managed to contain for over
four years a total force "considerably larger than Lord Roberts' whole army in
the South African war."4 The operations in Arabia were in Lawrence's own
words a sideshow within a sideshow. Nevertheless, in later years his raids
were to attract infinitely more attention than the war in East Africa. The
Oxford don, Arab headgear and all, was a flamboyant personality in the great
tradition of British adventurers and explorers in the Orient. He quarreled with
orthodox military authority and underwent incredible hardships; his
complicated and tortured mentality fascinated the intellectuals and his books
were received with enthusiasm by the avant-garde critics of the 1920s. Hailed
as a genius by some, derided as a charlatan by others, this elusive figure was
to intrigue, more perhaps than any other hero of the Great War, both his own
generation and the ones to follow, still providing until today inspiration for
biographers, moviemakers and amateur psychoanalysts. Appearing to shun
publicity, he attracted it beyond a single other contemporary — among his
friends were the leading writers of the period, unorthodox strategists, such as
Liddell Hart who compared him to Napoleon, and leading American prac-
titioners of the new art of public relations. Even those who bitterly and
sometimes unfairly attacked him, Richard Aldington for one, added to the
Lawrence myth.
Lawrence's courage and qualities of leadership are beyond all doubt, but
his originality and the importance of his exploits have
certainly been magnified; seldom in the history of modern war has so much
been written about so little. It was neither the first nor the last time in the
history of guerrilla warfare that the measure of attention paid to a particular
campaign depended less on its military importance than on the accident that a
gifted writer wrote about it. But for Euclido da Cunha, Canudos would rank at
most as a footnote in Brazilian history; but for Balzac (Les Chouans) and
Tolstoy (Hadji Murat), the Vendee and Shamil's wars would be less well
remembered. Ernst von Salomon's books helped to popularize the German
Freikorps, and For Whom the Bell Tolls made many readers believe that
guerrilla warfare was a major element in the Spanish Civil War, whereas in
reality there was little of it. As a partisan commander, Lettow-Vorbeck stood
head and shoulders above Lawrence, but his personality was neither
particularly interesting nor attractive. A Pomeranian Junker by birth and a
diehard reactionary, he was a typical product of the German officer caste; and
not one of the brightest at that. Aged forty-four when war broke out, he had
not advanced beyond the rank of lieutenant-colonel. His transfer to East Africa
was professionally a dead end; there was no plan to defend the German
colonies in the event of war. He was, to put it mildly, an indifferent writer; his
books, published after the war, are mere variations on the same theme. 5 In
short, it is hard to envisage a greater contrast than that between the brilliant,
unorthodox British amateur soldier and the dull, conventional, unimaginative
and unattractive German professional. But Lettow succeeded brilliantly in
adverse conditions against a vastly superior force; Lawrence's few raids over a
much shorter period against small enemy units were not in the same class.
Military experts have acknowledged this — the official British history of World
War I devoted two volumes to Lettow's operations in East Africa; one would
look in vain for the name "Lawrence" in the memoirs of German and Turkish
commanders in the Near East.6 It is not certain that they were even aware of
his existence. There has been in recent years a modest Lettow-Vorbeck revival,
but as far as the general public is concerned, Lawrence figures as one of the
central figures in guerrilla warfare while Lettow has passed into oblivion. 7
Lawrence's guerrilla operations, which began in late 1916, were part of a
general blueprint for an Arab rising against the Turks. The insurrection had in
fact started even earlier, in June 1916, but the attempts to seize Medina and
other places occupied by the Turks were abortive. Despite a numerical
superiority of more than three to one, the Bedouins, untrained and ill
equipped, could not defend
a line or a point, let alone launch a massive attack against regular troops.
Lawrence shrewdly realized that he should concentrate his attacks against the
Hedjaz railway in such a fashion that the Turks could just about keep it
working with the maximum of loss and discomfort, compelling them to
strengthen their posts beyond the defensive minimum of twenty men. 8 To this
end he established a small, highly mobile and highly equipped striking force.
This approach worked well. Wejh was taken by the Arabs in January 1917,
they were successful at Abu al Lissal and Auda, and in July 1917 they entered
Aqaba after the Turkish garrison of three hundred had surrendered. 9 In these
encounters the Bedouins were usually stronger in numbers; a party of ten
thousand was dispatched to Wejh, halfway between Medina and Aqaba,
which was defended by only about two hundred Turks. Subsequently it
appeared that an assault by five hundred Arabs (landed by British ships) was
sufficient to seize the place. Military actions after the capture of Aqaba were
no longer along unorthodox lines; the Arab forces continued to march on
Damascus, but this was coordinated with the general advance of the Allied
armies.
Lawrence found coping with his desert warriors anything but easy; the
Arabs had no artillery and they were frightened by the sound of the Turkish
guns. "They thought weapons destructive in proportion to their noise." 10
Discipline was nonexistent, and when the time came for looting, "they lost
their wits, were as ready to assault friend as foe." Lawrence's superiors called
them cutthroats; he commented with pride that "they would cut throats only
to my order," a somewhat rash boast in the light of his own recounting that at
Mudawwara he had to defend himself three times against his own men who
pretended not to know him, that at Al Shalm, in the general looting, the
Bedouins attacked their allies, the Egyptians. Lawrence's chief aide during the
campaign was one Abdulla al Nahabi — Abdulla the Robber. 11 Eventually the
Turks had to evacuate the Arabian peninsula, but since the British army
operating from Egypt had meanwhile occupied Sinai and had reached Khan
Yunis in February 1917 and Gaza in March, they would have been withdrawn
anyway as their presence there no longer served any useful purpose and they
were in danger of being cut off. Thus, Lawrence's guerrilla doctrine about
winning campaigns without giving battle — to be amplified later — was not
really tested.
When Lettow-Vorbeck took over the command of the Schutz-truppe in East
Africa in January 1914, the outlook was bleak. There were altogether
approximately six thousand Germans living among
eight million Africans. The German colonial record, though not worse on the
whole than that of other European powers, was certainly no better; in the
suppression of the big Maji Maji revolt in 1905-1906 tens of thousands of
Africans had been killed. Lettow's force consisted of two hundred and sixty
German officers and NCOs and two thousand native soldiers (askaris). Unlike
in the fatherland, there was no enthusiasm among the local Germans when the
war broke out; they had believed that a European war would not affect
Africa.12 Lettow's position was impossible; he could not expect any help or
supplies from outside. He had to fight not only the British and the Belgians,
but had to carry on a running battle with Schnee, the civilian governor who
was nominally commander in chief. Lettow ignored his orders and Schnee
threatened to have him court-martialed after the war. Lettow may have hoped
that the war in Europe would be over within a few months and that, with a
little luck, he could hold out that long, inflicting maximum damage on the
enemy. He had some previous guerrilla experience, gained in the Hottentot
war in German Southwest Africa; the black people in this war were led by
Jakob Morenga, a Herero, an exceedingly able commander, who had learned
the art of commando warfare from studying de Wet.13
There were four phases in the East African war; in November 1914 a first
British attempt to land Indian troops at Tonga ended in disaster. Throughout
1915 there was stalemate which the Germans used to attack the seven-
hundred-kilometer-long, vitally important Uganda railway. The next phase
opened in March 1916 when the British, having built up their forces with South
African assistance, penetrated deep into German East Africa. By the end of
1916 two-thirds of the German territory had been occupied by the Allied forces
led by General Smuts. But the Germans had not been eliminated, and when
Lettow's unit crossed in 1917, first into Mozambique and subsequently into
Northern Rhodesia, the British were unable to pursue him in strength for
almost a year; the logistic difficulties seemed insurmountable. Lettow
surrendered at Aber-corn in Northern Rhodesia after he had been informed of
the armistice in Europe. His force consisted at that time of 156 Europeans,
1,168 askaris and some 3,000 native carriers. Altogether, three thousand
Europeans and eleven thousand askaris had at one time or another served in
its ranks, the basic unit being the company of which there had been sixty. But
the Germans had suffered losses during their retreats and, when Lettow
crossed into Portuguese Africa, he decided to leave part of his force behind.
Like all gen-
srals, he was prone to exaggerate the numbers he faced; he asserted :hat on

one occasion twelve thousand armored cars had been Drought into action
against him.14 And another thing that should be Dome in mind is that the
enemy troops he was countering were not exactly the flower of the British
Empire. "It was too piteous to see the state of the men," Meinertzhagen wrote
after the battle of Tonga.
Many were jibbering idiots, muttering prayers to their heathen gods, hiding
behind bushes and palm trees with their rifles lying useless beside them. I would
never have believed that ^.own-up men of any race could have been reduced to
such shamelessness. I do not blame the men, still less their officers. I blame the
Indian government for enlisting such scum.15
Lest Meinertzhagen be accused of racism, it may be useful to quote bis

comment on the quality of British leadership:
I think the worst and most expensive error of the campaign was the employment
of generals who were not first class; their quality was lamentable. I have no
hesitation in saying that if we had had a general of the calibre of General von
Lettow-Vorbeck, and if the Germans had had an Aitken, Wapshare, Stewart or
Malleson — or even Smuts — the East African campaign would have been over
by the end of 1914 and hundreds of valuable lives and millions of pounds would
have been saved.16
While Lettow succeeded in containing in East Africa a force so numerically

superior to his own, one can but stress again its, on the whole, inferior fiber;
the great majority of soldiers (South Africans, Indians, Africans) and
superannuated generals would not have been employed in Europe anyway.
The British war office was giving this campaign low priority. During 1915 it
opposed any major attack against the Germans. All this does not, however,
detract from Lettow's achievements. The difficulties he encountered at every
level were formidable. Cut off from outside supplies, everything needed by
his troops had to be locally produced in the most primitive conditions; shoes,
shirts, quinine (of which great quantities were a requisite) and even some
ersatz gasoline. The Germans revealed great ingenuity in this respect, and it
was perhaps no idle boast when Lettow wrote after the war that "we could
have continued for years."17 The local askaris fighting with the Germans were
more promising human material than the Indians — a fact
gradually realized by the British that was to induce them to expand their own
King's African Rifles quite considerably — but Lettow still had to train his
recruits and mold them into an efficient and disciplined little partisan army.
Only soldiers of stout caliber would be able to survive four years of long
marches through deserts and bush, lack of food and water, wild beasts,
disease, and of course enemy attacks.
The East African experience tends to disprove much that has been written
about the preconditions for guerrilla warfare. Lettow-Vorbeck was no fanatic,
just a tough regular soldier who thought his duty was to fight as long as he
possibly could. He was in no way a charismatic leader, able to generate
enthusiasm among his subordinates. True, he had acquired a smattering of
local tongues and studied the native customs, but his attitude toward his men
was old-fashioned, paternalistic, if not downright authoritarian. He could not
promise them anything, nor influence them other than through the example of
his own behavior. The askaris had no particular reason to love the Germans
or to support them in the war. Furthermore, by 1916 at the very latest it must
have appeared doubtful whether Germany could be the victor. The askaris
did not get their pay for more than four years, and there was hardly any
booty. Lettow could neither cajole nor threaten them; they were free to desert
at any time. Yet against all odds, he inculcated in them a pride in their
uniform and their units, discipline and a fighting spirit, so that they fought
exceedingly well for a cause which was not their own.
Lettow developed his guerrilla tactics only by trial and error. His first
skirmishes with the British, while successful, were too costly for the Germans
in men and supplies and it was this that decided him to subdivide his little
legion into smaller units, sometimes of no more than ten men, who were sent
on special missions. He had a few guns, dismantled from a ship which had
been destroyed by the British; they were carried through bush and jungle —
whether to any great effect is not certain. The machine gun was the most
important weapon in the bush; Lettow's great problem all along was lack of
ammunition. His soldiers had standing orders to regard the acquisition of
ammunition from the enemy as their foremost function; they had to have more
bullets at the end of a battle than at the start. 18 When they surrendered their
weapons in November 1918, it appeared that their rifles, almost without
exception, were of either British or Portuguese origin.
The British adapted far less well than the Germans to local condi-
tions; it is difficult to visualize a British general cutting his own shoes out of
deerskin, as Lettow did. They should have used native soldiers rather than
Europeans and Indians from the beginning. In 1916 their numbers began to
tell, but the very size of the British army hampered its mobility, the organizing
of supplies proving a mounting problem the farther they went. Lettow figured
rightly that he would still have local superiority in Mozambique, and that
while the Germans would be independent of supply dumps, the British would
be increasingly reliant on them to keep their immense quantity of men and
materiel sustained and maintained over the ever-growing distances. All this
made it possible for Lettow to retain the tactical offensive throughout the war,
despite the fact that he was strategically on the defensive.
Four decades later, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania had become independent
states. Von Lettow-Vorbeck survived not only Wil-helm II, but even Hitler,
and almost outlived Adenauer. He had never been a member of the Nazi
party, perhaps because they were not monarchists, perhaps because he
disliked their socialist slogans. In the early 1960s he still pursued his favorite
sport of hunting. He died in Hamburg in 1964. He was ninety-four years old.
THE POSTWAR CRISIS
Following the breakdown of the old order in Central and Eastern Europe and
the disintegration of the Russian, German and Austrian armies, irregular units
began to emerge, to become for several years a factor of some military
importance. There was no lack of recruits; the young officers and soldiers had
been fighting for four years without interruption, it was the only kind of job at
which they were proficient. The survivors of the greatest concentrated mass
slaughter in modern military history had few scruples about shedding more
blood; human lives counted for far less after 1918 than before World War I.
There was plenty of arms and ammunition; all the ingredients existed for
bloody and prolonged civil wars.
Russia was in many respects ideally suited for partisan warfare; guerrillas
were more numerous on the right than on the left, but most frequent were the
nonpolitical, "a-plague-on-both-your-houses" bands. The Bolsheviks would
use partisan tactics from time to time, but neither Lenin nor Trotsky was a
great admirer of this particular form of warfare; they rejected the idea of a
militia,
l 6 l THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (i) : BETWEEN TWO WORLD WARS
even though this concept had figured prominently in their political program
before the revolution. Having seized power, they realized that their need was
for a well-trained, well-organized regular army, not enthusiastic amateurs.
Partisan bands had been of some use in the pre-revolutionary period, but once
the Bolsheviks ruled large parts of Russia, the main task was to maintain their
hold, and this was not the work for partisans. Besides, Bolshevik influence
was strongest in the towns, weakest in the countryside — the party thus
lacking steadfast bases most fit for the launching of guerrilla warfare.
The main areas of partisan warfare were Siberia and the south of Russia.
According to Soviet sources, some hundred to a hundred and forty thousand
guerrillas operated in Admiral Kolchak's rear. 19 The number is almost
unquestionably too high; figures in guerrilla wars are always inflated. Tens of
thousands of partisans did fight the White armies — but many of them fought
the Red Army as well. Local conditions favored partisan warfare: the vast
stretches of forest provided excellent cover. There was no communications net-
work save for the Trans-Siberian railway, which constituted an easy target for
partisans. Kolchak and his Czech allies were holding the railway, but the rest
of Siberia was in a state of anarchy. The Siberian partisans, mostly
smallholders, whose individualism was proverbial throughout Russia, held no
brief for the Bolsheviks, but the outrages and the systematic looting
perpetrated by some of the White partisan units, led by bandits such as
Ungern-Sternberg, Kal-mykov (ataman of the Ussuri Cossacks) and
Semyonov, a Cossack of part Mongol extraction and a Japanese agent,
eventually drove them into the Soviet camp.
The war between the Red and White armies, like all religious and political
wars, was callous, sanguinary and claimed a host of civilian victims. It is
difficult to establish which side was answerable for more bestialities,
particularly since the situation varied from front to front. Insofar as the
irregulars were concerned, the White partisans undoubtedly had the edge. The
American General Graves, an observer in Siberia and a professional soldier not
given to squeamish overstatement, wrote of Kalmykov that he was the "worst
scoundrel I ever saw or heard of and I seriously doubt, if one should go
entirely through the Standard Dictionary, looking for words descriptive of
crime, if a crime could be found that Kalmykov had not committed." 20
Semyonov was a bird of similar feather, while Ungern-Sternberg had received
a blow on his head during the war which seems to have unhinged the mind of
an officer who
had not been too stable in the first place. All three were cavalry officers who
had fought in the Carpathian campaign. 21 If Kolchak was defeated, it was
partly owing to the activities of these savage bands only nominally under his
command.
There were not many Communist partisans outside cities such as Tomsk,
Omsk, Irkutsk and the towns of the Far East.22 The anti-White partisan units
behind Denikin's lines in southern Russia consisted mainly of deserters (the so
called red-green units), and as in Siberia, the Bolsheviks were not too effective
outside the cities. Politically the south was, on the whole, hostile territory from
the Communist point of view: the Ukrainian peasants were strongly
nationalistic; most of the Cossacks in the southeast and the Caucasus, who
constituted almost half of the rural population, were supporters of the old
regime. Among the anti-Bolshevik Cossack irregular units, Shkuro's from the
Kuban (the "wolves") and Grigoriev's band were two to acquire great
notoriety. Shkuro had little to learn from the Kalmykovs and Ungern-
Sternbergs who devastated Siberia; Grigoriev had originally cooperated with
the Bolsheviks but turned against them, heading a mutiny in May 1918 which
almost overthrew Soviet power in the Ukraine. 23 Grigoriev was shot while
negotiating with another major partisan leader, Nestor Makhno, a Ukrainian
anarchist, the most colorful of them all. Makhno came from a poor peasant
family and had spent years in a Tsarist prison; he first made his name as a
resistance leader against the German occupiers of the Ukraine and then, for
about eighteen months, collaborated closely with the Bolsheviks. At its zenith,
in the late autumn of 1919, Makhno's movement numbered between twenty-
five and fifty-five thousand adherents.24 His chief base was his native village of
Giulai Pole in the Ekaterinoslav district. A man of small stature, he made his
motley force of deserters — bona fide anarchists, landless peasants,
adventurers and bandits — into a formidable fighting force. He was perhaps
the greatest guerrilla fighter of the lot, developing techniques of fighting
dependent on swift dispersal and assembly, together with rapid movement by
carts and captured gun carriages which were, when necessary, lifted onto
flatcars and moved by rail. 25 He was a leader of great cunning and many ruses;
on one occasion he dressed his units up as Ukrainian police units, on another
as Red Army battalions. His command was the only truly radical one in the
civil war; the Red Army employed former Tsarist officers, but no one of
middle-class or aristocratic origin could serve as an officer in Makhno's armies.
His soldiers killed the habitual numbers of Jews in their pogroms,
but there were also Jews among his closest collaborators; Grigo-riev, when
visiting him, complained at the presence of Jews in Makhno's camp. Like
many partisan commanders, he was a heavy drinker; at one point his
partisans passed a resolution that orders of the commanders had to be obeyed
only if they were sober when issuing them.26
Makhno was a genuine anarchist, who believed in the abolition of the state;
wherever he went, prisons were destroyed, and the banknotes printed on his
behalf advised that no one would be prosecuted for forging them. His
movement was bound to fail because it was merely regional in character and
could not link up with similar groups in other parts of Russia. In August 1921
Makhno gave up what had become an unequal struggle and with his two
hundred and fifty remaining followers crossed into Roumania. If Grigoriev
was a mere brigand who could switch sides in the civil war without
compunction, Makhno was a political leader, albeit a very confused one. For
some anarchists he was to become a patron saint, whereas the Communists
dismissed him as nothing but a bandit. The truth, as so often, lies somewhere
down the middle, simply demonstrating yet once again that in guerrilla
warfare the distinction between patriotic and revolutionary leader and
marauder is easier to draw in theory than in practice.
Ry 1920, with the execution of Kolchak and the flight of Wran-gel, the
Red Army had at long last defeated the White armies. Partisan warfare was to
continue, however, though on a smaller scale, in various parts of the Soviet
Union. In the eyes of the Soviet leaders these partisans were of course no more
than another brand of plain brigands, to be handled as such — just as the
White generals had treated the Rolsheviks as criminals, just as all governments
through the ages have denied their irregular opponents political motivation
and status. That the anti-Soviet partisans were marauders no one would deny,
but it must equally be allowed that their inspiration was largely political and
social — there could scarcely otherwise have been any accounting for their
mass support. Antonov for one, the leader of the Tambov guerrillas, had been
jailed for years by the Tsarists for acts of violence during the 1905 revolution.
He called himself a social revolutionary and with the backing of angry peas-
ants first set up a partisan band in 1919. Ry early 1921 he had as many as
twenty thousand volunteers, almost exclusively peasants; the land of some
had been taken away to establish state farms, others had been hard hit by the
requisitions carried out by order of Communist officials. 27 The political
demands of the insurgent peas-
ants were radical ("The land to the toiling peasants!"). In suppressing this
counterrevolutionary insurrection the Bolsheviks behaved as the White
armies had done; houses and farms were burned, hostages were taken and
sometimes executed. Antonov achieved great popularity because his force, as
a matter of principle, plundered only state farms while the Red Army lived off
requisitions from the peasants, but his movement was defeated in late 1921; it
was a purely regional uprising that could not hold out against vastly superior
regular forces. The Soviet authorities did not, however, rely entirely on
military repression and for a time discontinued the nationalization of land,
reduced requisitioning to a minimum and introduced the more liberal New
Economic Policy (NEP). Thus peasant riots gradually abated; fighting of one
sort or another had continued for seven years, and the peasants were only too
happy to work the land again.
The one exception was Central Asia, where guerrilla warfare continued up
to the early 1930s. The Basmatchi, the Soviets' main opponents, were made up
of partisan detachments, almost always on horseback. They were elusive and,
in the words of a Soviet eyewitness, often dissolved in the neighboring villages
"literally before the eyes of our troops, who would immediately undertake a
general search of the villages but without any result." 28 According to Soviet
sources, the Basmatchi, who first appeared in the Fergana valley, the rich
center of cotton plantations, and subsequently spread to other parts of Central
Asia, were professional bandits who had made common cause with the local
reactionaries, the Beys and the Mullahs. (The origin of the term Basmatchi is
not clear; it has been variously translated as "raider," "robber," and "down-
trodden.")29 Again, there is no denying that there were robbers among the
Basmatchi, if perhaps more at the start than in the later years. But, again,
banditry would hardly explain the widespread support they enjoyed among
the local population, making it that much more difficult for the Soviet
authorities to destroy them. The marauders' popularity and strength lay in
their constituting simultaneously a movement of national resistance against
the Russians who had, to put it mildly, shown little tact in their dealings with
the natives. By the same token, Basmatchestvo was also a social movement,
reflecting peasant protest against requisitioning and collectivization. The
Basmatchi were weakened by internal divisions; the Uzbeks did not cooperate
with the Kirghiz, and the Turkmens would not collaborate with either. For a
short while in 1921-1922 it appeared that all the bands might unite under the
leadership of the
Turkish leader, Enver Pasha, who had cooperated with the Soviet government
but then switched his political allegiances to the Pan-turks of Central Asia. He
failed, however, in his attempt to consolidate all these peoples and tribes and
was killed in a skirmish with Soviet forces in August 1922. Enver was no
outstanding partisan leader; he had been accustomed to giving orders to
armies and found it hard to adjust himself to commanding bodies of only
three thousand men.
The influence of the Basmatchi dwindled as the Soviet authorities rescinded
some of the harshest abuses of power and as they made religious and
economic concessions to the local populations. Nevertheless raids continued
in the Samarkand region up to 1924 and aircraft and tanks had to be used
against the insurgents. There was resistance in the Fergana valley as late as
1926, and small raids from across the Iranian and Afghan borders over which
the Basmatchi had escaped were reported even in the 1930s. The Soviet
border was long, complicated to control, and whenever the Basmatchi crossed
into Soviet territory they apparently had no problem hiding among
sympathizers. They had ceased to be a real military and political menace
much earlier, but it is interesting that even a totalitarian state with its
unlimited means of repression needed almost a decade to stamp out the last
remnants of armed resistance.
Soviet military thinkers were very much preoccupied during the 1920s and
1930s with topics such as the future of tanks, artillery, aircraft, and the
character of a future war in general. They were not concerned with the
prospects of partisan warfare. At best, insofar as they thought in terms of it at
all, their attitude was ambivalent. Nevertheless, a strong claim could be made
for regarding Marshal Tukhachevski as one of the originators of the theory of
modern counterinsurgency. In a series of articles published in 1926, 3 0 he
reveals with great candor the difficulties Soviet power was facing in its
struggle with counterrevolutionary bands in European as well as in Asian
Russia; a rebellion, he points out, was not necessarily crushed when the band
had been destroyed, military measures had to be closely linked with political
and economic steps, and even then success would not necessarily be
immediate. Tukhachevski argued that surrounding guerrillas was time- and
manpower-consuming and very often ineffective. His definition of "national
banditry" is of interest — a "peasant rebellion . . . organized by the kulaks
which attracts the poor elements in the villages."31
181 ™E TWENTIETH CENTURY (i) : BETWEEN TWO WORLD WARS
THE FREIKORPS
Following the dissolution of the German army after the armistice in

November 1918, some hundred and twenty Freikorps (free corps) came into
being, numbering altogether about two hundred and fifty thousand men.
They varied in their status, size, function and political orientation. Some were
more or less legal, that is, recognized both by the Allies and the German
government of the day, others were semilegal, being recognized only by the
German government, while yet others were altogether illegal. Some went on
fighting, with short interruptions, for several years, others existed for a few
days only. Some had the strength of several divisions, whereas the Freikorps
Gross Thuringen consisted of one lieutenant and thirty-two soldiers. 32 The
strength of the average free corps was that of a battalion or a brigade, and
they were frequently called after their commander (Ehrhardt, Rossbach, von
Loewenfeld). A very few were republican in orientation, but the great
majority were right wing, or even semi-Fascist; the Raltikum Freikorps was
the first to display the swastika on its helmets. The Social Democratic
government tolerated some of the Freikorps because it needed military units
both against external enemies who had penetrated German territory — the
Poles in the east — and against the Spartacists who tried to overthrow the
Social Democratic government. The government would have preferred a
fighting force of reliable republicans, but there had been few, if any,
republican officers in the imperial army, and if the Bolsheviks had a few
months to forge a new one, the German Social Democrats had only a few
days.
Some Freikorps joined forces with the White armies against the Bolsheviks,
others provided cover for the retreating German armies from the east, others
again served as border police, or fought against Communist paramilitary
units inside Germany. Many free corps had official recruitment offices in the
major towns, this leading to frequent abuses, such as new recruits enlisting in
several units at one and the same time. The general atmosphere reminded ob-
servers of Wallenstein and the age of the Thirty Years' War. 33 The activities
described so far would have been those normal to regular army units, the
police or border guards. But in addition, there were operations of traditional
guerrilla character — in Upper Silesia against Polish units, in Carinthia
against the Yugoslavs, in the Ruhr
in 1923 against the French occupiers, and in the Rhineland against the local
separatists.
The fighting in Upper Silesia was the heaviest and in many ways the most
confused because it was carried out by partisan units on both sides; on the
German side the Bavarian "Oberland" Freikorps was prominently involved,
while the Poles were led by Adalbert Wojciech Korfanty, a former member of
the German Reichstag, a gifted and very ambitious politician and
propagandist, who later became deputy prime minister in Poland. 34 The Allied
statesmen had left the fate of Upper Silesia wide open and Korfanty, with the
discreet help of the Polish government, tried to maneuver as many faits
accomplis as possible before a plebiscite took place. He had earlier successfully
engineered an insurrection in Poznan, but he found the going in Silesia much
rougher. The Poles were a minority except in some mining and rural districts;
besides, not all Polish-speaking Silesians supported the Polish cause. The
German irregulars, while badly equipped, were more numerous, and to make
matters still worse for him, coordination between Korfanty and his officers
was deficient. Both sides committed acts of senseless terror. The Germans
assassinated a senior French officer, the Poles killed some forty Italian soldiers
who were to supervise the plebiscite. But whereas the French supported the
Poles anyway, the Italians and the British, who had been neutral in the
dispute, were incensed by the Polish attacks. Since the Polish government very
much depended on Allied goodwill, it had to dissociate itself eventually from
Korfanty. Meanwhile, in May 1921, a major battle took place at Annaberg in
which the Poles were routed. Some Polish officers wanted to fight on, but
Korfanty accepted an armistice and later a political decision which gave
Poland the more important part of the Upper Silesian coal mines. Altogether,
some sixty thousand Poles and thirty thousand Germans were involved in the
fighting in Upper Silesia.35 It was to a large extent war by proxy; Germany still
had a regular army but it could not be used for fear of French intervention. For
different reasons, Poland could not employ its new armed forces. Thus,
military operations in Upper Silesia on both sides turned into partisan warfare,
with the local population the principal victim.
In Carinthia, operations were on a more restricted scale. German-speaking
peasants organized themselves into small units but the conflict was no less
bitter, because it was waged between neighbors, dividing little villages and
even hamlets into two armed camps. The struggle against the French
occupation of the Ruhr had
183 ™E TWENTIETH CENTURY (i) : BETWEEN TWO WORLD WARS
the support of all German political parties. It took for the most part the form
of passive resistance, which still did not inhibit the occasional terrorist act,
such as the mining of the railway line between Duisburg and Diisseldorf. This
sabotage was organized by Albert Leo Schlageter, an early member of the
Nazi party who had fought with the Freikorps in Upper Silesia. Apprehended
by the French, he was executed in May 1923, thus becoming the earliest
martyr of Hitler's Third Reich, a "fighter for national liberation who had paid
the supreme penalty for his patriotic idealism."
The free corps consisted chiefly of former officers and soldiers of the
Imperial army (some Freikorps consisted entirely of young officers), but
students who had been too young to fight in the Great War also volunteered.
The veterans were quite familiar with the tactics of fighting in the open
country, but they were not accustomed to street battles and they learned only
by trial and error the technique of crowd control. 36 The great majority of the
soldiers of the Freikorps were right-wing activists, many of them becoming
even more radical in their opposition to the Weimar Republic as the fighting
continued. Rut traditional labels are of only limited help in explaining the
Freikorps phenomenon. Bitterly opposed though they were to Communism,
they hated the Poles and the French even more; not a few of them were
enthusiastic advocates of a German-Soviet military alliance against Poland
and the West. The spirit of Tauroggen, the anti-Napoleonic convention of 1813,
was again conjured up. There are many illustrations of the anti-bourgeois and
anticapitalist spirit prevailing in these units. They despised the "fat, cowardly
bourgeois" and all he stood for; and they made it known, time and time again,
that they had not the slightest wish to fight for the preservation of this social
order. They had far more respect for their enemies, the Communists, and the
Communists tried hard to attract members of the free corps to their ranks.
Karl Radek devoted a friendly essay to the memory of Schlageter. Schlageter
and his comrades were, so he wrote, men of goodwill, confused or misguided
nationalists, who could be swayed either way. They were uprooted men,
radicals who shared with the Communists the militancy, the desire to
overthrow the political system. "I cannot go home and start the old life," one of
them wrote later, "my Germany is where the Verey lights illuminate the sky,
where the time of day is estimated according to the strength of the artillery
barrage. It ends where the train for Cologne departs."37
The radicalism of the Freikorps also found expression in their way of life.
Former colonels served under the command of lieuten-
ants, and there was equal pay for all, from general to the youngest recruit. 38
There was little marauding in these campaigns in comparison with other
guerrilla wars. Individual banditry was not in the Prussian tradition, it was
detrimental to discipline; the state, the collective, was entitled to maraud on a
grand scale, but not the individual. Many members of the free corps joined the
Reichswehr in later years. Many became supporters of the Nazi party, but
only a few rose to its top leadership. There was a tendency in the Third Reich
to play down, not so much the historical role of the Freikorps in general, but
that of those who had taken a leading part in them. Some former Freikorps
men were killed in the Nazi purge of June 1934, others deviated from the
Nazi cause in time and were imprisoned or executed. The volunteers of the
Freikorps fared a little better under Hitler than the Old Bolsheviks under
Stalin, but not by very much.
THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR AND REVOLUTION: REVOLT

IN THE DESERT
The war years were arid insofar as the development of guerrilla doctrine is
concerned. The only original contribution was made by T. E. Lawrence in an
essay published in the Encyclopaedia Britan-nica, a curious mixture of
brilliant insights, of stating the obvious, and of arrant nonsense. It is marred
by pretentious neologisms ("bionomics," "diathetic"), and deliberately
paradoxical formulations which do not survive critical analysis. ("The Turkish
army was an accident, not a target." "In irregular war, if two men are together
one is being wasted.") Lawrence believed guerrilla warfare could be proved an
exact science, granted certain factors and if pursued along certain lines. These
factors are an unassailable base, a regular army of limited strength that has to
control a wide territory, and a sympathetic population. The guerrillas,
Lawrence argued, must have speed and endurance and be independent of
lines of supply. They also need the technical equipment to destroy or paralyze
the enemy's supply lines and communications:
In fifty words: granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the
enemy), time, and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness),
victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end
decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in
vain.39
17° GUERRILLA WARFARE
Lawrence maintained that the Turks would have needed six hundred
thousand men to control the Arabian peninsula, but as they had only a
hundred thousand they were bound to fail. (They had, in fact, far fewer.) They
were low, besides, on war materiel, consequently "the death of a Turkish
bridge or rail, machine or gun, or high explosive was more profitable than the
death of a Turk." The enemy soldier should never be given a target; many
Turks on the Arab front "had no chance all the war to fire a shot." To achieve
this, the guerrilla needed infallible intelligence.
The enemy, again in terms of Lawrence's thesis, should be encouraged to
stay in harmless places in the largest numbers. Propaganda is important: "the
printing press in the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern
commander." Range is more to strategy than force, "the invention of bully beef
has modified land war more profoundly than the invention of gunpowder."
Guerrilla tactics should be what they had been in the Arab peninsula, "tip and
run, not pushes but strokes." The smallest force is used to reach the farthest
place in the quickest time. Lawrence's concept of guerrilla warfare was based
entirely on his own experience in Arabia; he seems not to have been aware of
the lessons of guerrilla warfare elsewhere, let alone of the existing literature on
the subject. His generalizations are of limited worth only, valid in certain
circumstances, inapplicable in others. Nor should one look for consistency in
his writings. Thus, in a letter to Wavell he noted that if the Turks had mounted
machine guns on their touring cars and patrolled the desert, they would have
put a stop to the Arab camel parties and so to the whole rebellion. "It wouldn't
have cost them twenty men or £20,000. . . . They didn't think hard enough."
This observation is certainly at variance with his statement that the Turks
would have needed six hundred thousand men to control the peninsula. The
Turks, to put it somewhat crudely, lost out not because of any "algebraical
factors," but because they did not have armored cars. Another time he argued
that bombing tribes was ineffective, that guerrilla tactics were a complete
muffing of air force, a statement of doubtful validity with regard to desert
warfare. He wrote that guerrilla war was essentially a moral contest and that
counterpropa-ganda was never effective when conducted on the conservative
side. But in the same breath he declared that Turkish intelligence was
miserable, that one well-informed traitor could spoil a national rising, and that
the Turks had failed because they did not go to the effort of buying a few venal
men.
Lawrence succeeded on a modest scale because, like Lettow-
Vorbeck, he understood that he had to go for the main weaknesses of the
enemy, and that warfare had to be adapted to local conditions, human as well
as geographical. Compared with Lettow's precarious position in East Africa,
his situation was much more advantageous; he had money, almost unlimited
supplies, and there was a separatist movement that could be mobilized
against the enemy. The Turkish army in Arabia was overextended and for
that reason Lawrence's "rapier play" could have pointed thrust. But to argue,
as he later did, that this approach was generally applicable and preferable to
Allenby's "wood-chopping tactics" was simply not true; rapier play and
evading battle would not have worked in Palestine, let alone in the European
theaters of war against heavy army concentrations. Lawrence's ideas were
rejected at the time for the wrong reasons by orthodox military thinkers.
Liddell Hart, on the other hand, popularized his views because they fitted in
so well with his own concept of the strategy of the indirect approach. He lived
to regret his enthusiasm. In essence, however, Lawrence's theories gained
their generally wide currency and appeal because he was a romantic figure
and had little, if any, competition. The few other contemporary practitioners
of the art of guerrilla warfare were not literary men or, as already remarked,
simply did not bother to put down their experiences in writing. If they did,
they refrained from engaging in generalizations.
THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR AND REVOLUTION: LENIN,

TROTSKY AND THE PARTISANS
While Lawrence in later years came to be regarded as the great guerrilla

theoretician in the West, Lenin was largely, and by most as ignorantly, held as
its chief proponent in the East. More than any other major revolutionaries of
his generation, Lenin studied military strategy and organization and, of
course, the art of revolution. But although he had much of account to say
about revolutionary situations and the proper tactics to be employed in each,
he certainly offered no new and startling advice on guerrilla warfare. He was
more favorably inclined toward it than other radical socialists, but that is
saying very little indeed. In the many volumes of his published works there is
just one short article on the subject and some occasional references in 1905-
1906 and in 1918-1919. Whatever interest he had in it at all was first aroused
by the Moscow
insurrection in December 1905, and the armed rebellions in Latvia, Poland

and in other parts of the Russian Empire during the revolution of the same
year. He noted that the Moscow experience had shown that, pace Engels,
urban insurgency was not altogether obsolete; Moscow had inaugurated new
barricade tactics, a fact which had been observed, incidentally, by Kautsky
even before Lenin.40 Unfortunately there had not been enough volunteer
fighters, and their arms had been inadequate. Lenin thought that the
experience had nevertheless been positive and that its lessons should be
spread among the masses. One month later, in September 1906, Lenin directly
addressed himself to a consideration of what guerrilla warfare was, in what
conditions it could be effective, and what the correct attitude of a
revolutionary should be toward a question which "greatly interests our party
and the mass of the workers."41 Lenin defended the guerrillas against their
Social Democratic critics who invoked — vainly in his view — the authority of
Marx and Engels. Blanquism and old-style Russian terrorism, which had been
denounced by Marx and Engels, had been futile because it was an affair of a
few intellectual conspirators. Since then the situation had changed. "Today, as
a general rule, guerrilla warfare is waged by the worker combatant, or simply
by the unemployed worker." (This statement was not altogether accurate; in
Latvia the peasants, not the workers, had been in the forefront of guerrilla
warfare, and Moscow apart, Latvia had been the main focus of the
insurrection.) Thus, reasoned Lenin, guerrilla warfare had to receive the
Bolsheviks' blessing; it was an "inevitable form of struggle at a time when the
mass movement had actually reached the point of an uprising and when fairly
large intervals occur between the big 'engagements' in the civil war." 42 It was
not true, as Plekhanov and others had argued, that guerrilla warfare demor-
alized the revolutionary avant-garde, only the senseless methods of
unorganized, irregular bands had that effect. The avant-garde party had to
direct the masses not alone in the major battles of the revolution but also in the
lesser encounters. There was no gainsaying that guerrilla warfare brought the
class-conscious proletarians into close contact with "degraded, drunken riff-
raff." But this meant only that the Bolsheviks should not regard it as the sole,
or even as the chief instrument of struggle, or ever as anything but
subordinate to other methods. It did not mean that guerrilla warfare should be
left to the riffraff. Lenin refrained, expressis verbis, from prescribing "from our
armchair" what precise part guerrilla warfare should play in the general
course of the civil war in Russia.43 He did once, but once
only (in 1906) claim that partisan warfare in combination with uninterrupted
strikes, attacks and street fighting throughout the country would effectively
exhaust the enemy. No government could withstand such a struggle in the
long run, it was bound to paralyze industry, demoralize the bureaucracy and
the army and create discontent among the people.44
This was the sum total of Lenin's prerevolutionary dicta on guerrilla
warfare. The insurrection of December 1905, he thought, had demonstrated
that armed uprisings could be victorious even when pitted against modern
military techniques and organization. But guerrilla warfare was only one of
the tools for the revolutionary, and not the most important one. Between 1906
and the revolution of 1917 Lenin did not refer to the subject again, apart from
welcoming the Irish rebellion of 1916, and in his polemics against Rosa
Luxemburg's thesis that national wars were no longer possible. Lenin felt that
such wars were still possible in Europe and inevitable in colonies and
semicolonies.45 On a very few occasions he pointed to the revolutionary
potential of the peoples of the East without, however, elaborating. But
whereas Lenin sedulously studied Clausewitz and made copious notes which
were published posthumously, even the most diligent guerrilla enthusiasts
have been unable to discover any further references to guerrilla warfare up to
and including the revolution.46 In 1917 the main task facing the Bolsheviks
was to win over as many units of the Tsarist army as possible and to
transform, with the help of ex-Tsarist officers, the old army into an instrument
of Soviet power. Thus, in the words of a leading historian:
Guerrilla war and military freebooting held little appeal for Lenin, squeezed dry
of any drop of romanticism. . . . The republic could not defend itself with
untrained mobs or be held together by wild-eyed guerrillas.47
Lenin frequently referred to partisanshchina (guerrillaism) after 1917, but

always in a derogatory vein. "One should shun partisanshchina like fire," he
wrote, "the arbitrary operations of individual detachments, the disobedience
vis-a-vis the central power. It leads to ruin." 48 Or again in July 1919 in an
appeal to intensify the struggle against Denikin:
The partisan spirit, its traces and remnants, have caused our army more
suffering, defeats and catastrophes, more losses in life and material than all the
betrayals by [former Tsarist] military experts.49
What the Red Army needed above all was iron discipline and central
control; guerrilla warfare was at best ineffective in this struggle. Perhaps there
had been a justification for it in the first difficult weeks and months while the
Red Army was being born, but that once achieved, guerrillaism had to be
stamped out "with an iron fist." Trotsky, the architect and first commander of
the Red Army, entirely agreed with Lenin; those who obstructed the Leninist
approach were Voroshilov, and, to a certain degree, Stalin. Rut this dispute
mainly reflected some of the Old Bolsheviks' resentment of military specialists
who had been taken over from the Tsarist army. The Old Bolsheviks wanted a
party committee to run military operations, whereas Lenin opposed
misplaced "collegial-ity"; decisions had to be taken by one man, the
commander.50
The debate about a specific Soviet military doctrine much exercised the
Bolshevik experts in the early post-revolutionary period. Some of them
contended that the Red Army should launch partisan actions and deep-
penetration raids in the enemy rear. Trotsky, in reply, noted that these tactics
had in fact been used first by the White armies:
The first big raid was made by Mamontov [a general in Denikin's army]. Petliura
[the Ukrainian nationalist] was the leader of partisan formations . . . the
operations of Ungern's and Makhno's detachments — these degenerate, bandit
outgrowths of the civil war — were distinguished by great maneuverability.
What conclusion follows from this? It follows that maneuverability is not
peculiar to a revolutionary army but to civil war as such.51
Guerrilla warfare, as Trotsky said on another occasion, was the "truly peasant
form of war," but this was not meant as a compliment, for he added,
"Similarly in religion the peasantry is unable to go beyond the sect" — a
generalization which will hardly be underwritten by historians.52 Guerrilla
war, as he saw it, was a primitive form of warfare, inevitable perhaps in some
cases, but devoid of any specific revolutionary character. His fairest
assessment of the value of guerrilla warfare was made in a speech in 1923:
The guerrilla movement had been a necessary and adequate weapon in the early
phase of the civil war. The revolution could not as yet put compact armed masses
into the field, it had to depend on small independent bodies of troops. This kind
of warfare demanded self-sacri-
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (i): BETWEEN TWO WORLD WARS
fice, initiative and independence. But as the war grew in scope it needed proper
organization and discipline and the guerrilla movement then began to turn its
negative pole to the revolution.53
Stalin had been one of the early "guerrillaists" in the Red Army and when the
civil war was over he stressed in a speech the importance of the rear in the
fight against the White generals. But what has been interpreted by some
writers as a manifesto of guerrillaism turns out to be, on closer scanning,
nothing more than a reference to the "tacit sympathy, which nobody hears or
sees" — scarcely a characteristic of the armed struggle.54 Stalin, the
archdisciplinarian, forever suspicious of independent initiative, the leader
who wanted to concentrate all decisions in his own person, was bound to
regard partisan warfare with disfavor — except in extremis, and under the
close supervision of the party and the secret police. When war broke out in
1941, great efforts had been made to strengthen Soviet artillery, tank units,
the air force and other parts of the regular army. No such preparations had
been made for partisan warfare.
In the light of these facts, the emergence of a cult depicting Lenin and
Trotsky as great guerrilla strategists is difficult to understand and impossible
to justify. Mao Tse-tung did not join this chorus; in his speeches and writings
he did not attribute any special significance to the lessons of the Russian Civil
War. Some of the blame for the cult rests with Western military historians, and
theorists who "discovered" Lenin in this context in the 1950s and 1960s. In
their search for the key to the mysteries of revolutionary warfare, they failed
to discriminate between the various modes of revolutionary struggle in
different ages, countries and societies. For both ideological and practical
considerations, the Soviet approach to guerrilla war was as ambivalent as the
Tsarist attitude. While not entirely ruling out its applicability in certain
extreme situations, a political regime such as the Soviet Union, based on
centralized control, order and discipline, could not tolerate an inherently
disorderly system of warfare based on lack of central control and on
individual enterprise. Furthermore, Soviet military thinking has always been
oriented towards the concept of masses and large numbers, not the feats of
small groups of intrepid men. Bolshevism derived some of its inspiration from
the Jacobins, and the reliance on mass armies was part of this inheritance. In
the 1920s and 1930s books on the civil war partisans were not uncommon,
and there were films dedicated to the exploits of Shchors and Chapayev. But
the patron of guerrilla warfare in the Soviet Union
between the two world wars was not the army, but the secret services.55
Guerrilla warfare was interpreted as one specific aspect of intelligence and
sabotage work behind enemy lines, to be carried out by highly trained
individuals, or very small teams. The idea of a people's war on guerrilla lines
was rejected as unfeasible not for the Soviet Union alone, but for the advanced
capitalist countries as well; it was sporadically entertained as one of the forms
the revolutionary struggle might nonetheless take in Asia, Africa and Latin
America.
Thus, as an instance of this occasionally qualifying attitude, the sixth
Congress of the Comintern (1928) recommended that, "the situation
permitting," Communists should proclaim slogans calling for national-
revolutionary uprisings and the immediate formation of national-
revolutionary guerrilla units. But the situation did not permit, the third
(radical) period of the Communist International was followed by the
conciliatory popular front era, and save for the Chinese Communists, acting
quite independently of Moscow, no one heeded the Comintern resolution of
1928. Manuals were published and courses instituted in the twenties and
thirties for tutoring and training in conspiratorial work and insurgency
technique in major cities, but not one on guerrilla warfare.
Of the twelve chapters in a Soviet guide to insurrection published between
the two world wars only one, the very last, deals with "revolutionary guerrilla
methods."56 It was written by a young, "friendly, unassuming Indochinese
revolutionary" named Ho Chi Minh. Ho argued that in the overall pattern of
the class struggle guerrilla movements play the role of an auxiliary factor; they
cannot of themselves achieve historic objectives, but can only contribute to the
solution provided by another force — the proletariat. The peasant movement,
however large, could not count on any conclusive success if the working class
did not move. Ho predicted that Soviet power would initially establish itself in
China in some province or group of provinces possessing a great industrial or
commercial center such as Kwangtung, Hupeh or Hunan — not in Kansu or
Kweichow.57 Subsequent events in China and Indochina did not bear out these
predictions; the guerrilla movement was not just an auxiliary factor, the
working class did not move and Soviet power established itself far from the
industrial centers. It has been suggested that Ho at the time may have known
better but that he had to pay lip service to the collective wisdom of the
Comintern. It is far more likely, however, that he changed his views only later,
when he realized that Asian revolutionaries could not possibly wait
for a working-class initiative and that the peasants would be the main force in
the Asian revolution. Ho's essay included some valid observations; conditions
for guerrilla warfare varied from country to country; the strength of the
guerrilla was not in defense (because they were not strong enough for
defensive action); guerrillas had to avoid decisive encounters if the
circumstances and the balance of forces were not in their favor. But these
insights had been common knowledge for centuries and there was nothing
specifically Marxist-Leninist about them. Ho's specific predictions and
guidelines were quite wrong; but like Lenin and Mao, he was an opportunist
of genius. He was quick to recognize that if the workers were too weak or
would not fight, peasant movements led by intellectuals constituted a
promising alternative. In 1928 there was only one young Chinese leader who
dissented from the collective Leninist wisdom that "the city inevitably leads
the village"; but even Mao did not at the time advocate guerrilla warfare.
There were a few articles in 1937-1940 in Soviet periodicals about Mao's
experience in northern China, but there is no evidence that Soviet military
leaders took notice.58 Mao's famous treatise on guerrilla warfare was
published in Russia only in 1952 as far as can be ascertained, years after it
had first been translated into English. Guerrilla warfare was peasant warfare,
and the Bolsheviks were, after all, primarily a working-class party.
CONNOLLY AND THE PROBLEM OF STREET FIGHTING
Among the few socialist thinkers of the early twentieth century who gave
more than passing thought to military affairs was that highly unorthodox Irish
Catholic revolutionary, James Connolly. Analyzing the lessons of the Russian
revolution of 1905 as they might apply to his native country, he wrote that
the tactics of the Moscow insurgents had been basically right; but for their
miserable equipment, they would have seized the army's field guns. The
rising was doomed because there were no simultaneous uprisings in other
Russian cities and the peasantry had been hostile. But Moscow had shown
that a well-defended line of houses was a position of strength. This surely had
some important implications in relation to the Irish struggle. Ireland, Connolly
acknowledged, was no ideal guerrilla country in the traditional sense, it had
no mountainous passes or glens. But
a city is a huge mass of passes or glens formed by streets and lanes. Every
difficulty that exists for the operations of regular troops in mountains is
multiplied a hundred fold in a city. And the difficulty of the commissariat which
is likely to be insuperable to an irregular or popular force taking to the
mountains, is solved for them by the sympathies of the populace when they take
to the streets.59
Connolly's observations, while superficially plausible, were grounded, in fact,

on the old fallacies of nineteenth-century barricade fighting. Street fighting
was admittedly difficult for regular troops, especially if they were untrained
for this purpose and if the population were hostile. But a frontal collision
constituted the very antithesis of guerrilla warfare. An insurgency such as
Connolly envisaged would either lead within a few hours to victory or, more
likely, to defeat, as it did in Dublin in 1916. A later generation of Irish
insurgents, having digested the lesson, did not opt for street fighting. Looked
at in retrospect, the Moscow rising of 1905 provided fresh hope for some
revolutionaries, but far from being a panacea, it could well result in failure
and ruin.
IRA
The history of the Irish struggle for independence from the time of vVolfe
Tone's "United Irishmen" until the Easter Rising of 1916 is a main of abortive
conspiracies and defeats. Ireland was indeed, as Connolly had recognized,
bad guerrilla country and the Irish insurgents were ill prepared to conduct
that kind of fighting. Britannia still ruled the waves and could easily prevent
arms reaching Ire-and from the United States and the Continent. The Fenians
were nternally split and they could not keep a secret; forthcoming oper-itions
were widely discussed. The British secret service had effec-ively penetrated
the ranks of the Irish nationalists; one of its igents operated for almost a
quarter of a century in the leading councils of the American Clan-na-Gael.60
Last but not least, the dergy, however patriotically inclined, did not support
military ac-ion; as Bishop Moriarity of Kerry said of the Fenians: "Hell is not
lot enough nor Eternity long enough to punish such miscreants."
In the 1860s the Fenians enlisted several American officers of rish extraction
who had gathered guerrilla experience in the Vmerican Civil War.
Conspicuous among them was a Captain
194 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (i): BETWEEN TWO WORLD WARS IS
McCafferty who had been one of Mosby's rangers. According to a colleague,

he was essentially a man of action, who thought, quite mistakenly, that
insurgent cavalry on the American pattern could achieve a great deal in Irish
conditions:
He began by saying, "I believe in partisan warfare". Probably only O'Reilly and
one or two more knew what the word "partisan" meant, but if he had said
"guerrilla" warfare they would have understood him.81
McCafferty was to be in charge of the attack on Chester Castle in the

uprising of 1867, but as so often in the history of Irish rebellions, either the
British were forewarned or the Irish failed to gather in time for the operation.
Later on McCafferty made an even more daring suggestion — the kidnapping
of the Prince of Wales — but this scheme the Fenian leaders rejected.
It was only during World War I and its aftermath that large-scale armed
struggle in Ireland became a reality. As Wolfe Tone had noted one hundred
years earlier: "England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity."
The Easter Rising of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood was quickly and
ruthlessly suppressed by the British armed forces, and fifteen of its
ringleaders were executed. The Irish leaders had given up the old idea of
guerrilla war in favor of an urban insurrection. But an urban insurrection
could only succeed if it was not confined to one town, although in this case its
indubitably poor preparation was not the determining factor; it is virtually
certain that the rising would have failed even if it had received more
widespread support. It should have been clear that for political reasons
Ireland's opportunity would come only after the war; revolt at that particular
time could have had a chance only if the British army had been in an
advanced state of disintegration — which it was not.82
But if the Easter Rising of 1916 was a crushing defeat, it still gave fresh
impetus to the nationalist movement; it helped to mobilize a whole new
generation of activists to the Irish cause. The blood of the martyrs had not
been shed in vain.63 By war's end it was obvious that Ireland would attain self-
government, the only question now being how soon and on what conditions.
In the December 1918 elections the Sinn Fein Republicans emerged as the
strongest party by far; in January 1919 they convened the first Dail (parlia-
ment). Independence, however, was still not at hand and was to come only
after three more years of bitter .fighting.
l 8 l THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (i): BETWEEN TWO WORLD WARS
Outstanding among the leaders of the Irish Volunteers (later the IRA) was
Michael Collins, then in his late twenties. Intellectually a self-made man and a
military amateur, Collins provided the very qualities which the Irish rebels
had palpably lacked in the past, including an appreciation of the paramount
need for strict organizational control and secrecy. As head of intelligence and
later as chief of staff, he masterminded a strategy of revolutionary terror
directed above all against the "G" (intelligence) branch of the British police in
Ireland and their informers. Some hundred and twenty policemen were killed
and almost two hundred injured in these attacks in 1919-1920; other victims
included "collaborators" with the British such as judges and civil servants. In a
venturesome raid in April 1919 Collins's men seized all the secret files of the
Special Branch in Dublin. British intelligence, which Collins regarded as the
single most dangerous enemy, was effectively paralyzed.64
Throughout 1920 the IRA continued its campaign of terror, its ambushes
and raids against police barracks, the assassination of political enemies. It
found it easier to cope with the fifty-thousand-odd British soldiers who had
been concentrated in Ireland than with the Black and Tan volunteers and the
Auxiliaries, many of them former British officers and NCOs. These anti-IRA
irregulars, unlike the army, responded with a campaign of counterterror, mili-
tarily quite effective but politically counterproductive. Indiscriminate
retaliation drove many waverers into the ranks of the IRA.
Outside the urban centers the IRA set up flying columns, but its members
knew little about explosives and their use; they had, as a rule, only one week
of collective training. Their task was to "inflict more casualties on an enemy
force than those it would suffer."65 But in the event, the IRA sustained more
losses than the British in men killed (about six hundred) between January
1919 and July 1921, when a truce came into force. If, according to Collins, the
effective strength of the IRA was three thousand, it had lost almost a quarter
of its men, not counting those injured.
In Ulster, the IRA attacks provoked fighting along sectarian lines and a
Protestant backlash. Thus, when the war ended, the IRA guerrillas, while
appearing all-powerful to the general public, "were in fact almost at the end of
their tether. Losses had been heavy and arms were running dangerously
short."66
The truce did not satisfy the extremists, some of them regarding the
acceptance of the Free State perpetuating the division of Ireland as an act of
betrayal. In the civil war that followed, Michael Collins was to be assassinated
as were many other leading figures,
the wounds still remaining open to this day. The IRA was declared illegal in
the Irish Free State and, although it continued to exist and to engage in small-
scale operations, it was reduced to insignificance for many years to come. It
made the headlines in 1939 when bombs were placed in London and
Coventry. Rut since this new campaign coincided with the outbreak of World
War II, even its publicity value was short-lived and it petered out in the
spring of 1940.
During the war the IRA established contact with Nazi Germany through
Sean Russell, its chief of staff, and Frank Ryan who had fought with the
Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. A radio link between the German
intelligence and the IRA was established; it did not, however, contribute much
to the German war effort.67 The circumstance is of interest only in view of the
subsequent ideological development of the IRA, its official leadership in the
1960s veering sharply to the left.
During its first postwar heyday, from 1919 to 1922, the IRA was the
military arm of a national movement. It was-a genuinely popular little army
— workmen of this and that kind, small farmers, shop assistants, employees.
Their inspiration was fiercely nationalist and sectarian. It received financial
help, as before and after, chiefly from the United States. And if it eventually
achieved some of its objectives, it was not alone because the political
constellation was auspicious, but also because it had had paralyzed enemy
intelligence and created a general climate of lawlessness and fear. Its main
weapon was not partisan warfare but individual assassination. It had few full-
time soldiers; most of its members continued to pursue their regular civilian
work, being mobilized on short notice for a few hours or a few days for special
operations. Specific conditions in Ireland dictated the employment of terrorist
methods rather than guerrilla warfare. It is doubtful whether IRA partisan
bands roaming the countryside would have been able to hold out for very
long; the cities, on the other hand, provided conveniently anonymous cover.
To combat a terrorist organization effectively, the British would have
needed several more divisions. But after a long and costly war public opinion
in Britain would not stand for this. Most people in Britain were sick and tired
of the Irish troubles; some Englishmen would admit that the Irish had been
wronged and those who had no guilt feelings thought that Britain would be
better off without Ireland anyway; they had reaped nothing but ingratitude,
insults, and endless murderous attacks. If the Irish preferred secession to
belonging to a great Commonwealth, they should be given the op-
l 8 l THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (i): BETWEEN TWO WORLD WARS
portunity to go their own way. This, in briefest outline, was the psychological
and political background to the decision granting Ireland independence. The
establishment of the Free State brought the immediate terror to a halt, but, as
the years were to demonstrate, by no means eliminated its sources and failed
to prevent a major revival in Ulster five decades later.
IMRO
Twentieth-century European guerrilla movements were usually separatist in

character and, in view of the geographical dispersal of minorities, this
frequently involved them in a three- or four-cornered conflict. It was one thing
to appeal for a holy struggle against foreign rulers or invaders; it was far
harder to come to terms with neighboring nationalities or minorities who did
not share the same aspirations. Thus, the IRA in its clash with the British after
World War I failed to establish its predominance in the north. And thus
partisan activity in wartime Yugoslavia was hampered by the ethnic
antagonism inside the country, and the Macedonian IMRO, which came into
being in opposition to the Turks, was fighting Greeks and Serbs as well at one
and the same time.
IMRO (the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization) was founded
in the i8gos when Christian villagers in Turkey, inspired by the example of the
Serbs, Bulgars and Greeks, were roused into a striving for their own national
independence. Because they were a small people and since their territorial
claims conflicted not with one country alone, they early on elected to integrate
into Bulgaria. Their struggle against the Turks began with isolated raids from
across the border engineered by Macedonians who had already emigrated to
Bulgaria. But the local population was something less than enthusiastic and it
was only in later years, with the growth of the movement inside Macedonia
itself, that guerrilla warfare became possible. IMRO's motto was "Freedom or
Death," its banner a black flag bearing a crimson skull and cross-bones. It
aimed at a concerted national uprising, which took place on Ilin Den (St. Elias
Day), 2 August 1903. About fifteen thousand Macedonian irregulars fought a
total of forty thousand Turkish soldiers for seven weeks. More than a hundred
Macedonian villages were completely destroyed in the course of this
insurrection and five thousand Macedonians and Turks found their death. A
frontal
assault against the Turks was bound to fail, and if IMRO had hoped that the
Bulgarians or the Russians would come to its assistance, it soon realized that it
had been sadly mistaken. Its guerrilla tactics between 1896 and 1903 had
been more effective; these had been small-scale operations, usually carried out
by two or three volunteers so as to prevent Turkish punitive raids. The
Macedonians had virtually established a state within a state, collecting taxes,
even running their own "revolutionary postal service"; Turkish rule was
confined to big towns such as Salonika — and only in daytime at that. 68
According to Macedonian sources, 4,375 Turkish soldiers had been killed in
132 skirmishes during the guerrilla war prior to Ilin Den — no doubt a grossly
exaggerated estimate.69 IMRO never quite recovered its influence in Thessaly
and Turkish Macedonia after the defeat, which resulted in the migration of
thousands of Macedonians to Bulgaria. Most of IMRO's subsequent operations
took place in Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. The IMR.O insurgents fought bravely,
but their strategy had been at fault, along with its being based on a mistaken
assessment of the international situation.
Initially a genuine movement of national liberation, IMRO degenerated
within the next decade into a gang of hired assassins and a tool of foreign
powers. With the transfer of its activities to Bulgaria it specialized in bank
robberies, drug traffic and extortion, not necessarily for political purposes. It
still, in its declarations, invoked the liberation of Macedonia as the ultimate
aim, but as an outside observer noted in the late 1920s, a full account of its
activities would be to compile a dossier "which would make American
gangsterdom look insignificant."70 Some of the elements of corruption had
been present from the very beginning; patriotic robbery, smuggling and
extreme cruelty had long been part of the tradition — to bury an opponent
alive was by no means considered a particularly vicious way of expressing
one's displeasure. IMRO had engaged from its earliest days in indiscriminate
bomb throwing in Muslim bazaars and mosques. It was commonplace to kill
rivals and enemies within its own ranks. Having no substantial funds and
dependent on the outside for supplies, IMRO solicited, and received, both
money and arms from Rulgaria, Austria (during World War I), and later from
Fascist Italy; at one time there was also some cooperation with the Soviet
Union. But there were usually strings attached; to get the Austrian subsidy,
IMRO undertook military operations against its fellow Slavs, the Serbs, and
this at the time when Serbia was fighting for its very survival. Bulgaria was to
be-
199 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (i) I BETWEEN TWO WORLD WARS
come IMRO's chief protector and paymaster; as a quid pro quo IMRO, in close
cooperation with the Bulgarian police, set about the systematic liquidation of
oppositionist politicians in Sofia and other Bulgarian cities.
IMRO was beset by deep splits; the Mikhailovist faction, in the pay of Italy,
spent far more time and effort in killing the Protogerov-ists than in fighting for
an independent Macedonia. Occasionally IMRO would stage raids into
Yugoslavia from its bases in Bulgaria; according to the official IMRO version,
its headquarters were in Yugoslavia, but its leaders resided in Sofia and it is
not certain whether they ever set foot on Yugoslav soil. Whenever the Yugo-
slavs lodged a diplomatic protest following an IMRO raid from across the
border, the Bulgarians would indignantly deny any such imputation; as far as
they were concerned, IMRO was a partisan army based in Yugoslavia, just as
in later years Fatah was officially located in Israel, not in Lebanon. Such total
dependence on Bulgarian goodwill had its drawbacks, as IMRO discovered to
its detriment when relations between Sofia and Belgrade improved in 1933.
IMRO was no longer needed by the Bulgarians and in July 1934 Mikhailov,
again a fugitive, crossed the border into Turkey looking for political asylum
with the archenemy of his people. Since then the Macedonian issue has
cropped up whenever Bulgaria's relations with Yugoslavia have been at a low
ebb as, for instance, after Tito's defection from the Cominform. But there has
been no revival of IMRO. The tragic history of the Macedonian Revolutionary
Organization is that of a small people which, given the geographical facts of
life and the balance of political power in the region, had no chance of attaining
full national independence. In its attempts to gain support, IMRO became
subservient to alien interests and ultimately it lost its political identity
altogether.
ABD EL-KRIM
The biggest colonial war in the twentieth-century interwar period was fought
in Spanish Morocco, an area which had seen much guerrilla fighting ever
since Roman days. It was led by Abd el-Krim, the chief Qadi of the Melilla
region, a Kabyle who despised the Spanish and hated the French. His slogan
was, "The Rif is poor, we fight to make it rich." Abd el-Krim was an educated
man; he had worked in the civil service, had acted as editor of the Arab
supple-
ment of the leading local Spanish newspaper and at one stage had served as
the first professor of the Berber dialect.
In 1919 Abd el-Krim left Melilla and joined his father in his native
mountain village in order to prepare the rebellion. By the spring of 1921,
following a cold winter and poor harvest, he had concentrated a little army
(harka) of about three thousand men.71 Spanish forces under General Silvestre
were ambushed and annihilated in July 1921, the native police and army
auxiliaries mutinied and a general insurrection ensued. Within a few weeks
the whole of eastern Morocco was in Abd el-Krim's hands. He could have
taken Melilla, the capital, but his men were preoccupied with looting and he
busied himself instead with the establishing of a Berber state, the Rif Emirate.
All in all the Spanish lost more than ten thousand men in the disasters of
1921, and it was to take them five years, countless military setbacks and
domestic crises before, with the help of a hundred and sixty thousand French
soldiers and an even larger army of their own, they were able to subdue the
Rerbers. Abd el-Krim soon acquired the reputation of an inspired guerrilla
strategist. Rut in actual fact, "the disaster was due more to Spanish
demoralization than to Berber prowess."72 The Spanish officers facing Abd el-
Krim (Franco, Sanjorjo, Mola, Queipo de Llano — all of civil war fame) had
little guerrilla experience, and their army was in a state of advanced decay.
General Weyler, the tough old soldier who had seen guerrilla action in Cuba
many years before, bitterly attacked the inefficiency, cowardice and
corruption which had come to light in Morocco. Lyautey and Petain watched
events from the sidelines in French Morocco with a mixture of concern and
Schadenfreude; it was only toward the end of the Rif war that France and
Spain decided to act in unison, the last thing Abd el-Krim would ever have
credited.
Abd el-Krim showed a good grasp of the essentials of guerrilla warfare,
such as mobility, but his tactics were not particularly sophisticated; his
soldiers would launch sneak attacks against enemy outposts and, if these
failed, they would wait until the enemy ran out of food and water. 73
Throughout most of the war the Riffi supply line to Tangiers was kept open.
They received money from German, British and Dutch firms who were
interested in mining concessions, they were assisted by some European
military advisers, and their artillery (including some French 75 mm guns) was
equal, if not superior, to the Spanish. Abd el-Krim was the first guerrilla leader
in history with some aircraft of his own — though there is
some doubt whether any of his planes actually ever took off. The whole
conflict was deeply and increasingly unpopular in Spain where the
abandonistas opposed any further major military effort. As it was, Abd el-
Krim's assumption that time was working for him still almost came true. The
Spanish government tried hard to find a face-saving formula in its
negotiations with him. Had he not insisted on total independence and had he
not attacked the French zone in 1925, it is doubtful whether the two
European governments would have made common cause to dislodge him. In
September 1925, in one last determined offensive, a Spanish force led by
Lieutenant-Colonel Francisco Franco landed at Albucamas, in Abd el-Krim's
rear, and by early 1926 it was obvious that his defeat could no longer be far
distant. He surrendered to the French in May 1926 and was exiled to
Reunion. Released in 1947, he died in 1963.
Looking back in later years, Abd el-Krim blamed his defeat on the
marabouts, the Muslim preachers who, he claimed, had thwarted his plans for
national unity. But Abd el-Krim had done little to counteract them while he
was in a position to do so. He established a theocracy in which everyone was
obliged to pray five times a day. His regime was tyrannical; his men
committed atrocities not only against their European enemies but also against
other tribes. With all his talents as a guerrilla leader, his great enterprise and
energy, Abd el-Krim's ambitions grew beyond any reasonable hope of
fulfillment; in effect, his downfall was caused by his own hubris. When
Spanish Morocco became part of Morocco in 1957, Abd el-Krim was still alive
in his Cairo exile. The year after, his own tribe, the Beni Urriaguel, revolted
against the Moroccan government, but their rebellion was put down by Rabat
with short shrift.
THE PALESTINE REBELLION
Between the two world wars British forces faced armed resistance in various
parts of the empire. But these outbreaks of violence were either short-lived
(Amritsar in 1919, the Moplar [Malabar] rebellion in 1921, Cyprus in 1931),
militarily insignificant (the Burmese rebellion in 1930-1932), or nonviolent in
character, such as Gandhi's Swaraj movement. A British authority noted that
even in the Burmese insurrection, which lasted for eighteen months, a military
police force should have been able to cope with the situation and
would in all probability have nipped it in the bud.74 The army had to be called
in only because the police were not strong enough and lacked experience.
Palestine was the one major blot on an otherwise almost idyllic landscape.
There had been two previous Arab outbreaks in Palestine, albeit on a minor
scale, in 1919 and 1929, directed almost exclusively against the Jews. The
third, far more extensive revolt was directed both against British Mandatory
rule and the Jewish community. Following the rise of Hitler, Jewish
immigration to Palestine had risen by 1935 to over sixty thousand. The
number of Jews was still less than half that of the Arabs, nor was it true, as
some Arab leaders asserted, that the Arabs had suffered economically from
Jewish immigration. Arab resistance was political, or more precisely, national
and religious in character; the fact that it was led by the Mufti (chief religious
dignitary), Haj Amin el-Husseini, was perhaps not altogether accidental. The
Arabs resented the steady influx of foreigners, who, they feared, would one
day make them a minority in their own land and whom they in any case
considered an undesirable element. Arab spokesmen accused the Zionists of
Bolshevism in the 1920s; four decades later they were to be charged with
Fascism. The Zionists had not changed, but intellectual fashions certainly had.
That Palestine's neighbors had attained independence, or were about to gain
it, acted as a spur to the Palestinian Arabs.75
The insurrection began with a general strike and some sporadic acts of
violence. It had been preceded by increased brigandage, some of it political in
nature. The band of Sheikh Izzed Din Kas-sem, pursued by the French, had
infiltrated northern Palestine; Kassem was a religious leader who had
apparently taken to brigandage for patriotic reasons, and became a national
hero. Shot in a clash with the Palestine police, his funeral in Haifa turned into
a great national occasion. Something of glamour had for long attached to
those indulging in brigandage; Abu Gilda's exploits in the 1920s have
remained proverbial to this day. Not that the heroically selfless reputation of
these brigands was always warranted. What is worthy of remark is that some
of them — Abu Durra, Aref Abdul Razek, for instance — took a leading part
in the rebellion.76
Its first phase witnessed small-scale attacks directed chiefly against the
country's rail and road network. The British Mandatory administration lost
control over Palestine's hilly regions (Galilee, Samaria, and part of Judaea)
and this although the guerrillas numbered no more than five thousand at the
time. But the police,
largely composed of Arabs, could not be trusted, and anyway had no orders
to intervene. There were only a few British army units in the country; military
command was, in fact, in the hands of the Royal Air Force, and there was no
officer of general rank. The civil administration dragged its feet for about a
year without taking any drastic action. The Jews, with a few exceptions, did
not engage in counterterror but limited themselves to purely passive
resistance.
As the months went by with no sign of the rebellion abating, the British
government looked for a political solution to the crisis; Jewish immigration
was to be drastically restricted and other measures introduced to allay the
fears of the Arabs. But these conciliatory steps did not go far enough to
placate the Arabs and in November 1937 the rebellion entered a new and
more dangerous phase. By that time the rebel bands numbered some fifteen
thousand members, supplemented by a still larger host of villagers mobilized
as required for special undertakings. The rebel units were mainly con-
centrated in the north but some operated in the Mount Carmel region, in
Samaria and Judaea. The largest unit was commanded by Fawzi Kaukji, also a
fugitive from Syria. The rebel high command was in Damascus, but there was
in actual fact little, if any, coordination between the bands. The Damascus
leaders helped with money and arms, some of which came from Fascist Italy.
On the whole the rebels were skimpily equipped; they had no artillery, no
heavy machine guns, no motorized transport. Later it appeared that British
and Jewish accounts about the quantity and quality of Arab equipment had
been considerably exaggerated; the standard weapon of the rebels was the old
(World War I) Turkish rifle and they used bombs of a primitive kind. 77 The
insurgents would focus their attacks with some effect against highroads, and
railway and small Jewish settlements; they would refrain from clashes with
the army or police strongpoints ("Tegart fortresses") in Arab territory. Part of
the supplies and the money needed by the rebels was collected through taxes
imposed on the not always willing villagers. The gang leaders and their
followers engaged frequently in settling old personal accounts and tribal
feuds. More Arabs were killed at the hands of Arabs than British and Jews put
together.
During the summer of 1938 the rebellion spread from the hilly regions
throughout the country. "By October 1938 a large part of Palestine was
physically under the control of the rebels, and almost the entire Arab
population was either giving active support to, or was dominated by fear of,
the rebels."78 As a result, substantial British army units were dispatched to the
country and in October of
that year the army was officially made responsible for the maintenance of
public order. It lacked counterguerrilla experience altogether, but a number of
elementary measures were sufficient to break the back of the revolt within
three months. These included the imposition of curfews, traffic restrictions,
occasional razzias and the building of roads into rebel territory. In 1938, the
worst year of the rebellion, approximately two thousand Arabs were killed, as
well as three hundred Jews and seventy British. (The official figure for Arab
casualties, sixteen hundred, was for once almost certainly too low.) Isolated
attacks continued throughout the spring of 1939, but when World War II
broke out, the rebellion had already petered out — partly as the result of
substantial political concessions made by the British government, but mainly
in view of the military defeats and dispersing of the bands which were not
strong enough to fight regular army units and not agile enough to evade
them. Futhermore, the Jews, too, had gone over to active defense in the later
stages of the rebellion, and as the tide turned against the bands they found far
less support in the Arab villages. They no longer readily obtained supplies
and they could not take it for granted that their whereabouts would not be
betrayed to the authorities.
The Palestine rebellion was not, as is sometimes claimed, a peasant
uprising, even though most of the guerrillas themselves were villagers. The
political struggle preceding the revolt had been the work of the urban upper
and middle classes and the intelligentsia, but these disappeared from view
once armed struggle broke out. With one exception (Abd el Kader Husseini),
the leading Palestinian families were not actively represented in the guerrilla
movement; many of them moved to Egypt or Lebanon during the "riots" — as
these were called locally throughout their three years' duration. The military
chiefs were all "lower class"; one of the most respected among them, "Abu
Khaled," had been a stevedore at Haifa harbor. 79 But even though it was a
popular movement, it was by no means radical by modern standards; it
lacked a social program, there was no demand for the redistribution of land,
and the general inspiration was nationalist-religious-fundamentalist in the
narrow sense. In other words, the aim was to fight foreigners and infidels.
Militarily, the guerrillas chose by instinct the correct tactics. They did not try
to establish liberated zones, which they would not have been able to hold, but
engaged instead in hit-and-run attacks. But they had little military training,
there was no overall strategy, no coordination, no outstanding leadership. The
coun-
GUERRILLA WARFARE
try was too small and the bands too exposed for successful partisan warfare.
When the revolt was finally put down, it transpired that the guerrillas had
been unable to overrun even the smallest Jewish settlement, and this despite
the lack of military experience and weapons among the Jews.
Mention has been made of the support, both propagandists and financial,
given to the insurgents by Axis powers; some leaders of the rebellion,
including the Mufti of Jerusalem himself, settled in Germany during the war.
But the same was true of nationalist rebels from other parts of the globe, such
as, for instance, Subhas Chandra Bose. It would be mistaken to exaggerate the
significance of such collaboration with the Axis countries. Nazi Germany and
Fascist Italy were the natural allies for these rebels because they were "anti-
imperialist," meaning anti-British, and because it was widely believed that the
days of the Western democracies were numbered. Hitler and Mussolini were
popular figures among nationalist rebels not alone in Palestine, just as, after
the defeat of the Axis, Stalin and Mao were to have so much appeal.
Nationalist movements were primarily concerned with their own cause;
whether they turned "right" or "left" depended on the general political
constellation. Authoritarian regimes had of course greater attraction as models
than the democracies because, their "anti-imperialism" quite apart, they
seemed far more dynamic and purposeful.
LATIN AMERICA
The most colorful incidents of guerrilla warfare at a time when small wars
seemed to have gone out of fashion took place in Latin America. Among them
were Pancho Villa's and Emiliano Zapata's operations in Mexico, Luis Carlos
Prestes's "long march" in Brazil, and the Sandino rebellion in Nicaragua. Of
these movements, only the last was guerrilla in the strict sense of the word,
although it bears repeating that to apply purist standards with regard to guer-
rilla warfare is as misleading as the indiscriminate use of the term in general.
Porfirio Diaz, who had started his career as a partisan leader in the struggle
against Emperor Maximilian and who had subsequently ruled Mexico for
thirty-five years, was overthrown in 1911. A decade of civil war and anarchy
ensued and it took another
lgi THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (i): BETWEEN TWO WORLD WARS
decade until central state power reasserted itself. In 1911, too, the Manchu
dynasty was overthrown in China with similar results. But whereas China for
the next twenty years was ruled by warlords, the Mexican situation was
different inasmuch as there were more horse thieves in Mexico at the time
than soldiers, which made for a war-lordism of another sort. (The effective
strength of the Mexican army in 1911 was eighteen thousand troops, quite
insufficient to keep order in Mexico's many provinces.) Most of the Mexican
caudillos to emerge in the interregnum were not military men by training but
local chiefs who imposed their leadership by force of personality.
To review the main developments of these years, the ever-changing
alliances and frequent betrayals, the campaigns and the intrigues, or even
simply to list the names of the main protagonists, would be to write the
history of that chaotic decade. Zapata and Pancho Villa, the two most
important guerrilla leaders, had their bases in the south and north
respectively; Zapata's "Liberation Army of the South" in his native Morelos,
Puebla and Guerrero, Villa's "Division of the North" in Chihuahua and
Durango. Villa had been a popular bandit, his politics, in as far as they went,
vaguely populist. He was a local hero, a crude and frequently cruel man,
brave, a patriot, and in his way a radical. Zapata, a peasant leader, thirty years
old at the time of the revolution, made his name in the struggle against the
hacendados who had illegally acquired land belonging to small farmers. "The
land free for all, land without overseers and masters, this is the war cry of the
revolution." He sponsored an agrarian reform program (the "Plan of Ayala")
that was subsequently adopted in its essentials by his rivals, and he was also
the author of several memorable phrases such as "Men of the South, it is better
to die on your feet than live on your knees," and "Seek justice from tyrannical
governments not with your hat in your hands but with a rifle in your fist." 80
However, the struggle in Mexico was complex, it was not a clear-cut
confrontation between the forces of reaction and the party of the revolution.
Once the Diaz regime had been overthrown and Victoriano Huerta had been
exiled, all the chief protagonists in the conflict were men of the left, or in any
case left of center. A good many vested interests were involved in the struggle
for power and it was not always readily obvious who were the most
consistent and radical revolutionaries. Zapata distrusted, not unjustly, the
urban leaders and civil servants who, he suspected, would sabotage, or at
least water down, agrarian reform. But Zapata's urban critics claimed, again
not quite unfairly, that Carranza, Zapata's major foe, was also committed to
agrarian
10,2 GUERRILLA WARFARE
reform. In contrast to Zapata, Huerta had the support of sections of the urban
working class. Furthermore, the acts of brigandage committed by Zapata's
men made orderly agrarian reform very difficult indeed. Pancho Villa's
interest in politics was minimal and capricious; he hated foreigners, especially
North Americans and Chinese, he fought for the government and against it,
he entered an alliance with Zapata which never really worked, and when a
leading Zapatista writer published an article critical of Villa, he had him shot
by way of rebuttal.
Pancho Villa was the more spectacular guerrilla fighter. Within six months
his little army swelled from eight to eighty thousand; this figure included the
raiders' women, who frequently participated in the fighting. Villa's "Division
of the North" defeated the government forces in several battles at Torreon in
the summer of 1914. It was the most important achievement of his military
career; in later years he was to put even larger armies into the field, and seized
(and lost) countless cities, but he could never hold his gains for any length of
time. He was in substance an audacious buccaneer and master of the ambush
and hit-and-run attack who vainly sought to excel as a regular army general.
His successes in open field battles were largely thanks to the advice he
received from Felipe Angeles, a French-trained general who was his artillery
commander. Villa was at his most potent when he could play his old guerrilla
game; he eluded General Pershing's expeditionary force which had been sent
to Mexico to punish Villa for raiding Columbus, New Mexico, and murdering
American civilians. When he chose to fight an able Mexican general such as
Obregon at Celaya in 1915, he suffered heavy losses and this despite
numerical superiority. The Villistas were better equipped than the Zapatistas;
Villa usually did not lack money and he liberally nationalized (and resold)
horses and cattle wherever he went. But for all his astonishing tenacity and
ability to reassemble new bands after each defeat, he never quite recovered his
strength after 1915. After finally making peace with the government in June
1920, he was given an estate of twenty-five thousand acres, and his seven
hundred followers were also offered land, a time-honored Latin American
manner of settling a dispute in the case of a draw.
Zapata, a mestizo like Villa, began his career as the head of the defense
committee in his native village, and emerged during the last year of Diaz's
rule as the supreme revolutionary chief in the state of Morelos. His army may
have been the poorest in the Mexican civil war, suffering from a chronic lack
of money, arms, ammu-
nition and supplies, yet it was also the one most adept at employing guerrilla
tactics. Whenever the government forces attacked in strength, as in 1913 and
again in 1916, the Zapatistas just melted away in small groups to reassemble in
neighboring districts. The government troops would seize the towns and major
villages, only to withdraw after a short while on account of severe casualties
from malaria, dysentery and, of course, innumerable small ambushes. The
government could mobilize an army of forty thousand against Morelos, but it
could not permanently station them there. Unlike Pancho Villa, Zapata hardly
ever concentrated his troops and was reluctant to fight in open battle. Only
once his modest army had greatly expanded did he besiege and occupy towns
such as Cuernavaca, Puebla and eventually Mexico City. At the height of his
power in 1915, when Zapata withdrew from Mexico City, he had (nominally)
some seventy thousand men under his command. A year later their number
had dwindled to five thousand. There was much revolutionary enthusiasm,
but discipline was lax, officers were unreliable and unpunctual; if the
government forces committed horrible excesses in their pacification campaigns,
the Zapatistas also burned, raped, plundered and killed civilians and prisoners.
From time to time Zapata would express regret about these abuses, but he
knew that he could not really restrain his followers. His army was not a
centralized body, but consisted of units of several dozen or several hundred
men, acting most of the time independently. The composition of these units
would constantly change, for the guerrillas would be released to work their
fields during the agricultural seasons.81
Eventually, the central government reasserted itself and the bands grew
weaker. By 1920 the guerrilla war came to an end; the year before, Zapata had
been lured into an ambush and assassinated. Felipe Angeles was executed a
few months later and Car-ranza was shot in 1920. Pancho Villa was murdered
by private avengers three years after he had retired to his large ranch, and
Obregon was killed by a religious fanatic posing as an artist who wanted to
draw him.
The Mexican revolution, like others, devoured its children; among the few
to escape unscathed was Adolfo de la Huerta who became an opera singer in
his North American exile. But the revolution itself was not abortive; there was
no return to a Porfirian dictatorship; agrarian reforms were carried out and, in
fact, gathered additional momentum in the 1930s. Granted, the guerrillas,
whether of the south or the north, could not provide any political
leadership for the country; their resistance movements were regional, entirely
wanting in organizational ability and the necessary minimum of political
sophistication. Villa, for all his populist-radical slogans was, after all, only a
bandit-cum-caudii/o, and the Zapatistas had little support in the towns and
could not transform themselves into a broad, national movement. Zapata led
his peons through the desert, but like a more monumental leader, did not live
to witness their arrival in the promised land.
THE PRESTES COLUMN
The military coup which occurred in Sao Paulo in July 1924 seemed at the
time no more than just another coup of which Latin America has seen so
many. It collapsed after a few weeks and would hardly be remembered today
but for the initiative of a twenty-six-year-old captain, Luis Carlos Prestes, who
decided to move with a column into the interior of the country. There he
hoped to continue his struggle, shake the country out of its apathy and
perhaps trigger off an eventual general insurrection. The attempt failed, but
not before the Coluna Prestes, made up of about a thousand men, had covered
some sixteen thousand miles in a giant raid unprecedented in military history,
traversing Brazil from north to south, from east to west (and vice versa), while
fighting government troops. When Prestes with six hundred and twenty of his
men crossed into Bolivia in February 1927, he was still undefeated. His
mounted column (it reportedly used as many as a hundred thousand horses
during the campaign) originally consisted of regular army officers and
soldiers, but about half of them were killed, wounded or fell ill and were
replaced by volunteers. The column thwarted innumerable attempts by
government troops to surround and capture it and had to fight, moreover, the
Cangaceiros of the north, bandit groups which had been given official status
as counter-guerrilla units by the central government; it found these enemies
far more dangerous than the government troops which showed little fighting
spirit. The Coluna Prestes with its vaguely revolutionary watchwords had the
passive support of the populace, but the general insurrection it had hoped for
simply did not get off the ground. It was a heroic episode without political
effect and all that remained was the folk myth of the Cavaleiro da Esperanca,
the Knight of Hope and his companions, a symbol of the struggle for a new
and better Brazil.
The ideological makeup of the coluna presented a picture almost as curious

as a map of its raids; it was a mixture of revolutionary nationalism
compounded of both extreme left-wing and rightist philosophies. In terms of
this, the future paths chosen by its leaders are peculiarly enlightening. Several
of them took part in the Vargas coup in 1930 and in this roundabout way
rejoined the political-military establishment to become in due course generals
and ministers. Prestes, on the other hand, turned to the Brazilian Communist
party, serving as its secretary general. But the very man who had shown such
exceptional skill as a guerrilla leader became the left's chief opponent of
guerrillaism when in the 1950s and 1960s it had a revival.82 Brazil in the
1960s was in many ways an altogether different country, with great
conurbations, a modern industry and a growing working class; a rebellion in
the backlands must have appeared even less promising than forty years
earlier. But this alone may not be sufficient to explain Prestes's
disenchantment with guerrilla tactics; it also reflected the general Communist
aversion to this kind of warfare, a subject to which we shall have to return in a
separate context.83
SANDINO
Whereas Prestes's long march was the unexpected sequel to a traditional Latin
American military coup, Augusto Cesar Sandino's guerrilla movement in
Nicaragua grew out of an equally traditional civil war, a confrontation
between conservatives and liberals. San-dino, a mestizo of upper-class origin
who had spent some years in Mexico and was strongly influenced by the
heady wine of Mexican revolutionism, became after his return the leader of an
armed band within the liberal camp. When in the summer of 1927 a
compromise was reached between the two sides which gave the liberals most
of what they had asked for, they laid down their arms. Only Sandino, the most
radical leader among them, declared his intention of continuing the struggle
until a truly democratic regime was installed and the American marines,
which had intervened in Nicaraguan politics on and off since 1909, were once
and for all withdrawn.84 Nicaragua, a sparsely populated country with
mountains, many forests and few roads, was in many ways admirably suited
for guerrilla warfare. The social structure was conservative-traditional and a
populist leader was bound to gain the sympathy of the poor villagers.
Sandino's campaign lasted for five years, and with a force never exceeding a
thousand men he imposed his rule over large
sections of the country, establishing to all intents and purposes a

countergovernment, even levying its own taxes. He adopted guerrilla warfare
only by trial and error; in the beginning there were tactical mistakes for which
his force had to pay dearly. But he quickly mastered the guerrilla approach,
and once he had done so, all attempts to destroy his scratch little army came
to nothing. The government force, the Guardia Nacional, was small and
ineffective and the U.S. Marines, a few thousand at most, forever failed to
catch up with Sandino in the impassable forest. Attempts to bomb him from
the air were no more successful. Sandino made peace with the government in
1933 after the last marines had been evacuated and once the liberals had
again come to power. He was assassinated by political enemies within the
year.
Sandino (El Liberador) became, like Prestes, a legend in his own lifetime;
his operations were closely studied by later generations of Latin American
guerrilla leaders. Not that he was without blemish as such; there was the
usual high incidence of professional murderers and robbers in his ranks, the
familiar atrocities. Yet service was well rewarded — every sergeant was made
a general, or at least a colonel — and there was great emphasis on military
pomp. Sandino's social radicalism, while shocking in the eyes of his con-
temporaries, was exceedingly mild in retrospect; he was not a socialist, just a
radical caudillo with a populist program. True, hardly ever before in the
history of Latin American guerrillaism had the anti-American element been so
pronounced. As Castro attracted the Argentinian Guevara, so Sandino was
joined by radical militants from Honduras and Guatemala. Lastly, Sandino
looked for, and found, some support among the native Indians, who had
hitherto been neglected by both the political establishment and opposition
alike. But if in its immediate effect the Sandino revolt did not entirely fail, it
did in its longer-range purpose; under the dictatorship of the Somoza dynasty
Nicaragua became politically one of the most backward countries in Latin
America with a small clan monopolizing political and economic power to the
detriment of every other section of its society.
THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
When the Spanish Civil War erupted in July 1936, it was widely expected
that large-scale partisan warfare would be one of its chief
characteristics both in view of the specific character of the war and because
Spain was the country with the richest guerrilla tradition of all. When the war
ended, it was clearly apparent that the assumption had been altogether
mistaken and there was much mutual recrimination bearing on who carried
the blame for this sin of omission. The Communist leader Enrique Lister
(Manuel in Malraux's L'Espoir) wrote in 1965 that it was the fault of the
indecisive Republican government not to have organized a powerful guerrilla
movement in Franco's rear. The Anarcho-Marxist Abraham Guillen, on the
other hand, who had fought in the civil war to become later an ideological
mentor of the Tupamaros, wrote in 1969 that the Russians were the guilty
party because they had always pressed for frontal attack. 85 Both Lister and
Guillen were right, but neither version provides a full explanation. The
Spanish Republican government of the day gave guerrilla warfare low priority
because the main task facing it was to create a regular army as a defense
against Franco's troops. Since most regular army officers were anti-Repub-
lican, this was a formidable undertaking. The problem facing Madrid was
very similar to that confronting Lenin and Trotsky in 1918: not to give
additional encouragement to the irregulars of whom there were too many
anyway, but to weld them into a regular army and to create a central
command. The Russian advisers in Spain did indeed press for "confrontation,"
in accord with their military doctrine, but they also established schools for
guerrilla specialists on Spanish soil. These institutions were run by the Soviet
secret police who trained their students for acts of sabotage to be carried out
by individuals or small units — but not for guerrilla warfare. These
operatives, more often than not, would be foreigners, figures like Kashkin or
Jordan in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, who could not possibly
have played the role of a Mina or an Em-pecinado among the Spanish
peasants. Over a thousand men were trained in the six guerrilla schools and
eventually a special unit, the 14th Guerrilla Corps, was established.86 But all
this refers to missions of very short duration, to "diversionist acts," not to the
organization of guerrilla units. Robert Jordan's three-day mission to blow up a
bridge (described in Hemingway's novel) was quite typical.
Guerrilla units in the truer sense did come sporadically into being in the
winter of 1936-1937 in various parts of Spain, particularly in the center and
the north.87 These were usually small bands which did not last long and whose
activities left no great imprint. The war was decided in the battles for Madrid,
at Guadalajara and the Ebro; partisan warfare made no difference to its
course. Even
ose Spanish leaders who were most predisposed toward partisan arfare —
anarchists like Durutti — fought at the front in Barce-na and Madrid; there
were not enough soldiers to spare for parti-n operations. Even a born
guerrilla leader such as the Communist 1 Campesino was appointed a
division commander, in which ca-icity he showed much less aptitude.
Given the long-standing Spanish propensity for guerrilla warfare, e political
support of substantial sections of the population for the epublican cause
and the inefficiency revealed by the right-wing gular army commanders,
would not the Republicans have been itter advised to put stronger emphasis
on guerrilla warfare? Even ith the benefit of hindsight the question cannot
be answered in e affirmative. True enough, the Nationalist anny (as Stanley
ryne has written) never became a first-rate twentieth-century mili-ry
machine. "It won because it proved less ineffective than the otley
contingents of the Popular Front."88 But however incompe-nt, the
Nationalists would still have been able to seize the major ties within a short
time but for the Republican forces concentrated i their defense. Precisely
because they were not really a modern my, the Nationalists were not that
dependent on supplies, and image to their lines of supply and
communication would not have sen fatally harmful. Partisan units could
have been concentrated i the mountainous regions of central and northern
Spain, but the ilitary decisions fell in the plains. The presence of active,
strong id highly mobile guerrilla units in Franco's rear might have made
difference in the battle for the Basque country; it is most unlikely iat they
would have influenced the outcome of the fighting in the ruth.
The Nationalists, too, had many irregulars in their ranks; during ie first
year of the war regular army units were in a minority. There ere many
banderas — Carlists, Falangists, and other right-wing jlunteers, some of
them counting a few hundred members, others, ich as the Tercio de
Navarra, ten thousand or more. But they were "adually integrated into
Franco's army and there was never any 'stematic attempt on the part of the
Nationalists to wage guerrilla ars in the Republican rear.
GUERRILLA WAR AND THE REGULAR ARMIES
n the eve of World War II, the attitude toward guerrilla warfare iat its
advocates had noted four decades earlier still held true: the
various army general staffs had no interest in it, and the military academies
saw no reason to include courses on it in their curricula. Individual officers
had gained guerrilla knowledge in the interwar period. Major Wingate's
experiences in the Palestine rebellion helped him in the jungle of Burma,
doubtful though it is whether General Patton, the tank commander, drew on
the inspiration acquired by Lieutenant George Patton in the raid against
Pancho Villa. By and large the feeling prevailed that guerrilla warfare, half-
brigandage, half-political in genesis, was a messy business best left outside the
confines of regular armies and their commanders. One German writer's view
was that it could endanger the country's war effort by very reason of its
methods being so diametrically opposed to the German way of waging
battle.89 But Arthur Ehrhardt was almost the only German author in the
interwar period to concern himself with the prospects of guerrilla warfare in
modern conditions. He pointed out that aircraft and motorized columns
would make for armies being able to advance far more rapidly than ever
before. But this meant that their supply lines would be much more extended
and that the advancing units would be infinitely more dependent on supplies,
above all of fuel, ammunition and spare parts. Long and vulnerable supply
lines would be an obvious target for enemy partisans. 90 Ehrhardt also
calculated that the average modern airplane was much too fast to be of help in
combating guerrillas and that special aircraft would be needed for this pur-
pose. He envisaged the possibility of enemy partisans landing in the German
rear, and of motorized guerrilla units. He even weighed the potential use of
chemical warfare by guerrillas, or in the fight against them, but dismissed this
as impractical. These, however, were only the views of an outsider, the
German military command remained uninterested; among the hundreds of
books and the thousands of articles on military topics published in the 1920s
or 1930s one looks in vain for any serious discussion of guerrilla warfare.
There was some logic in Germany's neglect since she was prepared (and
preparing) for a Blitzkrieg, and in a war of this kind, if successful, guerrillas
could not possibly play a part of any significance. There was less logic in
French, British and American ignoring of the subject, none of them having that
faith in a Blitzkrieg. Yet they nevertheless equally shared the German
conviction that guerrilla warfare was unimportant. True, all the British army
was asked to prepare itself for in the 1920s was small wars only, for which it
was generally assumed that no special provision was required since these
would surely be, grosso modo, on the pattern of previous colonial wars.91
Warnings about impending changes in the character of guerrilla war were

so infrequent that they deserve to be singled out. Thus Major B. C. Dening in
an essay on "Modern Problems of Guerrilla Warfare," published in 1927,
pointed with astonishing foresight to three important contemporary processes
favoring the guerrillas. The first, and the most important, was that in view of
the increasing influence of public opinion at home, the Great Powers could no
longer act with the same "ferocity" as on past occasions. "Otherwise such an
outcry would arise as would be certain to bring about either the fall of the
government responsible or the intervention of an interested outside power." 92
Secondly, the development of modern weapons favored the guerrilla more
than those operating against them. These weapons could be readily concealed
and lent themselves to the first principle of guerrilla warfare — rapid con-
centration and equally rapid dispersion. Last, there was the difficult problem
of combating guerrillas in thickly populated areas. "Here the guerrillas have
opportunities to make propaganda, to destroy property and to deliver attacks
with great ease. The task of the army becomes essentially a police task." 93
Major Dening also suggested that it was quite likely that guerrillas would in
future try draining the financial rather than the military resources of a great
power, as the Cuban rebels had done with considerable success in 1898. But
such predictions, to repeat once again, were the exception, not the rule in the
interwar period.
There was an upsurge of nationalist and revolutionary movements in Asia
and Africa in the 1920s and 1930s, but their activities were largely political.
British and French, Belgian and Dutch colonial administrators were not
unmindful of these activities, and from the time of the famous Baku Congress
on, there was a tendency in the European capitals to attribute most colonial
rebellions to Soviet propaganda and intrigues. Quite frequently it was argued
that these operations were carefully prepared and coordinated in Moscow.
This was almost certainly untrue at the time or in any event exaggerated; the
Comintern supported existing colonial insurgencies, but such support was
usually quite limited and often as not refused. The Germans, who had lost
their colonies after the war, followed the anti-imperialist struggle with great
interest; the geopoliticians, with General Professor Karl Haushofer at their
head, were quicker than most others to realize the potential importance of
coming national liberation wars. It was another former German general, Max
Hoffmann, who predicted that the explosive mixture of Communism and
nationalism would result in protracted colonial wars, dif-
ferent in character from those in the past, which the British and the French
could not win.94 Even if the colonial forces were to defeat the enemy, there
would be a subacute revolutionary situation which would make it impossible
for the British to withdraw their units. This constant combat readiness would
wear out the colonial troops, there would be no clear and distinct enemy to
combat and, furthermore, it would be impossible to employ native troops.
Even if Britain were able to crush an insurgency in Egypt, its position would
become untenable should there be simultaneous risings in Bengal, in Iraq and
elsewhere — the power and the resources of Britain and France would sooner
or later be exhausted in these unending colonial wars.
Such predictions were rejected as too pessimistic at the time. In the 1930s
the Communists favored popular or national front policies that excluded the
armed struggle. The radical nationalists had no such inhibitions, but the time
was not yet ripe for mass campaigns against foreign rulers or domestic
enemies, nor was it certain that the guerrilla approach would be the most
effective weapon in any such struggles. The development of modern military
techniques had seemingly made regular armies well-nigh irresistible. Guerrilla
movements could hope to challenge regular armies only in certain exceptional
conditions which in the 1930s did not exist. World War II was the turning
point in this respect; Europe's (and Japan's) decline was, to paraphrase Wolfe
Tone, the guerrillas' opportunity. World War II caused the collapse of the
colonial powers, it undermined the confidence of the European ruling classes,
led to deep economic and political unrest and created revolutionary situations
the world over. In these conditions, following a major shift in the global
balance of power, it was again possible for a few determined people to find
support for an all-out assault against the established powers by other than
political means. Once it had been demonstrated that guerrilla war worked, the
example was bound to be emulated.
The Twentieth Century (II):
Partisans against Hitler
Resistance in the German-occupied countries ranged from a refusal o read

Nazi newspapers to organized armed struggle. Resistance ighters gathered
and transmitted military intelligence to the Allied commands, printed and
disseminated anti-Nazi newspapers and leaflets, sabotaged the German
economic war effort. Partisan warfare aimed above all at disrupting lines of
supply and communications, at creating a general climate of insecurity,
compelling the A.xis powers to divert some of their forces from the main
theaters of war. The story of the resistance movement in the various countries,
its achievements and many setbacks has been amply documented; resistance
organization, political views, activities and way of life have been studied in
the greatest detail. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of partisan warfare is still in
dispute. The claims made by the partisans as to the damage and the losses
inflicted on the enemy are often ridiculously high.
There is a tendency in every war to magnify one's successes in the heat of
battle; even in so notable a one as the Battle of Rritain the official Rritish
announcements on enemy aircraft shot down were proved after the war to
have been greatly exaggerated. Rut when it comes to guerrilla warfare, there
seems to be, as remarked long ago by Denis Davydov and other outstanding
guerrilla leaders of the past, an almost built-in temptation to overstate, and
here the possibility for verification is usually all but nonexistent. Rumors or
wild estimates are repeated and passed on so often that they eventually enter
the history books as the established truth. According to General Bor
Komorowski, for instance, the Armia Krajowa had four
2 0 -3 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (il)'. PARTISANS AGAINST HITLER
hundred thousand sworn-in members in 1944. There is no reason to doubt

this statement; for all one knows, the number of its sympathizers may have
been even greater. But judging by all available evidence, only a very small
proportion of them were in physical partisan actions at any one given time
during the war (one percent in 1943, perhaps five to ten percent in 1944).
Soviet partisans in the Orel region claimed after the war to have killed
147,835 Germans.1 But Western sources give the total number of Axis soldiers
killed by partisans in Russia during the war as only about thirty-five thou-
sand; and of these not more than half were Germans. According to the British
official history of the war, the Greek Communist guerrillas wounded and
captured five thousand Germans in October 1944. Brigadier C. M.
Woodhouse, deputy head of the British military mission to Greece at the time,
called these figures absurdly inflated. "I myself never saw more than two or
three [Germans]. The fact is that the guerrillas' claims were simply copied out
from hand to hand, without any attempt to evaluate them, until ten years
afterwards they had become part of the official history of the war." 2 The
published figures of French Maquis membership are substantial, but to this
must be added that the great majority joined only during the last few weeks
(or days) before the liberation.
If Allied partisan claims cannot be trusted, German internal reports, if for
different reasons, also bloated the strength of these partisans and the
importance of their activities. A local German commander would deliberately
exaggerate the number of partisans operating in his vicinity, either because of
deficient intelligence reports or in the hope of getting reinforcements for the
next counter-guerrilla operation. Following such operations, the Germans
would magnify the extent of their successes. Of the total number of "bandits"
killed, wounded or taken prisoner, the bulk would more likely than not be
peasants who had no connection whatsoever with the partisans. 3 There are, in
short, few reliable facts and figures. Internal accounts of the German Army
Railway Command 4 record two thousand cases of railway lines being mined
or trains attacked in one sector of the Eastern front during 1943. This is an
impressive figure, except that on breaking it down further, one finds that only
ninety-four servicemen and railway personnel were killed in these many
incidents and only in fifty-two cases were the lines closed for longer than
twenty-four hours.4 An overall assessment of the cost effectiveness of these
attacks would also have to take into account the resources invested in
producing the mines, in transporting them from the Russian rear to the
partisans, the man-hours
GUERRILLA WARFARE
pent and the losses incurred during the attacks themselves. But ;uch
calculations are virtually impossible.
Mining railway lines was the most important activity of Soviet >artisans;
after the war they declared there had been five hundred housand such
operations whereas the Germans were aware of only i hundred and fifty to
two hundred thousand. Partisan avowals vere of fifteen thousand
locomotives destroyed throughout Eu-ope; again, the real figure seems to
have been considerably lower, or Germany had more locomotives at the end
of the war than at its jeginning. A locomotive which had been derailed might
be reported to headquarters by five or six different partisan units;* be-iides,
the partisans had no way of establishing whether a loco-notive had been only
slightly damaged or permanently disabled. Whether successful or not, these
actions undoubtedly involved a ;reat deal of courage and many partisans
paid for it with their ives. They merit our admiration, but the historians'
assignment is lot that of the hagiographer and he cannot uncritically accept
their daims.
According to Yugoslav sources, Tito's partisans fought in early L 9 4 2
against 616,000 Fascist soldiers; later that year their number is ;aid to have
risen to 830,000. Altogether, 450,000 Fascist officers ind men were reputed
to have lost their lives fighting the partisans. But the total number of troops
under the German commander in diief "Southeast" (Balkans) never exceeded
467,000. Many of the nen under his command did not fight in Yugoslavia at
all, and most if them were not killed. 5 Mikhailovich's Chetniks reported
military operations against Germans whereas in reality they had concluded i
de facto armistice with them.
The probable truth is that the political impact of partisan activity vvas far
greater than its military contribution. It helped restore the self-respect of a
defeated nation and gave new impetus to the spirit jf defiance: sanguis
martyrorum, semen ecclesiae. It was in any svent restricted in its scope, actual
guerrilla war being confined ilmost exclusively to parts of East and Southeast
Europe. In Den-nark, Holland and Belgium there could be strikes, acts of
sabotage ind of individual terror, but partisan warfare was ruled out. Toward
:he end of the war Maquis congregated in certain areas of France 'such as the
Massif Central) and in upper Italy, but their military
* This point is made by a recent Soviet source in a footnote to the statistics issued 3 y
the partisan general staff, i.e., 1.5 m. enemies killed, wounded or taken prisoner, t,ooo
tanks and 16, 0 0 0 locomotives destroyed, etc. Bolshaya Sovietskaya Entsiklo-wdia (1975),
vol. 19,234.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (il): PARTISANS AGAINST HITLER
operations were of no great consequence. The Slovak uprising in the latter

days was not guerrilla in character, which, incidentally, may have been one of
the reasons for its failure. Partisan units existed in Greece but they spent more
time fighting each other than the German invaders.
The two major theaters of guerrilla war were Russia and Yugoslavia, but
again, if chiefly for geographical reasons, it was contained within certain
areas; in Russia the partisan movement was strongest in the central sector, in
Yugoslavia it was at its most active in Bosnia, Montenegro and parts of Serbia.
Within these regions, the partisans' hold on the countryside was virtually
unchallenged, German rule being limited to the towns and the main lines of
communication.
In Yugoslavia, as in Russia, the partisan units were still weak in 1941, they
gathered strength during 1942, and by late 1943 reached the height of their
power— following Italy's collapse and the German defeats on the Eastern
front. This gradual development of partisan ascendancy was perhaps only
natural, but it also points up the tenuous effect the partisan movement had on
the course of the war; the partisans were at their weakest when they were
needed most and might have rendered the greatest service — before
Stalingrad. They could cause serious harassment to the Germans only after the
tide of the war had already turned.
In many European countries the Communists were the leading force in the
armed resistance. They were the only political party organizationally
prepared to operate in conditions of illegality. To be a Communist involved
an unqualified measure of discipline and commitment, it meant not merely
paying one's dues, it meant fighting for the cause and, if necessary, giving
one's life for it. Opposition to Nazism was widespread in all social classes and
most political parties, but it was almost solely the Communists who had the
machinery to channel resistance into armed struggle.
Relations between Communist and non-Communist partisan units were
always strained. Non-Communists were usually suspicious of Communist
intentions and reluctant to cooperate with them; the Communists tried
wherever they could to isolate and destroy their rivals. From time to time,
under the pressure of the Allied powers, Communists and non-Communists
would collaborate on some specific operations, but sooner or later hostilities
would again break out between the two sides. This applies above all to
Greece, Albania and Yugoslavia. In Poland the Communists were in lame
shape; their party had been dissolved following the
2C -7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (il)'. PARTISANS AGAINST HITLER
execution of most of its leaders in the Moscow purges. It was reestablished in
1942 but remained much weaker than the Armia Krajowa. There was tension
between Gaullists and Communists in occupied France, but no armed clashes.
The structure of the partisan movements and the leeway for their
operations varied from country to country. After an initial period of confusion
and disorder, the Soviet partisan units were in close contact with the partisan
general staff in Moscow, and all major units were in radio communication
with the "center." They had airports of their own, received amis and supplies at
frequent intervals; wounded partisans were evacuated by air, there was a
steady stream of new commanders, political commissars, demolition experts
and important visitors. Some Soviet partisan units grew within a year from a
few dozen members to a few thousand (those, for instance, headed by
Kovpak, Melnik, Saburov and Naumov) and from time to time several units
would combine for a large-scale operation, but on the whole their assignment
was to act as individual units, not to become an army in the enemy's rear.
Some units were dispatched on long-distance raids, but only very rarely
would they try to occupy cities. The few attempts that were made (by Kovpak)
failed. The dispersal of forces was in keeping with the overall strategy of the
Soviet High Command; the establishment in the German rear of large infantry
units lacking armor would have exposed the partisans to dangerous
counterattack.
German forces in the Balkans, on the other hand, were not strong and the
Yugoslav partisans concentrated their units into an "Army of National
Liberation" subdivided into divisions as early as November 1942. 6 (A
partisan division, however, numbered no more than three thousand men at
the time, frequently fewer.) This partisan army fought large-scale battles
against Axis forces in 1943 at the Neretva and the Sutjeska rivers. It occupied,
and held, cities for long periods. In 1943 the German High Command
admitted outright that it no longer faced "bandit" (i.e., partisan) warfare, but
that a new front had been opened in Southeast Europe. Thus, Yugoslav
strategy followed the Chinese pattern, even though there is no evidence that
Tito and his comrades were familiar with developments in China. According
to Yugoslav sources, Tito's army numbered eight hundred thousand men at
the end of the war, whereas Soviet partisans never exceeded two hundred and
fifty thousand; the quality of the forces the Yugoslav partisans were up
against was, however, distinctly inferior to the antiguerrilla ones on the
Russian front.7 Still, it must be borne in mind that the Yugoslav partisans
received no supplies at all from outside during the first years of the war; a
massive Allied airlift was organized only in 1944. The partisan movements
in other parts of Europe were considerably smaller and the operations against
them, until the last year of the war, were, with rare exceptions, carried out by
special police units.
THE SOVIET PARTISANS
Guerrilla warfare in the Soviet Union was officially initiated with Stalin's
appeal on 3 July 1941, calling Soviet patriots to establish infantry and cavalry
partisan units everywhere in the enemy's rear, to mine bridges, to cut his
communications and supply routes; in short, "to make life intolerable for the
invader." Mention has been made of the fact that before the war the NKVD,
the secret police, had been responsible for diversionary action. With the
outbreak of the war the Communist party apparatus and the Soviet army also
became prominently involved in the enterprise; a central partisan staff was
formed under the command of P. K. Ponomarenko, former party secretary in
White Russia, and Marshal Voroshilov. The major partisan commanders
(Naumov, Saburov, Medvedev) were usually either NKVD men or leading
party officials (Begma and Fyodorov, former first secretary of the Chernigov
party district).8 Later on, regular anny officers were attached to the units as
chiefs of staff or as their commanders. The chief of the Ukrainian general staff
was T. Strokach, formerly head of the Ukrainian NKVD; he was later replaced
by V. Andreyev, a partisan commander. There were some notable exceptions;
Sidor Kovpak, a veteran of the civil war, was fifty-four years of age when the
war broke out. He had been mayor of the city of Putivl; his deputy, P.
Vershigora, who later became commander of another major unit, had been a
movie producer. The party officials who became partisan leaders showed
enterprise and courage well above what could be expected of the average
bureaucrat. Few of them would have collaborated with the Germans in any
case, even if it had not been Nazi policy to execute all leading Communists.
No exact data exist about the social composition of the partisan units;
according to one Soviet source, of twenty-five thousand partisans in the Orel
districts, thirty-eight percent were workers, thirty-one percent peasants, and
thirty percent belonged to the "intelligentsia." Of sixty-two thousand
Ukrainian partisans, thirty-
2C -7 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (il)'. PARTISANS AGAINST HITLER
six percent were workers, forty-seven percent peasants, and seventeen percent
"employees."9 Such statistics are, however, of dubious value, for during the
early period of the war the partisan units consisted for the most part of Red
Army stragglers who in the general retreat had been cut off from their units.
Later on, the composition of the units changed rapidly as young villagers
were recruited in the Nazi-occupied areas.
The attitude of the population during the first months of the German
occupation was one of attentisme, especially in the Ukraine and the Baltic
countries. However, this mood did not last. It was official Nazi policy to treat
the Slavs as Untermenschen; the Germans engaged in wholesale requisitions,
they employed forced labor and carried out mass executions. The partisan
leaders would have found it much more difficult to attract recruits had the
Germans treated the populace decently, but this would have been quite
incompatible both with the character of the Nazi leaders, their doctrine, and
their aims.
The initial defeats of the Red Army had come as a shock to the inhabitants
of the occupied territories, but with the failure of the Germans to take Moscow
and at the very last with the battle of Stalingrad, the belief in a German victory
waned. As a result, the partisan movement continued to grow; if there had
been something like thirty thousand partisans by the end of 1941, their
number had risen to a hundred and fifty thousand during the second half of
1942, and reached its peak, about two hundred to two hundred and fifty
thousand, in the summer of 1943. 10 At first partisan units had been organized
on a territorial basis; platoons and companies were mobilized by the local
party secretaries, the Komsomol officials and the NKVD. Later, as the units
congregated in wooded or marshy areas far away from their original base, the
territorial system was given up. There were relatively few guerrilla units in the
northern sector of the front and south of Kharkov; the Ukrainian steppe and
the lowlands of the north offered little cover and the partisan units operating
there endured heavy losses. The main concentrations were around Smolensk
and Minsk, the forests of Bryansk, the Pri-pet marshes, and White Russia
generally.11
The area occupied by the Germans during the first fifteen months of the
war was several times that of Germany proper, the population also exceeded
that of Germany itself, and supply lines had become a logistic nightmare.
Troops could not be spared for operations in the rear and the German
presence, as in Yugoslavia, was necessarily confined to the towns and the
main traffic lines. There were
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (il): PARTISANS AGAINST HITLER
large areas which throughout the occupation remained altogether outside

German control. Thus, a region of several thousand square miles southeast of
Minsk was in partisan hands without interruption from the summer of 1942
onward and there were a number of other such little partisan republics dotted
about elsewhere. The Germans were fully aware of their existence but could
not divert sufficient forces to destroy them. Even the front line was not contin-
uous; certain gaps existed, such as the Vitebsk corridor, through which the
partisans maintained contact with the bolshaija zemlya, that is, Soviet
territory.
The vast spaces and the lack of manpower thwarted the German attempts
to suppress the guerrillas. The German army group "Center," the one most
exposed to partisan attacks, had at its disposal in late 1941 no more than four
regiments and one SS brigade to police an area the size of England.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1942 the German armies largely
ignored the partisans, with something of fitful actions against them launched
only in the autumn of that year, and during the following spring. Meanwhile,
however, control of antipartisan operations, hitherto left mainly to the local
commanders, was coordinated and non-German units, including Russian
collaborators, Latvians and Lithuanians, were set up to fight the "bandits." In
the end, the number of Russians serving in assorted German auxiliary units far
outstripped that of the partisans. Hitler objected to the use of Russian
volunteers; shortly after the outbreak of the war he had even welcomed the
existence of Soviet partisan units, for this, so he said with his own
unfathomable brand of illogic, would make it easier to recognize the enemy
and to destroy him. His few instructions about antibandit warfare left little to
anyone's imagination; there was to be no misplaced chivalry in this struggle —
the enemy had to be exterminated. 12 Villages were destroyed and their
inhabitants killed, or at the very least rendered homeless. In the countryside
there had been no overwhelming enthusiasm for Soviet power; the
circumstances of collectivization were still fresh in the memory. But
indiscriminate arson and murder soon made the Germans as much hated in
the villages as in the cities. In the later phases of the war, the German
command switched its tactics and made all kinds of promises to partisans who
surrendered. But of three major antipartisan operations, only one
(Zigeunerbaron), produced a sizable number of deserters — 869 — whereas
Nachbarhilfe netted a mere twenty-four, and Freischiitz only five, a poor
response to half a million leaflets that had this time been distributed.13
225 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (il) : PARTISANS AGAINST HITLER
During the first months of the war the partisan units were building up their
organizations, training for action, gathering weapons and establishing contact
with the "center." Alongside this, and on a more political level, they circulated
propaganda broadsheets, assassinated individual collaborators and tried, by
persuasion if possible, to enlist support among the civilian population,
appealing to the villagers' patriotism (Communist slogans were dropped
during the war), but also not hesitant to use intimidation.
Fearing for their life and property, many mayors and policemen appointed
by the Germans opted for collaboration with the partisans. True, the German
military command had published countless warnings that all those who gave
cover or supplies to partisans would be executed. But the next German police
post was usually :ar away, whereas the partisan was the man with the gun in
the doorway. In the circumstances, the decision was not difficult to nake.
Another major partisan task was to spoil and destroy the agricul-ural crops,
preventing their shipment to Germany. Since the main ■vheat-growing areas
were a long way from the main partisan concentrations, they succeeded only
partially in this in 1942; in 1943 he results in this respect were more
impressive. They almost never nanaged to interfere with the extraction of
minerals and oil in the )ccupied areas; the mining centers were located in the
south, leyond the partisans' reach. They did better in the battle for the ailway
lines; to hamper German transport had been one of their Drimary missions
from the start, but in 1943 it was given absolute jriority. The Smolensk-
Bryansk-Orel and Minsk-Gomel-Bryansk ailways which were of vital
importance to the German central irmy group were temporarily paralyzed
during a decisive phase of he war. In late July 1943 new plastic mines,
against which metal letectors were ineffective, were used for the first time
and in their greatest single operation of the war, on 2 August 1943, more
than .00,000 partisans planted 8,422 of these mines on the railway racks.
This sabotage coincided with the Soviet offensive following he battle of
Kursk.14
Occasionally an especially large partisan body would be given nstruction to
carry out penetration raids deep in the German rear; he intention was usually
to relieve pressure on the Soviet army. 15 During the winter of 1942/43
several major partisan units trans-erred their activities to the Western
Ukraine far beyond the Ger-nan lines; the Saburov and Bogatyr units
marched some four hun-Ired miles through the German rear, crossing five
rivers in the
process. From his hideout in the Bryansk forests, Kovpak moved to the same
target area, west of the Dnieper, where by May 1943 a partisan concentration
of twenty-two thousand men had assembled. One White Russian unit went on
a six-hundred-mile raid, but the most spectacular operation was Kovpak's in
1943 which took him to the Carpathian Mountains and the Slovak border. 16
Sections of his unit remained there and participated in the Slovak rising of
1944. Later, Kovpak ran into trouble and his unit was almost wiped out. The
partisans were unfamiliar with the area and the population was frequently
hostile. The partisans had to cope not only with the Germans but also with
Ukrainian nationalist irregulars who were both anti-German and anti-Soviet.
After May 1943 operational cooperation between the partisans and the
Soviet army was near total, the partisans coming under direct army
command. During this period partisans became more active in the northern
sector of the front where they had previously been weak. Having already
been of assistance in preparation for the Soviet offensive in 1943, they also
helped to pursue the fleeing Germans, while the great Soviet summer
offensive of June 1944 was again preceded by massive partisan attacks on
railway lines, with more than ten thousand minings taking place two nights
before its start.17
As the Soviet army crossed into Poland and Germany, the partisan units
were gradually disbanded. Their general staff had already been dissolved
earlier, in January 1944, for reasons which are not entirely clear; that of the
Ukrainians, in contrast, continued to function up to the end of the war.
Perhaps some influential party leaders such as Khrushchev and Korotchenko
took a personal interest in the Ukrainian partisans.
As more and more territory was liberated by the Soviet army, the local
partisans would be absorbed into regular units; their former commanders,
awarded some military decoration and promotion, returned to their old
positions in government, political parties and the secret police. Their
subsequent personal fates fluctuated with the postwar purges and shifts in the
Soviet party leadership. Among those who were to rise to high rank was
Mazurov, the partisan Komsomol secretary in White Russia, who eventually
became a member of the Politburo.
The place of the partisan movement in Soviet historiography and literature
underwent certain ups and downs in the postwar period. In professional
military literature there was a tendency to downgrade the importance of the
partisan units; they were honorably
mentioned and due tribute was paid to their heroism, but there was a reaction
against the wartime disposition to exaggerate their part in the victory over
Nazi Germany. Some of the firsthand accounts written while the war was still
on, or immediately afterward, had to be rewritten, because, as highly placed
critics argued, the authors had paid insufficient attention to the "leading role
of the Communist party in organizing and guiding the partisan units."
Conditions of partisan life varied inevitably from place to place, but they
improved everywhere as the war continued. During the first winter, partisans
underwent great hardships; a typical account relates that members of one of
the larger White Russian units were given sugar — a great luxury — in their
tea and salt with their bread only on special occasions. 18 Most partisans were
forced to hibernate in their hideouts during the first winter of the war because
they had no suitable clothing or equipment, and furthermore their traces in
the snow would have betrayed them. 19 Eighteen months later the situation
had improved so much that when a temporary food shortage occurred
following a German antiguerrilla operation, the problem was solved by flying
in supplies from behind the Russian front. Altogether, partisan life on the
whole was neither as dangerous nor as strenuous as was generally imagined.
It was far more risky to engage in anti-German activities in a town; the illegal
party leadership in the cities lasted, as a rule, no longer than six months,
whereas most leading partisan commanders survived the war. (One notable
exception was Rudnev, Korpak's chief of staff, who fell in action in 1943.)
There are no detailed statistics, but it would appear that the chances for
survival among the partisans were no worse than among Russian front-line
units.
One of the reasons for the partisans' relative safety has already been
mentioned. The Germans never had sufficient manpower during the war to
cope with them, nor could they concentrate enough armor and aircraft for
such operations. The partisans, on the other hand, had radio contact with their
general staff and could ask for air support. Radio communications were of
great psychological importance; there was no feeling of isolation, one of the
commonest drawbacks of partisan warfare throughout history. Add to this
that the partisans received warnings of impending German attacks and their
offensive operations were effectively coordinated.
Arms and supplies were flown in by air. 20 This included medical supplies
and personnel; in one partisan unit, seven doctors took care of five hundred
men. During the antiguerrilla operation Zi-yeunerbaron, the Germans found
to their consternation that the
228 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (il) '. PARTISANS AGAINST HITLER
partisans had not only heavy guns but even a few tanks. (The Germans
seldom used tanks against partisans, partly because they could not spare
them, partly because the terrain was unsuitable.)21 Some larger partisan units
had been supplied with 45 and 76 mm guns. Although the Germans used
aircraft against partisans, it was chiefly for reconnaissance, on only rare
occasions for tactical support. The Soviet partisans, in brief, were in almost
every respect in a more advantageous position than partisans in other
European theaters of war.
Partisans helped the Soviet war effort in many supplementary ways. They
collected taxes for the Soviet government, recruited soldiers for the Red Army
and, in the Leningrad region, transported food from the Pskov kolkhozes into
blockaded Leningrad.22 They acted as the long arm of the Soviet government
disseminating propaganda and policing the countryside. In all this, however,
their function was almost entirely political and administrative. Militarily, their
activities, as has been noted, were by far the most frequent and forceful in
central Russia, affecting the operations of the German Army Group Center.
Years later, a military historian analyzing the Battle of Kursk, the turning point
in the history of the war on the Eastern front, mentioned the many partisan
operations against railway lines, and the fact that, as a result of them,
agricultural deliveries decreased by two-thirds. But for all that, he concluded
that until the spring of 1943 partisan activities did not seriously influence the
operative planning of the German army.23 It was only during the German
retreat from Russia that the partisans became more than a nuisance. During
1942 and 1943 many German generals grumbled about the intolerable
situation in the rear, and there were similar complaints emanating from
German headquarters. Rut Himmler, in a secret speech to his Gauleiters in
October 1943, summarized the situation in the rear in saying that it was
nonsense to make so much of a mere inconvenience; the soldiers at the front
were not dying of hunger, nor were they short of supplies and reserves, which
arrived as planned.24 It was only in May 1944, when the German armies were
about to evacuate the last parts of the occupied Russian territory, that they
realized that they might have saved themselves much inconvenience if they
had treated the partisans differently. An official handbook on antipartisan
warfare published in May 1944 decreed that partisans should not be shot but
treated as prisoners of war unless they were caught in German uniforms. 25
Such recognition of past mistakes was by that time of purely academic interest.
A balance sheet of partisan operations in Russia, then, would have to be

based on an equation including many incommensurate, and immeasurable,
factors.26 From a purely military point of view it is not certain whether the
effects (and the losses incurred) were worth the effort. 27 The same resources,
used in a different way, might have produced greater gains. Nor does one
know whether the intelligence provided to the Soviet general staff by the
partisans was of crucial importance. Partisan brigades were not needed for the
collection and transmission of military intelligence; this could be done by
individuals.
The decision to wage partisan warfare in the German rear was only partly
motivated by military considerations; political reasons were assuredly more
telling. Stalin's views on its value in general had changed more than once;
having been one of its early advocates during the civil war, he later took a
dim view of its military significance. In the 1930s the civil war partisans were
systematically denigrated, together with other old Bolsheviks, and
many ;'ame to grief in the great purges. Still, Stalin believed that if Russia
were attacked, partisan warfare could do no possible harm and might do
some good. Perhaps he was already concerned with the more distant future,
the postwar period and the restoration of the image of omnipotence and the
omnipresence of Soviet state and party organs. 28 And in this respect the
partisan movement could play a very important part indeed.
YUGOSLAVIA
T o the Russians, the creation of partisan units was an auxiliary weapon of

the regular army to carry out certain tasks behind enemy ines; to the
Yugoslavs the partisans were the army. 29 The Yugoslav partisans fought alone
and their achievements earned them the ad-niration of friends and enemies
alike. "I wish we had in Germany a :ew dozen Titos," Himmler said in one of
his secret speeches in 1944, "a man with such a strong heart and such good
nerves; he has eally earned the title of marshal."30 The fight of the Yugoslav
parti-;ans is indeed in many respects unique; a mere handful of dedicated
Communists, with little experience of tactics and none of strategy, hey
succeeded against all odds in building up a military force of ;onsiderable
potency. During the critical period of their struggle
230 THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY (il): PARTISANS AGAINST HITLER
they received no outside help. The Russians provided advice of doubtful

value, but nothing else; the Western Allies sent substantial military assistance,
but only after the partisans had emerged as the leading resistance force in
Southeast Europe.
Partisan warfare in Yugoslavia has been fully documented, yet to some of
the main questions there still are no ready answers. 31 Outwardly, Communism
had been little in evidence in Yugoslavia in the interwar period, but there was
a fairly strong Communist tradition going back to the early 1920s. The
Communist party, illegal for most of the time, had been steeled in the
underground struggle; hundreds of its members had fought in the Spanish
Civil War. The Yugoslav establishment, on the other hand, the monarchy and
its political supporters, had been discredited by the military defeat of April
1941. Yugoslavia was a house divided against itself—between Croat
chauvinists, Serbian nationalists and Montenegrin fanatics, between Roman
Catholics, Orthodox Christians and the Muslims. The Communists,
paradoxically, were almost the only political force which could provide a
platform for all nationalities. The cadres of the party were almost entirely
urban, with a heavy preponderance of intellectuals and students; Tito and
Rankovic apart, there were hardly any leaders of working-class origin.
How, one wonders, could urban intellectuals not only make common cause
with the villagers, but transform themselves into highly effective mountain
fighters, the most militant in the struggle against the invader? It is true that
many of them were only one generation removed from village life, that they
were young and enthusiastic. It is also true that in Serbia and Montenegro
there was a strong pro-Russian tradition. The partisans benefited from the
systematic extermination of Serbs by Ante Pavelic, the Poglavnik (leader) of
the new Croatian state; of those who survived, many fled and joined Tito's
forces. All these facts help to explain the partisans' success, but they do not
provide a conclusive answer. The partisans made mistakes as well, more
perhaps in the political than in the military field. The Russians were horrified
by the political extremism of their overzealous Yugoslav comrades. In
Montenegro and Slovenia, in the middle of the war, partisan leaders gave
orders to assassinate local patriots because their attitude to the Communist
party was not sufficiently enthusiastic.32 This policy was discontinued after
Tito had reprimanded them.
The achievements of the Yugoslav partisans cannot begin to be
satisfactorily explained without reference to the men who led them. In Tito
they had a great political and military leader, imperturb-
2l6 GUERRILLA WARFARE
tble, a man of iron will, a true believer yet not a fanatic, a civilian vith an
uncanny military instinct. Yet Tito alone would have been ible to accomplish
little but for the presence of younger men of ;reat capacity, a Kardelj and a
Djilas, a Ribar and a Popovic, willing o accept his authority, yet able to act
independently. For once ntellectuals were also men of action; the partisans
were not only nore intelligent than their opponents, they were also tougher.
The Yugoslav revolt began with a call for a general insurrection >y the
Communist party in July 1941; the appeal had some effect in lerbia and
Montenegro, none at all in Croatia. Rut the Germans nd their local
collaborators suppressed the revolt without diffi-ulty. On 16 September Tito
left his hiding place in Relgrade and vent to the mountains to assume
leadership of a more intensive truggle; a decision had been taken previously
by the party execu-ive to convert itself into the general staff of a guerrilla
army and to reate operational bases in certain parts of the country from
which he enemy would have to be evicted.33
Ry September 1941 Tito's supporters numbered about fifteen housand but
many of them were without arms; Colonel Mikhailo-ich, who had organized
a resistance group in the mountains even lefore the Nazi invasion of Russia,
had some five thousand follow-rs at the time. The menace of the "bandits"
was thought by the Jermans to be sufficiently serious by then to warrant a
major offen-ive against them; in a matter of days in late November 1941
three Jerman divisions cleared Serbia, and the partisans had to escape to
iosnia-Herzegovina. In Yugoslav partisan history, as in China, the nemy
offensives are the great milestones; the Yugoslavs counted even, the Chinese
six (up to the Sian incident in 1937). The second ierman offensive was of no
great import, but the third, carried out lainly by Italians and Croats,
compelled Tito to withdraw even irther to the south. Montenegro had the
great advantage of being irtually inaccessible, but it was also exceedingly
poor and sup-lies were almost impossible to obtain and in June 1942 Tito de-
ided to march north again, where he occupied a fairly large area in le heart of
Yugoslavia, including the towns of Jajce and Rihac. The purth and fifth
enemy offensives (operation "White," January/larch 1943, and operation
"Black," May-June 1943) were success-jl inasmuch as Tito lost about half of
his troops, but, as on previous ccasions, he once more broke out from the
enemy encirclement. Vhen Italy surrendered in September 1943, his forces
were back in losnia, disarmed some ten Italian divisions and seized great
quan-iies of arms and supplies. By the end of 1943 Tito's partisan army
232 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (il)'. PARTISANS AGAINST HITLER
numbered almost three hundred thousand according to Yugoslav sources;

two hundred thousand according to others. These forces were not, however,
all concentrated in one region; besides Tito's own anny, major partisan units
were fighting from Slovenia in the north to Macedonia and Montenegro in the
south.
Early on in the war Tito had realized that the strength of the partisan
movement lay in its dispersal, that the establishment of one compact front
would be more than dangerous.34 He had told his comrades in Montenegro in
November 1941 that given the conditions, partisan warfare was the best
means of getting a popular uprising underway, aware of course as long ago as
then that the tactics of guerilla war alone would not be suitable for large-scale
offensive operations aimed at the liberation of vast stretches of territory; hence
his later decision to form larger mobile units (brigades) which were not tied to
any specific locality. But these did not replace the guerilla units, which
continued to operate in Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. Even in
November 1942, after fifty thousand square kilometers had already been
liberated, Tito insisted that the guerrilla tactics used previously — meaning
the harassment of the enemy's supply lines, the destruction of his bases and so
on — must still remain integral to the overall struggle of the Popular Army. 35
By the late summer of 1942 Tito's partisans had become an "operative
problem" for the Germans.36
One year later, in November 1943, the German High Command
determined that a "Soviet State" had come into being behind its lines, and new
major antipartisan operation was decided upon, with the object of clearing
eastern Bosnia, and above all the Dalmatian coast.37 This was a matter of
utmost consequence to the Germans, because the partisans' presence could
have opened the road to Allied landings. So operations Kugelblitz and Adler
were set in motion. Adler succeeded, but Kugelblitz was a failure; Tito again
broke through the enemy lines without undue hazard. Paradoxically, the last
German offensive in May 1944 {Ross el sprung), in which relatively small
German units were parachuted near Tito's headquarters, was the most nearly
destructive; a German battalion almost seized Tito and his staff. Six thousand
partisans were killed at the cost of only a few Germans. But by that time the
Allies were in a position to provide more effective air support to the partisans,
and the German columns had to withdraw, their basic mission, save for the
casualties inflicted, in no way fulfilled.
Mikhailovich's Chetniks continued to exist but played no significant role in
the war against the Germans, he having mean-
2l8 GUERRILLA WARFARE
ime, through various intermediaries including the Belgrade pup->et

government, concluded an armistice with the Germans and the talians. The
Mikhailovich tragedy was, to some extent, the fault of he partisans.
Mikhailovich certainly was no collaborator or traitor n the strictly accepted
sense of either word; he could, after all, lave stayed in Belgrade in 1941 in the
first place instead of leading
far less comfortable existence in the mountains. In November-December
1941 the two factions — his and Tito's — negotiated the oordination of their
activities; Tito claims that he even offered /likhailovich the supreme
command. But Mikhailovich prepared limself for a long war; he thought
partisan activism misplaced and n any case deeply distrusted the
Communists. His attitude was hared by other Serbian officers; it is one of the
ironies of history hat Kosta Pecanac, who had been the principal guerrilla
leader ehind the German lines in World War I, and who served for a time 1
1941 under Mikhailovich, was among the first Chetniks to make ieace with the
Germans. A Serb, a conservative and a regular army fficer, Mikhailovich was
suspicious of all non-Serbian Yugoslavs; ne Croat Tito was in his opinion a
mere "jailbird." At his trial he aid that he was not a politician but a military
man; he certainly icked the Communist ability to mobilize the masses. The
Royal 'ugoslav government in exile had appointed him minister of war in
942, but as his forces disintegrated, he lost his official position fune 1944).
He managed to evade the Communists for about a year fter the war had
ended, but was captured in March 1946 and sen-snced to death.38
While they forged their guerrilla units into an army, the partisans lade
similar progress on the political front. At a meeting in Bihac r November
1942, the Anti-Fascist Council of Yugoslavia (AVNOJ) /as established,
superseding the Movement for National Liber-tion ("We are now setting up
something like a government," Tito /rote to Dimitrov, the general secretary
of the Comintern in Mos-ow).39 A few non-Communist politicians belonged
to AVNOJ but lis was mere window-dressing, for all effective power was in
the ands of the Communists. Partisan discipline had been strict from le very
beginning; with the establishment of a quasi-state, their nits increasingly
resembled those of a regular army. Ranks and ecorations were formally
introduced, several generals were ap-ointed, and in November 1944 Tito
was made Marshal of Yugo-lavia.
The partisans did not lack money during their campaigns; in the arly days
of the war they had commandeered considerable sums
from provincial banks. It was far more difficult to get arms and for a long
while the partisans depended on those taken from the enemy or
manufactured in their own small factories. The first Allied emissaries visited
Tito's headquarters in 1942, but a permanent British mission was not
installed until 1943 and there were no Russians in the partisan headquarters
until late in the war.
At the Teheran Conference it was decided that the Allies should give Tito
full support and, from then on, the partisans received more or less what they
needed from Rritish and American bases. This help was important, but it was
no longer decisive. To the great disappointment of the partisans, no Russian
supplies were forthcoming until the very end of the war.
Yugoslavia is one of the few cases in history in which a partisan movement
liberated a country and seized power largely without outside help. It is, of
course, true that but for their military involvement in Russia and on other
fronts, the Germans could have crushed the partisans with the greatest of ease,
just as the Chinese Red Armies could not have won their war but for Japan's
many preoccupations elsewhere. But this does not detract from the partisans'
achievements. As in China, it was essentially a peasant army led by middle-
class rebels, mainly intellectuals.40 But it was not a peasant war, land was not
redistributed while the fighting continued. Again as in China, the government
which emerged after the war was the wartime general staff of the partisan
movement. The partisan experience enormously strengthened the self-
confidence of the Yugoslav leaders; unlike the other Communist governments,
they had not been imposed by the Russians but had attained power through
their own efforts. They were not a satellite and this made for growing strains
in their relations with the Soviet Union, culminating in Tito's break with Stalin
in 1948. Seen in a wider perspective, it could be argued that Communism
would have prevailed in Yugoslavia even had there been no partisan
movement, because it had been decided between the Allies that this was to be
part of the Soviet sphere of influence. It is quite likely, furthermore, that,
sooner or later, Yugoslavia would have opted for national Communism;
Rumania after all did so, despite having been "liberated" by a foreign army.
Inside Yugoslavia the partisans emerged as the "new class" described by Djilas
in his books; their mental makeup and their intellectual outlook differed in
some respects from that of the Communist elites in other East European
countries and this has had its impact on Yugoslav domestic and foreign
politics since 1945. Much of the partisan tradition has worn off with the years,
but
235 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (il): PARTISANS AGAINST HITLER
ome still persists, and for this, among all the other reasons, Yugo-lavia
remains a "special case."
THE SLOVAK RISING
"he two major East European risings outside the Soviet Union and 'ugoslavia
ended in disaster. The initiative for the Slovak revolt ame from Lieutenant-
Colonel Golian who acted both as chief of taff of the local puppet
government and as the representative of fie Czechoslovak government in
exile. He had conspired with fel-DW officers during the spring and early
summer of 1944; in one apid action the whole Slovak army was to open the
road to the Soviet army. He coordinated his plan with the Communists who
iad at the time around fifteen hundred partisans in the Slovak riountains.
Golian and the regular army officers intended to carry >ut the operation in
late September or October to coincide with the ssumed date of the Soviet
army's new offensive. The Slovak Com-nunist leadership agreed in principle
with this timing, sharing the ear that should the rising start prematurely, it
would be quickly mothered by a few German divisions. The Czech
Communists in /loscow and the Soviet High Command, on the other hand,
pre-erred an earlier date and were anyway more interested in partisan
ctivities than in regular army participation. Substantial Ukrainian >artisan
units were parachuted into Slovakia in late July; in August hey launched a
general insurrection, thus forcing Golian's hand. It annot be established
unequivocally whether the partisan leaders cted on their own initiative, or
whether they had explicit instruc-ions from Moscow to pre-empt a non-
Communist rising.41 At first he Germans hesitated; they were not as yet
certain about the ex-ent of the revolt and could ill afford to divert troops
from the Eastern front. However, on 28 August a German military mission
vas stopped in transit in the north of Slovakia and its members :illed. The day
after, Tiso, the puppet president of Slovakia, an-lounced that German forces
had been "invited" to suppress the >artisans; within twenty-four hours the
first Wehrmacht units en-ered Slovak territory.
At the beginning of the rising, Golian had at his disposal twenty housand
regular soldiers in central and eastern Slovakia; in the vestern part of the
country his appeal had found little echo. There vere also some twenty-five
hundred partisans; within the next few
weeks their number rose to seven thousand. The German advance did not go
too well during the first ten days of fighting; but by mid-September the tide
turned in its favor, and while operations lasted until late October, the outcome
was no longer in doubt. The insurgents received small quantities of arms from
both the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. But they had expected the
arrival of the Soviet army, or at least Czech units fighting with the Soviet
army, and neither of these joined them in time to avert the disaster. The most
they were given was occasional air support by Czech pilots operating from
Soviet airfields. During October the Soviet army tried to force the Dukla Pass,
which would have allowed of rapid advance into Slovakia. But they
encountered unexpectedly heavy German resistance which they overcame
only after the Slovak rising had ended. As the rising collapsed, several
thousand Slovak soldiers joined the partisans in the mountains, but they no
longer constituted a military danger for the Germans.
The story of the Slovak rising has been written and rewritten several times
since the end of the war. Communist historiography in the Stalin period has it
that the Slovak rising had been led by the Communists but had failed owing to
the incompetence and the intrigues of the bourgeois elements which had been
involved. The party line was modified in the 1960s and a collection of
documents published which showed fairly accurately what had actually hap-
pened in ig44.42 Seen in perspective, it was a case of bungling and bad timing;
there was no deliberate attempt to sabotage the rising. The Soviet command
could not have known that it would face such determined German resistance
in the Carpathian Mountains, and that the advance into Slovakia would take
so long. The Communist partisans' decision to launch the insurrection
prematurely for political reasons certainly did little good to their own cause.
They would have helped the Russians more by intensifying partisan warfare;
it is doubtful that this would have provoked a German invasion. In the
fighting against the Germans the partisans played only a secondary role; the
Slovak army units bore the brunt of the German attack. Had they employed
partisan tactics, occupying the mountain heights rather than trying to defend a
front of some hundred and thirty miles, they would certainly have held out
longer, although it is less guaranteed that they would have been able to resist
the Germans for the further seven months until the Soviet troops at last
arrived.
WARSAW
he Warsaw rising in 1944 was the one major urban insurrection of /orld
War II. The resolve of the Polish Home Army (AK) to acceler-te the struggle
against the German occupiers reaches back to late 943. As the Germans
retreated from the eastern regions of Poland, le AK appeared more or less
openly in the countryside and in jme cities such as Vilna. For the Polish
leadership this operation, urza (the Storm), was of the greatest political
significance. For enturies Russia, the occupying power, had been the enemy
par wellence, and to the Polish eye the attitude of the Soviet Union iffered in
no essential respect from that of Tsarist Russia. As the oviet troops advanced
into Poland, the people's fear was that they 'ere come not to liberate the
country, but to occupy it. The arrests f Polish Home Army commanders and
the execution of some of lem by the Russians proved that these fears were
not groundless.
The decision to mount the Warsaw rising was rooted in the as-umption that
the Soviet army would very soon be at the gates of le Polish capital; the
Home Army would forestall it, thus creating political fact. There was no
unanimity about this decision; Sosn-owski, the Polish minister of defense,
strenuously opposed it; ne of his chief reasons was that the insurgents could
not count on .Hied help. Warsaw was still outside the effective range of
Allied ircraft, and the Soviet Union refused to give the Allies landing ghts for
supply missions to Warsaw. The rising began on 31 July 944 with an attack
of between twenty-five hundred and three thou-and Poles against German
strongpoints; of the twelve thousand lembers of the Home Army in Warsaw,
only every fourth one was rmed. 43 The city was defended by five thousand
German soldiers /ho were supplemented inside a week. There was no
moment of urprise, the Germans had foreseen what was coming. "The ex-
ected rising has started," ran their army report.44 The insurgents' intelligence
and communications system was totally inadequate; rders scarcely ever
reached the units at the right time. The Ger-lans repelled attacks against
almost every strategic point.
In effect, the rising was defeated on the very first day, when the oles lost
one-half of their manpower and failed to seize a single ridge or the airfield.
Yet against all odds the struggle continued for nother fifty days. Fighting
courageously, the Poles received rein-prcements from other towns and they
still hoped that the Russians
would perhaps after all come to their rescue or that the Allies would
somehow assist them. The Germans, who for all their more professional
equipment had nonetheless too few forces to quell the rising entirely within
their predicted day or two, resorted to calling in the most notorious cutthroats
such as the Dirlewanger brigade and the Kaminski Russian volunteer units for
antipartisan operations. In one Warsaw region alone, Vola, ten thousand
civilians were killed. As a result of these atrocities, the Polish will to resist
stiffened all the more.
Meanwhile the Russians were camping just outside Warsaw, on the
opposite shore of the Vistula. They had not stirred the inhabitants of the
Polish capital to rise (as some of the Poles later claimed) in order to watch
them being killed by the Germans. But equally, they had not the slightest
intention of coming to their aid. Stalin told Churchill and Roosevelt that the
whole enterprise was a "contemptible adventure," the Home Army was not an
army; it could do no more than hide in the forests, and was quite incapable of
challenging the German army. Even earlier, Soviet spokesmen had declared
that there was no fighting in Warsaw; it was all an invention by the Polish
government in exile in London.
The fight for Warsaw ended in early October. A hundred and fifty thousand
Poles were killed in the rising, among them some sixteen thousand members
of the Home Army. German casualties were eleven thousand including two
thousand killed. The German conditions of surrender were curiously and
surprisingly magnanimous; prisoners were not to be shot but to be accorded
combatant status. The Germans had of course every incentive to bring the
struggle to a quick end for they were aware that the Russians might at any
moment resume their offensive. Hitler's instructions were that Warsaw was to
be razed to the ground, to "disappear from the face of the earth." Soon after it
was all over, the Soviet army entered a ghost city.
It is only too easy in retrospect to conclude that the rising was doomed
from the start. Even had the insurrection succeeded on the very first day, and
even had the Russians come to its help, a Stalinist regime would have been
imposed on Poland. The Poles lost thousands of victims and their capital was
destroyed, but even a military victory would not have affected the political
outcome; there was no hope of Poland regaining its independence. In purely
military terms, however, the rising proved once again that failing the element
of surprise and sufficient arms and ammunition, an insurrection cannot
succeed. (The insurgents had initially ammuni-
>n for five days only.) But it also demonstrated simultaneously at, given
equal determination on both sides, it is very hard in-;ed, short of
overwhelming military superiority, for regular army lits to reimpose their
control on a major city.
ALBANIA
he development of the Albanian resistance movement during the ar much

resembles that in Yugoslavia. The Communists were the rongest group and
they revealed not only greater military ability it also considerable political
acumen. They outmaneuvered, iso-ted and ultimately destroyed their
enemies of the Balli Komhe-r. There was in Albania a guerrilla-banditry
heritage dating back • the Middle Ages which had never been altogether
stamped out. he topography of the country made it all but impossible for
any ivader to establish effective control unless he had almost un-mited
manpower at his disposal. Since the country was neither ch nor strategically
important, it had usually escaped the worst Ffects of foreign domination.
Italian and German control during the war was always limited to le major
towns and lines of communication. In large parts of the Duntry the partisans
could operate virtually without hindrance, he Communists were at first
undeniably handicapped by their ick of military experience, and they had
great difficulty in acquir-lg arms and supplies. The existence of deep ethnic
conflicts made , in addition, anything but easy for the Albanian Communists
(as )r their Yugoslav comrades) to establish a unified guerrilla com-land.
Initially they based themselves mainly on the landless peas-nts among the
Tosks; their primary foe, Abas Kupi (the Albanian likhailovich), belonged to
the Gheg, the rival tribe. Born in the ame little town as Skanderbeg, he had
fought in World War I with little guerrilla band behind the Austrian lines.
The Yugoslav Communists already had an active party organiza-ton to
draw upon when the war broke out, not to mention two lecades of political
and conspiratorial experience. The Albanian Communist party, on the other
hand, came into being only during he war. Its backbone was two to three
thousand young urban ntellectuals; as in China, they constituted the
leadership which nobilized the peasants.45
Julian Amery, who was a British liaison officer with the Albanian
resistance, has pointed to the social and political roots of the partisan
movement in Albania; a new class of officials and merchants had emerged in
the 1920s and 1930s whose children had received a European education,
either in Albania or abroad (frequently in Paris).
These young men had no roots in landed property or among the tribes and could
find no outlet for their energies within the narrow limits of independent Albania
such as the Ottoman Empire had offered earlier generations. They were thus
peculiarly susceptible to the influence of revolutionary ideas. In other countries
such young men often inclined to Fascism, but in Albania Fascism was the creed
of the foreign overlord and, in their search for faith and discipline, they therefore
turned to the Communists.46
Operating under the cover of a "National Liberation Movement," founded at a

conference in Peza in September 1942, the Communists gradually subverted
and took over the other bands — a considerable achievement by any
standards. Their contribution to the Allied war effort in 1941-1942 was
negligible apart from such projects as cutting telegraph lines in July 1942.
Boasts by Albanian spokesmen that they had detained a hundred thousand
Italians and seventy thousand Germans can hardly be taken seriously. Some
Italian and German troops were kept in Albania as a precaution against an
Allied invasion, not to fight the partisans.
The great hour of the Communist partisans came in the summer of 1943
when Italy capitulated to the Allies, and much of Albania, including some of
the major cities, passed into the partisans' hands. Paradoxically, they came
under much greater pressure toward the end of the war, for whereas the
Italians had not been that eager to fight, the Germans, with relatively small
forces, launched a counter-offensive in November 1943 which almost proved
fatal for the partisans. They were pushed back into the mountains where they
had to spend a most uncomfortable winter. But by 1944 Germany was no
longer in a position to squander its men and resources in so very minor a
combat area; its troops were gradually withdrawn and by November 1944 no
more German units were left in the country. Some of the non-Communist
guerrillas escaped abroad, others were seized and shot, a few continued their
struggle in the mountains. To all intents and purposes the victory of the
Communists was complete by late 1944.
The Albanian Communists had received both guidance and support from
Yugoslavs during the war, but this did not prevent their
lrning violently against Tito in later years. In the Khrushchev era leir
country became the last bastion of Stalinism in Europe. This as not
altogether surprising in view of the cultural level of de-slopment of the
country, but the spirit of defiance cannot perhaps e explained entirely in
terms of political, cultural and social back-ardness. The case of Albania is yet
another to illustrate that a artisan movement coming to power mainly
through its own efforts ill still remain stubbornly independent and strongly
nationalist in ispiration quite irrespective of its internationalist slogans.
GREECE
s in other European countries, the resistance against the Axis owers in

Greece was split; most of the guerrilla fighting was done, 1 the event, after
the war had ended. Great claims were later made ith regard to the Greek
contribution to the Allied war effort. But le German War Diary noted on 5
November 1943 that "nationalist nd communist bands, altogether some 12-
15,000 men, oppose ach other; British officers in both camps have been
unable to bring Dout unity of action. So far these operations have been of
little gnificance."47 The Greek Communists (ELAS) were the sturdiest f the
partisan movements; their party had been in existence since le early 1920s,
and they were among the first to take to the moun-lins after the Russians
had entered the war. Their closest rivals ere EDES under General Napolean
Zervas, the "National Band" f General Serafis, and EKKA commanded by
Colonel Psaros. erafis was taken prisoner by the Communists and joined
them lbsequently, Psaros was killed by ELAS. Only the units com-landed by
Zervas survived the war more or less intact, primarily wing to British
support. Zervas and the Communists collaborated ora time to time, as in the
first major action of guerrilla warfare — le mining of the Gorgopotamos
railway viaduct in October 1942 nder the direction of a party of British
parachutists. But fighting ach other was their more frequent occupation. 48
The Germans iter maintained that even the mining of Gorgopotamos was of
no lilitary consequence, because the British assumption that this was le main
supply line to the Afrika Korps no longer held good; ommel had already
retreated from El Alamein. According to Colonel Woodhouse, second in
command of the ritish military mission among the partisans at the time, the
value
of the guerrilla operations was not inconsiderable in 1943; they created the
impression that an Allied landing was about to take place in Greece rather
than in Sicily, and thus drew into southern Greece a German armored division
which the Germans could not withdraw in time when it was needed
elsewhere. But in 1944, again to cite Woodhouse, partisan activities were not
important in scale, and this despite the guerrillas having grown substantially
in strength and their seizure of great quantities of Italian arms and
ammunition.49 The Communists were being more farsighted than their rivals
and the British, whose overriding concern was to win the war as quickly as
possible. The Communists realized that the decisive contention for power
would take place only with the end of the war. Their fundamental task was
therefore to increase their strength and, if possible, to destroy their own
internal antagonists before the war should be over. Although the Communists
fought the Italians and the Germans only on rare occasions, they still were
more active than other Greek resistance groups; since the British command
appears to have been oblivious of the Communists' postwar ambitions, it
seemed only natural to send them more supplies than the other factions.50
As in Albania, partisan life was neither particularly strenuous nor risky
under Italian occupation. The situation changed radically after the Italian
surrender; during the last months of 1943 the Germans launched an offensive
in Thessalia, Epirus and the Pelopon-nese which involved the partisans for the
first time in heavy fighting and compelled them to retreat to distant mountain
hideouts. But the overextended German forces were no longer in a position to
sustain a prolonged campaign and the partisan movement survived this
difficult winter.
The Communists feared, not without reason, that the British would support
the restoration of the monarchy after the war; they also suspected, quite
mistakenly, that the British intended to destroy Communism. In fact, the
British merely insisted on a plebiscite to decide the future of the monarchy;
they were quite ready to accept its results. What the British were not willing to
accept was a Communist coup; it was this fatal misreading of the situation that
led first to the Communist refusal to disarm and subsequently to the
insurrection in Athens in December 1944 with its tragic consequences.51 Years
later, the Communists were to regret their precipitate action; Siantos, who had
led the insurrection, was denounced by his colleagues as a traitor, enemy
agent and British stool pigeon.52
The partisan experience in Greece during the war reveals a pic-are similar to
that in other European countries. Relatively weak efore the war, if with a
sounder nucleus than the rest, the Commu-ists emerged as the most dynamic
party, the best prepared psy-hologically and organizationally to operate in
illegal conditions, 'he prestige of the party grew by leaps and bounds during
the war; :s military contributions to the victory had been small, but it had till
done more than the rival groups. Since the Axis forces were not umerous
enough to occupy the whole of Greece, the Communists tepped into the
vacuum and eventually dominated about half of be mountain regions.
During the war years new cadres were rained for the postwar struggle and,
by war's end, the Communists tad become a powerful military force. For
three years they were to ngage the Greek army in a bloody and costly
guerrilla war.
FRANCE
r
renchmen resisted the German occupation by collecting informa-ion of
military value for the Allies, by acts of sabotage and individ-lal violence.
Guerrilla warfare played only a minor role in the rrench resistance, except in
the weeks following the Allied land-ngs in 1944 and again during the
liberation of France. On 6 June .944 when it received its orders to move to
Normandy, the 2nd SS 'anzer Division (Das Reich) was stationed near
Toulouse. Owing o resistance harassment, railway sabotage and RAF attacks,
it eached the battle zone only sixteen days later. Rut the price that lad to be
paid when it did arrive was high; it was this division vhich destroyed
Oradour-sur-Glane and killed its inhabitants. It las been argued that it was
not a very good division anyway and its presence at the front did not make
much difference.53 While giving heir blessing to the various Maquis, most of
which had sprouted ipontaneously, both the Gaullist leadership and the
Communists rad reservations about the military value of large partisan
concen-rations. These doubts were only too justified. The north of France vas,
with some exceptions (the Ardennes and the Vosges), un-iuitable for guerrilla
operations, quite apart from the fact that many German divisions were
stationed in this area. Certain sections of he south, on the other hand, were
thinly populated and the rough errain favored the defender. This was true of
the Massif Central, or instance, and the Vercors, an Alpine plateau to the
south of
Grenoble. But while the Maquis were relatively safe in these mountainous
areas, their ability to strike from there at the main lines of communication was
limited.
The first Maquis had come into being in late 1942; by early 1943 there
were so many that it was already impossible to list them in full. 54 Most of
these, however, were very small groups, only rarely existing for more than a
matter of weeks or a few months. Many of their members were refractaires,
young Frenchmen escaping forced labor and deportation to Germany, and
more anxious to hide in the woods and mountains than to indulge in military
operations. The idea of establishing a major concentration of Maquis in the
Vercors originated with Pierre Dalloz, the secretary of the French Alpinist
Association, and Yves Forge, a resistance leader in Lyons. Another plan aimed
at concentrating some ten to fifteen thousand partisans in the Mont Mouchet
region near Clermont-Ferrand. Both projects were undertaken in the belief that
the local Maquis would be joined by French paratroops and that heavy
equipment would be provided. (War materiel was dropped by British planes
on many occasions in 1943 but consisted mostly of light weapons and explo-
sives.) The Maquis congregated but neither the paratroops nor the heavy arms
arrived. Furthermore, the basic concept of a "mountain fortress" violated the
most fundamental guerrilla principles.55 The Germans stormed Mont Mouchet
on 1 1 June 1944; most of the defenders were fortunate enough to escape. The
main battle for Vercors began on 13 June 1944, the Maquis having struck
prematurely. Following the failure of the first German assault, the local
Maquis had some four weeks' respite, but eventually the superior numbers of
the Germans and their heavier equipment told and most of the Maquis
perished in the battles of July 21-23. There were bitter complaints that the
Maquis had not received the promised help, but the hard-pressed Allies could
not divert forces to a military sideshow, hundreds of miles from the places
where more imperative battles were being fought. Nor could the responsibility
be so easily shifted; the original notion of using guerrilla forces for
conventional warfare was itself of course at fault.
These two major partisan efforts apart, there were countless minor
operations, the story of which has been described in exhaustive detail.56 When
General Marshall wrote in 1946 that the resistance in Normandy had assured
the success of Allied landings by delaying the arrival of German
reinforcements and in preventing the regrouping of enemy divisions in the
interior, he referred not to one major, spectacular engagement, but to
hundreds of small acts of
23° GUERRILLA WARFARE
abotage, especially on the part of transport workers. Generally peaking, there

is reason to believe that the railway workers of Europe contributed more to
the Allied victory than the partisans.
Between 1942 and 1944 the French resistance suffered more 3sses as the
result of betrayal within its own ranks than through German action. By early
1944 it had to some degree recovered and t played a certain role in the
liberation of French towns and vil-ages. But in the last stage of the liberation
of France, military iperations were dictated by the overt scramble for power.
The Com-nunist (FTP) decision to launch an insurrection in Paris while the
dlied columns headed for the capital were yet on their way is the >est-known
example. Elsewhere the Gaullists tried to pre-empt he Communists. One
circumstance, however, that perhaps distin-;uishes the French resistance
from others of its kind at the time s that although it was internally no less
divided than any politically, the conflicts between Communist and non-
Communist ;roups brought no ostensible armed clashes as long as the
Germans vere the common foe. It was only in the interregnum between their
etreat and before full civilian control was established that a free-or-all took
place. Most of the participants in these postwar struggles had never even
seen action against the Germans.
ITALY
rhe Italian military resistance differed in some immediate respects Tom

partisan warfare elsewhere in Europe. In the first place it legan only after
Mussolini's downfall, when the final outcome of he war was scarcely any
longer in doubt. Secondly, relations be-ween Communists and other anti-
Fascist forces, despite occa-iional strains, were more harmonious than was the
usual rule. And urther, if it produced no giant world figure, its partisan
movement ,vas headed by men such as Longo, Parri, Pajetta, who were to
play in important part in Italian politics for years to come. Activist al-nost by
definition, it ranged itself deliberately against the policy idvocated by the less
militant anti-Fascist leaders. As the movement saw it, Italy had to redeem
itself before the world and to regain its self-respect after submitting for two
decades to Fascist domination. The Italian resistance, to put it somewhat
crudely, was rhe return ticket to democratic, anti-Fascist respectability. The
Rome government, along with the Allied command, was less enthu-
siastic about partisan operations. Italy, like France, was save for a few
exceptions not ideal guerrilla country: it could well be that the partisans
might hinder more than help the Allied campaign. The Italian government
tried to bring the partisan movement under its direct control, but as in France,
the exercise was not wholly satisfactory. The Rome government appointed
General Cadorna as the partisan chief of staff, whereupon the resistance
(CLNAI) named two of its leaders, Longo and Parri, to keep a watchful eye on
him.
The resistance claimed that the lack of Allied encouragement stemmed from
political reasons, a not altogether unfounded charge. The Western
governments were aware that at least a third of the partisan movement was
under Communist administration. The second largest contingent was that of
the Action party — the former Giustizia e Liberta. It is undeniable both that
the tactics of the Italian resistance were not very well thought out and also that
its strategy was politically motivated. A striking instance of this was the
decision (against Allied advice) to establish large rather than small fighting
units. Granted all the undoubted heroism, there was also a bombastic element
in the heady invoking of il secondo ri-sorgimento.51 True, the difficulties
facing the early partisans were formidable; they fought not only the Germans,
but the diehards of the Duce's Fascist regime which still had its stalwarts
throughout the German-occupied areas. Kesselring, the German commander,
estimated that some thirteen thousand soldiers were killed and the same
number wounded as the result of Italian partisan action; transport between
Italy and the south of France was interrupted for ten days in October 1944
and some major Italian cities were temporarily cut off because of mined
bridges, roads and railway lines.58 But the partisans suffered many more losses
— some estimates range as high as sixty-five thousand killed and wounded,
and up to ten thousand civilians were executed during German and Fascist
reprisals.59
Some partisan leaders had acquired military experience in the Spanish Civil
War but this was of no great help in such different circumstances. They
committed the same mistake as the French Maquis, attempting to establish
liberated areas at a time when German military power was yet unbroken. For
a while small partisan republics existed near the Swiss frontier (Ossola,
Monferrato, Car-nio), but at the end of six weeks, in late October 1944, they
were destroyed by the Germans who did not even have to employ strong
forces for the purpose. The partisans found themselves in the worst possible
situation that could face a guerrilla — having to defend a
atic line without real fortifications, armor and artillery. It is only ir to add
that Longo and other partisan commanders had warned ;ainst this
strategy.60 Following these disasters, General Alexan-;r, the commander in
chief of the Allied forces in Italy, appealed the partisans on 13 November
1944 to stop large-scale oper-ions; he did not tell them in so many words to
go home, but Ivised them to save arms and ammunition for a better day and
ore propitious circumstances. From the partisans' point of view ich advice
was highly demoralizing; they regarded his call as an nderhand trick, giving
a new boost to bourgeois attentisme. But in uth there was no other strategy
the partisans could have adopted ice they had been defeated; it was only
commonsense to prevent irther unnecessary losses.
The partisan movement recovered its momentum the following jring.
During the winter the organized bands numbered no more tan a few
thousand members, whereas on 1 March there were *ain eighty thousand
men in the partisan army. By mid-April that gure had swollen to a hundred
and thirty thousand, and at the time f the general insurrection there were
two hundred and fifty to tree hundred thousand. 61 But "general
insurrection" usually leant not much more than stepping into the vacuum
created by the erman retreat, ousting the Fascist bureaucracy, and turning
the ascist casa del popolo into the headquarters of the Communist arty.
The Italian partisans were from the start a political movement 3ove all, their
military activities were subordinated throughout to leir political aims. In
military terms their operations were of no reat consequence, but their
political impact was indubitable; but >r them the country might have
remained a monarchy — at least >r far longer than it did. 62 As in France, the
resistance movement 1 Italy was the cradle of many idealistic schemes for a
better postwar world, of far-reaching internal changes, social justice,
industrial emocracy. Even in defeat these ideas continued to be cherished,
nd through its unfulfilled dreams the spirit of the resistance was )
materialize as a distinctly tangible factor in the country's postwar olitical
history.
POSTWAR REFLECTIONS
V h e n the war broke out in 1939 no one thought that guerrilla oper-tions
would play any material part at all in the critical years ahead.
And it was perhaps by very virtue of this revival of partisan war being so
unexpected in the first place that the pendulum later swung to the other
extreme and its importance exaggerated. The impression is sometimes even
created that it was the guerrillas who in fact won the war with occasional help
of this or that regular army. These sources have it that there were two million
partisans in the USSR, 50,000 in France, 462,000 in Italy and 250,000 in
Bulgaria.63 The partisans claimed to have killed millions of enemy officers and
soldiers, not to mention local traitors; they allegedly destroyed fifteen
thousand locomotives, fifteen thousand bridges, four thousand tanks and a
thousand aircraft.64 They claim to have diverted enemy forces amounting to
between two hundred and fifty and three hundred Axis divisions, forty
divisions in the USSR, fifty in Poland, fifty-five in Yugoslavia, more than thirty
divisions in France, twenty in Greece, ten to fifteen in Czechoslavakia, eight in
Albania and so on down the line. These figures certainly do not err on the side
of understatement.
The real number of partisans is virtually impossible to establish. Much, of
course, depends on the definition of the term. If one applies it liberally and
includes men and women who were ready to hide partisans for a night or who
expressed sympathy with them, there may have been millions of them. The
dangers involved should not be belittled; it took a brave person to give shelter
to a partisan for it could mean execution. If, on the other hand, one counts
only those who actually participated in the armed struggle against the enemy,
the number is much smaller; the less resistance there was, the taller quite often
the claims. Furthermore, there are great discrepancies between the figures
given by Soviet, Yugoslav, French and other sources at various times and in
various contexts. Recent Soviet sources quote the total number of people
involved at one time or another in the partisan movement as seven hundred
thousand; Western sources put it at five hundred thousand. But the rate of
attrition was high; many lost their lives, others were wounded or captured,
some deserted or were sent back to join the regular army. The maximum
strength of the Soviet partisan movement at any given time was two hundred
to two hundred and fifty thousand men and women.65
The discrepancies are even greater when it comes to the results of the
partisans' operations. The Yugoslav partisans alone, it was noted, claim to
have killed and wounded almost a million "enemies." If this figure is correct,
most of the victims must have been Yugoslavs. The same applies to other
European countries; a great many people perished in Europe during and after
the war in
ivil wars, purges and the settlement of all manner of accounts, but his did not
necessarily weaken the German war effort. If two to hree hundred divisions
had been diverted by the partisans, the var would have been over by 1943 at
the lastest. Again, much lepends on the interpretation of the term "diverting
enemy orces." A French author rightly observed that in the German oper-
tions against partisans in the Soviet Union far more forces were liverted than
in the entire North African campaign which involved . mere twelve
divisions.66 But with equal justice it could be laimed that the number of
German troops stationed in Norway in g44 (372 ,000 men) exceeded that of
German antiguerrilla forces in Russia and Yugoslavia, and this despite the
fact that there was no ;uerrilla warfare in Norway. Such uncritical
comparisons are, of :ourse, absurd; occupying armies have to station some
divisions in heir rear quite irrespective of the incidence of guerrilla warfare,
rhe larger the territory occupied, the greater the number of forces hat have to
be deployed as garrisons, to police it and to safeguard upplies and
communications. Considering that the Germans oc-,'upied vast territories
with a total population of more than two mndred million, the forces stationed
in the rear of the German irmies were few, and the aggregate of tanks, aircraft
and heavy trtillery diverted for antiguerrilla warfare was insignificant.
Some of the reasons making for the partisans' exaggerations have dready
been gone into. There were other motives, conscious and inconscious, such as
the compulsion in some of the occupied ;ountries to wash away with braggart
tales of gallant resistance exploits the shame of the defeat and of
collaboration; the majority of he population, so it was avowed, had been
actively anti-Fascist all ilong. There were numerous such brave men and
women who ought the occupiers from the very beginning, but for every one
of hem there were a hundred (or perhaps a thousand) last-minute ■esistance
fighters who would put on a red armband or don some ancy uniform to join
the partisans in the victory parade. The genu-ne partisans were contemptuous
of these late arrivals but they still needed manpower, so welcomed them in
their ranks nonetheless. Mot that these tardy recruits were necessarily all
cowards or oppor-unists; many of them had perhaps for long sympathized
with the ■esistance. But not everyone is born to be a hero, and besides, in
some countries it may indeed have been physically impossible to oin a
partisan group earlier.
The very fact that the military experts had prematurely announced the
demise of guerrilla warfare, or ignored the subject
altogether before 1939, acted as a spur in itself to further the tendency after
the war to overrate it. Now it became the fashion to proclaim Marx and
Engels, Lenin and Stalin as the great strategists of guerrilla warfare. 67 German
writers who had taken part in antiguerrilla operations discovered belatedly
that partisans were not just bandits, and that the problem could not be solved
by military repression alone.68 To which one must hasten to add in due
fairness that in the documents and memoirs of the supreme warlords, of Hitler
and Stalin, of Churchill and de Gaulle, there are but few references to guerrilla
warfare. Liddell Hart, who had been so enthusiastic about Lawrence's
accomplishments in the First World War, had strong reservations about the
efficacy of partisan warfare in the second.*
The real causes of the proliferation of guerrilla warfare are not shrouded in
mystery; they were the same, broadly speaking, as those that provoked
resistance against Napoleon in Spain, Russia, the Tyrol and elsewhere. Both
Napoleon and Hitler had occupied many lands and dispatched their armies to
faraway countries. They had both overextended their supply lines and spread
their forces very thin. But whereas Napoleon scarcely intervened in the inter-
nal affairs of occupied countries, except perhaps by appointing a relative to
rule it, the Germans interfered brutally and on a massive scale, and this was
bound to intensify the struggle against them. Terror produced counterterror,
and given the heavy demands on their manpower, the Germans lacked the
soldiery to destroy the partisans if these operated in favorable conditions.
The partisan experience during World War II again demonstrated the
paramount importance of geography. But it also pointed up the significance of
psychological factors; but for the dedication of capable cadres, and rallied
political sympathies among the local populations, there could have been no
guerrilla warfare. A partisan
* Liddell Hart's enthusiasm for guerrilla war waned because he found it both ineffective
and politically counterproductive. He wrote in 1954 that the partisans in the Second World
War had rarely had more than nuisance value except when their operations coincided with
the imminent threat of a powerful offensive absorbing the enemy's main attention: "At
other times they were less effective than widespread passive resistance — and brought far
more hann to the people in their own country. They provoked reprisals much more severe
than the injury inflicted on the enemy. They afforded his troops the opportunity for violent
action that is always a relief to the nerves of a garrison in an unfriendly country." Liddell
Hart recalls a meeting with Wingate, then serving as a captain in Palestine, in the late
1930s. He was beginning to have doubts about the long tenn consequences of guerrilla war
— the political and moral ill effects which would inevitably continue after the invaders had
gone. (B. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy [New York, 19671,368-370.)
movement needed space to maneuver, and areas in which it could bide. This
ruled out most of Western Europe; with German concentrations in all the
major cities, urban guerrilla operations were also impossible there. If the local
garrisons had not sufficed to subdue the partisans, the German air force
would have bombed them out of existence. Allied intelligence agents and
individual resistance fighters could hide in a city, major partisan units could
not. In the German scale of priorities, Western Europe mattered far more than
the Balkans. The presence of small guerrilla bands in the mountains of
Albania was a mere pinprick, it did not threaten any vital military or political
German interests. If, on the other hand, the Maquis had been able to gain a
firm foothold anywhere in France, the German military leadership would
have had to destroy it at any price because this would have constituted a
direct military threat. But even if geographical conditions had been more
propitious, it is doubtful whether a major partisan movement would have
emerged in Western Europe. Partisan war, guerre a Voutrance, was not in the
tradition of civilized nations; as Engels had noted many years before, Western
Europe was no longer conditioned for a war of this kind. There was
opposition to foreign rule, but not necessarily the willingness to sacrifice life
and property, to risk the destruction of cities and perhaps the entire nation.
Furthermore, Nazi terror was much less in evidence in Western than in
Eastern Europe. The West, as far as the Nazis were concerned, was merely
decadent, whereas Eastern Europe was racially inferior; the fewer Slavs, the
better.
The attitude of the civilian population was, of course, of crucial importance.
The partisans could knock on many a door and expect help, or at the very
least be certain that they would not be betrayed. The strength of the partisan
movement's appeal lay in its patriotic character; revolutionary slogans would
have been wholly ineffective and the Communists were the first to
acknowledge this.
Conversely, it was this very strength of patriotic feeling that prevented the
emergence of a resistance movement directed against the government inside
Nazi Germany and inside the Soviet Union. The German and the Soviet
political police had no difficulty in putting down any manifestation of
political dissent and obstructing any organized resistance. The majority of the
population in these countries either supported the regime or was cowed into
submission. It is revealing that of the German Communists parachuted into
German territory by the Soviets to organize cells of resistance and to collect
information, only one was not caught within a week
or two, and this lone survivor, significantly, infiltrated toward the end of the
war, was an agent of Polish extraction who hid among Polish friends in Upper
Silesia. (One or two German socialist parachutists also survived, but this was
in the last phase of the war when the activities of the Gestapo were already
disrupted as a result of saturation air raids.) The Germans tried on various
occasions to send agents to the Soviet rear, but there is reason to believe that
most of them were arrested before very long. The only trenchant resistance
could have come from inside the German army, but the oppositionist generals
and colonels were not at all sure whether their troops would follow them.
From what has been said so far it would appear that the partisans in
Europe were not strikingly successful in their paramount task, namely, to
inflict decisive damage on the Axis forces. One of the foremost historians of
the resistance, who can scarcely be suspected of lack of sympathy, later wrote
that "the vast majority of German units never came into direct contact with
the guerrillas."69 The only expression of real anger and concern about partisan
warfare on Hitler's part was his directive No. 46, dated 18 August 1942. ("In
recent months banditry in the East has assumed intolerable proportions.") But
in 1943-1944, when "banditry" had assumed far greater proportions, there
was no such outburst. As the German position deteriorated, the German
military leaders were totally preoccupied with the regular forces facing them.
Conditions differed from one country to another and political perspectives
were subject to change. The Soviet partisans certainly had no doubt that their
chief assignment was to wreak the worst possible havoc on the Germans.
Elsewhere in Europe the situation was far more complex; by the time the
Balkan partisans reached the peak of their strength — in the autumn of 1943
— the German summer offensive in Russia had failed and Italy had
surrendered. It was obvious by now that the Germans were going to lose the
war and this affected the political perspective of Communists and non-Com-
munists alike. Seen from the Communist point of view, it was far more
important to destroy their domestic rivals than engage in costly battles against
the Germans who were doomed anyway. The anti-Communist partisans also
stopped operations against the Germans, unless they were attacked, because
survival had become their top priority. True, some of the heaviest fighting
took place in the Balkans in late 1943, but this was invariably the result of
German antiguerrilla campaigns, not of partisan offensives. As in China,
priorities had changed; if at the start everything (or almost
everything) had been subordinated to the anti-Fascist war effort, from 1943
on at the latest, the anti-Fascist fight was subjugated to winning the struggle
for power inside each country.
Whether one considers the record of the European partisan movements a
story of success or failure or something in between depends entirely on the
yardstick employed. Insofar as winning the war is concerned, Alan Milward
correctly observes that, on the evidence, the history of the resistance should
have a far lesser place in the history of World War II. "As an individual act
resistance was liberating, satisfying and necessary; on a coordinated level it
seems to have been seldom effective, sometimes stultifying, frequently
dangerous and almost always too costly." 70 But then, the task of the
Communist resistance movements was, of course, not only to help win the
war.
Seen in this light, their operations were not, of course, a failure but an
outstanding success; the guerrilla movement was an excellent school for the
mobilization of masses and the training of cadres, it was the most effective
tool for the seizure of power. There was widespread feeling in the west of
Europe as well as in the south that the old elites had failed — hence the
defeats in the early days of the war. It was widely held that the old system had
been corrupt, that out of the ashes of destruction a new order would emerge
— just, more humane and effective, under the leadership of the progressive
forces headed by the Communist parties.
The record shows that in Yugoslavia and Albania the Communists
destroyed the rival forces before the end of the war, in Greece they almost
succeeded, in France and Italy they were in a very strong position but failed.
Wherever Communist partisans did not succeed it was principally because the
presence of Allied troops made an armed takeover impossible. Once
parliamentary democracy was restored, the majority was bound to reassert
itself, and the "vanguard" had missed its opportunity. Irrespective of the exis-
tence of partisan movements, Communist regimes would of course have been
imposed in Eastern Europe, but this does not detract from the overall
achievement of the partisans. The political repercussions of the resistance
were for long to echo — still echo resoundingly — through the west, south
and east of Europe.
GUERRILLA WARFARE
6
The Twentieth Century (III):
China and Vietnam
Of all guerrilla wars in modern history those in China and Vietnam have been
the most important, and all others have been in comparison of regional
significance only. The war in China resulted in the victory of a new social and
political order in the most populous nation in the world; the Vietnamese war
caused a deep crisis in the United States, and it is too early to assess its impact
on the global balance of power. The wars in China and Vietnam were won by
political parties inspired by a mixture of Communism and nationalism whose
elites came to correctly understand and apply the ideas of peasant support,
political organization and propaganda. By trial and error they chose the
military strategy most likely to succeed in local conditions. The Communists
won because the Japanese occupation of China and Vietnam had discredited
these states' former rulers and had created, with Japan's defeat, a power
vacuum. The Japanese were not defeated by the Chinese Communists, and in
Vietnam there was hardly any anti-Japanese resistance; but in both countries,
the Japanese acted as the catalyst for the victory of Communism. The
Communists prevailed in the struggle for power that followed the Japanese
defeat because they were the only modern political party that appeared both
as the "party of the poor" and at the same time as the leading patriotic
resistance movement.
For many years the Chinese Communists received virtually no help from
outside. Their tactics were traditionally Chinese; foreign examples, such as the
Russian revolution, were of little relevance to them. New elements for the
Communists were the political techniques, and the subordination of the
military struggle to political
iims. The Vietnamese Communists were in a more fortunate posi-ion
inasmuch as they received foreign assistance on a massive ;cale from a very
early stage of their war. On the other hand they lad to do more fighting than
the Chinese Communists, and their oom for maneuvering was more limited;
they also had to cope with in enemy using superior equipment. For both the
Chinese and the /ietnamese Communists guerrilla warfare was a transitional
stage n the struggle: they were fully aware that guerrilla tactics could
not )ossibly win the war and that sooner or later these would have to be
upplemented by and ultimately subordinated to regular war. The Chinese
Communists had used guerrilla tactics on and off from the 'ery beginning but
they were employed, on the whole, in the frame-vork of regular warfare; it is
quite likely that the Communists vould have been defeated by Chiang's fifth
encirclement campaign myway, but the defeat was certainly precipitated by
their engaging n positional rather than guerrilla warfare. In view of the
numbers nvolved in it, the Long March was not, and could not possibly have
>een, a guerrilla operation, though in the skirmishes guerrilla tac-ics were of
course frequently used. Guerrilla warfare was an essen-ial stage in the war
against Japan, but the Communist commanders ounded sometimes almost
apologetic: thus Peng Te-huai said in .938, "The growing partisan units in
North China will very rapidly >e transformed into a regular army, and this
new army will be )etter than the present one . . ."1
In fact, the transformation took much longer than expected, and it vas only
after the surrender of the Japanese that the "new armies" mtered the fighting.
As usual reality was far more complex than loctrine: up to 1945 there were
guerrilla bands that had the trength of a division, and on the other hand
there were regular irmy units that used guerrilla tactics; the dividing line was
far more luid in practice than in theory.
In Vietnam the Communists engaged in regular army operations :arly on in
their war against the French, and suffered some major lefeats. By trial and
error they came to combine guerrilla and con-entional warfare and, as in
China between 1928 and 1935, they constantly discussed to which form of
military operations preference should be given. Eventually their emphasis
also shifted to egular warfare.
The facts about guerrilla warfare in China and Vietnam are not easy to
unravel since they have become the object of hagiography ather than of
critical study. Those who fought the Communists, laving originally
underrated their tenacity, fighting spirit and in-
241 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (HI) : CHINA AND VIETNAM
ventiveness, frequently ended by regarding the victors as a race of supermen,

thus exaggerating the originality and general applicability of the guerrilla
strategy of Mao and Lin Piao, of Ho and Giap. They came to accept
"revolutionary warfare" as an irresistible force, as the greatest revolution in
modern politics as well as in modern warfare. 2 Thus a recent historian has
written: "For the first time in a century the armed might of an industrial power
was fought to a standstill, its dreams of empire crushed, by a people in arms." 3
It is certainly true that Japan in 1937 was an "industrial power" to the extent
that it had an industry. But the military importance of the textile industry —
its chief industry at the time — was strictly limited, and its heavy industry
was still in its infancy. Its share in world industrial production was only about
three percent. Japan had started to produce motor vehicles only in the early
1930s, and by the end of the decade the number of Japanese trucks and cars
was less than ten per cent of Britain's. Furthermore, Japan's dreams of empire
were shattered not in China but on other fronts; the number of Japanese
casualties in the Philippines alone far exceeded those suffered at the hands of
the Chinese Communists. If, towards the end of the war, the Japanese
evacuated much of China this was not the result of fighting in mainland China
but of the defeats suffered in the Pacific, mainly a consequence of the Amer-
ican victory at Okinawa. The Russians, needless to say, have not joined the
general chorus of admiration for obvious political reasons: poor Mao had
always been mistaken, had engaged in either right- or left-wing deviations;
the general line had somehow always eluded him.4
In the search for historical truth one has to proceed beyond mythology and
political polemics: despite all the tenacity and courage displayed by the
Chinese Communists, they were on more than one occasion exceedingly
lucky. They operated in near ideal conditions: there was no strong central
authority in China even before the Japanese invasion. Once the war had
started in 1937 the Communists enjoyed virtual immunity in their bases in
northern China. For the Japanese, the Communist guerrillas were not a
serious danger, and this despite that the Japanese occupation army was small
by any standards. Indeed, the Chinese Communists did little fighting against
the Japanese after 1940, though Chiang Kai-chek's troops did even less.
Mao's policy was to devote seventy percent of the Communists' effort to
expansion, twenty percent to coping with the Kuomintang government and
ten percent to fighting the Japanese. The Vietnamese Communists' war of
liberation against the.
apanese belongs almost entirely to the realm of mythology, for reir military
organization came into being only towards the end of ae Second World War.
After the Japanese surrender and before the 'rench returned in strength, there
was an interval during which ae Communists obtained a great many arms
and consolidated their olitical and military power base. After that they faced
the troops of ae French Fourth Republic, a regime quite incapable of waging
nd sustaining a "dirty colonial war.'/jBy the time American troops ecame
involved in Vietnam a major Communist army had already ome into
existence that was better trained and more experienced, ■ much less well
equipped, than its enemy) During their struggle ae Chinese and Vietnamese
Communists displayed a great many 'erling qualities and, of course, greater
political foresight. But iven the vast size of China's territory, the weak base of
Japanese lilitarism and the chaotic state of Chinese domestic politics, it annot
fairly be argued that the victory of the Chinese Communists ras an
unprecedented, superhuman achievement. Seen in his-)rical perspective the
military odds were heavier against the Viet-amese Communists, but the
political factors involved in the truggle for Southeast Asia favored them to a
great extent, and aese, in the end, proved to be of decisive importance. The
stories f the guerrilla wars in China and Vietnam have been told count-;ss
times; the following account concentrates on a discussion of :>me of their
essential features.
CHINA
Guerrilla warfare in China developed against the background of easant

unrest, the breakdown of the central authority and the pres-nce of a
Communist elite which, by trial and error, evolved a more ffective strategy
than did its rivals for coping with China's prob-mas. The decisive turning
point was the Japanese invasion, which ggravated the general discontent,
discredited and paralyzed the entral government and thus created the pre-
conditions for the Communists to spearhead the armed struggle in northern
China. Agrarian unrest had been endemic in China for many centuries;
irfhermore the peasant wars had been on a much greater scale lan those in
Europe. In the T'ai Ping rebellion some three million lsurgents had fought,
and millions of civilians had been killed, 'he peasantry suffered from natural
calamities and rising rents, as
258 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (ill): CHINA AND VIETNAM
well as the requisitions and pillaging of warlords and their soldiers. Local
industry and handicraft were undermined by cheap foreign imports. 5 Most of
this had happened before in Chinese history; the young peasants would "take
to the mountains," a euphemism for banditry, and, generally speaking,
elements declasses proliferated. Those remaining in the villages would
establish self-defense societies to struggle against bandits, warlords, tax
collectors and other plagues. The secret societies such as "Red Spear" and
"Great Knife" had supporters in many parts of the country due to widespread
unemployment in the villages and increasing militancy among a peasantry
wanting land.
Since the fall of the Manchu Dynasty in 1911, there had been no effective
central authority in China. Chiang Kai-chek's attempts to reunite China in the
late 1920s were only partly successful; the warlords were integrated into the
system as subcontractors who collaborated, or refused to do so, as they saw
fit. Their loyalty could never be fully trusted.
The Communist Party of China was founded in 1921. The main stages of its
growth during its first decade are well known and need not be reiterated. Its
influence spread among sections of the intelligentsia, particularly the students
and the urban younger generation. It also had some support among the
working class. The party established a united front with the Kuomintang but
it was defeated in the struggle for power by Chiang, its erstwhile ally, and its
urban insurrections failed totally. The Communists had never entirely
neglected the revolutionary potential of the countryside, but they had given it
low priority; according to Marxist-Leninist doctrine only a mass movement
led by the industrial proletariat could be truly revolutionary and so prevail in
the end. From time to time resolutions would be passed by the Comintern (as
in 1922 and again in 1926) (that the revolutionary movement in the
backward countries could not be successful unless it relied on the broad
peasant masses.jRut the magic wand to mobilize the peasants and to combine
their struggle with that of the industrial proletariat had not yet been
discovered. The Chinese Communists began to reveal greater interest in the
countryside only in 1927, the year of their great defeats in the cities. Tjie two
processes of revolution were not, of course, unconnectedAVhen Mao, head of
the peasant department of the party, returned from an inspection tour in
Hunan he wrote that the upsurge of the peasant movement was a colossal
event, that several hundred million peasants would rise and that this would
be a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power
could hold it back.6 Mao was, of course, not the first to discover the
evolutionary potential of the peasantry. The tactics he suggested at he time
were, in fact, less far-reaching than the Comintern line vhich advocated
confiscation of the land. But Mao was among the irst to make use of the
peasants' potential and to move beyond extreme but noncommittal slogans.
There had been among the precursors of Communism in China a strong pro-
agrarian, populist bias ningled with antiurban sentiments and nationalist
overtones: the /oung intellectuals (it was argued) should go back to the
villages to ree themselves from the corruption and the vices of town life,
rhere was also a great belief in the spontaneous energies of the aeople and in
revolutionary voluntarism.7 The idea that people, not hings, are of paramount
importance was not entirely new; the the->ry and practice of Maoism did not
develop in a vacuum. Mao's ;reat merit was to open a new vista to the party
at the very time vhen its fortunes were at a low ebb.
From August 1927 to the "Autumn Harvest Uprising" and the
establishment of a first Red Army to the beginning of the Long vlarch in
October 1934, Mao and his supporters, with Chu-Teh and -•eng Teh-huai as
the chief military commanders, engaged in armed )perations in the Hunan-
Kiangsi-Fukien area and built their first evolutionary bases. But the great
hurricane Mao had predicted lid not yet break: there were many military
defeats, and he came inder strong attack in his own party. In fact, in
November 1927 he vas ousted from the Politburo. He made a temporary
comeback, nit from 1932 to 1934 his influence was again on the wane. It was
mly in January 1935 that he was elected chairman of the Military affairs
Committee and became the de facto leader of the party. The itory of these
seven years was basically one of an almost unin-errupted struggle for
survival. By trial and error the Communists gradually developed in the
Kiangsi Special Border Area a system of merrilla warfare that in some
respects followed traditional Chinese patterns. In later years Mao
summarized the experience that had jeen gathered in the fighting:
Divide our forces to arouse the masses, concentrate our forces to deal with the
enemy. The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy
tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue. To extend stable base areas,
employ the policy of advancing in waves; when pursued by a powerful enemy,
employ the policy of circling around. Arouse the largest number of the masses in
the shortest possible time and the best possible methods. These tactics are just like
casting a net; at any moment we should be able to cast it or
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (ill) : CHINA AND VIETNAM
draw it in. We cast it wide to win over the masses and draw it in to deal with the
enemy. . . .8
Mao claimed that these tactics "are indeed different from any other tactics,
ancient or modern, Chinese or foreign." But neither for Sertorius nor for
Viriatus two thousand years earlier would these ideas have been startling
revelations — nor for guerrilla leaders all over the globe throughout history.
Although neither the strategy nor the tactics were novel, their use in the
framework of a political doctrine was. The idea to combine them had
occurred to others before but they had never been applied on such a scale, or
ultimately with such effect.
Mao and his comrades-in-arms faced overwhelming odds in the early years
of the fighting. The enemy was weak, but they were even weaker. They had no
supplies, no arms, no money except what they could seize from the enemy.
The human material they were dealing with was unpromising: bandits,
vagrants, various elements declasses, deserters from the enemy camp who had
not been paid their wages — a veritable riffraff. They had, as a historian of the
Chinese army put it, "few bricks and little straw, but they had a clearly defined
goal and the determination and perseverance needed to attain it." 9 The
Communists were not just another party or clique of warlords; they had an
ideology that at one and the same time provided an explanation of the world
and a guide to action for changing it. It generated among the younger
generation enthusiasm and the willingness to sacrifice. They were far more
highly motivated than their rivals and they realized that it was necessary to
establish a much closer relationship between the soldiers and their
commanders and between the army and the people; they had a method to
mobilize the masses that was more effective, more in line with Chinese
realities than that of the Kuomintang or the warlords. It has been noted that
there was no great difference between the social background of the military
leaders of the Communists and their enemies; 10 some Communist
commanders (such as Nieh Jung-chen, Ho Lung and Chu Teh) hailed from
poor peasant fam-iles, and there were also officers of similar background in
Chiang's armies. Communist and Nationalist commanders had studied in the
famous Whampoa military academy; their careers were parallel in some
respects, and they were heirs in many ways to the same tradition. The main
difference was that those who had embraced Communism were willing to
share the life of the common people and its misfortunes and deprivations. The
Communist party curbed its of-
cers' individualistic traits, whereas the Nationalist officers were ot subject to

such discipline; they lacked the feeling of serving a □mmon cause and were
incapable of cooperating.
During the early years of its mountain warfare the Red Army was ngaged
in guerrilla operations; these, however, were on the whole abordinate to
regular army activities. Mao was not in charge of perations during much of
the time and it is in retrospect almost npossible to say with any degree of
accuracy when and in what ircumstances guerrilla doctrine developed. In
1928 Mao called for :rict discipline because "guerrillaism" ("the tendency to
destroy ities and kill, burn and rob purposelessly") had to be extirpated, his
(he argued) was merely a manifestation of the L u m p e n p r o l e t a - a t and
peasant mentality that might hamper development of the arty among the
peasant masses.11 In 1929-1930 Mao bitterly de-ounced the idea of "pure
guerrilla warfare," the "aimless and leffectual raids of vagabond
elements."LThe Red troops should not e dispersed but instead should
establish and consolidate revolu-onary bases.! 2 Communist experience with
guerrilla warfare fre-uently had been negative; several guerrilla leaders had
even de-jrted. Some of the leading military experts such as Chu Teh talked
bout the "guerrilla quagmire" into which the party should not nk; guerrilla
tactics were useless against the blockhouse system iat Chiang's troops
applied in accord with the advice given by ireign military specialists. 13 It was
only after the massive defeat of le Red Army at Kuangch'ang (April 1934)
that guerrilla tactics 'ere widely employed, and that the Tsunyi Conference
passed a ;solution that constituted a decisive switch from positional to mode
warfare. Preference to real guerrilla warfare was given only Pter the
Japanese invasion in September 1937.
The acrimonious disputes aboujt what was the correct strategy isted
throughout the early i93os .lMao and his supporters saw the lain task to be
the establishing of "Red Areas" (the "highest form f the peasant struggle"),
the foundation and development of a Red rmy and the building up of a
political and military power that 'ould eventually lead to the encirclement of
the cities by the 3untrysideJ Li Li-san, Mao's chief antagonist during that
period, laintained that the center of gravity was still in the cities and that
rotracted warfare was "boxing tactics"; he for one was not willing > wait for
victory until his hair had turned gray.14
The Maoist line in Chinese Communist strategy prevailed only fter the
struggle for power in the party had been settled. Only after
appeared that Communism had no future in the cities was Li Li-
san's approach discredited and did the various emissaries from Moscow lose
their influence. The Communists, to be sure, had not done that well in the
countryside either, but at least they had preserved their strength. Chiang's
first two encirclement campaigns against the "Communist bandits" ended in
failure: the government troops were not familiar with the terrain, their units
were dispersed and they had no intelligence about Communist movements.
Above all, they thought the campaigns would be a walkover and did not take
the enemy seriously. The Communists captured thousands of prisoners and
seized considerable booty. In the third encirclement campaign Chiang himself
took command and employed some of his best troops. The Communists were
on the brink of defeat when the Mukden incident (the occupation of
Manchuria by the Japanese in October 1931) compelled Chiang to call off his
campaign. This campaign had shown that in the long run the position of the
Communists was untenable.
In the fifth encirclement campaign (October 1933) the Communists' area
was ringed with blockhouses, their supply lines were cut and their sources of
intelligence dried up. With the Nationalists' evacuation of part of the
population and the organization of local militias against them the
Communists' survival was no longer certain. The Communists had used the
wrong tactics — "halting the enemy in front of the gate," that is, fighting for
every inch of territory. This was, of course, exactly what Chiang had hoped
for because the elusive enemy had at last become easily identifiable. In later
years the blame would be put on one Li Te (Otto Braun), a German
Communist who had been delegated as military adviser. But the Communists
would have lost even if they had reverted to guerrilla tactics. In this desperate
situation the decision was taken to transfer the Communist forces to some
other part of China, and on 16 October 1934 some hundred thousand men
and women set out on the famous Long March. No one knew at the time
where it would lead to.
The Long March has entered the annals of Chinese and world history as an
achievement without precedent. Fourteen months later, after the Red Army
had arrived in Shansi, Mao claimed that the Long March was a "manifesto, an
agitation corps and a seeding machine." For twelve months (he related) the
Communists had been under daily surveillance and bombing from the air;
they had been encircled, pursued, obstructed and intercepted by hundreds of
thousands of enemy soldiers; they had crossed eighteen mountain ranges,
twenty-four rivers, had taken sixty-two cities. They had
ngaged in two hundred and thirty-five day marches and eighteen ight
marches and fought almost one skirmish a day against gov-mment troops
and provincial warlords. They had covered a dis-ince of over six thousand
miles.15
As so often, it is not easy to differentiate between fact and fiction, hat the
Long March was not a picnic goes without saying; for to love units such
distances involved great stamina even if there had ot been an enemy to
harass and obstruct them. On the other hand nemy attacks were not as
frequent and fierce as the Communists laimed in later years: according to the
official Communist version le First Front army averaged twenty-four miles a
day over a 368 ay period — including 44 days of rest in Szechuan. From a
prac-cal point of view no army involved in constant combat, even to a mited
degree, could have maintained this pace. 16 There was no nified effort to
attack the Red Armies: Chiang Kai-chek's units ere only rarely in contact
with them and the local warlords were nly too eager to leave the
Communists unmolested, provided that ley did not bother them. Some of
the hardest fighting went on not gainst the Nationalist armies but against the
(non-Chinese) Lolo ibesmen in southwest China. The main obstacles on the
march ere in fact natural ones such as the eternal glaciers of the Great now
Mountains, the marshy grasslands of Ching hai and the sa-ige Tatu River.
These obstacles caused the most casualties. Of the hundred thou-md who
had set out on the march, only about a third arrived at hensi in October
1935. This threadbare band represented at best ily a marginal element in
Chinese political life, but "sustained rincipally by discipline, hope and
political formulae it had . . . ;veral hidden assets which were later to prove of
major gnificance" (Howard L. Boorman). In retrospect it has been main-ined
that the operation was a stroke of genius meticulously lanned from the
beginning. In fact, there is every reason to be-eve that the Communists were
simply improvising; for a long time tey had no clear idea about their
eventual destination. On at least le occasion, Mao noted that the whole
march had been unneces-iiy and that the original base could have been kept.
The Long March was not a major victory but a great retreat. Rut ie
Communists turned military defeat into a propagandistic vic-ry, for Chiang
had after all failed to destroy them; their forces :emed invincible. Above all,
the march had given them out-anding training, far better than any military
academy could pro-de. Those who had been steeled in battle during this
annus mira-
264 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (ill) I CHINA AND VIETNAM
bills would stick together in the stormy years ahead until they became the
masters of a new China./(After the victory, to be sure, human nature and the
vicissitudes of politics would reassert themselves, and the veterans of the Tatu
River would find themselves in opposite camps in the struggle for power.)
The choice of northern Shensi as the main base was an astute one and for the
next ten years Yenan was the capital of Chinese Communism — partly
perhaps by accident. This remote, exceedingly poor and backward part of
China offered little temptation to warlords and was more or^less ignored by
the Chinese central government and the Japanese^/On the other hand, there
was already a Communist guerrilla tradition in this area adjacent to the north
China plain. Within less than three years of their arrival the Communist forces
counted a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers; by 1940, with the expansion of
their bases, their number had risen to some four hundred thousand. Almost
unnoticed the Communists had re-emerged as a major factor in Chinese
politics.
The Long March was a great test of endurance but otherwise it offers little
that is new to the student of military history, for it proceeded, roughly
speaking, like all long marches in history from the anabasis onwards. The
Communists occasionally used guerrilla tactics, but the retreat of so big a
force had to proceed largely on orthodox lines. At times the Red units
presented a "snake" fifty miles long. Chiang Kai-chek himself would fly
reconnaissance missions: there was never a secret about the location of the
Red Armies. It was just another maneuver, albeit one of historical importance,
in the general course of the Chinese civil war. If the politics of the
Communists were revolutionary, their military strategy was fairly orthodox,
and it changed only to a certain extent during the Yenan period.17
The wilderness of northern Shensi was, as a Communist leader told Edgar
Snow, culturally one of the darkest places on earth: "We have to start
everything from the beginning."18 But some politico-military spade work had
already been done in the area; for almost a decade previously banditry had
gradually changed to viable guerrilla operations. In the course of eight years
of setbacks, local partisans had independently developed a set of military and
political postulates appropriate to survival and revolutionary growth in the
northern Shensi area.19 The Shensi disputes about whether and in what way
guerrilla tactics should be used were almost identical to the discussions
among the Communist leadership in the Kiangsi Soviet. The issue was
decided in favor of the
guerrillaists" (such as Kao Kang) only upon the arrival of Mao and lis
companions in 1935.
Having made its way to northern China the Red Army began to eorganize
and expand its units and to consolidate its political base, "here was hardly
any outside interference. In 1936 Chiang had nstructed the Manchurian army
to attack the Communists, but its ttacks showed little determination: to
Chinese patriots the Japa-tese, not the Communists, were already the main
enemy. A second mited front between the Communists and the Kuomintang
came nto being after the Sian incident (December 1936), and hostilities eased
for a number of years. The understanding between the two ides was rather
vague, however. It certainly did not prevent the Communists from
expanding the areas under their control nor Chiang's troops (in December
1939) from taking some of these reas back and imposing a blockade on the
Soviet regions. In Jan-lary 1941 Kuomintang forces moved against the New
Fourth (Com-lunist) Army which was based south of the Yangtse and which
had lade inroads in what the KMT considered its own territory. But the
'lockade apart, there was little fighting in northern China. Having ast their
major cities and lines of communication and having to iear the brunt of the
Japanese offensive, the KMT could no longer lunch a major campaign against
the Communists. It was reduced □ adopting a "negative policy" of restricting
as much as possible he areas of Communist control and suppressing
Communist activ-ties in areas under its control. 20 Thus, for the first time in
their xistence, the Red Armies were no longer fighting for mere sur-ival; they
could invest their energies in the expansion of their nilitary units and bases.
Russia's and America's entry into the Sec-nd World War offered further
protection, for the Japanese could no onger concentrate their military efforts
in China.
Communist political activities in Yenan, such as land reform, iolitical
organization and indoctrination, were, of course, closely onnected with
military strategy; they have been described and nalyzed in great detail and
need not be retold here. We should nstead turn to the military doctrine as
formulated in the late 1930s iy Mao, Lin Piao and others and to the specific
place of guerrilla ghting within the general concept of revolutionary warfare.
It has ieen noted that Mao's three major essays on guerrilla warfare were 11
written during the first half of 1938; 21 Lin Piao's one major essay n the topic
was also apparently written in ig38.2:£Mao's ideas on evolution in China rest
on three basic assumptions: that military Drees will play a decisive role and
that the fight will be carried on
266 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (ill) : CHINA AND VIETNAM
by the villages, which will eventually "encircle" the cities — hence the
importance of rural base areas. Lastly there is the concept of "protracted
struggle.'^"These ideas took about a decade to evolve, the concept of
protracted war being the last of the three to be pronounced and in some ways
the most difficult to accept, for it is the natural inclination of soldiers, as of
politicians, to prefer a short war to a long one. On guerrilla warfare Mao
usually took a "centrist" position between those who advocated "pure
guerrillaism" and dismissed regular warfare altogether and the military (or
party) experts who took the opposite view. Mao always claimed that, in the
last resort, the correct choice of an approach depended on the circumstances.
He argued that positional warfare was ruled out as long as the Red Armies
were not strong, lacked reserves, supplies and ammunition. Mobile warfare
was the answer since in China as in the Soviet Union in 1918-1919 or in other
revolutionary wars there could be no fixed battle lines. "Fluidity of battle
lines" meant that the base areas, too, had to be fluid, constantly expanding and
contracting, "as often as one base area falls another rises." 23 In a rare flash of
irony Mao notes that the very comrades who had been the strongest advocates
of regular warfare in 1933-1934 "managing affairs as if they were rulers of a
big state," had in fact caused extraordinary and immense fluidity — the "Long
March."
Mao noted that while military doctrine in general favored both "moving"
and "fighting," few people did as much moving as the Chinese Communists:
"We generally spend more time in moving than in fighting and would be
doing well if we fought an average of one sizeable battle a month." 24 As Mao
saw it, the rejection of guerrilla warfare and fluidity had been practiced on a
large scale. But upon the arrival of the Communist army in northern China
and the establishment of base areas, conditions had again changed.
Guerrillaism was part of the infancy of the Red Army; this involved
irregularity, decentralization, lack of uniformity, absence of strict discipline
and, generally speaking, simple methods of work. These were the negative
aspects, but there were others that were still valid: the principle of mobile
warfare, the guerrilla character of certain strategic and tactical operations, the
inevitable fluidity of base areas and the rejection of premature regularization
in building the Red Army.25
The task, as Mao saw it in 1936, was to end those practices of the Chinese
guerrilla struggle that had become obsolete and to prepare for a new stage in
which battle lines would become more stable and positional warfare more
frequent. At the same time, it was vital not
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (ill) I CHINA AND VIETNAM
o discard the positive and still applicable lessons of the guerrilla >ast and not
to "rush blindly" into something new, simply due to its lewness.
In 1937, China, "a large and weak country," was attacked by a small and
strong country." Mao was optimistic about the outcome, me Chinese regular
armies had been beaten but the Japanese did tot have sufficient manpower to
occupy the whole of China, and nany gaps were left. In these circumstances
Communist strategy hould be to engage in independent ("exterior line")
operations ather than in interior line actions in support of regular troops.
Mao's prescriptions for the war against Japan were simple and
traightforward, and can be summarized as follows^the basic aim in VSLI is to
preserve one's strength and destroy that of the enemy/in evolutionary war
this principle is directly linked with basic politi-al aims — to drive out the
Japanese and to build an independent, ree and happy (that is, Communist)
China] The correct approach luring the early phase of the war is the strategic
defensive or, to be Tecise, the frequent and effective use of the tactical
offensive within the strategic defensive^Guerrilla warfare involves careful
banning and flexibility ("breaking up the whole into parts" and assembling
the parts into a whole")(Pure defense and retreat can lay only a temporary
role in self-preservation; the offensive is the nly means of destroying the
enemy, and it is also the principle tieans of self-preservation. Offensive
operations must be well orga-lized and not be launched under pressure.26^
The constant repetition by Mao of these elementary insights does ot detract
from their educational value. But there was yet another major problem: how
to coordinate guerrilla with regular warfare, uch coordination should exist
on the level of general strategy — •inning the enemy forces down behind the
front line, disrupting is supply lines, and, generally speaking, spreading
demoralization mong his troops and providing fresh courage to the Chinese
ieople. But there should also be coordination in specific campaigns nd
battles. Mao saw the third main problem of the Communists' evolutionary
war to be the maintaining of the vital base areas: it /ould be impossible to
sustain guerrilla operations in a protracted /ar behind the enemy lines
without such strategic bases. They onstituted the rear in a war without rear;
without such bases the uerrillas would be mere "roving rebels" in the ancient
Chinese radition, noisy but ineffectual.27
Mao correctly predicted that a long time would pass before the
Communists could launch their strategic counteroffensive to re-
cover the lost territories. Meanwhile a great part of China's territory would
remain in Japanese hands. Guerrilla warfare behind enemy lines would have
to be extended over all this vast area. This would be impossible without bases
either in the mountains, the plains or "river-lake-estuary regions." Mao
differentiated between guerrilla zones and base areas. A "zone" becomes a
base area only after large numbers of enemy troops have been annihilated, the
puppet (collaborationist) regime destroyed and the masses roused to activity.
The key to establishing a base area is the building up of armed force.
Economic and also geographic conditions — mountains being preferable to
plains — are of importance, but in view of the vastness of China's territory
and the shortage of Japanese troops, guerrilla warfare can be conducted and
sustained also in the plains. Propitious geographical conditions are desirable
but not vital. Essential on the other hand is coordinating with and mobilizing
the masses and organizing self-defense corps among the villagers to assist the
hard core guerrillas. Existing base areas should be consolidated so as to enable
them to withstand enemy attacks. At the same time they should be constantly
expanded: conservatism in guerrilla warfare will not achieve the target,
namely the confinement of the enemy to a few cities.
How are guerrillas to cope with enemy attempts to conquer the base areas?
Mao advised guerrilla commanders to smash the enemy's converging attacks
upon them. They should contemplate giving up their base area only after
having failed repeatedly to achieve this objective. Mao (wrongly) predicted
that the Japanese would not be able to use the blockhouse system because
they were too few in number to make it work effectively. Once the enemy
offensive had been halted the guerrillas could go over to the offensive — not
by attacking the main enemy forces entrenched in defensive positions, but by
driving out or destroying small enemy detachments and by expanding their
base areas.
Mao maintained that since the war would be protracted and ruthless, the
Japanese invaders could be defeated only if the guerrillas gradually
transformed themselves into a regular army and adopted a system of mobile
warfare. In. certain mountain regions the elements of mobile warfare had
existed from the beginning of the war and could simply be expanded. This
involved increasing numbers and improving military and political quality. 28
Lastly was the problem of command. There cannot possibly be a high degree
of centralization in guerrilla operations, otherwise their flexibility would be
restricted and their vitality sapped. On the other hand, the centrali-
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (ill) I CHINA AND VIETNAM
ition of command is essential for coordinating guerrilla with regu-r warfare.

If absolute centralization is harmful and absolute de-mtralization
ineffectual, the answer is to centralize the strategic jmmand for the overall
planning and directing of a guerrilla war id to decentralize it for campaigns
and battles. In other words the mtral command should not interfere in
details such as the specific ispositions for a battle.
Ten months after the outbreak of the war with Japan Mao out-ned in detail
his famous concept of protracted war.29 There was no •ound for pessimism
(he wrote), for China would prevail in the id. Nor was there reason for
excessive impetuosity; victory would ke a long time. Even before the
outbreak of the war Mao had ressed the importance of mobile warfare in
combination with the Derations of a great number of guerrilla units. The war
of national beration would gain support both at home and abroad. In view of
hina's vast territory, rich resources and large population, it could istain a
long war despite its being a semicolonial, semifeudal juntry. Japan's war, on
the other hand, was reactionary and barba->us, its manpower and material
resources inadequate and its inter-ational position unfavorable. Thus
everything depended on perse-erance. Mao assumed that the war would
pass through three :ages: at first the Japanese would take the strategic
offensive. Later n the enemy would engage in strategic consolidation and the
Chinese would prepare for the counteroffensive ("strategic stale-late"). Lastly
the Chinese would pass over to the strategic Dunteroffensive. From
inferiority China would move to parity and ventually to superiority. Mao
assumed that the first stage would ist a long time because the Chinese forces
would not soon have le technical equipment for a massive counteroffensive.
Chinese uerrilla forces would operate in the enemy's rear in large num-ers,
and the country would suffer devastation. Mao predicted a ery painful
period that eventually, with the change in the balance f forces in China and
the changes in the international situation, /ould be overcome. In the last
stage of the war mobile warfare /ould still be conducted but positional
warfare would be of grow-ng importance.
Mao attributes the greatest importance to man's dynamic role in var. His
emphasis upon the decisiveness of men, not arms, ex-ilains the central role of
political mobilization in his thinking. Guerilla operations per se cannot win a
war. The strategic role of guerilla troops is twofold: to support the regular
armies and to trans-orm themselves into regular army units. In the second
stage of the
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (ill): CHINA AND VIETNAM
war against Japan the guerrillas will fulfill the first role, but in the third stage
mobile warfare will become paramount and be conducted by former guerrilla
forces.
Mao was preoccupied with problems of grand strategy and political
analysis, but he also provided guidance on basic tactics. His lectures provide a
great deal of sound advice: avoid attacking strong enemy positions and
fighting hard battles; take precautions when on a march or a halt; stage
concealed attacks from ambushes; and try "to cause an uproar in the east, and
to strike in the west."30 Most of this is derived from the writings of Sun Tzu,
The Water Margin, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and, of course, Mao's
own experience since his first exploits in the "Autumn Harvest Uprising."
Other Chinese Communist military leaders were, for all one knows, Mao's
equals with respect to understanding the theory and practice of guerrilla
warfare, but he was the only one to develop a comprehensive guerrilla
doctrine. Lin Piao in 1938 explained why northern China was ideal guerrilla
country: "Enemy mechanized units find it difficult to penetrate mountain
ranges; large units learn that it is logistically infeasible to encamp in hilly
regions, while smaller units are easily annihilated on arrival."31 The enemy
could probably neither use blockhouse tactics nor enjoy local support; he
would exist in a vacuum. The main difficulty facing the Communists was to
defeat a stubborn enemy imbued with the Samurai tradition who believed that
his victory was inevitable. A developed network of railroads and
communications facilitated swift movement against the guerrillas by enemy
cavalry and mechanized units, but these and other unfavorable conditions
would be overcome in time.
Mao emphasized more than once that it was necessary to study what
foreign specialists (including, needless to say, the Marxists) had to say about
military problems. But he ridiculed those who wanted to apply foreign
models in China. This attitude can also be found in Chu Teh's occasional
speeches. On the basis of their experience the Chinese Communists had
developed a native military science which combined theory with practice and
which corresponded with the needs of the Chinese people. According to Chu
the three essential points for conducting a battle were to avoid rashness in
attack, to avoid conservatism in defense and to resist any tendency to run in
panic from the enemy when withdrawing from a point. 32 All this clearly is
elementary common sense; all military leaders in history have tried to act
according to these princi-
271 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (ill) '. CHINA AND VIETNAM
pies, even, it must be assumed, the Kuomintang generals. Thus, the key to
Communist success can be found neither in Chu Teh's speeches nor even in
Mao's writings. The Chinese Communists' theoretical contribution to military
science is limited. Their real achievement was a practical one: first, to survive;
later on, to consolidate and expand their bases; and lastly, to establish a
regular army that eventually defeated the government forces.
Mao's military writings are likely to create a mistaken impression in some
respects: that the Chinese Communists were engaged in constant fighting
against the Japanese invaders, that the Communists were facing (strategically)
an overwhelmingly strong enemy, that most of the Japanese war effort was
directed against the Communists and that in the end the Japanese were
defeated mainly due to the relentless attacks of the Chinese Red Armies. In
reality the Communists devoted more of their time and effort to fighting the
Kuomintang (and vice versa) than the Japanese. The whole of occupied China
— an area larger than Western Europe — was held by small Japanese forces
(about 400,000 in 1939-1940, about a million by the end of the war). Until
1940-1941 the Japanese virtually ignored the Communists, whose pinpricks
had hardly any military impact. But even after 1940 only about one-quarter of
the Japanese forces in China were operating against the Communists. The
Chinese Red Army, on the other hand, counted 400,000 soldiers by 1940; in
other words it had overwhelming numerical superiority over the Japanese
forces confronting it. The Communists' arms and equipment were vastly
inferior, but the supposition that a few courageous guerrillas out-fought
forces superior to them in every respect is historically quite untenable. The
number of Japanese soldiers tied down by the Chinese Communists was
proportionally smaller than the number of German soldiers that were needed
to police the occupied European countries, even if one includes the puppet
troops whose military value was very nearly nil.
The Japanese troops in China were not defeated by the Communists; the
change in the balance of power that led to the Japanese surrender in 1945 had
little, if anything, to do with the fighting in China. It seems virtually certain in
retrospect that the Japanese troops in China would have surrendered even if
neither the Kuomintang nor the Communists had fired a single shot against
them between 1937 and 1945. Mao correctly understood, even if he did not
directly say so, that the main obstacle on the Communists' road to power was
the Kuomintang, not the Japanese. The Japanese forces, as he saw it, would be
defeated sooner or later because the
material base of Japanese imperialism was simply too narrow to dominate a

country such as China for any length of time. Once the United States had
entered the war, its outcome, despite the initial setbacks, was virtually certain
because the Japanese High Command had to disperse the limited manpower
at its disposal over a vast area from Burma to the Philippines, not to mention
Manchuria. The anti-Japanese struggle was essential from the Communist
point of view. But equally there is no doubt that from 1942 both the
Communists and the Kuomintang prepared themselves for the postwar
contest and that this became their overriding concern.
During the whole war the Communists fought two major battles against the
Japanese — the Battle at P'inghsingkuan in September 1937, in which they
inflicted some 5,000 casualties on the enemy, and the offensive of the
"hundred regiments" which began in August 1940, lasted for three months
and resulted in some 25,000 Japanese casualties and some 20,000 prisoners.
As a result of the "hundred regiments" offensive, the Japanese began to take
the Communists seriously and initiated the "three-all" counterinsur-gency
policy — burn all; kill all; destroy all. By the end of 1942 the number of Red
Army soldiers had fallen from 400,000 to 300,000 and the population in the
base areas had shrunk from 44,000,000 to 25,000,000. The Japanese,
however, were too weak to keep up their counteroffensive. After 1942 the Red
Armies again expanded; by the spring of 1945 there were almost a million
soldiers in the 4th and 8th Communist Route Armies (not to count a militia of
about 2,200,000) and the population in the base areas had risen to well over
100,000,000. Wherever the Japanese were really concerned, it must be noted,
they managed to stamp out the guerrillas without undue difficulty; this refers
above all to Manchuria, China's main industrial center. By staging
paramilitary special operations and establishing defense hamlets, and, above
all, by following a policy of propaganda and pacification (treating the
peasants less brutally than elsewhere) they had liquidated the guerrillas there
by 1940. It should be added in fairness that the quality of Japanese forces in
Manchuria was superior to that of Japanese troops in other parts of China and
that the Manchurian guerrillas had no active sanctuary. During the long
severe winters they had nowhere to hide.33
The one battle of 1937 and the campaign of 1940 apart, there were no major
encounters between the Chinese Communists and the Japanese. The transition
to mobile warfare that Mao had demanded did not, in fact, occur until after
the war had ended.34 Until then there was some but not much guerrilla
warfare. The occasional
273 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (ill) '. CHINA AND VIETNAM
Timing of a road or a railway line were pinpricks, and not enough to provoke
Japanese retaliation on a massive scale. Most of this was 'sparrow warfare,"
carried out by groups of three to five men. The Communists "encircled the
cities" in some parts of China because :he Japanese did not have sufficient
forces to garrison the whole countryside. But the Japanese garrisons were not
cut off and it is lot even certain that they suffered any serious inconvenience.
The main effort of the Communists was invested not in the military but in
the political field, in organization and propaganda. Their prestige inside
China and among foreign observers was steadily rising: the Communists had
purpose and determination; they were well organized and there was no
corruption in Yenan. The Communist victories of 1937 and 1940, even if
militarily insignificant, had a considerable psychological effect, whereas the
prestige of the Kuomintang, which had to bear the brunt of the Japanese
attacks up to the end of the war, lacked inspiration and steadily dwindled; 35
they had neither the ability nor the will to fight. In the Japanese offensive of
1944 the Chinese government lost 700,000 troops and areas with a
population of sixty million without putting up any serious resistance. The
steady rise of Communism has to be viewed against the dismal record of the
Nationalists and the decay and disintegration of the state apparatus and the
army.
An investigation into the etiology of Communist achievements shows no
single pattern of success.36 Communist influence certainly did not increase as
a result of extreme revolutionary politics. If the Communists had learned
anything from their unfortunate experience in Kiangsi, it was the need for
caution and a moderate line in dealing with the peasantry. While carrying out
agrarian reform in the areas under their control in northern China, they acted
with great prudence, and at times even refrained altogether from carrying out
any changes affecting land tenure. It has been maintained that the
Communists' appeal to peasant nationalism was the key to their success, just
as in Yugoslavia the partisans prevailed as the patriotic party rather than as a
movement of socialist revolution.37 This interpretation has much to
recommend itself: Japanese terror, exploitation and devastation was certainly
a very important factor in mobilizing the peasant masses. But, on the other
hand, the peasants of the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region, where the
Communists had their main base, were not exposed to Japanese brutality. For
them the invasion was something fairly remote. And for the Communist
enclaves in the Japanese rear, the Red Armies could not offer real protection
against Japanese punitive raids. The
Communists' influence in these areas remained limited even though they

recruited many soldiers from them. The Red Chinese were the party of the
poor in contrast to the Kuomintang, and peasant nationalism did play an
important role, but this was only a prerequisite for success; it does not, by
itself, explain the Communist victory. They made real headway only after the
peasant war became a patriotic war.38 But conversely, it was only after the
Japanese invasion had wrought havoc in China, when the Chiang
government was fatally weakened and could no longer fight the Communists,
that they could expand their bases.
Thus the two main causes of the Communist victory were the general
disruption caused by the Japanese invasion and occupation and the
superiority of Sino-Communism as a force rallying the masses. The Japanese
victory destroyed the hold of the KMT; the Nationalists had been weak even
before: the military defeats accelerated and deepened the process of
decomposition. The government lost control over most of China and a power
vacuum resulted. The extent of Nationalist incompetence came as a surprise
even to the Communists; Mao had written in 1940 that
Whoever can lead the people in driving out Japanese imperialism and
introducing democratic government will be the saviour of the people. If the
Chinese bourgeoisie is capable of carrying out this responsibility, no one will be
able to refuse it his admiration; but if it is not capable of doing so, the major part
of the responsibility will inevitably fall upon the shoulders of the proletariat. 39
The Chinese "bourgeoisie" (meaning Chiang and his supporters) lacked the
faith, the stamina, the resolution and the political know-how to pursue the
anti-Japanese war successfully. The Communists had these qualities;
furthermore, they were in the enviable position of not having to share
responsibility for the grave domestic and military setbacks during the war
years.
Marxism-Leninism as it developed in China provided a new world view
that inspired its followers with something akin to religious faith and with the
readiness to fight and sacrifice. It increasingly appealed, as the Kuomintang
never did, to the activist and idealist elements among the younger generation,
in whose eyes the government had dismally failed. Traditional Chinese
political ideas and practices were outdated, and Western liberalism was quite
unsuitable for China; Maoism seemed to provide the answer for most of the
problems besetting the country. Old-fashioned au-
thoritarian government divorced from the masses was no longer effective;
Marxism-Leninism, suitably modified to Chinese conditions, provided an
excellent method by which to reach the masses and to organize them. The
idealism of the elite and its ability to mobilize mass support at a time when the
central government had all but broken down were the decisive factors in the
Communist victory. Thus, the key to Communist success was the Sinification
of Marxism by Mao, who did not stick too closely to foreign models but
adapted Communist ideology and practice to the needs of China:
If a Chinese Communist, who is part of the great Chinese people, bound to his
people by his very flesh and blood, talks of Marxism apart from Chinese
peculiarities, this Marxism is merely an empty abstraction. The Sinification of
Marxism — that is to say, making certain that in all of its manifestations it is
imbued with Chinese peculiarities, using it according to these peculiarities —
becomes a problem that must be understood and solved by the whole party without
delay. . . .40
This is the reason for Mao's voluntarism (the downgrading of "objective

conditions") and his orientation towards the peasantry and other
"peculiarities," large and small. It is quite irrelevant in this context that the
ideology to which Mao referred as "Marxism" was in fact Leninism, a doctrine
that in many essential respects had already deviated a great deal from
historical Marxism. Nor does it matter that the new ideology and the new
political techniques that emerged as the result of the Sinification of Leninism
had about as much to do with Marxism as Boulez with Beethoven (or
Kandinsky with Fra Angelico). All that mattered in the final analysis was that
the new system worked.
The victory of Communism in China, an event of world historical
importance, has induced many students of guerrilla and revolutionary
warfare to regard Mao's military writings as the greatest revolution in military
thought in modern times. But there have been few, if any, such revolutions in
recent centuries; the basic principles of warfare have been known since time
immemorial: Clausewitz, Jomini and other military philosophers were not
radical innovators but systematizers. In the same way Mao's military writings
do not really contain novel ideas. This refers not only to his "basic principles"
and the elements of surprise and deceit, but
also to his ideas about flexibility, the coordination of guerrilla with regular
warfare, and even the concept of protracted war. It applies to his advice about
concentration and dispersal, the strategic defensive and offensive, interior and
exterior line operations and the war of attrition and annihilation. There was
nothing new with regard to his advice about how to treat the civilian
population; the concept of political power growing out of the barrel of a gun
has been known to warlords in China (and not only there) ever since the
invention of guns and, in a modified form, well before. The one new element
was perhaps the concept of base areas. The idea had been known and
practiced before, but Mao put far greater emphasis on it. Yet precisely this is
the most contradictory element in his doctrine, for it led the guerrillas into
dangerous situations.
The Chinese Communists were not revolutionaries in the military field for
the simple reason that the possibilities and variations of guerrilla warfare (and
of warfare in general) are limited. New, as far as China was concerned, was
the use of time-honored military strategies in the framework of a political
movement. The idea had occurred to others elsewhere and it had even been
practiced, but never in a backward country and on such a scale. The
Communist victory in China proves that a few determined and highly
motivated people, equipped with an ideology of radical change, are by far the
strongest contender for power once established authority is breaking down. It
could be argued that the existence of an activist elite and internal chaos are
essential factors and that the character of the ideology is largely irrelevant. A
militant movement propagating different policies might have prevailed in
China in the 1940s —but it did not. That Communists were also doing well in
other backward countries shows that the choice of the ideology was perhaps
not fortuitous and that Asian Marxism had distinct advantages over rival
doctrines as a tool for the modernization of underdeveloped societies. The
character of the struggle and the doctrine was of importance not just for
gaining victory; it also shaped to a large extent the quality of the political
regime that subsequently emerged. The military tradition and the
regimentation of the war years reinforced the tendency towards dictatorship
by a small elite; the strong nationalist trends contained the seeds for the break-
up of what should have been a happy family of Communist states. In later
years Soviet spokesmen were to argue in their polemics against the Maoists
that, while guerrillas began as Communists, they tended to end up as
nationalists. They should have added, in fairness, that the Soviet Union had
undergone, mutatis mutandis, the same process,
and this despite the fact that the Communists in Russia had not come to
power through guerrilla warfare.
THE VIETNAM WAR
The Vietnamese war was the longest, bloodiest and most spectacular of all
those modern wars in which guerrilla operations played an important role. In
contrast to the Chinese, the Vietnamese Communists were in a position early
on in their war to set up a regular army that was comparatively well equipped
even though it did not have an air force. This army saw action from 1949
onwards. Dien Bien Phu, the turning point in the war against the French, was
not a guerrilla operation but a classical case of positional warfare, an
eighteenth-century-style siege, in which the Vietminh defeated the French
because of their superiority in men and artillery, and because, as General Giap
put it, "we overcame the French artillery by digging trenches." 41 The guerrilla
tactics used by the Communists were fashioned, broadly speaking, on the
Chinese pattern; an American observer writing in 1954 thought that the
tactics used were not just similar but identical for all practical purposes. 42 Ten
years later, by contrast, another American observer noted that revolutionary
guerrilla warfare as developed in the early 1960s in South Vietnam was
something new, not just in degree but in kind. He referred, however, not so
much to military tactics as to the political use of guerrilla warfare. 43 From a
military point of view the main interest of the Vietnamese war is in the use
that was made of guerrilla operations in combination with regular and
semiregular warfare. For all their technological superiority, the French and
American expeditionary corps were less effective in counteracting guerrilla
tactics than were the Japanese in China.
There were certain important differences in the strategic political context
between the guerrilla war in China and that in Vietnam. A country smaller
than France, Vietnam's geography nevertheless offered in some respects ideal
conditions: many of the guerrilla operations were conducted in marshy rice
lands and in the jungle; there were countless bridges to be mined.
Furthermore, individual urban terrorism, almost entirely absent in China,
played a significant role in Vietnam. The Communists systematically
liquidated their political rivals from the left as well as from the right. One of
their main targets during the early period were the Trotskyites, who had been
fairly strong in the South.44 While the Chinese were self-reliant and without an
outside source of supply, the Vietnamese Communists received arms and
supplies from the very beginning from various well-wishers — first, on a
small scale, from America and Nationalist China, then, after 1949, from the
Chinese Communists and the Soviet Union. Air power was used against the
guerrillas to a much greater degree than in China, but the country's
geographical conditions reduced its effectivity; most guerrilla operations were
anyway carried out by night. In the war against the French, the Vietnamese
Communists enjoyed numerical superiority almost from the beginning. True,
on paper the French Expeditionary Corps had a superiority of two to one over
the Communists, but more than half of these units were tied down in "static
duties," defending cities, villages and isolated strong points. 45 In later years,
the percentage of noncombatants among the American troops was even
higher. (The French troops, in comparison, always outnumbered the Algerian
rebels by ten to one and, towards the end, by twenty or more to one.) The
Chinese Communists faced a ruthless enemy, who was unfettered by moral
scruples or restraints imposed by public opinion at home, and thus was free to
apply even the most inhuman measures. Torture and the "three-all" strategy
was official policy; those who practiced it were promoted, not court-martialed.
French and American public opinion, on the other hand, narrowly circum-
scribed the scope and choice of measures of antiguerrilla action.
The social origins of the Vietnamese Communist elite which conducted the
armed struggle were very similar to those of the Chinese Communist
leadership. Ho Chi Minh hailed from a peasant family but his father had
become a mandarin of sorts as secretary of the ceremonial office of the
imperial palace in Hue; later he became a deputy-prefect. 46 Giap's father was a
poor scholar; the son became a journalist and professor of history. Pham Van
Dongh was the son of a high nobleman. There were one or two lower-class,
uneducated montagnards among the leaders, such as Cho Van Tan (at one
time minister of defense), but most of the leading cadres were of the
intelligentsia, with a heavy prevalence of teachers — and, more often than not,
these were the children of minor mandarins. There was little advancement for
the holders of degrees under French colonial rule, but no undue importance
should be attributed to the lack of social mobility. Indeed, it is a well-known
fact that the intelligentsia has been the standard-bearer of all movements of
national and social revolt in colonial countries, and not only there. That the
national movement had been systematically suppressed
and indeed decapitated by the French authorities between 1885 and 1932 (to
select two important dates in Vietnamese history) made it all the easier for the
Communists, with their greater cohesion and more accomplished methods of
conspiracy and organization, to take over the leadership of the national
movement after the Japanese surrender in 1945. The Vietnamese Communists
put an even stronger emphasis on Popular Front tactics in their policy than did
their Chinese comrades; they entered various coalitions during the 1940s and
1950s and, at one stage, even temporarily dissolved the party as a protective
measure. That Vietnam, with its various nationalities, sects and religions, was
less homogeneous than China created certain difficulties for the Communists.
If they recruited followers among a certain sect that had grievances against the
government, other sects would turn against them. But the Saigon government
was even more deeply ensnared by the tensions and rivalries between
Buddhists and Catholics, between the Cao-Dai and Hoa Hoa, not to mention
various pirates, semicriminal sects, the ethnic Chinese and other groups. The
Vietnamese Communists, like their Chinese comrades, had little influence
among the urban working class even though in theory the struggle of the
party was conducted "under the leadership of the proletariat." Frequently the
impression was gained that the Communists were active in the trade unions
more from a sense of duty to the demands of theory than from genuine
conviction. The Communists invested considerable energy in tackling agrarian
problems but this issue was more acute in the Mekong Delta than in the
northern provinces where they ruled. Nevertheless, despite their appeal as
agrarian reformers, the Communists' influence in the South always remained
limited and the drastic agrarian reforms in North Vietnam that involved a
great deal of terror did them more harm than good.
Students of Vietnamese history have been puzzled by the sources of
Communist appeal, despite the fact that the war in Vietnam has been
documented in absorbing detail. It can be shown that the effects of colonialism
on traditional society was a factor in the rise of Communism, but these effects
were more political and psychological than economic. Mention has already
been made of the limited significance of agrarian problems. Generally
speaking, immediate socioeconomic grievances were in the final analysis not
of decisive importance. All that mattered was that the Japanese surrender had
caused a vacuum even more complete than that in China, and that the
Communists, however few, were the only group with the political will,
internal cohesion and organizational know-how
capable of filling it. There was no Vietnamese Kuomintang which would have
threatened their progress. The old ruling stratum had disappeared and when
the French (and later the Americans) tried to build up a counterelite, the
Communists were already firmly entrenched in wide parts of the country.
Without foreign intervention they would probably have seized the whole
country within a few weeks; against French and American opposition they
were to take thirty years.
When the Second World War broke out most leaders of the Vietnamese
Communist party found themselves in China and, following Russia's entry in
the war, they collaborated with the Kuomintang. They received a small
subsidy to start a guerrilla war in the Japanese rear, but their operations were
limited to the collection of military intelligence. A small guerrilla unit was
established under Vo Nguyen Giap in October 1944 in the remote north of
Vietnam among the Ho tribes, near the Chinese border. (This region had been
throughout history an area of piracy, banditry, insurrection and partisan
warfare.) The unit consisted of thirty-four men who had between them two
revolvers, seventeen rifles and one light machine gun. On 22 December 1944
it established itself as the "Army of Propaganda and Liberation." There were
hardly any Japanese or French units stationed in the region and the only
recorded military operation was an attack against a police post at the moun-
tain resort of Tain Dao on 17 July 1945, in which eight Japanese gendarmes
were killed.47 But the political activity of the partisans was far more intensive
and spread rapidly: by June 1945 some six mountain provinces were largely
under their rule. And three months later the Japanese had surrendered, a
general insurgency had been proclaimed, the Vietcong had entered Hanoi and
the whole of North Vietnam had fallen into their hands almost without a shot
being fired. They seized great quantities of arms (including some Russian
rifles that had been used in the war against Japan in 1905). Some modern
weapons they had bought from Nationalist Chinese troops and others they
had received by way of American airdrops before VJ Day.
Some ten months were to pass before French forces would return to
Indochina in strength; in this time the Communists built up a regular army of
considerable strength and organized a countrywide guerrilla network. Their
position was weaker in southern Vietnam because the earlier return of the
French restricted their activities to certain enclaves in the countryside.
Throughout 1946 negotiations continued between the French authorities and
the
281 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (ill) ! CHINA AND VIETNAM
Communists; on 19 December 1946 full-scale war started when Vietminh

units attacked French garrisons. In the beginning the war was mainly
guerrilla in character; the Communists, with some exceptions, were as yet
reluctant to risk their regular anny in open combat. Since the French forces
were not numerous enough to occupy in strength the whole of northern and
central Vietnam, they had to limit their occupation to the main towns and
certain select regions. The guerrillas could not stop the French but they could
block their routes:
They blew up bridges, built road blocks, ambushed patrols and convoys,
assassinated collaborators, and attacked and eliminated numerous watchtowers
and small road posts set up by the French in the hope of keeping the enemy out
and their own lines of communication open. The Vietminh fighters did their
work chiefly by night; as a result, many regions controlled by the French during
the day became Vietminh territory after darkness fell.48
The French expeditionary corps was militarily and psychologically quite

unprepared for such unorthodox warfare. As the French did not have
sufficient forces to engage in systematic antiguerrilla operations, the
Communists gradually and with relatively little disturbance built up a
"counter-state"; they levied taxes, collected rice, recruited soldiers and
disseminated their propaganda. Occasional French attempts to move against
the guerrillas were futile:
The French as a rule conquered only empty spaces, of which there was enough in
the marshes, jungles and mountains to allow the Vietminh to become invisible.
They dispersed only to reassemble again at a base five or ten miles away, and
they would repeat this manoeuvre if the French continued their pursuit. Sooner
or later, the French found themselves too far away from their own bases, out of
supplies and ammunition, and had no choice but to return, usually followed
closely and harassed continuously by the reappearing guerrillas.49
In February 1950 major units of the Communist regular army first entered
battle; their aim during the next two years was first to remove the French
garrisons from the Chinese border and then to drive the enemy out of Hanoi
and Haiphong and to seize the Red River Delta. But Giap's forces were
defeated on more than one occasion; the French suffered some seven
thousand casualties but in the end the Communist "human wave" attacks
failed against
superior French firepower. As a result of these setbacks, the Viet-minh again

adopted mobile and guerrilla warfare that could be carried out by smaller
units. Against this, the French forces under Navarre, Salan and Lattre de
Tassigny had no answer. Dispersed over the country they lost more and more
control until, by the fall of Dien Bien Phu (May 1954), only about one-quarter
of northern Vietnam remained in their hands. Meanwhile (April 1953) Viet-
minh forces had entered Laos and Cambodia and given a strong uplift to the
local insurgents, the Pathet Lao and the Khmer Rouge. The French
government was no longer able to shoulder the mounting cost of the war so
the Americans, somewhat reluctantly, decided to pay for the French war
effort, but to avoid direct intervention. However, growing war weariness
inside France made a continuation of the war impossible. From an economic
and strategic point of view, Indochina was of no importance for France. At the
Geneva Conference (April-July 1954), an armistice was concluded and the
seventeenth parallel became the border between two sovereign states.
The outcome of the first Vietnamese war was a triumphant justification of
the Communists' use of the guerrilla strategy that they had learned from the
Chinese. The first to provide a more or less systematic outline of Indochinese
guerrilla doctrine was Truong Chih, the secretary general of the party in
1946-1947, 50 and the chief spokesman of neorevolutionary guerrilla warfare.
When only twenty-two, he had been the head of an abortive peasant rebellion
in 1931; in the late 1950s he became the scapegoat for the "excesses" in the
agrarian reform program and temporarily fell into disgrace. Truong Chih
envisaged a protracted war but this, he said, was nothing new in Vietnamese
history; under the Tran Dynasty their forefathers had fought the Mongols for
thirty-one years. It would be a war without fronts, carried out simultaneously
by guerrilla, militia and regular army units. The people were the water, the
people's army the fish; partisans and small army units would disguise
themselves as civilians and thus become invisible. As he saw it, there would
be four separate phases of the war. In the first stage guerrilla warfare, by tying
down enemy forces, would be of decisive importance.51 But with a major effort
and good leadership it might be possible to win the war during the second
stage by using guerrilla and paramilitary forces without a big regular army. 52
Food, money and shelter could be commandeered from the villagers; it was
desirable to have the goodwill of the population but it was not a conditio sine
qua non.
283 THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (ill) ! CHINA AND VIETNAM
The views of Truong Chih's chief rival, Giap, gradually veered away from
guerrilla warfare. Earlier on, Giap had been its major practitioner. His
doctrine did not differ essentially from Mao's; a people's war in backward,
colonial countries is "essentially a peasant war under the leadership of the
working class." Giap meant the working class in the abstract because there
were hardly any working-class cadres in the top echelons of the Communist
political and military leadership. Guerrilla warfare was needed especially at
the outset of the struggle because it could be practiced in the mountains as
well as in the Delta and it could be waged with mediocre as well as good
material. If the enemy were strong, contact with him had to be avoided; if he
were weak, one ought to attack him. Losses must not be incurred at this stage
even if it involved losing ground. 53 Giap fully accepted the Maoist concept of
protracted warfare; writing as late as 1967, the victor of Dien Bien Phu
expected the war to last "five, ten, twenty or more years." 54 He also agreed
with Mao that political activities were more important than military
operations and that fighting was less important than propaganda.
The second stage of "people's war" (to follow Giap) would retain certain
characteristics of guerrilla war but would put greater emphasis on big raids,
including attacks against fortified positions. The principles of regular warfare
would become more and more important even though there would still be
many ambuscades and surprise attacks. It was imperative to make the
transition from guerrilla to mobile warfare, otherwise the strategic task of
annihilating the enemy's manpower would not be fulfilled. If the insurgents
failed to make the transition, they would find it difficult to maintain and
extend guerrilla warfare.55
In retrospect, Giap regarded Dien Bien Phu as a model of coordination
between mobile and guerrilla warfare, a "dialectical connection and
interlacement."56 Eventually, of course, the main tool in a people's war would
be the regular army. Like other Vietnamese Communists, Giap correctly
analyzed the main American weakness: unlike the Japanese in China, the
Americans had the potential to win the war. But they could not use it because
they had set definite limits on their military objectives. Neither could they af-
ford to have the war interfere with political, economic and social life in the
United States and with American foreign policy in other parts of the world. 57
It was unrealistic to expect military victory over the Americans. But sooner or
later the moment would be reached when, for domestic and foreign political
reasons, America would no longer be able to afford to continue the war. The
Amer-
ican public would tire of the war, and since America, in contrast to Japan in
1938, was a democracy, public opinion would prevail over the government.
The war in Vietnam was, in short, a struggle for American public opinion.
Giap's works are not a major theoretical contribution to military thought.
His main achievement, it has been noted, was not to commit many mistakes.58
He was no great strategist even though he did show mastery of the strategic
situation in practice. His decisions in 1952-1953 to move his forces into the
remote area of Tonkin and later on to give battle at Dien Bien Phu were his
main successes. He learned from his costly mistakes of 1950, when he
launched frontal attacks against the French army with forces then unprepared
for major operations. His experience explains his ambivalent attitude during
the internal disputes on Vietcong strategy in the 1960s: he was perhaps more
aware than anyone else that guerrillas could not win the war. But, on the other
hand, he feared that the comrades in South Vietnam would give up the
guerrilla approach too soon. This was the background to his controversy with
General Thanh (the commander in chief of the Vietcong up to his death in
mid-1967) and General Truong Son. The Vietcong commanders attacked
"rightist conservative thoughts" in the North, that is, the tendency to
overestimate the strength of the enemy. They thought that the enemy could be
defeated in an all-out assault. But the Vietcong failed to follow up their
successes of 1964-1965 in the dry season of 1966-1967. Giap advised them to
keep up large-scale operations but to regard the improvement and the
expansion of the guerrilla forces as their main strategic task. In the words of Le
Bao (probably one of Giap's pen names) the Vietcong had been successful as a
result of guerrilla attacks that had disrupted American attempts to establish
base areas, lines of communication, supply depots and had, moreover,
"thwarted the whole pacification program."59
These debates belong, however, to a later period. Between 1954 and i960
there were six uneasy years of peace. South Vietnam was in a state of near
anarchy; there was only the shell of a government; the civil service was
incompetent and the army far from trustworthy.60 The position of the Saigon
government was further complicated by the arrival of nearly a million
refugees from the North, who had to be resettled. It was widely assumed that
the Southern regime was not viable and that it would collapse within a few
years, if not sooner. But against expectations, Ngo Dinh Diem, Prime Minister
of South Vietnam, coped better with the enormous prob-
lems facing him than could reasonably have been expected. In North Vietnam
the Communists needed longer than expected to consolidate their position
and, while doing so, committed various doctrinaire "deviations"; they were
guided by the principle that it was better to kill ten innocent people than let
one enemy escape.
Guerrilla war in the South never ceased entirely; there was little activity
between 1954 and 1957 but, after that time, it gradually increased. Following
the Geneva accord some 75,000 South Vietnamese Communists had been
evacuated to the North; most of them filtered back after the Vietminh
Communists had decided (in 1959) to step up guerrilla warfare. Up to 1964
there were few Northerners among those dispatched to the South to fight and
do political work. Later on there was open intervention by the North though,
according to the official Communist version, the insurgency in the South was
spontaneous, entirely self-sufficient and nationalist rather than Communist in
character.
By late 1958 the Vietcong bands constituted a serious threat to the Diem
government, which had lost its initial impetus and no longer provided
effective leadership. Diem came to rely more and more on members of his
family, excluding from power influential groups inside the country. His
administration consisted more often than not of corrupt civil servants. Land
reform, admirable in principle, was "notably weak in execution and frequently
operated to the benefit of absentee landlords rather than of those who actually
tilled the soil."61 Diem's police tried to weed out the Communists who had
stayed behind in the villages after the Geneva agreements. Such repression
was carried out in an indiscriminate fashion; it was neither as brutal nor as
effective as the Communists' campaign against resistance to their regime in the
North. There was no attempt to create any feeling of identity between the
population and those governing it. Thus the Diem regime neither terrorized
the villagers into submission nor attempted to gain their support and goodwill
by friendly persuasion. It was maintained that Diem's "excesses" were the fault
of local officials and the regional security forces. But the effect, as far as the
population was concerned, was all the same: active and inactive Vietminh
cadres were indiscriminately lumped together and private accounts were
settled by incompetent, arrogant and venal local chieftains:
The brutality, petty thieving, and disorderliness of which they [the South Vietnam
security forces] were frequently guilty was a source of great annoyance to local
inhabitants and the Vietminh cadres who
promised to eliminate the security forces and local officials responsible for these
indignities found many sympathetic listeners.62
This is not to say that the Vietcong behaved like early Christian martyrs. They
had already engaged in individual terror on a massive scale in the first phase
of the fighting (1949-1954). Systematic assassination of village leaders, local
teachers and other "dangerous elements" played a more important role in
Vietnam than in other Asian guerrilla wars; the contrast with China has
already been noted. Bernard Fall relates that he returned to Vietnam in 1957
after the war had been over for two years and was told by everyone that the
situation was fine. He was bothered, however, by the many obituaries in the
press of village chiefs who had been killed by "unknown elements" and
"bandits." Upon investigation he found that these attacks were clustered in
certain areas and that there was a purpose behind them. But hardly anyone
paid attention at the time; these activities were considered a minor nuisance,
not a military danger. The attacks increased in scale until President Kennedy
announced in his State of the Union message in May 1961 that, during the
past year alone, the Communists had killed some four thousand small
officials in Vietnam. Altogether the Communists had "liquidated" by that time
about ten thousand village chiefs in a country with about sixteen thousand
hamlets and thus had methodically eliminated all opposition. South Vietnam
was subverted, not in the sense that it was out-fought but in the sense that it
was "out-administered."63
To counteract this danger, the South Vietnamese government, with
American help, established strategic hamlets. This limited the Vietcong's
freedom of maneuver, but only temporarily. The Communists still had the
original bases that they had administered ever since the expulsion of the
Japanese. On the other hand, there were the hostile villages, those, for
instance, in which Catholic influence was strong. Most of the Vietcong's
terrorist activities were concentrated against the third and most numerous
group of villages, those in which there was (in Duncanson's words) "symbiotic
insurgency," in which both the government and the Communists levied taxes,
collected food and recruited young men for their armies.64
The Vietcong put great stress on political propaganda and indoctrination.
Most Western observers tended to underrate these factors in the early phase
of the war, and some tended to exaggerate their importance later on. It was
asserted that only men and women with the strongest political convictions
and firmly implanted revolu-
tionary attitudes could possibly continue so long a struggle and bear such
suffering.65
A high degree of political awareness and sophistication was attributed to
the people of Vietnam by pro- and anti-Communist observers alike. Thus, in
the words of one sympathetic observer: "When I was in North Vietnam during
the winter of 1966-67, I got the feeling that every Vietnamese was indeed an
internationalist."66 On the other hand, there were the political science advisers
of the American government who installed political reeducation centers for
Vietcong prisoners only to realize much later that their proteges were
altogether untouched by the intricacies of Marxism-Leninism let alone
proletarian internationalism.
It is, of course, perfectly true that the leadership of the Vietcong was more
deeply politically motivated than its enemies and that what has been said
about the Chinese Communists in comparison with the Kuomintang applies a
fortiori to the situation in Vietnam. But despite all the indoctrination of the
rank and file, there is every reason to believe that politics played a lesser role
than was generally assumed. This is not a novel phenomenon: the fighting
qualities of the German soldiers in the Second World War were second to
none, yet subsequent research has established that their political convictions
were only involved to a slight extent.67 The history of guerrilla warfare, too, is
replete with examples showing that men fight for many years and face great
hardships with little apparent political motivation. Throughout history it has
been strong leadership, the personal example of the commander, the ethos and
the esprit de corps which have kept guerrilla movements going and not just
ideological motivation. When the shooting was over, a French observer
watching the Khmer Rouge enter Phnom Penh in May 1975 noted:
The common soldier did not appear to be very concerned about politics,
Cambodia's future or other ideological questions. I had the impression that a lot
of them didn't know which group they belonged to. I felt that their fighting spirit
and ability came more from the rough discipline rather than from convictions. I
rather admired them, but they often seemed like animals being led into the field
by the master.67
Of decisive importance to the conduct of the struggle was the small elite
which formed the backbone of Vietnamese Communism in both the North
and South. It was this cadre which was told: "On
your shoulders rests the entire burden of the revolution." 68 Through its
courage, persistency and frugal habits this cadre made the Vietcong a
supreme fighting force.
The guerrillas were poor, which made it all the more important to share
what little they had between themselves, and also with the peasants.
While there was abundance in South Vietnam, the Viet Cong had to impose
austerity on its members: in a psychological environment conditioned by
Western materialism versus Eastern spirituality, social levelling made the
burdens of "protracted war" a little lighter to bear. The less one has to lose the
less hardship one will feel. There is no immediate hope of laying down one's
personal burden anyway. . . .69
The Vietcong cadre came to the village "barefooted and dressed in black
like every other peasant. He made tax demands, but they were not excessive
. . . he did not talk Communism or Marxism, but exploited local grievances."
He had the habit instilled in him to keep away from the corrupting influence
of the cities; he had replaced the Confucian mandarins — but was closer to the
people than the mandarins had ever been.70
The official Communisr version of the war rested on a twofold fiction: that
it was a spontaneous revolt, which received no outside aid, and that it was
led, not by the Communists, but by a leadership that was in the hands of a
coalition, the NLF (National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam). Like
the Chinese Communists the Vietcong deliberately played down their basic
ideological tenets and put heavy emphasis on their patriotic inspiration. It
was widely argued at the time that this was just a case of political camouflage.
But it is also true that, with all the invocations of proletarian internationalism,
nationalist feeling was very strong in In-dochinese Communism (and
apparently even stronger in Laos and Cambodia) from the beginning and it
became even more pronounced the longer the war lasted. The rift in world
Communism further strengthened the trend towards national Communism,
and what was in the beginning, at least partly, mere make-believe, became in
the end the alter ego.
The assassination campaign against government officials in 1957-1958 was
the prelude to the second Indochinese war. Even before that date, however,
the Diem regime had engaged in anti-Communist repression and the North
Vietnamese government had
applied similar measures to stamp out domestic opposition, real or imaginary.

But, while the South would have been quite incapable of stirring up trouble in
the North, even if it had tried, the Communists had a foothold in the South —
about 6,000 armed Vietminh, who had stayed behind after the ceasefire.
These "stay-behind cadres" were the hard core of the insurrection. Up to i960
the Vietcong had enlarged its forces mostly on a local basis. Infiltration on a
massive scale from the North via the Ho Chi Minh trail began only in i960
(3,500 men came south in i960, 10,000 in 1961 and altogether some
50,000 between i960 and 1965). By early 1966 this force had grown to
some 55,000 full-time, main-force soldiers engaged in mobile warfare. In
addition there were about 125,000 guerrillas operating on a regional basis,
and also some 45,000 political instructors and administrators. The number of
North Vietnamese army regulars who had been dispatched to the South by
1967 was estimated at 70,000. These forces faced more than half a million
Americans, 700,000 Republic of Vietnam soldiers and some 60,000 troops
from Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Most of the foreign soldiers arrived,
however, only after June 1965; up to that date, the Americans had been active
almost exclusively as advisers. In 1962 helicopters were first used against the
Vietcong on a large scale, and for a little while it seemed as if the tide was
turning against the insurgents. But the battle (January 1963) of Ap Bac, a
village in the Mekong Delta some forty miles from Saigon, showed that the
South Vietnamese army was incapable of coping with guerrilla forces in open
battle, however great its technical superiority. On this occasion it had 2,500
men in armored amphibious personnel carriers supported by bombers and
helicopters, yet it failed to defeat a group of 200 Vietcong.71 Militarily, the
battle was of little significance, but the outcome was ominous because it
showed all too clearly that the Vietnamese army was badly led and had little
fighting spirit. Following the mission of General Maxwell Taylor it was
decided to establish "special forces" that would collaborate in antiguerrilla
warfare with irregular Vietnamese units (Operation Sunrise 1962, Operation
Hop Tac 1964-1965, Strategic New-Life Hamlets 1966). But the attempts to
pacify the countryside by applying certain Vietcong techniques within a
totally different political framework were of no avail and, as a result of this
failure, there was an ever-increasing demand for regular American forces.
The basic concept of the Vietcong until roughly 1964 was that it would
come to power following a general uprising (Khoi Nghia). It
was expected that following the intensification of the political struggle, as well
as of acts of terror and guerrilla fighting, the whole country would explode,
the army disintegrate, the soldiers join the people; no one would be left but a
few imperialist lackeys in Saigon.72 There was, of course, a great deal of
guerrilla fighting prior to 1964, but with the arrival of the northern cadres it
was very much stepped up. The Northerners advised their comrades in the
South that the build-up of military forces was the commandment of the hour.
With the Tet offensive of spring 1968 that led to the occupation of Hue and
parts of Saigon, the transition from guerrilla to regular warfare was made,
although later on the emphasis was again put on guerrilla operations. In the
third Vietnamese war (1975) guerrilla operations no longer played any
significant role; the conquest of South Vietnam was carried out by regular
units of the North Vietnamese army.
The military lessons of the Vietnamese war have been discussed in the most
minute detail. Some Western observers had misgivings about the war from the
very beginning. Experience elsewhere had shown that to suppress insurgency
effectively, great superiority in manpower was needed; far more men are
necessary for guard duty on a bridge than for blowing it up. General Maxwell
Taylor thought in 1965 that a superiority of twenty-five to one was essential;
at the time other experts were more optimistic and believed that a ratio of ten
to one would be enough. Yet, in actual fact, the forces fighting Communist
insurgency had not even a five to one superiority. To make good its lack of
manpower, the American command tried to exploit its technological
superiority. But the air attacks against selected targets in North Vietnam did
not have much effect on guerrilla operations in the South and the systematic
bombing of the North was ruled out for political reasons. Air strikes against
the Vietcong were not decisive either, because the enemy was usually not
visible. Helicopters, on the other hand, while a real danger to the partisans,
also offered an easy target to Vietcong machine guns; a disproportionately
high number of them were lost in combat. As Colonel John Vann put it: "In a
political war the worst weapon to kill is an airplane, the next worst—
artillery."73 There was not much scope for the use of tanks in the marshes of
the delta or in the mountains. This was ideal country for staging ambushes, as
General Dayan noted during a visit. The main problem facing American forces
was to discover enemy positions in a country with many natural places for
concealment. Dayan predicted that technological devices would not seal the
Ho Chih Minh trail forever: if the Viet-
cong opted for guerrilla warfare, it could not be subdued. 74 This is not to say
that the Vietcong could not have been defeated by a determined adversary
who, unhampered by political considerations, would have been willing to
employ its military power. The United States, for obvious reasons, was not in a
position to do so. The main danger facing the Vietcong all along was the loss
of its cadres. The fact that some six thousand of them dropped out or were
killed or taken prisoner between i960 and 1965 was far more serious than the
killing of ten or twenty times that number of Vietminh rank and file. The
cadres were irreplaceable, except, of course, in the long run. The Communist
high command was all along aware that military victory against the
Americans was ruled out; the strategic aim was therefore to make the war so
costly for the United States that it would tire and withdraw. Once the Ameri-
cans were out of the country, victory over the Saigon government was just a
question of time, and probably not much time and effort at that.
The Vietnamese war was unpopular in America from the very beginning,
and it became more so the longer it lasted. Furthermore, American
intervention in Indochina had been based on three assumptions, two of which
had been proved manifestly wrong by 1971. The domino theory included a
larger element of truth than its critics wanted to admit. But by 1971 no one
could argue any more with much conviction that the United States had to fight
Communism in Vietnam in order to stop Chinese expansionism. For, mean-
while, relations between America and China had been normalized and the
continuation of the war in Southeast Asia became a serious obstacle on the
road to a further improvement in relations with China and the Soviet Union
and thus an embarrassment to the architects of detente. The Vietnamese
Communists gravitated more to Moscow than to Peking but they did not want
to be a satellite of either. Lastly, it had become perfectly obvious by 1971 that
the United States was neither willing nor able "to pay any price, to bear any
burden, to meet any hardship" in order to assure the survival and success of
liberty in Southeast Asia; the burden and the commitments had become too
heavy, the country had become disillusioned and retrenchment was the order
of the hour.
The deeper reasons for the Communist victory in Indochina are not
shrouded in mystery. The Vietcong fought exceedingly well, but there was
nothing novel about its military strategy and tactics. Nor was there any secret
political weapon; the Algerian nationalists and the Cypriot EOKA won their
wars with much smaller forces
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (ill) '. CHINA AND VIETNAM
against even heavier enemy superiority than the Vietcong faced; they
achieved victory in geographical conditions less propitious than those in
Vietnam and without the benefit of Communist ideology. The reason for their
success was simply that a foreign power could have destroyed the insurgents
only by applying a strategy that would have been unacceptable to a
democratic society. Above all, no native elite existed which equaled the
Communists in enthusiasm, determination and dedication; the Americans
could offer guidance, money and arms, but they could not provide the
qualities most needed to win the war.
National Liberation and
Revolutionary War
With the profound global shifts in the post-World War II balance of power,
guerrilla warfare received a galvanic fresh impetus. Very much weakened, the
European colonial powers could no longer resist the rising tides of nationalism
in both Asia and Africa. By i960 most former colonies had attained
independence, the majority without recourse to armed struggle. The breaking
of the "colonial yoke" did not, however, inaugurate a new era of peace and
stability, for there were many contenders for dominance in the newly
established countries. Radicals fought conservatives, national minorities
pursued separatist policies, and the conflicts frequently took the form of
guerrilla, or quasi-guerrilla war. Of these many wars no two were alike. Some,
as in Palestine, predated World War II in origin, some were given a fillip by it,
with continuing resistance merely switching its focus — as in Greece, Malaya
and the Philippines, for instance — once the territories concerned were no
longer occupied by the wartime invader. Some of these wars were short, others
protracted, some ended with the victory of the insurgents, others with their
total defeat. The Greek and the Malayan insurrections were Communist-
inspired and led, the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya was in the time-honored
tradition of anticolonial uprisings. In Malaya, Palestine and Cyprus the wars
were further complicated because they took place within a multinational
society. In the military sphere, too, the patterns were infinitely variable. In
Indonesia the rudiments of a regular army had come into being during the
war; in Palestine and Cyprus the accent was for the most part on urban
terrorism, in Greece and in
NATIONAL LIBERATION AND REVOLUTIONARY WAR
Indochina the Communists transformed their guerrilla groups into militias

and even regular army units of brigade and division strength. The Greek and
the Indochinese Communists received key support from neighboring
Communist countries whereas the Huks in the Philippines were given no
such assistance. In Greece most of the fighting took place in the mountains, in
Southeast Asia, on the contrary, in jungles and forests.
A periodization of guerrilla warfare is possible only in very general terms.
By and large, the first phase was over by the mid -1950s with the end of the
Malayan insurgency, the lull in Indochina, the defeat of the Huks and the Mau
Mau. But it was just at this moment that the Algerian rebellion began, with
Castro's landing in Cuba coming close on its heels. In the 1960s, following
the victory of the Algerians and the Cuban rebels, the principal scene of
guerrilla operations shifted to Vietnam and Latin America, although there was
also some fighting in Africa south of the Sahara. By the late sixties the rural
guerrillas in Latin America had been subdued, to be replaced by urban
terrorists. Simultaneously there was an escalation in the Middle East, and the
war in Indochina reached its climax. But the Indochinese war had meanwhile
become increasingly conventional, with guerrilla operations as only a
supplementary weapon, while the Palestinians used techniques which were
no longer "guerrilla" in the familiar sense.
In some guerrilla wars there was direct superpower involvement, in others
help was extended obliquely, and in yet others there was no interference at all.
Nor may it be ignored that in addition to the major wars that have been
mentioned, guerrilla war was endemic in certain parts of the globe — in
Kurdistan and Burma, to name but two. The political character of these more
minor wars was in turn so complex as to defy generalization. Some were
Communist in inspiration, but with the gradual erosion of the Communist
bloc the general trend was towards a nationalist socialism or a socialist
nationalism. Some gravitated to Moscow, others to Peking, and they all tried
to get support from both. This, however, did not necessarily mean that they
were willing to toe either the Soviet or Chinese line; the one common
denominator was that each country insisted on its independence. Most Latin
American guerrilla movements and the Palestinians were split along political
lines, whereas in Africa the divisions derived usually from the tribal or
confessional (ELF) background. Sometimes the factions would join forces
against the mutual enemy, but more often than not they would be at odds
with each other. The differences, in short, were altogether
295 NATIONAL LIBERATION AND REVOLUTIONARY WAR
more pronounced than the similarities and any attempt to classify these
guerrilla movements according to their ideology, their geographical location
or their eventual achievement (victory or defeat) is at best an arbitrary
exercise. And yet, for all that, it is only by comparing and juxtaposing the
individual wars that something of a clearer picture ultimately emerges.
PALESTINE
The British decision in 1947 to evacuate Palestine and to hand over the thorny
problem to the United Nations came after three years of military and political
feuding. Jewish resistance was splintered. There was the Hagana, a militialike
self-defense organization that had been tolerated although never officially
recognized by the British Mandatory authorities. During World War II its
members had been voluntarily mobilized for the war effort against Nazi Ger-
many. The IZL (Irgun Zvai Leumi) had been founded in the 1930s by the
right-wing Revisionist party in protest against the purely "defensist" line taken
by the Hagana against Arab insurgents. With the outbreak of war the IZL, like
the Hagana, declared a truce. Rut its attitude changed as the danger of a Nazi
victory passed, as the full extent of the holocaust in Europe became known and
as the British government persisted nevertheless in its opposition to Jewish
immigration to Palestine. Thus the IZL renewed its activities in February 1944
with attacks directed against police stations and other government buildings.
It was IZL policy at this early stage to avoid, if possible, causing loss of life.
The avowed objective of the movement was to expel the British from Palestine
and to create a Jewish state. 1 The third resistance group was LEHI (Lohame
Herut Israel — the "Stern Gang"), an offshoot of the IZL. Abraham Stern, its
leader, had been shot early in the war while allegedly resisting arrest, and
most of its members had been detained. In November 1943 some twenty of
them broke jail and almost immediately reactivated their organization. Their
program was a curious mixture of extreme right-wing and revolutionary
elements; the enemy was British imperialism, the ally every anti-imperialist
force including the Soviet Union and "progressive" Arabs. The great historical
model for both the IZL and LEHI was the Irish struggle for independence and,
to a lesser extent, the Risorgimento. LEHI had no qualms about political
murder and fashioned itself after the classi-
cal terrorist organizations reaching back through the ages. An attempt in
August 1944 to assassinate the High Commissioner of Palestine was
unsuccessful, but in November of that year two of their members killed Lord
Moyne, British minister for Middle Eastern affairs, in Cairo.
The Hagana had collaborated with the British police in hunting down
members of both the IZL and LEHI because they regarded their activities as
detrimental both to the anti-Nazi war effort and the Zionist cause. Nor were
they willing to put up with acts of defiance against their own official
underground army, representing the majority, the elected institutions of
Palestine Jewry. But a few weeks after VE Day collaboration between the
Hagana and the British (saison) came to an end. In late October 1945 the IZL
and LEHI joined with the Hagana in sinking three British naval craft and
wrecking the railway lines at a number of points. Throughout 1946 and 1947
the IZL and LEHI continued their operations, directed for the most part
against British troops in the major cities. The Hag-ana's actions were far fewer
but on a larger scale, concerned chiefly with the sabotaging of lines of
communication. The most spectacular terrorist operation (carried out by the
IZL) was the mining of a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which
several government departments were at the time located, with the loss of
more than ninety British, Jewish and Arab lives. Terrorist acts were
suspended, however, with the outbreak of the Arab-Jewish war in December
1947. 2
The dissident organizations nonetheless continued their separate existence
until shortly after the end of the war of independence (summer 1948),
although while it was yet in progress Ben Gurion, himself an activist second
to none, was firmly resolved that the Hagana — or the Israeli anny, rather, of
which it had become both nucleus and backbone — should impose its
authority on the "dissidents," even at the risk of a civil war within the shadow
of the wider one being fought; the Altalena, a ship chartered by the IZL with
badly needed ammunition and provisions, was shelled and sunk off Tel Aviv
midway through the war since the dissidents were not willing to hand it over
to the government. Eventually the IZL and LEHI were dissolved and their
members incorporated in the body of the Israeli army but still not before the
Deir Yassin massacre had been perpetrated. And it was members of LEHI
who after the war assassinated Count Bernadotte, the Swedish mediator
appointed by the U.N. Both dissident groups later went into politics. Members
of the IZL established the right-wing Herut
party, while members of LEHI were involved in the foundation of a short-

lived national Communist party.
LEHI in its heyday consisted of no more than a few hundred activists; the
IZL had a few thousand members and active adherents. The Hagana was a
much bigger, but also much looser organization with perhaps between sixty
and eighty thousand members of whom, however, only a small number saw
action in the anti-British operations of 1945-1947. The command structure of
the IZL envisaged three divisions: the "Army of Revolution" (which somehow
never came into existence); "Shock Units"; and a "Revolutionary Propaganda
Force." Like the Hagana and LEHI, it had a small, mobile broadcasting station.
The IZL and LEHI had only light arms and explosives; for a long time they
could not get automatic weapons. But Hagana had no artillery either prior to
1948.
The political effect of the terrorist operations has been hotly debated and
has remained a matter of bitter controversy to this day. Some Zionist leaders
have argued that without the Irgun the state of Israel would not have come
into being; Menahem Begin, commander of the Irgun, has claimed that "we
succeeded in bringing about the collapse of the occupation regime." 3 Other
authorities maintain that the "dissidents" did more harm than good to the
cause. The international auspices were at the time more than favorable from
the Zionist standpoint. With delayed realization of the great disaster that had
overtaken the Jewish people in Europe during the Hitler era, there was much
sympathy for its aspirations to establish a Jewish state. Notably weakened by
the war, Britain found the administration of the Mandate a thankless task.
From a strategic and economic point of view Palestine was of no great
importance. British antiguerrilla operations, though far from ruthless, had a
bad press the world over and were not popular at home. In the circumstances
a minimum of force was needed to precipitate the British exodus; the
dissidents played a certain part in the process but not a determining one.
THE GREEK CIVIL WAR
On 16 October 1949 the Greek Communist radio transmitter situated

somewhere in Eastern Europe announced that the Communist army had put a
stop to operations in order to "avoid the total destruction of the homeland."
The announcement, magnanimous in spirit,
came a month after the army had ceased to exist. During the preceding three
years it had successfully challenged the Greek government, defeated its
armed forces, and a stalemate, if not a Communist victory, had seemed
virtually inescapable. The third round in the fight for power in Greece had
started with small-scale Communist attacks launched in February-March
1946. Zakhariades, the secretary general of the party, wrote in retrospect that
"we all agreed that the situation was ripe, that we should take up arms and
fight. . . . The People's Democracies were behind us." But a few British forces
were still in Greece and it was not in the Communists' interest to bring about
their intervention. The attack, in other words, had to be directed not against
the foreign enemy but the domestic foe. 4 It is not entirely clear to this day to
what extent the Greek Communists had been encouraged by their mentors
abroad; it has been asserted that they were prodded by Tito to start the
insurrection, that Stalin was first in favor and then skeptical about the
outcome of the venture. Perhaps he had no strong views one way or the other.
The ultimate decision had to be taken by the Greek Communists themselves,
but it is patent that they would not have gone to war if Stalin had been
opposed.
The conditions seemed propitious. The postwar economic crisis had not
been overcome, the police force was inefficient and the army in the process of
being rebuilt. There was no stable government, let alone strong leadership.
Much of Greece consists of mountainous territory which favors guerrilla
warfare; the border between Greece and her Communist neighbors, seven
hundred miles in length, is almost impossible to secure. Thousands of
Communist activists had gained military experience in World War II. The
Communists had bases, training grounds and steady sources of supply in
Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. The Greek Communist party, to be sure,
was relatively small; it had never polled more than ten percent in general
elections, but it was far more tightly knit than the other Greek parties and
could rely on a high degree of militancy and discipline. It had supporters both
among the urban intelligentsia and the industrial workers; it was especially
influential among the Greeks from Asia Minor who as the result of the popu-
lation transfer after World War I had been repatriated to Greece. Both Markos
Vafiades, the commander in chief of the Communist army, and Nikos
Zakhariades who later replaced him, had been born in Turkey. The
Communist partisans did indeed appear to have the advantage. They were
more deeply motivated, their morale was sturdier, they fought better than the
government troops.
They were also more ably led, at least until the very last stage of the fighting.
Two reasons have been advanced to account for their defeat nonetheless in
1949. The first is the decision taken in November 1948, apparently against
Markos advice, to convert their guerrilla army into one of larger formations
(divisions), and to engage in positional warfare in defense of the liberated
areas; this, when they had been at their potent best in 1947-1948 operating
with units of company strength (fifty to a hundred men) and, at most, in
battalions (two to four hundred). The second frequently cited reason is
Yugoslavia's rift with the Communist camp which eventually resulted in the
closing of the border with Greece. These circumstances had, needless to say,
their adverse effect but they were by no means the only causes of the
Communist rout. The very decision to embark on an armed offensive had
been a mistake, as the Communist leaders themselves later admitted. The
country's mood was not as revolutionary as they believed. Greece was, after
all, not a dictatorship at the time; the Communists' deliberate boycotting of the
first postwar democratic elections was generally interpreted as a confession of
weakness.
When they made their fateful choice, the Communists had banked above all
on the demoralized state apparatus and an undermined army, lacking both
training and modern equipment. A protracted war, it was figured, would of
necessity bring about the collapse of the regime. They overlooked — or
perhaps preferred to ignore — the possibility that a long war might precipitate
the reorganization of the army. Between 1946 and 1949 the United States
supplied Greece with approximately three hundred and fifty million dollars'
worth of arms; this undoubtedly contributed to the Communist defeat, but
even more telling was the revitalization of the Greek army under Papagos,
who became commander in chief in early 1949. As an American observer
wrote later: "The army was galvanized into action. Its manpower was not
increased, its training was not greatly improved, and there was no significant
increase in its equipment. The army was simply made to do what it was ca-
pable of doing, and no more than this was then needed to gain the victory." 5
But even if the Greek Communists had not made the mistake of transforming
their forces into a semiregular army, if they had continued to operate in small
units, they would still have had no chance. The shift to conventional warfare
was a fatal error, easy though it is to see why the step was taken. Some
Communist leaders felt that time was running out, with Yugoslavia's "defec-
tion" the international situation had from their point of view deteriorated, it
would be wisest to move against the Greek army while it was still depleted.6
Guerrilla tactics would have made it more difficult for General Papagos to
defeat the Communists, but without bases inside Greece, which they did not
have, the guerrillas could anyway not have existed much longer; their cause in
fact lost more of whatever appeal it initially had with each month the war
dragged on. The Communists had no popular aim, no obvious, all-embracing
slogans such as the overthrow of the tyranny or the reapportionment of the
land. They tried to use anti-imperialist slogans, but to little purpose; there
were, after all, no more than three thousand British soldiers in Greece at the
time, who did not participate in the fighting, and a few hundred American
military advisers. On the other hand, the Communists had to defend
themselves against charges of treason, since they supported the establishment
of an independent Macedonian state. The proposal to surrender Greek
territory to the Bulgarians was anything but attractive. Even the Greek
Communists were not enthusiastic about this item in their political
paraphernalia; perhaps it was part of the price they had to pay for the help
they received from their comrades abroad. Their having to press-gang young
peasants into their army during the last year of the fighting merely
antagonized villagers the more, and at no benefit to their fighting machine
either, for there was not time enough to indoctrinate the new recruits.
The Greek Communists were better armed than most postwar guerrilla
movements. After the battles in the Vitsi and Grammos mountains, the
government forces captured about a hundred pieces of artillery, including
anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, some 650 machine guns, 216 heavy mortars
and 142 rocket launchers. Considering that the guerrilla forces had never
numbered more than twenty-five thousand soldiers (up to twenty percent of
them women), they seem to have had about as much equipment as they could
possibly absorb. They had no air force, but the government air force was
minute and until the last phase of the fighting played no significant role in the
campaign. The war was fought with great bitterness, clemency was rare and
atrocities common to both sides. The Greek government forces suffered about
sixty thousand casualties, among them sixteen thousand dead and almost five
thousand missing. More than four thousand civilians were executed by the
Communists. No accurate figures are available about the extent of Communist
losses. They were, in all probability, as large as those
of the government. Greece, a small and poor country with about seven million
inhabitants at the time, needed years to recover from the trauma of the civil
war, the material destruction wrought and the loss of life. With the Russian
and the Spanish civil wars heading the list in that due order, the Communist
insurrection in Greece ranks as third among the major European internal wars
of this century.
SOUTHEAST ASIA
As World War II came to its shuddering end, the calls for national
independence began to reverberate across Southeast Asia. The easy victories
of the Japanese against the European colonial powers had given an enormous
boost to the native national movements. In India, Pakistan and Burma, Britain
abdicated without a struggle; the course of events in Indochina has been
described elsewhere in this study. But in Malaya and the Philippines, guerrilla
movements mushroomed, while in Indonesia the Dutch attempts to reimpose
their rule also provoked armed resistance.7 The Indonesian bid for
independence was won with relatively little fighting, and this despite the
movement there being internally split, with the Communists taking, grosso
modo, a more militant line than the rest. To compound the confusion, the
Communists were themselves divided and all in all there was a real danger
that the country might quite literally fall apart. Indonesia's very weakness,
however, was its strength, for the Dutch were wary of the chaos whereas the
Nationalists and the Communists had no such inhibitions.
There had been no resistance movement in Indonesia during the war; on
the contrary, there had been widespread collaboration with the Japanese.
Mention has already been made of the fact that under their occupation a small
Indonesian army, the Peta, had come into being. Furthermore, all the main
political parties had their private armies, such as the Masjumi (Hizballah) and
the Darul Islam. The Peta consisted of fewer than a hundred thousand officers
and men, the private armies of somewhere in the neighborhood of double that
number. The two Dutch "police actions," in 1946 and 1948, were carried out
by much smaller forces, but these were highly trained and well-organized
units which had no trouble whatsoever coping with the untrained, ill-
disciplined and badly equipped Indonesian troops. But the real problems, as
so often in
this kind of war, emerged only after the Dutch had seized the key cities and
lines of communication. A hundred thousand Dutch soldiers were not
sufficient to control the heartland of Java and Sumatra, let alone the other
islands. The Dutch army was, in the words of one observer, incapable of
occupying an overcrowded area of fifty million people, short perhaps of an
outright campaign of terror, for which the Dutch were "temperamentally
unsuited."8 Facing an economy in ruin, the prospect of general turmoil, the
condemnation of the United Nations (still a moral force to be reckoned with in
those days), facing the strong disapproval of the United States and their other
allies, the Dutch opted for withdrawal and Indonesia became a sovereign
republic. Weak as the national government was, the Communists were in no
position to challenge it for their force had been much reduced in the fighting,
notably in the Madiun rebellion. Moreover, by the time they recovered from
their internal splits (1952-1953), world Communist policy was no longer that
enthusiastic about armed struggle outside the colonial context. So the
Indonesian Communists reshaped their strategy to one of political action,
demonstrations, strikes, and eventually even of collaboration as the Sukarno
government veered towards "anti-imperialism."
Communist guerrilla warfare in Malaya began in 1948, reached its climax
in 1950-1952, and petered out in 1956-1958. In the Philippines fighting
developed in 1947, continued on and off for about seven years and then
gradually died down after the surrender of Luis Taruc, the Communist leader.
Both in Malaya and the Philippines the leading cadres of the postwar
insurgency were composed of the same men who had organized the wartime
resistance. The Chinese Malayans had established a guerrilla force in February
1942, and the following year British officers ("Force 136") landed and
cooperated with them; Chin Peng, the commander of the MPAJA (the
Malayan resistance forces), which numbered some six thousand fighters, was
to be awarded the OBE. The Philippine Hukbalahap was founded in March
1942; its relations with the small U.S. guerrilla forces in the islands were,
however, anything but cordial, and although the Huks contributed in no small
measure to the war effort against the Japanese, they were equally if not more
eager to settle scores with their own domestic political enemies. Although the
leadership of the Huks was Communist, this fact was not made public at the
time. Whereas to all intents and purposes the MPAJA was identical with the
Malayan Communist party, the relationship between the Huks and the
Philippine Communist
party was more complicated. The political situation in Malaya was anyway
altogether dissimilar to that in the Philippines. Malaya was still a colony while
the Philippines had almost attained independence, even if the Communists
would argue that this independence was a mere legal fiction. Which does not
alter the fact that the Malayan guerrillas still had to contend with the British
army and police, whereas the Huks were by now free to take on their own
people. Again, recruits to Communism in Malaya came almost entirely from
one community, the Chinese; the membership of the Huks, on the other hand,
was not limited to a national minority.
The timing of the insurrections in Southeast Asia was probably not
altogether uncoordinated. They all broke out within the space of a few months
in 1948 and this has tempted observers to look for a definitive guiding hand
behind the eruptions. Attention has been drawn to the Calcutta Conference of
the World Federation of Youth and Students in February 1948. 9 The
resolutions of the conference attacked the "false independence" of India and
Pakistan and called for an intensification of the struggle for true
independence, which in the circumstances did not of course mean the
concentration of one's efforts on electoral contests. It is most unlikely,
however, that the Cominform would have chosen a minor meeting to
coordinate its policy in Southeast Asia. Whatever coordination there was had
most probably taken place at the highest level. The "general line" of
Communist policy, the "two camps" concept, had been defined by Zhdanov
and others well before then and the new militancy just happened to coincide
neatly with the desires of the Southeast Asian Communists. But this is not to
say that the policy was clear-cut, or planned in detail. During World War II the
Soviet Union would have taken a dim view of any fraternal party which did
not contribute its share toward the defense of the Soviet Union. The world
situation after the war, however, was infinitely more complex and there could
be no imposing of one rigid universal law. Between 1947 and 1952 the stress
was certainly on the armed struggle, at that point peaceful coexistence became
the watchword. But just as not everyone everywhere took to arms in those five
years, so neither did all armed insurrections cease after 1952. It all depended
on local factors, "objective" and "subjective" alike.
Malaya is a small country, four-fifths of its area uncultivated jungle. It was
(and is) a major producer of tin and rubber, of its 5.3 million inhabitants
(1945), forty-nine percent were Malay and thirty-eight percent Chinese. 10 The
Chinese were better educated and had, on the whole, a considerably higher
living standard. After
28g NATIONAL LIBERATION AND REVOLUTIONARY WAR
the war the Communist party had become legal; its new head was the now
twenty-six-year-old Chin Peng, the guerrilla hero who had cooperated with
the British. His predecessor, Loi Tak, had been successively a French,
Japanese and British agent, a particular learned only later and that anyhow
did not affect the party line.11 At its fourth plenary meeting (May 1948), the
MCP decided that "an armed struggle will be inevitable and will constitute
the most important form of struggle."12 This decision coincided with the final
victory of Mao's forces in China and was probably not unconnected with it.
There is reason to believe that the secretary general of the Australian
Communist party, on a visit to Malaya at the time, acted as an emissary and
that he advised the local Communists against continuing the constitutional
struggle.
Communist strategy, insofar as can be ascertained, was to liberate certain
areas near the jungle, to seize plantations and mines, and then to envelop the
cities. From the guerrillas' point of view the squatters' villages on the fringe of
the jungle were of paramount importance; they relied on them for intelligence,
food and supplies. After some hesitation the British authorities decided to
resettle the squatters in new villages. This proved an easier task than had been
envisaged and it aggravated the guerrillas' supply situation. But it did not
solve the authorities' military problem, for with great tenacity the guerrillas
continued to fight on in adverse conditions. General Clutterbuck, who was
actively involved in counterinsurgency, writes admiringly not only about the
organization of the Communist guerrillas but of the "fortitude of tiny bands of
guerrillas holding out against the concentrated efforts of twenty or even sixty
times their strength of soldiers when the war was already lost — ranking high
in the annals of human endurance." 13 It has been pointed out that the main aim
of the insurgents at the start of the guerrilla war was to cause maximum
disruption to the country's economy and the administration. But in contrast to
Vietnam, the Communists never quite succeeded in achieving their objective;
the administration continued to function throughout the country, the
government collected taxes, the schools were kept open and justice was
administered. Unlike their Vietnamese comrades, the Chinese guerrillas in
Malaya had no active sanctuary, no secure line of supply from beyond the
border. Their staunchest ally was the well-nigh impenetrable jungle in which
their camps could be tracked down only with the greatest difficulty.
Individual terrorists would be seized only by accident.
The first phase of guerrilla fighting (1948-1949) was not an out-
standing success inasmuch as the government failed to collapse. But the

guerrillas continued to launch constant attacks from their bases in the jungle
and their assault reached its climax in 1951, a year in which the security forces
suffered some 1,195 casualties, including 504 killed. (One of the victims was
Sir Henry Gurney, the High Commissioner, who was killed in an ambush.)
But the toughest year of the emergency was also the period in which the tide
turned, though few realized it at the time. Guerrilla casualties in 1951 were
over two thousand, including a thousand killed and three hundred and
twenty captured or surrendered, an unacceptable number considering that
there were no more than ten thousand of them in all, and most of the time
only about five thousand.14
Looking back on the years of fighting, the Communist leaders
acknowledged that certain mistakes had been made. They had subjected the
masses to great losses through their acts of destruction and sabotage — "blind
and heated foolhardiness" was to be avoided in future, the emphasis was to be
on "regulated and moderate methods."15 This meant among other things no
more slashing of rubber trees, and no more indiscriminate assassinations.
Internal purges, however, continued; a leading party member was executed
for having dared to criticize the top leadership. But instead of having the
desired effect, this execution led on the contrary to the defection and
surrender of other dissenters. The government tried psychological warfare
with some degree of success; once it had been established that the British
would not shoot deserters, there was a steady trickle of surrenders, averaging
two hundred a year. This damaged the morale of those remaining in the jungle
and provided intelligence to the British commanders.
The serious British counteroffensive began in late 1951 and lasted for about
two years. By 1953 the security forces were killing or capturing six guerrillas
for each of their own men lost. 16 The British had managed to cut the guerrillas
off from their regular food supplies, and driven them deeper into the jungle
where they lived with the aborigines. They had become far less dangerous,
but to flush them out from those tangled depths was an almost fiendishly
frustrating exercise. As many as a thousand man-hours could be spent even
so much as to encounter a guerrilla. But there were limits, too, to Communist
endurance; the guerrillas were aware that they had been isolated and this
finally undermined their will to continue the struggle. By the end of 1955 the
number of jungle fighters was down to three thousand, by late 1956 only
about two
2Q1 NATIONAL LIBERATION AND REVOLUTIONARY WAR
thousand were left, the following year the remaining Communist units
disintegrated and the "emergency" was virtually over.
One of the major mistakes of the guerrillas (in the opinion of one who
fought them) was to adhere too rigidly to Maoist strategy in so altogether
different a setting.17 After 1954 they realized that they had neglected
indoctrination and they tried to broaden their mass basis. But several valuable
years had been wasted; the British had meanwhile carried out administrative
reforms and promised independence. The Communists still found little
support outside the Chinese community; their principal bases were the
Singapore secondary schools. It has been reasoned with hindsight that the
guerrillas might have come closer to success had they engaged in simul-
taneous urban terror and rural guerrilla operations, or if they had
concentrated their attacks against plantations and mines. But they were not
strong enough to carry out projects on such a massive scale. Even within their
own community they lacked full control; they were not able, for instance, to
win over the powerful secret societies. The official name of the guerrilla
movement was the MRLA—Malayan Races Liberation Army — but for all
that, no determined effort was made to rally Malay supporters, although the
tensions between the component nationalities were so palpable that the
attempt would probably in any event have proved abortive.
Small guerrilla units continued to exist near the Thai border; the
headquarters of the MRLA (later restyled the MNLA) were transferred to
southern Thailand as early as 1953. After the collapse of the revolt, the
Communist party of Malaya veered toward Peking, to have the decision to
give up its active fight criticized later as a "revisionist deviation." But despite
the appeals in 1961, in 1963, and again in 1968 to correct the "capitulationist
line" and to persist in the anned crusade in rural areas to the very end, Malaya
was to remain quiet for almost two decades.
THE PHILIPPINES
In later years Communist writers were to maintain that the guerrilla

insurrection in the Philippines was bound to fail because there was no
"objective" revolutionary situation.18 In actual fact the prospects for a
successful takeover were better in almost every respect in the Philippines than
anywhere else in Southeast Asia. Political and
economic power in the islands was in the hands of a small oligarchy which
owned all the large farms. The agricultural system was almost entirely feudal
in practice, with peonage widespread and an immense landless proletariat.
Potentially, the Huks had even greater peasant appeal than had either the
Chinese or Vietnamese Communists; they had laid the broad foundations for
it during the war on the dual count of fighting the invader and their insistence
on a just redistribution of the land. (In China, it will be recalled, the agrarian
demands of the Communists were played down while the war continued.)
The Philippines had, besides, a long guerrilla heritage dating back to the
resistance of the tribes to the Spanish invasion. It had manifested itself again
in the struggle of Aguinaldo, the national leader and guerrilla chieftain who
had withstood the Americans for two years after the end of the Spanish-
American War in 1898. 19 Sixty thousand Americans had fought forty
thousand Philippine patriots based chiefly in the north of Luzon, and the U.S.
suffered six thousand casualties before they succeeded at long last in
surprising and capturing Aguinaldo in his headquarters. Clashes on a smaller
scale continued well beyond 1902. (Aguinaldo was still alive when the Huk
insurrection broke out in 1947.)
The Huk rebellion reached its climax in the years between 1950 and 1952
when "they were the masters of the countryside and of several cities. . . . The
people paid them taxes, fed and sheltered them, gave them valuable
information and sometimes rendered military service to them."20 They
numbered then some twenty thousand men with perhaps fifty thousand
auxiliaries, and two million people lived in the areas they dominated. Luis
Taruc, who had been the commander of the movement when it had first been
set up to fight the Japanese, wrote after he had left the party that "errors were
made and innocent people died . . . but the common people certainly loved
and respected us."21
The forces opposing the Huks were weak and inexperienced. The
Philippine army consisted altogether at the time of only two fighting
battalions, the rest were engaged in service, administration and training and
could not be enlisted for active duty.22 Nevertheless the Huks (whose name
had meanwhile been changed to the HMB — People's Liberation Army) could
not prevail in their long and bitter war. For all the discontent and the internal
tensions, they found it harder to mobilize the peasants against their own
masters than against the foreign foe. Nor was there any powerful Communist
neighbor to act as a protector, to provide them with a steady supply of arms
and ammunition, food and medicines. Further, the
GUERRILLA WARFARE
Huk leaders seemed to have no clear notion of how to proceed beyond rural
guerrilla warfare. Finally, they had the misfortune to meet up with a gifted
opponent in Ramon Magsaysay. Thanks to his initiative, the army and the
administration were revitalized, and local government was reformed.
Handsome rewards ranging from fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars were
given for information bringing about the capture of any of the HMB's leaders.
At the same time former members of it received both an amnesty and fifteen
to twenty acres of land apiece. This "left hand, right hand policy" produced
fairly quick results. In 1953 Magsaysay was elected president; by the time of
his death in an airplane accident the war was virtually over. A few hundred
Huks remained in their mountain hideouts, but the Communist party was no
longer a danger. Jesus Lava, the pro-Soviet secretary general, returned to
Manila, abjured the armed struggle and became a loyal oppositionist. The
remnants of the Huks engaged in brigandage; in 1969 a new Maoist New
People's Army (MNA) came into being. But a more effective threat was the
Muslim revolt in the southern islands in 1973.
The Philippine Communists suffered a series of setbacks, some of them self-
inflicted. When in 1950 the prospects were at their brightest, half of the
Politburo was arrested in a police raid in Manila, leaving the party
disorganized. The leadership was ridden by ideological and personal disputes
from the start. Above all, as in China, the Communists were entirely on their
own. But conditions in the Philippines after the war did not resemble those in
China during the Japanese invasion, Taruc and the Lava brothers lacked
Mao's qualities, and Magsaysay was infinitely more competent than Chiang
Kai-chek.
Since World War II, guerrilla warfare of one kind or another has taken
place in every country throughout Southeast Asia. In Burma it is inherent and
latter-day Burmese politics have largely been dominated by the struggle
between the government and Communist guerrillas of various persuasions, as
well as with national minorities such as the Karen. The Indian Communist
party engaged in rural guerrilla warfare in Andhra Pradesh in 1948-1951.
Later, the Indian army came up against similar warfare in Nagaland. Under
Maoist inspiration, the Naxalites in West Bengal organized poor and landless
peasants for an armed struggle in 1967. This revolt, which aimed at the
physical extermination of the "class enemy," meaning landowners and
moneylenders, reached its climax in 1 96g -i970. Along the way, the Naxalites
also killed policemen and teachers, and members of rival political parties —
including the
pro-Soviet Indian Communist party — and destroyed symbols of enemy rule

such as Gandhi and Tagore monuments. The campaign had originally been
launched under the umbrella of antifeudalist slogans, but soon the target was
redefined as the seizure of power. 23 Following Peking's criticism of their
strategy, the Naxalites split into eight factions, and eventually some thirty
thousand of their members and adherents, students for the most part, found
themselves in Indian jails.24
Partisan warfare was conducted in Korea between 1951 and 1954. But none
of these campaigns was successful, and though each was different, a detailed
analysis would add little to a general understanding of the guerrilla
phenomenon.
ALGERIA
Early on in the Algerian war, General de Gaulle had realized that France could
not keep Algeria against the wish of the overwhelming majority of its
inhabitants. The revolt had started in 1954, by 1956-1957 the FLN thought
victory was at hand. Their optimism, however, was premature, for in the
following years their units were crushed by the French army. But de Gaulle
insisted that there was no solution other than total independence. It would be
different if France were still a "mastodon" as it had once been. In present
conditions, "only Russia with its Communist methods" could put an end to the
rebellion. Having already killed two hundred thousand people (de Gaulle
argued), France could certainly continue the war. But where would it lead?
The army, seeing no farther ahead than the next djebel, did not want to be
deprived of its victory, it had only one remedy: to break the bones of the
fellaghas. But this would merely lead to a new war in five or ten years and by
that time the Arabs would be even weightier in numbers.25
The French position in Algeria, it goes without saying, was far stronger
than in Indochina, quite apart from the fact that the French army had learned
from its unfortunate experience in Southeast Asia; a second Dien Bien Phu
was ruled out. Algeria was not a colony but part of metropolitan France, the
distance from Algiers to Marseille was no greater than from Marseille to Lille.
At the beginning of the war there was full support for it in France. Algeria
had no jungles or forests in which the rebels could hide; the French air force
could easily spot enemy concentrations. One million French-
men lived in Algeria and were well acquainted with the country and its
inhabitants. The rebels were not members of a monolithic party as with the
Communists in Vietnam — there was much less discipline and much more in-
fighting; thousands of Algerians were killed before the FLN had defeated its
domestic rivals. French army losses were small; during the seven years of the
insurrection the average annual number killed was two thousand. For all that,
as de Gaulle had predicted, the French army was neither strong nor ruthless
enough to win the war. By i960 half a million troops had been concentrated
to police a country several times the size of France; the cost of this amounted
to almost a billion dollars a year. Domestically, France passed through the
most difficult spell in its postwar history; there was no leadership, no stable
government, the crisis in Paris affected the situation in Algeria, and the
Algerian war aggravated the French crisis. Most Frenchmen were outraged by
the Algerian atrocities: they wanted to keep Algeria but they were no longer
willing to fight for it. Gradually the war found decreasing favor at home. 26 To
suppress the rebellion effectively the French security forces would have had to
use the same means, if not more drastic ones, than the insurgents —
indiscriminate assassination, systematic torture — and though the French
paras were not plagued by excessive humanitarian scruples, there were in the
last resort limits to what means the security forces of a civilized country could
apply.
The FLN would still have been routed but for their active sanctuaries in
Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Morocco. Their situation was more advantageous
than Abd el-Kader's, for whenever they were hard-pressed they could cross
the border, while France, in contrast to a hundred years earlier, could no
longer invade Morocco. However much the French generals might rave, they
were powerless to pursue the enemy. Even a minor air attack against an FLN
base on the Tunisian side of the border (Sakiet Sidi Yusef) provoked a major
international scandal; a massive attack was altogether unthinkable since the
French government felt it could not commit such an affront to world public
opinion.
Algeria had been under French control since the 1830s but native
opposition had never been far from the surface. In World War II, France's
position in North Africa had become much weaker and in 1945 there was a
major insurrection; according to an official estimate, fifteen hundred
Algerians were killed, and the nationalists claimed twenty thousand victims,
the real figure being perhaps somewhere between five and eight thousand.
The fact that Mo-
rocco and Tunisia had made greater advances on the road to independence
added fresh fuel to Algerian nationalist fervor, so did Nasser's rise to power.
Egypt, where the North African liberation committees were located, was the
first base of the insurrectionists; only two years later the Algerians shifted
their headquarters to Tunisia and Morocco.
The prehistory of the rebellion is still something of an enigma. Officially the
coordinating body was the CRUA (Comite Revolutionnaire d'Unite et
d'Action), an activist group which had split from the MTLD led by Messali
Hadj. The nine leaders were Ahmed ben Bella, Relkacem Krim, Mohammed
Roudiaf, Mohammed Khider, Mustapha ben Boulaid, Larbi ben M'hidi,
Mourad Didouche, Rabah Bitat and Ait Ahmed Hocine. Yet these nine had
never actually met before the insurrection started on 1 November 1954. 27 The
real kernel was the special organization of the MTLD established in 1948,
which engaged in occasional bank robberies, the collection of arms, and
sporadic acts of terror. This special organization (OS) was headed by Ahmed
ben Bella who had served with distinction in the French army during the war.
In 1950 ben Bella was arrested following a robbery at the Oran post office but
made a successful getaway from jail. Of the early leaders of the rebellion,
hardly any were of peasant background but quite a few had served in the
French army. Some had been in politics before: ben Bella had for a short while
been deputy mayor of an Algerian town; Khider, who was older than the rest,
had been a member of the French parliament. Most had belonged before to the
MTLD, a few had been Communists. One observer records that Belkacem
Krim, a former French army corporal, had organized a Kabyle maquis of his
own prior to 1954, a second one puts it that he was a notorious brigand
chief.28 For all their fervent nationalism, most of the FLN leaders were
culturally uprooted men; scarcely one of them had a command of literary
Arabic.
According to conventional liberal wisdom of the day, the Algerian problem
was basically one of poverty, and consequently the solution had to be
primarily socioeconomic in character. There was indeed great poverty and
social discrepancies were immeasurable. Algeria was still a predominantly
agricultural country. Oil had been discovered, but production amounted to
only eight million tons in i960. Ninety percent of Algerian industry was in
French hands. Six million Muslims farmed some 4.7 million hectares,
whereas a hundred and twenty thousand Europeans had farms of 2.3
hectares. While the urban Muslims had benefited to some extent from the
postwar boom, most of the peasants were still desperately poor. There seemed
to exist all the makings for a major agrarian rebellion and the FLN leaders
stressed in their articles and speeches the importance of land reform once the
war was over; in this respect, as in some others, their policy resembled
Nasser's. Yet the agrarian issue was far from central to the rebellion and the
FLN by no means supported a social revolution. As one of its leaders put it,
"The problem is not posed for us as in China. The Chinese carried on both
national resistance and social revolution. . . . We have taken up arms for a
well-defined aim: national liberation."29 Some FLN leaders such as ben Bella
used more radical phraseology than others, but even most sympathetic
observers have noted that much of the ideological verbiage was simply a mask
for maneuvers of various groups within the elite which aimed at securing or
bolstering their own positions of influence.30 Thus the bedrock of the struggle
against the French was nationalistic, with socialist demands, other than
seizing foreign property, little more than scatterings of topsoil dressing.
Toward the end of the insurgency there was a shift in FLN orientation in the
direction of the Soviet Union, but the motivation was largely pragmatic; the
French generals and colonels who claimed that their army was the "first in the
world which had agreed to fight on the ground chosen by the Communist
revolution to destroy Western civilization" were quite mistaken. 31 The FLN
was perhaps more anti-Western than most European Communist parties, but
it was certainly not part of a "Communist conspiracy."
With the outbreak of the rebellion CRUA became the FLN, the ALN acting
as its military arm. Unlike in China, Cuba or Vietnam, there was no one
outstanding figure whose authority was undisputed: some of the founder
members were killed in the war, and four leaders, including ben Bella and
Khider, were captured by the French in 1957 and spent the succeeding years
in prison. The ALN was subdivided into five regions (wilayat) under a
colonel, with a sixth one (Sahara) added later. Estimates as to the number of
Algerian guerrillas vary enormously; at the beginning there were only a few
hundred of them, equipped mainly with rifles and some automatic weapons.
By 1956 there were forty thousand according to Algerian sources, twenty-five
thousand (including auxiliaries) according to the French. After 1955 the rebels
were equipped with machine guns, mortars (German 81 mm) and recoilless
rifles, and there was no shortage of mines and bangalore torpedoes.
The rebellion had started in the mountainous regions of Kabylia,
29.8 GUERRILLA WARFARE
Aures and northern Constantine; during 1955 it spread to other parts of the
country. The hit-and-run tactics focused on destroying French farms, cutting
lines of communication and punishing Algerian collaborators — sixty
thousand Algerians were fighting in the French army. The attempt to carry the
war to the capital in September 1956 ended in a debacle; the French
paratroopers smashed the ALN apparatus in Algiers with great losses to the
insurgents. But the political objective was largely achieved—the interna-
tionalization of the conflict and the political isolation of the French
government. The FLN gained increasing support in the Arab world and it was
joined by Algerian political leaders who had initially been hesitant. The
French army had at first underrated the extent of the rebellion; but after 1957,
strong reinforcements were brought in and systematic measures employed to
combat the insurgents. The ALN lost the initiative; the Morice line along the
Tunisian border made crossing difficult, and the "regroupment" of villages cut
the ALN off from much of its support. By 1961 the number of f e l l a g h a s
inside Algeria was down to five thousand men, scattered in small groups; they
could still vex the French but do nothing much of harm otherwise. If FLN
morale was low, however, among the French it was at breaking point. They
could not keep huge garrisons indefinitely in all the major centers, along with
large mobile reserves besides. Twenty thousand Algerian guerrillas were
concentrated in Tunis beyond the reach of the French. The European
population of Algeria was up in arms against the d e f a i t i s t e s in Paris,
the military commanders in Algeria paid no attention to the orders emanating
from the capital. France, in brief, was on the verge of a civil war as General de
Gaulle took over, nor did the danger pass until he had been in power for
several years. Meanwhile the FLN had established itself as a government in
exile, recognized d e f a c t o o r d e j u r e by some fifteen countries (in-
cluding China and the Soviet Union). De Gaulle had been ready to cut
France's losses without at first making his policy public; he had no illusions,
was fully sensible that this meant surrender, the exodus of French Algerians
and the loss of French property.
Thus, after seven years of struggle, Algeria attained independence. The
exodus of the Europeans did not ruin the country as many had expected, just
as the influx o i p i e d s n o i r s did not make for the Algerianization of
France. Very much in contrast to what Fanon had hoped, Algeria became a
dictatorship, first under ben Bella, later under Boumedienne. Ten years after
victory, all but one or two of the surviving early leaders of the revolt found
themselves in
prison or exile. On the first day of the rebellion the FLN had published a
proclamation defining its goal as national independence through the
restoration of a sovereign democratic state within the framework of the
principles of Islam, and the preservation of all fundamental freedoms. The
Algerian state that emerged from the war of liberation was not exactly the
country of the rebels' dreams; "Heureux les martyrs qui n'ont rien vu," one of
them wrote.32
According to some observers (such as Charles Andre Julien), the story of
Algeria and of the Maghreb in general is one of the lost opportunities insofar
as France is concerned. Much play has been made of Algeria's economic
maladjustment, and the failure to integrate the Algerians into a modern
economic system.33 But there is no good reason to assume that Algeria would
have remained part of France even had there been a much higher standard of
living and no unemployment. The Algerians belonged to a different civiliza-
tion; given the upsurge of nationalism after World War II and the weakening
of the European powers, neither economic or social or even political reforms
would have made the slightest difference. It might have postponed the
struggle for independence by a few years; the FLN did not demand total
separation at the start of the rebellion. But whatever the timing and the means,
Algeria would eventually, riding the current of the tide in the affairs of the
world, have demanded and obtained its independence.
CUBA
Cuba and Algeria, scenes of the two major guerrilla wars of the 1950s, were
different in almost every aspect except that the key to victory was political not
military in both instances. The Algerian FLN faced a colonial power, Castro
and his comrades fought native incumbents. The struggle in Algeria lasted for
seven years, it was waged against an efficient regular army of half a million
men and was exceedingly costly. The campaign in Cuba took two years and
did not involve much fighting; the Cuban army was small (forty thousand
men), ill equipped and lacked both experience and above all the will to fight.
The Cuban war is very much the story of one man and his "telluric force";
without him the invasion would not have been launched in the first place,
after the initial setbacks it would have been dropped.
Castro's force was so small that it is hard to explain its success
even in retrospect. Almost up to the end of the war there were no more than
three hundred guerrillas, but they made as much noise and received as much
publicity as three hundred thousand might have done. The materialization of
three hundred guerrillas induced Washington to declare an arms embargo,
weakening Batista both politically and militarily. Even professional military
journals were quite deluded about the strength of the insurgents; according to
an account in the Marine Corps Gazette (February i960), Castro commanded
not less than fifteen thousand men and women.34 From a Marxist point of view,
Castro's success is not easy to explain either. It was neither an agrarian
rebellion, certainly not a proletarian revolution, nor was it an opposition
movement headed by the "national bourgeoisie," or a combination of all these
forces, a people's war. If anything, it was Blanquism transferred to the
countryside. Cuba was not an underdeveloped country; it was semideveloped,
or, to be precise, suffered from arrested development. Its rate of literacy was
high, its standard of living about equal to Italy's (before the miracolo) and
higher than in the Soviet Union. Some of the most respected observers of the
Cuban scene have laid Castro's victory variously to the state of the Cuban
sugar industry (Hugh Thomas) or the tensions within Cuban social structure
such as the disparity between cities and countryside and the sluggish rate of
growth.35 It is of course perfectly true that Cuba was at the mercy of world
demand, that the price of sugar was highly volatile and that the industry was
in a state of decline (even though 1957 was a bumper year). There was indeed
a great gap between the level of income in urban and rural areas, but there was
a similar, even greater gap in many other parts of the world. As Theodore
Draper stresses, vast tracts of sugar land belonged to American owners, but
this was not one of the central issues in Castro's program; Draper emphasizes
that there was less antigringoism in Cuba than almost anywhere else in Latin
America. All this is so, but it still does not explain why Batista's regime
collapsed like the walls of Jericho at the mere sound of trumpets. Hugh
Thomas has it that the institutions of Cuba in 1958-1959 were for historical
reasons amazingly weak. But were not the historical reasons largely
accidental? Batista was a weak and ineffectual dictator, cruel enough to
antagonize large sections of the population, yet not sufficiently harsh (or
effective) to suppress the revolutionary movement. Cuba had a long record of
political violence and (as in Algeria) of guerrilla warfare. The bureaucracy was
weak and lazy, the police and army underpaid and demoralized, corrupt,
sedentary and internally divided.36 But all this could with
equal justification be said about a great many other countries. Batista had not
been unpopular with the masses when he first came to power; in 1940 he had
been, as Castro reminded him, the presidential candidate of the Communist
party. But the Batista who came to power in 1952 was a changed man; he had
become lazy, ate sumptuously and spent much of his time playing canasta or
watching horror movies.37 Batista's coup in 1952 was by no means inevitable;
another slightly more intelligent and energetic ruler or even Batista himself,
fifteen years younger, would have realized that in the interest of survival he
had to strengthen and modernize the police and the military establishment and
to make both more efficient. However tyrannical and unpopular, such a ruler
would not have been overthrown by Castro and his three hundred. It has been
maintained that an unpopular regime cannot possibly be saved by means of
repression, however well organized, but the Latin American experience simply
does not bear this out. It was not so much Cuba the country, its economy,
society and politics that were unique, but the specific political constellation
prevailing there in the late 1950s. This is neither to magnify nor to belittle
Castro's undoubted courage, personal magnetism and qualities of leadership; it
is to point to the fact that the Batista colossus had feet of clay. It was not
through farsightedness or by instinct, but through sheer foolhardi-ness that
Castro dared to challenge the dictator, only to discover to his and everyone
else's astonishment how brittle the regime was, and how near to collapse.
Castro certainly did not lack self-confidence and Havana University, where he
had studied in the late 1940s, had been an excellent training ground. It was, as
he noted years later, much more dangerous than the Sierra Maestra. There still
could have been an accident — a fatal mishap during the landing of his group,
or perhaps a quarrel with Crecencio Perez, the popular bandit who during the
critical period after the landing was Castro's main link with the "masses." It is
doubtful whether any of Castro's companions had the qualities to lead the
rebels from the Sierra to Havana. It was only in March 1957, four months after
the landing, that Castro was joined by new recruits from the towns and became
less vulnerable. The key questions with regard to the victory of the Cuban
revolution concern not Castro, but his enemies and rivals. Why was there no
resistance, why did the middle class, the Church, the foreign supporters desert
Batista?
The military operations were few and of no outstanding interest. Guevara,
in his Episodes of the Revolutionary War, recounts various "battles," such as
the battle of La Plata or the battle of Arroyo
del Infierno. But these were either minor ambushes or attacks against small
police or army posts carried out by twenty or thirty men. 38 The decisive
"battles" of the war were fought by a hundred men or less; there was only one
serious counterinsurgency operation by Batista's force, the "big push" in May
1958. In mid-June the government forces made contact with the rebels, but
Castro's combat intelligence was excellent, Batista's forces did not find their
way in unfamiliar territory, they were bombed by their own aircraft, and
within a few weeks the fighting was over. The "rebels" fought well on the rare
occasions they had to fight; there is evidence that in some cases money was
offered, and accepted, and that Castro's men did not owe their success entirely
to their military prowess. There were certainly more victims during the
fighting in the towns (as during and after the naval mutiny at Cienfuegos)
than in the Sierra, where police or army posts often surrendered after being
exposed to no more than a few minutes of shooting.
Castro's officers and men showed infinitely more fighting spirit, initiative
and intelligence than their opponents. Some of the regular army commanders
were superannuated, having entered service before Castro and Guevara were
even born. A capable and efficient officer was likely to be replaced because his
superiors either envied or distrusted him. There was no overall plan and
strategy on the part of Castro; neither he nor Guevara had read Mao at the
time.39 If anything, they were guided by the experience of nineteenth-century
Cuban guerrilla warfare — every Cuban child was familiar with the exploits of
Antonio Maceo and Maximo Gomez; the heroes of the war of independence
provided inspiration for the fighters in the Sierra Maestra.
Some American observers insisted from 1957 on that Castro was a
Communist, or surrounded by Communists, and Castro in later years himself
declared that he had been far more radical in his political views from the very
beginning than was generally known. His reasoning went that if he had come
out openly in favor of Marxism-Leninism, the rebels would not have been able
to get down to the plains, "because there would have been no support for
them." But these are rationalizations after the event. The Castro who landed in
Cuba was certainly not a Marxist-Leninist, but a radical who could have
moved "left" or "right" with equal ease. Many Cubans who supported Castro
expected a different revolution from the one they got; it is no less a certitude
that Castro and his comrades were primarily men of action, and that while the
fighting was going on in the Sierra Maestra they had little
inclination to engage in ideological hairsplitting. Gradually they moved

toward Communism. This conversion was not altogether surprising, for
Fascism was in disrepute and liberalism was out of place in Cuba. On the
other hand, there was a strong residue of free-floating radicalism in Cuba, and
a growing estrangement from the United States. But all this belongs to a
subsequent chapter in Cuba's history. The Cuban revolutionary war was not
fought under the banner of Marxism-Leninism, its leaders were not members
of the Communist party, and the Cuban Communists established contact with
Castro only toward the end of the war. It was fought under the pennon of
patriotism, national unity, of freedom from tyranny and corruption.
THE MIDDLE EAST
The Palestinian attacks against Israel have attracted far more attention than
other guerrilla wars in the Middle East chiefly because of their international
ramifications and the involvement of other Arab states. But there were other
wars such as the insurrection in southern Sudan during the 1960s or the
fighting in Kurdistan which punctuated most of the postwar period. Guerrilla
operations in the Persian Gulf (Oman) have lasted for more than a decade and
there was sporadic "urban guerrilla" warfare in both Turkey and Iran. The first
armed raids into Israel by Palestinian fedayeen occurred in the early 1950s
and provoked immediate Israeli reprisals. On a larger scale, attacks began only
with the creation oiFatah in 1965. Its activities became more widespread after
the Six Days' War (June 1967), for though the Arab armies had been routed,
Israel had occupied lands with a population of more than a million Arab in-
habitants. More important yet, the Palestinians now received very substantial
support from Arab governments, whereas before 1967 such aid had been
given only grudgingly and selectively. The refugee camps in Israel and
outside provided a unique reservoir for the mobilization of new recruits, as
well as centers for training and as hiding places. Between 1967 and 1970
Fatah expanded from a few hundred to between fifteen and twenty thousand
members. Immediately after the Six Days' War it had attempted to stage
"revolutionary guerrilla warfare" both in the cities of Israel and elsewhere
about the country. But the terrain was unsuitable, the local Arab inhabitants
not too cooperative and the Israeli counter-
measures quite effective. (The Gaza region became the classic example of a
successful counterinsurgency campaign.) After only a few months Fatah
headquarters and most of its members had to be removed from the West bank
to the other side of the Jordan; Fatah became a guerrilla movement in exile.
Sporadic terrorism continued on a limited basis for many years and there were
occasional demonstrations and strikes, but this was certainly not the "general
insurrection" Fatah had been waiting for. Located abroad, there were three
potential avenues open to the Palestinians for pursuing their war. They could
infiltrate guerrillas into Israel either for hit-and-run attacks or in the hope that
these would be able to establish foci. Alternatively, the Palestinians could shell
Israeli settlements from beyond the border; they had missiles in their arsenal
which reached fairly deep into Israeli territory. The Israelis would be unable to
retaliate without putting themselves in the wrong vis-avis international law;
Israeli reprisals moreover would aggravate relations between Jerusalem and
its Arab neighbors and help prevent a "sellout" by some Arab governments.
Lastly, the Palestinians could attack Israelis, Jews and even non-Jews, as well
as Israeli installations and institutions outside the country; the "acts of despair"
would demonstrate that unless justice were done to the Palestinians, there
would never be peace in the Middle East.
Fatah and the other Palestinian organizations tried all three approaches
with varying success.40 Small units were infiltrated into Israel from Jordan,
and later from Syria and Lebanon. But despite the covert sympathy for them
among some of the domestic Arabs, the terrorists' position was more like that
of goldfish in a bowl than fish in an ocean. Only very small units (up to four or
five members) could be infiltrated. They were usually intercepted within a few
hours, at most within a few days; only one or two groups managed to stay
undetected in Israel for as long as two months, and this primarily because they
refrained from outright violence. Between 1968 and 1971 there were
nonetheless innumerable cases of infiltration, or random shootings, of bombs,
resulting not alone in losses to the Israelis, but in sizable ones to the raiders,
and gradually this type of tactic was restricted to a very few hit-and-run
attacks with clearly defined aims. Because of their dramatic character, they
were to attract far more publicity; instances of this were the Lod Airport
massacre (carried out by Japanese terrorists), the attack against a school at
Ma'alot (1974), and a hotel in Tel Aviv (1975). The shelling from across the
borders began early in 1968 in the Jordan valley, spread in October 1968 to
southeast Lebanon,
and during 1969 to the whole of southern Lebanon (Fatahland). Again there
was Israeli retaliation, first against the Jordanians and later against the
Lebanese. A certain pattern emerged. The Palestinian terrorists would shell
Israeli settlements from across the border. The Israelis would then retaliate,
but since the Palestinians would have evaporated, the Jordanian and the
Lebanese regular army units would have to bear the brunt of the Israeli attack,
which did not improve relations between the Palestinians and their hosts.
Following heavy clashes with the Jordanian army in 1970, the Palestinians
had to transfer their activities to Lebanon, which became their major
springboard for attacks against Israel. In the south of Lebanon the Palestinians
established a virtual "state within a state," leading to severe tension and to
bloody encounters in turn with the Lebanese.
The shelling of one country from the territory of another is certainly a
warlike action; whether it can be defined as guerrilla warfare is a moot point.
But the most controversial aspect of the Palestinians' activities were those
carried out in third countries — the killing, for instance, of members of the
Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972, the hijacking of airplanes, most of
them not belonging to Israel, the dispatch of letterbombs, and other gambits
such as the attacks against foreign ambassadors in Khartoum. It looked — and
has so been argued — as though the Palestinians had simply found by trial and
error that there were better means than the traditional ones of guerrilla warfare
for furthering their cause, that publicity was the vital weapon, that what
counted beyond all else in the last resort was to keep the Palestine issue alive.
However widely condemned, all these outrages were given enormous notori-
ety. It is nevertheless unlikely that this strategy would have worked but for the
growing dependence of the industrialized countries on Arab oil. There were far
more kidnappings in Brazil but it led the urban terrorists nowhere. The
Palestinians, however, had powerful allies and benefited from exceptionally
auspicious international circumstances. Militarily, they failed, but as the
Algerian example had demonstrated, military failure per se meant nothing.
Politically the Palestinians succeeded; they were recognized by many member
states of the United Nations and an assortment of other international
organizations besides.
The splits within the Palestinian resistance did not bring any immediate
harm to the common cause. More serious were the long-term effects of the
terrorist operations. These stiffened Israeli resistance, made a dialogue
between Israelis and Palestinians virtually
impossible and, in addition, hampered any attempt to work out any unified
Palestinian policy for the future. A policy aimed at the destruction of the
Jewish state might have conceivably worked in the pre-atomic age, but with
the development of the means of mass destruction the rules of the game had
changed. If Fatah and the other Palestinian organizations had little to fear
directly from the nuclearization of the conflict, this was not so with regard to
Israel's Arab neighbors, and without their support the Palestinians could not
continue their struggle in the long run. Worse yet, in the case of a nuclear
attack against Israel, the Arab residents of that country were as likely to perish
as its Jewish citizens. Further, there was a growing discrepancy between
Palestinian theory and practice. Much of the fighting against Israel was done
by others. If other guerrilla movements throughout history never had enough
money, the Palestinians, thanks to the oil windfall, had almost too much of it. 41
The abundance of funds made it possible to engage in various kinds of
operations, military and propagandistic both, beyond the reach of other, less
affluent guerrilla movements. At the same time a surfeit of money bred
corruption; guerrillas must be lean and hungry, a condition which exposure to
life in Hilton hotels did nothing to encourage.
While Fatah proclaimed resoundingly that the shame of the defeat was to
be washed away by the mass struggle of the Palestinian people, it became
only too manifest after 1973 that not the armed assaults, let alone the masses,
but the profits of the oil-producing states had brought about the change in
Palestinian fortunes. It could be argued that whether the Arab masses did or
did not in fact participate in the striving against the Zionist enemy was beside
the point, all that mattered, again, was the result. It is unlikely, however, that
a Guevara or a Fanon would have approved such a rationalization; they
would have held that a people that owed its national liberation to financial
manipulations could scarcely be accounted free.
The Israelis tended to belittle the role of the Palestinians, and the fact that
there was so much "guerrilla by proxy," that is, terrorist acts committed by
Japanese, French or Latin American mercenaries, only strengthened their
contempt for the military qualities of their opponents. There is no denying
that in contrast to other guerrillas, rural and urban, the Palestinians usually
avoided clashing with the Israeli security forces and directed almost all their
attacks against the civilian population. But all this does not change the fact
that the Palestinian organizations were by no means totally
ineffective, and that individual infiltrators did show courage; realizing that
they could not conduct guerrilla warfare along conventional lines, they had to
look for other means to harass the enemy even if this approach led them
beyond guerrillaism and even urban terror, however liberally these terms are
interpreted.
If the ups and downs of Palestinian resistance point up the overriding
significance of foreign help, the fate of the Kurds only accents that importance
the more. The Iraqi Kurds, who constitute about twenty percent of the
population of the country, fought for their autonomy from i960 to 1970.
They had taken up arms on many previous occasions but never for so long a
period. The Iraqi army was fought to a standstill by the Pesh Merga in the hills
of Kurdistan despite their numerical superiority and the fact that the Kurds
had only light arms; it was only during the last year of the war that the Kurds
acquired some anti-aircraft guns. The Kurdish war also proves that a mastery
of guerrilla doctrine is not really of decisive import; their leader Mulla Mustafa
Barazani had in all probability never read a single manual on the subject, he
and his men simply knew all there was to know about it by instinct. There was
far more fighting, and many more casualties in the war in Kurdistan than in
many, much better-publicised guerrilla wars, including the Palestine-Israel
conflict. But it never attracted much attention, perhaps because the Kurds
failed to appreciate the great strategic importance of oil and did not attack the
Kirkuk oilfields. When the war was renewed in 1974 the Kurds were defeated
with relative ease, the international situation having changed in their disfavor.
Up to 1970 the attitude of the Soviet Union had been one of friendly
neutrality. But with the emergence of a pro-Soviet dictatorship in Baghdad, the
Kurdish struggle no longer served any useful purpose from the Soviet point of
view, and the Iraqi army, supplied and trained by the Russians, was now able
to cope with the problems of mountain warfare. Furthermore, Iran, which had
hitherto provided amis and supplies to the Kurds, closed its border, the Shah
fearing that an escalation of hostilities with the Baghdad regime, and indirectly
with the Soviet Union, might endanger his regime; the stakes in the game had
suddenly become higher. Thus Kurdish resistance collapsed, not because Pesh
Merga was fighting any less bravely but because, to quote an old Kurdish
proverb, "Kurds have no friends."42
The Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), on the other hand, did have friends.
Founded in Cairo in 1958, this separatist organization launched in 1961 a
terrorist campaign which, until 1975, was on a
relatively small scale. There was certainly much less fighting in Ethiopia than
in Kurdistan, and for years the ELF had no more than a few hundred active
members. It had, however, strong backing in the Arab world, particularly in
Syria, and it had the political support of the Muslim states in Africa. It was
well supplied with arms and money. Thus, in the course of a decade, a minor
army came into being, and as Ethiopia faced a major domestic crisis, the ELF
could stake its claims with much greater vigor.43
A third example of the decisive impact of outside help is PFLOAG (People's
Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arab Gulf). Established as the Dhofar
Liberation Front in 1965 by nationalist opponents of the Sultan of Oman and
active in Dhofar province, it was taken over by "scientific socialists" three years
later. Although the rebels at no time numbered many more than a thousand,
the sultan had only twenty-five hundred men at his disposal up to 1970,
altogether insufficient on any count to crush the insurgents. Later the sultan's
small army was reinforced by British advisers and Iranian and Jordanian
troops. The headquarters of PFLOAG were located in South Yemen, which
served also as a sanctuary, the main supplier as well as the fountainhead of
ideological inspiration. The Chinese and the Soviets competed for a stake in
this interesting attempt to apply Marxism-Leninism (or Leninism-Maoism) in
conditions varying between those of the stone age and the feudal era; Chinese
influence was on the decline after 1970. PFLO (the AG was subsequently
dropped) was the most antireligious of all Arab extremist movements, but this
did not deter Colonel Ghadafi from providing financial assistance any more
than it did the Iraqis from proffering help. Seldom in guerrilla history has such
a small war in such a remote country attracted so many foreign powers.
Russian artillery operated by Chinese-trained guerrillas in South Yemen
territory shelled Iranian forces engaged in counterinsurgency operations on
Oman territory. The original initiators of the revolt had invoked their belief in
Allah and pan-Arab-ism, but they were bitterly criticized by the professionals
who took over the leadership from them in 1968 for having chosen "the mis-
taken path of spontaneous action under a leadership incapable of leading
armed struggle."44
Attempts to launch guerrilla warfare in Turkey and Iran in the 1960s were,
on the whole, unsuccessful. The Iranian peasant was too conservative and the
Shah's agrarian reform had to a certain extent taken the wind out of the sails
of the revolutionaries. "Armed confrontation will start in towns and their
suburbs," wrote Fara-
hani, "as the Iranian peasantry with its rustic environment is not conducive to
revolutionary preparedness."45 The Iranian revolutionaries were split into
several factions (Maoists, Siahkal, and the National Liberation Movement).
One of the peculiar features of the Iranian resistance is the collaboration
between the extreme left and the (Shi'ite) religious fundamentalist sectarians
(NLM) who, led by ulema, established a little guerrilla army of their own. 46
This political alliance dates back two decades and is based on opposition,
albeit for different reasons, to the Shah's reforms.47
Guerrilla warfare in Turkey was similarly impeded by internal dissent.
Various small sects that would emerge from time to time engaged in
kidnappings or assassination, but there was no coordination between them.
Most of them derived from Dev Gene, the Federation of the Revolutionary
Youth of Turkey, a roof organization for an assortment of radical groups. 48
They all favored armed struggle, but some were Maoists tending toward rural
guerrilla warfare and the creation of a Vietnam situation in Turkey, others
called for a second Turkish war of independence. Some wanted to infiltrate
the Turkish armed forces and to conquer them from within; others, on the
contrary, looked for a confrontation with the army. Yet for all that rural
Anatolia with its backwardness and abject poverty should have been fertile
soil indeed for the recruitment of guerrillas, the students of Ankara and
Istanbul failed to gain any substantial foothold outside the universities.
Guerrilla warfare in the Middle East was most successful in the very place
in which it seemed most unlikely. At the height of the 1950s Cyprus
insurgency, twenty-eight thousand Rritish soldiers were chasing some two
hundred and fifty terrorists on an island of half a million inhabitants. The
leader of EOKA was an old man by military standards; Grivas, a native of
Cyprus, an ex-officer of the Greek army, was fifty-seven when the campaign
started. He had some support from this and that influential politician in
Greece, but the Athens government was far from enthusiastic about his
venture and on several occasions threatened him and demanded that he stop
it. Archbishop Makarios, the political leader of the Greek Cypriots, was also
initially opposed to Grivas's move; he would much have preferred a campaign
of sabotage, and (according to Grivas), the throwing from time to time of a few
hand grenades into Turkish mobs, just to teach them a lesson. 49 A year after
the outbreak of the rebellion, however, Makarios was to declare that the
terrorist operations had been more effective than seventy-five years of "paper
war." Grivas had the Cypriot Communists against
him, the strongest single party on the island; early on they revealed in their
manifestos the real identity of "Dighenis," Grivas's pseudonym. That the
Turkish minority saw in EOKA a mortal enemy scarcely needs saying.
International public opinion did not support EOKA; the Communist bloc, the
Chinese, the Third World countries, all the traditional sympathizers of
guerrilla movements showed a lack of interest, and quite often downright
hostility. But despite all these handicaps, Grivas succeeded in a three-year
campaign (from 1 April 1955 to Christmas 1958) in ousting the British from
the island, which led to the declaration of Cypriot independence. The British
suffered relatively few losses, but since Britain was reconciled to liquidating
the remnants of its empire anyway and since it found the task of policing a
rebellious island too burdensome, not much force was necessary to persuade
Whitehall to surrender.50 The long-term results of the Grivas campaign were
nonetheless disastrous, for victory in 1958 was followed by tragedy in 1974.
The EOKA campaign had sharpened the old conflict between Cypriot Greeks
and Turks. Eventually the Turks invaded Cyprus and the country was de
facto partitioned. Grivas's old partner and antagonist, Makarios, bore an
equal measure of responsibility for these tragic developments, for he had
shown no greater willingness than Grivas to work for an accommodation with
the Turkish minority.
LIBERATING AFRICA
Power was transferred in a more or less orderly fashion by the colonial

administration to the new rulers in most African countries. There were
exceptions, such as in the Congo, and guerrilla warfare occurred in the
Portuguese colonies. In addition, there was a good deal of internal fighting in
the postindependence period; some of it was tribal in character, or separatist
(Sudan, Nigeria, Chad, Eritrea), elsewhere it was a conflict between various
contenders for power. Not all these opposition movements were strikingly
effective (the Nigerian Sawaba or the Senegalese AIP), but in other cases, as in
Biafra and the Congo, the internal feuds were much more bloody than the
anticolonial guerrilla wars themselves. In contrast to Latin America, China
and Southeast Asia, the African guerrilla leaders hardly ever lived and fought
with their troops; their headquarters were almost invariably in some
neighboring country. The anti-
colonial guerrilla movements were usually split; in almost every country

there were two or more such groups battling each other even more fiercely
than they fought the common enemy; their "mass basis" was in essence tribal
rather than national. The Algerian FLN and the Vietnamese Communists also
had to face competition early on in their struggle, but they destroyed their
opponents and thus were able to monopolize the field. In Africa, on the other
hand, the splits persisted in many instances, and this affected both the
character and the course of the guerrilla war.
The Mau Mau revolt in 1952 was the first of the postwar insurrections.
Dating back in origin to the 1920s, it was led by educated members of the
Kikuyu tribe. They complained, not without justification, that some of their
best land had been taken away from them; they resented the fact that there was
no secular education and that female circumcision had been banned. In a
solemn oath, the members of Mau Mau swore never to sell land to a European
or an Asian, not to smoke foreign cigarettes or drink foreign beer, never to
sleep with a prostitute and to behave in general as a patriot and a decent
citizen.51 Considering the relatively small number of people involved and that
it was geographically restricted to a part of the country, the Mau Mau revolt
was quite bloody; more than eleven thousand Kikuyu (but fewer than a
hundred Europeans) were killed. The revolt failed, but within a matter of only
a few years the British departed and Kenya became independent. The
survivors of the Mau Mau land army were given a hero's welcome, but after
that a determined effort was made to erase Mau Mau from Kenya's public
memory.52 It was not that anyone doubted that the Mau Mau had made a
contribution to Kenya's independence, but many of their practices had been
repugnant in the extreme. Above all, the massacres perpetrated by the Mau
Mau against Kikuyu loyalists (as in the Lari massacre), and members of other
tribes, were divisive and did not augur well for the future of a country in
which a variety of tribes would have to live peacefully side by side. The next
major rebellions to occur, in Angola in March 1963 and in the Congo in 1964,
were also basically tribal in nature. While Europeans were killed, the number
of blacks of other tribes, and of mestizos and assimilados who came to grief
was far greater.53
After concluding a trip of African capitals in 1963, Chou En-lai observed
that the prospects for revolution in Africa were excellent. Events in the
suceeding years did not quite bear out his prediction. True, a great number of
liberation movements came into being and were duly registered on the
payrolls of the African Liberation Com-
mittee, the coordinating body of the OAU. They would publish victory
communiques from nonexistent war fronts and celebrate the establishment of
liberated and semiliberated zones; the Mozambique Frelimo had a particularly
bad record, but others were not far behind. 54 As in so many other cases, they
would more often clash with each other than with the declared enemy. To
some extent this was the result of old tribal feuds which made the formation
of national movements difficult. Thus SWAPO was essentially an Ovambo
organization (despite all disclaimers), and the UPA and FLNA had their
power base in the Bakongo tribe. Existing dissension was fanned by Sino-
Soviet rivalry for influence in the continent. At one time or another almost all
African liberation movements split into a pro-Soviet and a pro-Chinese wing,
beginning with the first of the "modern" (i.e., quasi-Maoist) guerrillas such as
the Camerounian UPC which, founded in 1947, started armed struggle in
1956. Lastly, the conflicting ambitions of leading personalities often collided.
The list of leaders of African liberation movements assassinated by political or
personal rivals (sometimes with a little help from the colonial powers) makes
depressing reading. It includes some of the most gifted leaders, such as
Amilcar Cabral (of PAIGC) and Eduardo Mondlane (of Frelimo). Some guer-
rilla movements practiced almost constant internal "purges" (Frelimo again
was one of the worst offenders). The sad events in Angola in 1975 brought
into the limelight a state of affairs that had existed, on a smaller scale, for
many years previously. Least affected by internal disputes and tribal rivalries
was PAIGC in Guine-Bissau, headed by Amilcar Cabral, a talented leader,
about whom more below.55 But in Guine as well, after a decade of fighting, a
sympathetic observer noted that "a clear-cut military victory that would expel
the colonial forces would . . . be a miracle."56 Another historian of the
African liberation movements, writing in 1971, prophesied victory over the
Portuguese not before the 1990s. 57
In retrospect it is easy to understand the reasons for these mis-judgments.
After the initial upsurge in the early 1960s, the tide turned against the
guerrillas almost everywhere in Africa. The ANC-ZAPU units which had
infiltrated into South Africa were destroyed, SWAPO activities were largely
ineffective, the MPLA campaign in Angola collapsed in 1966, and Roberto
Holden's GRAE was largely inactive after its initial operations in the early
sixties had petered out. Frelimo failed to prevent the building of the Ca-bora
Bassa Dam. Only in Guine-Bissau, PAIGC made progress; the
number of guerrillas there increased from four thousand in 1964 to
(allegedly) ten thousand in 1970. After ten years of strife, the three Angolan
independence movements had altogether some ten to fifteen thousand
fighters, and the Portuguese armed forces had fewer casualties in a decade
than the French in Algeria had in a single year. The leaders of the African
guerrilla movements spent far more time attending international congresses
than in stepping up guerrilla warfare. The Liberation Committee of the OAU
was taken to task in 1967 for incurring "excessive administrative expenses
and subsidizing certain individuals."
In view of these and other weaknesses, the eventual successes of the
liberation movements against Portugal seem almost inexplicable. But however
small the guerrilla forces and infrequent their operations, they enjoyed certain
distinct advantages such as secure bases in neighboring African countries,
sufficient financial help from the OAU, the Soviet bloc and China, and a
steady supply of arms. Frelimo and the MNLA were as well armed toward the
end of their war as their Portuguese opponents, save that they had no artillery
(which was useless in the bush) and no air force (which would have been of
limited assistance only). Above all, they were facing the poorest European
nation, which could ill afford to pay for a protracted guerrilla war in colonies
which, with the exception of Angola, were of little economic value. Even the
suppression of a small insurrection such as the Mau Mau had cost some
hundred and thirty million dollars, while the Algerian war cost anything from
five to ten billion dollars. The very presence of guerrillas in neighboring
African countries made the stationing of considerable forces necessary (a
hundred thousand men in the three main colonies), and this the Portuguese
simply could not in the long run afford. By 1970 the Portuguese had spent
two billion dollars on their colonial wars. Furthermore, there was considerable
international pressure which the Portuguese notwithstanding all their defiant
gestures could not ignore. The Portuguese commanders knew, in brief, that
they were fighting a rear-guard action, and this scarcely made for any great
enthusiasm or high morale.
Attention has been drawn to the intense rivalry between the Soviet Union
and China in Africa. During the cultural revolution and for several years
thereafter, the Chinese were almost totally preoccupied with their domestic
affairs, and by the time they returned to the African scene in 1971-1972, the
Soviet Union had made considerable strides in winning support in most major
African liberation movements. But how deep was Soviet and Communist
influence?
Radical African leaders have frequently described themselves as "Marxist-

Leninists"; on the other hand, they have claimed that their movements were
"authentically African."58 They have declared at one and the same time that
their movements had no official ideology, yet that only "scientific socialism"
could serve as their lodestar. Such contradictions are more apparent than real.
While individual leaders had acquired the rudiments of Marxism in European
universities, this certainly did not apply to their followers, and in any event,
the problems facing the guerrilla movements either during their struggle, or
after victory, were such as neither Marx nor Lenin, nor even Mao, had ever
envisaged. Eventually military leaders came to power both in those African
countries in which the transition had been peaceful and the others which had
fought for their independence. The poor countries were still poor after
independence, the rich remained rich, and the importance of ideological
pronouncements should not be overrated.
LATIN AMERICA
Guerrilla operations in Latin America reached their climax in the early 1960s.
They were mainly concentrated in the countryside, but with the failure to
establish secure rural bases (Argentina and Brazil in 1964, Peru and
Venezuela in 1965, Bolivia in 1967), urban terrorism became the fashion,
principally in Uruguay (MLN — the Tupamaros), Brazil (ALN), and
Argentina (ERP and Monteneros). The political doctrine and overall strategy
of these movements are discussed elsewhere, 59 but the causes of success and
failure remain to be analyzed.
The chances of guerrilla warfare in Latin America were excellent in many
ways. Capitalist development in the continent had few achievements to its
credit but all its defects were only too manifest. There was poverty, glaring
exploitation and widespread anti-Americanism. The establishment was not
usually noted for its social conscience or its reformist fervor. A comparatively
large class of intellectuals violently opposed the status quo, looking on the
urban slum dwellers and landless peasants as their revolutionary reservoir.
There was a long history of political violence, and Castro's victory had given
fresh hope to all revolutionaries; victory was possible, after all, even in a single
country. The ruling strata were weak, disorganized and devitalized, the forces
of repression
g X g NATIONAL LIBERATION AND REVOLUTIONARY WAR
inefficient. In short, there was a revolutionary situation with all its classic
ingredients, "objective" and "subjective." There was no lack of discontent nor
of idealism; there was mass support on the part of the younger generation in
the universities and even in sections of the army. And yet, without exception,
the guerrillas failed to reach their goals and the intriguing question is why.60
An analysis of the development of guerrilla movements in Latin America
indicates above all that they were nearest to victory in the least repressive
countries such as Venezuela and Uruguay. Bolivia was a military dictatorship
when Guevara tried to establish his foci there, but President Barrientos was a
populist of sorts with considerable backing among the campesinos. The new
upsurge of guerrillaism in Colombia in 1975 occurred precisely at a time
when the relatively liberal government of the day was engaged in carrying out
a policy of reform. The insurrection in Venezuela in the early 1960s,
spearheaded by the MIR and the Communists (who together established the
FALN — Armed Forces of Liberation) and the urban terrorist operations of the
UTC, came closer to success than in any other country in the continent. Rut
even they had no real mass basis, as the results of the 1963 elections proved.
The brutal character of many guerrilla operations antagonized the masses and
isolated the insurgents. Usually the guerrillas assumed that the regime could
be overthrown with one forceful push (golpe). The inevitable setbacks caused
splits in their ranks; if the Tupa-maros' strategy of provocation in Uruguay at
least brought about the downfall of liberal democracy and the rise of a
military dictatorship, the Venezuelan guerrillas did not carry even that much
weight.
It is difficult to generalize about Latin American guerrilla movements
because conditions varied so much from country to country, and the
movements themselves were so disparate. Some countries were
predominantly rural, others primarily urban; the Guatemalan MR- 13 was
launched by young officers, the Tupamaros by students, the Venezuelan
guerrilla groups by political parties. In Peru and Colombia there was a
connection with spontaneous peasant uprisings; in Venezuela the Communist
party supported the guerrillas, elsewhere it opposed them. Yet for all these
differences, certain staple patterns emerge:
1. If the guerrillas were inspired by Castro's victory and had assimilated its
lessons, the government forces had also learned from the Cuban example.
Initially unprepared for counterinsur-gency, they became quite adept at it;
sometimes they knew more about it than the guerrillas themselves. The
armies were built up
and modernized, the use of helicopters made guerrilla activities in the open
country very hazardous indeed. Moreover, as Malcolm Deas has noted,
soldiers in Latin America are not as unpopular as policemen — the army has a
different relationship with the population. "No Latin American army had the
combination of vices to be found in Batista's army." 61 But the establishment
had not only learned from the military tactics used by the guerrillas; in Peru,
far-reaching agrarian reforms carried out by the army stole the guerrillas'
thunder and a sizable part of their forces went over to the government, or at
least became a loyal opposition.
2. In most Latin American countries (as in the Arab world, Ulster and
Africa), there was not just one guerrilla movement but several; their internal
splits and the tortuous relations between nationalist, pro-Moscow
Communist, Trotskyite and Maoist parties were an ever-present source of
friction. On rare occasions the guerrilla movements would make common
cause: in February 1974 the Bolivian ELN, the Tupamaros, the Chilean MIR
and the Argentinian ERP set up a Junta of Revolutionary Coordination (JCR).
But far more often there would be disunity, internal strife and purges. The
Colombian ELN was notorious for the acts of terror committed in its own
ranks; the commander Jose Ayala was shot by his own men, and Fabio
Vasquez had many of his rivals liquidated, sometimes by "war tribunal,"
sometimes without such legal niceties. There were bitter, though less bloody
mutual recriminations among the Venezuelan, Peruvian and Bolivian
guerrillas. Above all there was the Communist problem. The Cuban
revolution had developed in its early phase quite independently of the
Communists, but in other Latin American countries the revolutionary
potential usually belonged to one political party or another, and no incipient
guerrilla movement could afford to ignore this elementary fact of political life.
The guerrillas (with the notable exception of Uruguay) became involved in
sectarian in-fighting on ideological, organizational or simply personal lines.*
3. Following the Cuban example, the guerrillas at first envisioned the
countryside as their main field of action, yet strategic considerations quite
apart, they found it unexpectedly hard to rally the support of the peasants.
There were exceptions, such as Hugo Blanco's POR in Peru, although this
created problems of its own, for while the campesinos were willing to defend
their homes and
* The climate of dissension in these groups has been vividly described in Regis Debray's
novel Vindesirable (Paris, 1975).
land, they were reluctant to operate outside their immediate neighborhood.
The leaders of the guerrilla movement were, for the greater part, city people of
middle- Or upper-class origin, young men (and in a few cases, women) who
spoke, quite literally, an altogether different language from the peasant
population, which belonged to all intents and purposes to another race. Just as
the mestizo leadership of the Angolan MPLA did not understand the tribal
tongues of their own warriors, so the Peruvian and Bolivian city
revolutionaries were at a frustrating loss to communicate with their Indian
recruits. For all their enthusiasm, they also found it anything but easy to adapt
themselves to the hard life of the countryside; they were genuinely shocked by
the miserable lot of the peasants, but at the same time they shared the
contempt for manual labor deeply rooted in Latin American (and African)
society. Since as revolutionaries they had to live, work and fight side by side
with peasants and manual workers, this instinctive attitude, which only a few
of them could completely overcome, did not exactly make for smooth relations
with the toiling masses. Although any number of sound tactical reasons could
be cited for the later withdrawal of the guerrillas from the country areas, there
is no doubt that on the whole they were only too happy to get back to a city
milieu more familiar in every respect and certainly less arduous.
4. The peasants (campesinos) had a tendency to adopt a wait-and-see
attitude rather than embrace the revolutionary cause on sight. If the
guerrilleros successfully defied the government forces, they could count on at
least the passive support of the rural population. But if they suffered a setback
and it appeared that the forces of law and order were after all stronger, there
would be no help for the insurgents and they would find themselves betrayed
to the authorities. And even if the peasants were prepared to join in their fight,
they would do so, as mentioned already, only within the district in which they
lived. This has been one of the traditional weaknesses of rural guerrilla
warfare; peasants cannot easily be turned into professional revolutionaries
willing to give up their ties and roots.
5. The guerrillas were caught on the horns of several dilemmas from
which there were no easydisentanglements. Guerrilla ideologists have claimed
since time immemorial that rugged and forest country is the most favorable
for guerrillas. But if the country was too rugged or the forest too thick, the
guerrillas would be hard put to it to get supplies. If they retreated into remote,
unpopulated areas that were not easily accessible, they would be secure but
ineffectual — as Guevara had noted. If they opposed elections (as
in Venezuela), this would damage their image as staunch fighters for

democracy. If, on the contrary, they contested elections, they would be
defeated — as in Uruguay — and by extreme reactionary forces at that. If they
waged guerrilla warfare in small elitist conspiratorial groups, consisting
primarily of students (or recent graduates), they would be reasonably safe
from detection, but the moment they tried to broaden their urban base and
"mobilize the masses," they would expose themselves to infiltration by enemy
agents.
6. A successful guerrilla movement could weaken or bring about the
overthrow of a relatively democratic regime, or an ineffectual autocracy. The
strategy of provocation predicted that the democratic regime would be
replaced by a reactionary and ineffective military dictatorship which would
within a short time antagonize the middle class and especially the
intelligentsia so that, as in Cuba, the guerrillas would gain the support of the
majority of the population. But not all military dictators were as inadequate as
Batista; others showed far greater determination and ruthlessness. Through
terror and counterterror, they succeeded in paralyzing or altogether
destroying the guerrilla movements (Guatemala, Brazil). Antiguerrilla murder
squads came into being and torture was practiced with considerable effect. 62
Worldwide public opinion was enlisted against these atrocities, but appeals
and manifestos from foreign lands showed diminishing returns and were in
any case a poor substitute for guerrilla victory. This raises the general ques-
tion of the strategy of destroying the stable image of the government and
creating a "climate of collapse." Modern governments, as Robert Taber has
observed in his War of the Flea, are highly conscious of "world opinion," they
do not like to be visited by human rights commissions,
their need of foreign investment, foreign loans, foreign markets, satisfactory trade
relations, and so on requires that they be in more or less good standing with a
larger community of interests. Often too, they are members of military alliances.
Consequently, they must maintain the appearance of stability, in order to assure
the other members of the community that contracts will be honored, that treaties
will be upheld, that loans will be repaid with interest, that investments will
continue to produce profits and be safe.
The weakness of this strategy is that it usually works only up to the point
where the terrorist ceases to be a mere nuisance and becomes a real danger to
the regime. Once this point is reached, the state —
however concerned it may be about the U.N., a human rights commission and
adverse publicity in the press — will react in kind, cruelly, unhampered by
laws and conventions or humanitarian considerations. Once the Brazilian
ALN and other such groups opted for individual terror, the government
responded with all but indiscriminate counterterror. Terrorists, sympathizers,
and no doubt some innocent people as well disappeared without a trace.
There were no trials and no death sentences, which made it all the more
difficult to organize protests at home or abroad. Despite the only too justified
outcries about repression and torture, the stable image of the government was
not destroyed; the terrorist movement collapsed, not the state.
7. When fortune smiled on them, the guerrillas were on top of the world;
victory appeared to be just around the corner. But they were not good losers,
even though they knew most of the time, certainly in theory, that their
struggle would be long and punishing. They had been spoiled by the Cuban
example; by temperament, most Latin American guerrillas were golpistas,
burning to topple the system with one big shove. Psychologically, they needed
quick results, and if these did not come, there would be despondency and
mutual recrimination. They were capable of great sacrifice and exertion for a
short time, but not of sustained effort or of fortitude in adversity. This applies
to both rural and urban guerrillas. The rapid success of the Guatemala army in
November 1966, of the Peruvian security forces against Hugo Blanco (1963)
and Hector Bejar (1965), the collapse of Douglas Bravo in Venezuela and of
the Bolivian guerrillas, are a few of the many examples. The one exception was
the Columbian ELN under Fabio Vasquez which continued its struggle for
more than a decade with varying success; but most of the time they operated
in remote areas and were no real threat to state security.
With the defeat of the rural guerrillas, action was transferred to the cities with
great initial effect. From 1968 to 1972 hundreds of banks were attacked in
Brazil and Uruguay, stores were robbed, political leaders assassinated,
businessmen and foreign leaders were kidnapped, "enemies" were executed or
kept in "people's prisons." After the defeat of the urban guerrillas in Brazil and
Uruguay, Argentina in 1974 became the chief scene of such action. The ob-
jective was not alone to spread fear and confusion, but to establish a "parallel
government" comparable to that of the Soviets in Petro-grad in 1917.
The immediate successes were astounding. The slums of the big cities — but
also the upper-class residential areas — provided far better cover for
operations than the Sierra. It was easier to get money and weapons in the city
than in the countryside, and to collect information about the targets for attack.
All this daring found an echo far beyond Latin America— in the United States,
Canada and even in some European countries. If the old-style guerrilla tactics
had been applicable only to backward countries, the new urban guerrilla
warfare seemed to offer immense possibilities to almost every country in the
world, including the most developed ones. Nevertheless, the startling
successes of the first years were again followed by grave setbacks and in some
cases by total collapse. Unable at first to cope with this new danger, the forces
of order were learning quickly. However strictly conspiratorial rules were
observed, sooner or later the traces of a single Tupamaro would lead the police
to a whole group, to its arsenal, and eventually to its headquarters, and once
this happened, escape was difficult, far more so than in the Sierra. Marighela's
assertion that the police "systematically fail" was overly optimistic — they
certainly did not fail to shoot him, as well as the other urban guerrilla leaders
in Brazil and Chile, and to arrest the Tupamaros. But individual failures quite
apart, the entire urban guerrilla strategy was found wanting. It is true that
urban guerrillas would get more publicity in a day than rural ones in a year; as
far as the media were concerned, their exploits were far more newsworthy. But
with repetition interest inevitably diminished; once a consul had been
kidnapped for the fifth time, the news no longer automatically commanded
the headlines. The terrorists had to think of new, sensational and even more
bizarre exploits, such as the theft of the remains by the Monteneros of former
President Aramburu (whom they had killed in 1970) from his grave. But there
were limits to human imagination, and in any case publicity could not in the
long run replace an overall policy. Urban guerrillas frequently referred to the
Algerian example, but it was precisely in the city of Algiers that the FLN had
suffered its greatest defeat. The FLN could not compel the French colonial
government to evacuate Algeria; in no circumstances would a French guerrilla
movement have been able to take over France even under the weak
governments of the Fourth Republic. It was one thing to appear as the
spearhead of a national movement against the hated foreigner; it was another,
infinitely more difficult task to compete with other native political parties in
the struggle for power.
This was the overall lesson learned by the Latin American guerrilla
movements in the 1960s and 1970s. But seen from the guerrilla point of
view, the picture was still not all dark. The old Latin American social order
with its inefficiencies and inequities could not last, and armed struggle was
certainly one of the possible ways of changing it. Cuba had been a success,
perhaps there would be a victory elsewhere, given some fortunate
juxtaposition — a prolonged political and/or economic crisis, able guerrilla
leadership, and bungling by the forces of law and order. "Objectively" there
still is a revolutionary situation in many Latin American countries.
URBAN TERRORISM
In the late 1960s rural guerrillaism gave way to urban terrorism in many
parts of the world. The major exceptions were Vietnam (where the war had,
however, proceeded far beyond the guerrilla stage), the Portuguese colonies,
and some minor theaters of war such as Burma, Thailand, the Philippines and
Eritrea. Elsewhere the hijacking of airplanes, the bank raids and the
kidnapping of diplomats and other public figures rather than the ambush in
some remote jungle village became the symbol of armed struggle. Skyjacking
had taken place since the early 1930s, with an average of about two to three
cases annually, most of them not even political in character. But there were
thirty-five cases in 1968 and eighty-seven in 1969. They affected twenty-
three countries; Israel was the victim in only one case. After 1969, the number
dropped, both as a result of diminishing returns and more stringent security
measures. The wave of kidnappings and assassinations started with the
murder of the U.S. ambassador to Guatemala and two American senior army
officers by the FAR in Guatemala in 1968. This was followed in 1969 by the
kidnapping of the U.S. ambassador to Brazil (by the ALN), the murder of the
West German ambassador to Guatemala (by the FAR) in 1970, the
kidnapping of the West German ambassador to Brazil (again by the ALN), the
murder of the Quebec minister of labor by the FLQ, the kidnapping of the
Swiss ambassador to Brazil by the ALN and of the British ambassador by the
Tupamaros, of the Israeli consul general in Turkey in 1971 by the TPLA, the
murder of the U.S. ambassador and other diplomats in the Sudan by Black
September. After 1972, Argentina became the main site of kidnappings with
the ERP concentrating on businessmen; Mr.
Aron Bellinson was released in June 1973 after the ransom of a million dollars
had been paid, the release of Mr. Charles Lock-wood, the following month,
cost two million dollars, and of Mr. John R. Thompson, the same month, three
million. The ERP allegedly received fourteen million dollars for an oil
executive in June 1974. A record was established in 1975 with the
kidnapping of two Bunge and Born heirs for whom some sixty million dollars
were reportedly handed over.63
Hijacking and kidnapping were also the favorite ploys of the Palestinian
organizations and of some of the European terrorist groups. But there was
competition in this field by angry or mentally unstable individuals; to launch
rural guerrilla war at least a small group of people was needed, whereas any
single madman or criminal could put a time bomb on a plane. The clandestine
nature of urban terrorist operations made it difficult to establish how many
members the terrorist groups numbered, in whose name they were operating
or speaking, whether the motive was political, or whether the love of
excitement or money was the driving force, and to what extent the whole
phenomenon belonged to the realm of psy-chodrama rather than politics.
Some Latin American terrorist groups consisted of no more than a few dozen
members, the Japanese URA had at its height three hundred, but the number
was reduced by defections and mutual assassinations, the FLQ had fewer than
a hundred and fifty members, the TPLA fewer than a hundred, the British
"Angry Brigade" eight, the Symbionese Liberation Army about ten, and after
its shootout with the police, only three or four. But even if there were only
three members left, to the media the "Army" was still an "army," "bulletins"
were published, "ideological platforms" hammered out and spectacular
exploits, whether an assassination or a bank raid, still caught the headlines.
Ideologically there was often utter confusion; leading members of the pro-
Fascist Tacuara (Argentina) moved over to neo-Trotskyite groups, the
Monteneros (also in Argentina) stressed at one and the same time both their
"Christian" (anti-Semitic) and radical-socialist character; the Canadian FLQ
and the Official IRA presented a mixture of Marxist-Leninist doctrine and
religious-nationalist sectarianism. Urban terrorist interest in political
philosophy was strictly limited — the deed was more important than the
thought.
The most active of the urban terrorist groups was the Provisional IRA
which had split from the "Officials" in 1969. 64 The Provos had some five to
six hundred militants, the Officials about four hundred, but they enjoyed
considerable support among the Catholics in
Northern Ireland against a background of deep-rooted anger about national

and social discrimination. The IRA had a sanctuary and a supply base in the
Irish Free State. Officially it was banned there and the Irish government
regarded their activities with disfavor, but being doctrinally committed to the
idea of a united Ireland, it could not drop the northern activists entirely. Like
other urban terrorist movements, the IRA had international connections;
money came from well-wishers in the United States, money and arms from
Libya's Colonel Ghadafi — a protector of terrorists from Northern Ireland to
the Philippines — and from Eastern Europe. The ideological differences
between Provos and Officials are discussed elsewhere in this study;65 cynics
had it that the only difference was that the former went to church each week,
and the latter only once a year. In practice, as opposed to doctrine, their
operations were not so much directed against the Rritish government, but
against the Protestant community. As the fighting progressed, it became a
straightforward sectarian civil war, with the Rritish army in the thankless role
of an arbiter trying to limit the fighting and to isolate the gunmen from the
community. The Protestants had paramilitary organizations of their own (the
UVF and others) and their terrorist record resembled that of the IRA. Looked
at in historical perspective, the armed struggle in Northern Ireland since 1969
was not a novel phenomenon but simply a new stage in the age-old struggle
between two neighboring communities. The methods used in this civil war
were on the whole old-fashioned; the IRA tried to extend its operations to
England, but this, too, had been tried before World War II, and on a small
scale even back in the nineteenth century. The IRA was more successful than
other urban terrorist groups because it had a fringe, albeit small, of
supporters; and it was probably not accidental that this base was sectarian-
religious rather than "revolutionary" in makeup. The FLQ lacked both a
sanctuary and a clear program and, since Canadian political culture was
considerably less murderous than in Ireland, its movement was much more
short-lived. The Basque ETA, with its bank robberies, holdups, bombings and
kidnappings, was a little more effective because, like the IRA, and unlike the
Latin American urban terrorists, it had its base in a national minority. Urban
terrorist operations in the United States and West Germany (on which more
below) had no major political impact even though they greatly preoccupied
journalists, psychologists, lawyers, judges and law enforcement officers.
The international character of urban terrorism has already been remarked:
the Palestinian PFLP engaged in combined operations
with the Japanese URA, various Latin American urban terrorists would
cooperate with Palestinians, who in turn collaborated with Baader-Meinhof
and other gangs, as the 1975 "Carlos Affair" (the case of Uich Ramirez
Sanchez) demonstrated. Foreign governments would take an active interest;
the Iran urban guerrillas were financed for years by Iraq; Cuba continued to
contribute to various Latin American terrorist groups even though, in
principle, it favored rural guerrillas. "Carlos" had been trained at the
Lumumba University in Moscow. The Soviet attitude to urban terrorism was
ambivalent; on the one hand they would welcome and support movements
likely to cause disruption in the West, on the other, they could not fail to
realize that small ineffectual factions such as Baader-Meinhof would bring a
political backlash that would be directed not only against members of that
specific group but against Communists in general. Terrorism came to resemble
the workings of a multinational corporation. An operation would be planned
in West Germany by Palestine Arabs, executed in Israel by terrorists recruited
in Japan with weapons acquired in Italy but manufactured in Russia, supplied
by an Algerian diplomat, and financed with Libyan money. 66 With the
improvement and greater accessibility of modern technology, the potential for
destruction for small groups of people became much larger. 67 As technical
progress continued, society became more vulnerable to destruction. A single
individual could spread alarm and confusion even by means of a telephone
call about a bomb that had allegedly been placed in some vital place. This new
power acquired by a few has, however, its limits; it could paralyze the state
apparatus but it could not take over. Urban terrorism faced its practitioners
with an insoluble dilemma — to reduce the risk of discovery they had to be
few in number. The political impact of a small anonymous group was bound
to be insignificant. Urban terrorists are not, as the Palestinian (1948) and
Cypriot experience had shown, serious contenders for power; once the foreign
enemy had withdrawn, they dropped out of the picture since they were so few
and had no political organization. Prospects are better perhaps where
terrorists operate as the military wing of a political movement rather than on
their own initiative. But in this case there are always the seeds of conflict
between the military and the political leadership of the movement. In urban
terrorism it is the action that counts, not consistent strategy or a clear political
purpose. It is a Herculean task to disentangle its rational and irrational
components, and not always a rewarding one.
An aristocracy and a proletariat emerged among the urban terrorists of the

1970s. The "proletarians" were shunned by the Russians and the Cubans
because their activities did not fit into Communist policies; they were rejected
by the Libyans and Algerians because they belonged to the wrong religion or
nationality, and refused a haven even by South Yemen. Yet the "proletarian"
terrorists were unquestioningly sincere whereas there were a great many
question marks with regard to the political bona fide of the terrorist aristoc-
racy, those with powerful protectors and rich financial backers. Were they not
mere pawns manipulated by outside forces? It was by no means always clear
whose interests they tried to serve and their ideological declarations could not
be taken at face value.*
* The attack against OPEC headquarters in Vienna in December 1975 and the abduction
of oil ministers was a typical illustration of the mysteries of transnational terrorism. The
leader of the group was said to be a Venezuelan who had been in close touch with Cuban
intelligence, according to the French authorities who had first established his identity. But
according to the Egyptian press the operation in Vienna had been paid for by the Libyans.
In this maze of great and small power rivalries, of big business and intelligence intrigues,
there were no longer any certainties apart perhaps from the fact that the official purpose of
the attack (to save the Palestinian revolution) was most probably not the real one.
8
Guerrilla Doctrine
Today
The great upsurge of guerrilla warfare in the 1950s and 1960s was reflected in
the hundreds of books and thousands of articles devoted to the strategy and
tactics of wars of national liberation, foci, revolutionary warfare, the
advantages of the rural over the urban guerrilla, and vice versa. Most of this
new body of doctrine emanated from Latin America and was left wing in
inspiration. There were heated polemics about the "correct approach," about
"subjective" and "objective" conditions, about the place of the vanguard, and
the role of the masses in the struggle. But the number and even the quality of
books produced was not necessarily an indicator to the efficacy of the
movements sponsoring them. Some of the most protracted and bloody
guerrilla wars such as those in Algeria, the Middle East or Ulster, produced
few theoretical reflections on the subject. The Kurds fought for twenty years
and knew all there was to know about guerrilla warfare even though they
probably never read a book on the subject. If they were defeated in the end, it
was not because of any doctrinal shortcomings. Conversely some guerrilla
movements, which barely functioned, were very strong on doctrine. Broadly
speaking the more remote the Marxist-Leninist inspiration, the more limited
was the interest in ideological disputations. This is not to say that all the
theoretical writings were innovative: most of the literature presented vari-
ations on the same theme.
The Marxist-Leninist tradition had a profound influence on the vocabulary
of the Latin American apostles of guerrilla warfare, but the real impact of
patriotic-nationalist traditions was quite un-
342 GUERRILLA DOCTRINE TODAY
mistakable. (The slogan of most Latin American guerrilla movements was

Patria o Muerte-Venceremos.) About the revolutionary character of these
movements there is no doubt; on the other hand they did not just "deviate"
from Marxism on essential points but did to Marx what Marx had done to
Hegel: they stood him on his head. That any political dogma is bound to be
adapted and modified in the light of new historical developments goes
without saying; Marxists in particular have always stressed the necessity of
"creatively employing" their method. But if these changes are fundamental
and far-reaching, if some of the basic tenets are given up, the point is bound to
be reached sooner or later when the old label no longer conforms to the new
content, when, in fact, it misleads and becomes a source of misunderstanding.
Other ideologies and creeds have faced a similar fate: Christianity without
God is an interesting phenomenon, but is it Christianity any longer?
The new doctrines of guerrilla warfare must be studied within their context
of time and place, and be subjected to a critical analysis for they by no means
provide a true reflection of guerrilla experience. The writings of Guevara and
the speeches of Fidel Castro contain much of interest about the Cuban
revolution; they contain even more myths and post facto rationalizations that
only can be explained in the light of their authors' subsequent political
careers. They went into the struggle with one ideology and emerged with
another. While the Cuban revolutionaries were fighting in the Sierra Maestra
they were a movement in search of an ideology; some of them belittled
revolutionary theory altogether and thought that all that mattered was
revolutionary struggle. As the Tupamaros put it in later years: "Words divide
us, action unites us." Castroist-Guevaraist doctrine is the product of a later
period, and offered no guidelines while the struggle lasted. It fails to explain
what happened and why, it is not the key to the lessons of the Cuban
revolution.
Guevara's views in 1965 differed to a considerable extent from those he
had pronounced five years earlier, and Debray's estimation likewise
underwent radical changes. The unity of theory and practice is always highly
imperfect and ideology frequently serves as a smokescreen. To provide two
extreme examples: firstly, from the ideological pronouncements of the leaders
of the IRA one would not learn that sectarian elements were prominently
involved in their struggle; secondly, the one major tactical innovation of the
Palestinian guerrillas was that their operations were mainly conducted from
outside Israel. Rut official pronouncements almost in-
variably proclaim the opposite. The IRA and the Palestinian Arab spokesmen
no doubt have sound political reasons for preferring fiction to fact.
There was a tendency among the guerrilla theorists of the 1950s and 1960s
to emphasize the universal applicability of their doctrines. This was as true of
Lin Piao's thesis about the struggle of the world villages against the world
cities, as of Frantz Fanon's analysis of the anticolonial struggle, or of the
propagation of the Cuban model as befitting all Latin America. But conditions
varied so much from country to country that these wholesale prescriptions
were usually quite unrealistic. They led to major setbacks for the guerrillas
and became a source of confusion to those trying to understand the dynamics
of guerrilla warfare. What Boris Goldenberg wrote about the Cuban
revolution applies mutatis mutandis to guerrilla warfare everywhere: in view
of its unique character it is a topic for the historian and not the sociologist. 1
Goldenberg's remark remains true despite the fact that the background of
most Latin American guerrilla leaders was remarkably similar. They all hailed
from middle- or upper-class families, they were young, had received higher
education and, if they were not city-born, they had lived in towns before
joining the armed struggle. The biographies of Castro and Guevara are of
course common knowledge. Castro was not quite thirty when Granma landed
in Cuba, Guevara was two years younger. The former came from a wealthy
landowning family and had studied law; Guevara was a physician by training
and had specialized in allergy. Debray was twenty-six years of age when he
wrote Revolution in the Revolution, he came from an upper-class French
family, was a normalien and had taught philosophy for a short time before he
arrived in Latin America.
Of the other major guerrilla leaders, Douglas Bravo who came from a
Venezuelan landowning family was also a lawyer by training; Camilo Torres,
a priest and professor of sociology, hailed from one of Bogota's leading
families and was thirty-six when he joined the guerrillas; Hugo Blanco, the
son of a Cuzco lawyer, had studied agriculture and was in his late twenties
when he became a peasant leader; Yon Sosa, son of a Chinese father, was an
army lieutenant and like his comrade and rival, Lieutenant Turcios Lima, had
undergone antiguerrilla training in the Guatemalan army; Raul Sendic, leader
of the Tupamaros, had almost completed his legal studies when he began his
revolutionary career — he too came from a landowning family; the Peruvian
Hector Bejar was a
poet, painter and engraver, aged about twenty-five at the time of his guerrilla
exploits; Javier Heraud, the poet, was only twenty-one when he was killed;
Cesar Montes, leader of the guerrillas in Guatemala, was also in his early
twenties; the Brazilian Leonel Brizola was an older man, once a professional
politician (and bon vivant), who served for a period as governor of Rio
Grande do Sul; Carlos Lamarca, the Brazilian urban guerrilla leader, was an
army captain when he joined the insurgents and he too had been trained in
antisubversive warfare. The only two men who were considerably older were
the engineer Carlos Marighela, the author of the Mini-manual, a mulatto, who
became a guerrilla fighter at the ripe age of fifty-seven after more than three
decades as a Communist party official, and Abraham Guillen, who provided
the Philosophy of an Urban Guerrilla, a native of Spain, had fought in the
Spanish Civil War and was fifty-three when his book was published. But
unlike Marighela, he was a noncombatant in the guerrilla movement.
The bourgeois background of most, if not all Latin American guerrilla
leaders is not in doubt, but this does not mean, as their orthodox-Communist
rivals sometimes argued, that their mentality was "petty bourgeois," or that
the revolution they aimed at was bourgeois in character. There are limits to
the usefulness of class analysis; throughout history revolutionaries have failed
to act in accordance with "class interest." They were spostati by choice.
The theory of the Castroist revolution was formulated only in part by the
Maximo Lider who was primarily a man of action (and speeches). It was given
its fullest and most systematic expression by Guevara and subsequently by
Regis Debray.2 During the war Castro was mainly preoccupied with the tactics
of fighting, and it is interesting to note that he changed his approach more
than once as he gained experience. When he first landed in Cuba, he did not
assume that his small band could possibly defeat Batista's army, but he did
anticipate that his initiative would trigger off a general strike in the cities that
would, in turn, lead to the overthrow of the regime. There was no such strike
but, as subsequent events demonstrated, the regime proved far weaker than
he imagined. Once the guerrilla war was launched, Castro announced that he
would burn Cuba's entire sugar crop ("including my own family's large sugar-
cane farm in Oriente") as a previous generation of Cuban guerrillas had done. 3
But he later changed his mind and found more effective means of weakening
the regime than a scorched-earth policy. After he came to power he would
proclaim the basic lesson: "El deber de todo revolucionario es hacer la
revolucion; the duty of every revolu-
tionary is to make the revolution . . . it is not for revolutionaries to sit in the
doorways of their houses waiting for the corpse of imperialism to pass by. The
role of Job doesn't suit a revolutionary."4 There were other such
pronouncements but for a comprehensive exposition of Castroism-
Guevaraism, we must turn to Guevara's handbook La Guerra de Guerrillas
published first in April 1959 and to some of his subsequent articles, the most
important of which was Guerra de Guerillas: un Metodo.5
GUEVARA
The essence, the three fundamental lessons of the Cuban revolution as

Guevara saw it, are boldly stated at the very beginning of his handbook:
1. Popular forces can win a war against the army.
2. It is not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution
exist; the insurrection can create them.
3. In underdeveloped America the countryside is the basic area for armed
fighting.
At the time he conceded that not all the conditions for a revolution could be
created through the impulse of guerrilla activity:
Where a government has come into power through some form of popular vote,
fraudulent or not, and maintains at least an appearance of constitutional legality,
the guerrilla outbreak cannot be promoted, since the possibilities for peaceful
struggle have not yet been exhausted.
Three years later in his article he withdrew this reservation: the conditions for
armed struggle existed everywhere in Latin America. Imperialism and the
bourgeoisie tried to keep in power without using ostensible violence. But the
revolutionaries had to compel them to remove their mask, to expose them in
their real Gestalt as a violent dictatorship of the ruling classes, thereby
intensifying the revolutionary struggle. In other words, a democratically
elected, constitutional government had to be compelled by provocative
guerrilla attacks into using its inherently dictatorial powers.
Guevara's three basic tenets are fundamentally opposed to the teachings of
Marxism-Leninism and, to a certain extent, even to Maoism. For he regarded
the armed insurrection not as the final,
crowning phase of the political struggle but expected, on the contrary, that the
armed conflict would trigger off, or at least give decisive impetus to the
political campaign. In Marxist-Leninist thought, as in Maoism, the political
party is the leading force and there is a heavy emphasis on ideology and
indoctrination. In the Castroist-Guevaraist concept the political party does not
play the central role, and there is no such emphasis on ideology and political
education. True, according to Guevara the guerrilla must be a social reformer
(above all an agrarian revolutionary), because this is what distinguishes him
from a bandit.6 But the revolutionary spirit is somehow taken for granted, and
so is support by the people.
In later years, Debray was to put it even more succinctly: a successful
military operation is the best propaganda. The guerrilla force is the party in
embryo. The vanguard party would not create a popular army, but it would
be for the popular army to create the political vanguard. 7 He based himself on
Castro who declared on one famous occasion: "Who will make the revolution
in Latin America? The people, the revolutionaries, with or without a party."
Guevara argued that the guerrilla must triumph because of his moral
superiority over the enemy and because of the mass support he enjoyed; the
fact that he might be inferior to the army in firepower was of no great
consequence. At the same time Guevara, like Mao, regarded guerrilla
operations as the initial phase of warfare; the guerrilla army would
systematically grow and develop until it acquired the characteristics of a
regular army. The aim was victory, annihilation of the enemy, and this
objective could be reached only by a regular army, even though its origins lay
in a guerrilla band.8
The assumption that the people could defeat a regular army was not
entirely new; it had been borne out, to give but one example, in Bolivia in
1952. What seemed to be new was the concept that thirty to fifty dedicated
revolutionaries were sufficient to launch an armed struggle in any Latin
American country. Debray was even more optimistic: ten to thirty
professional revolutionaries could pave the way, preparing the masses. But
was this not exactly what Blanqui had preached one hundred years earlier?
Debray argued that there were two essential differences: the revolutionaries
did not aim at a lightning victory, nor did they want to seize power for
themselves.9
The strategic concept of Guevara and Debray differed from that of even the
most militant Communists, Trotskyites, and Maoists in that they belittled
revolutionary spontaneity (such as advocated by the Trotskyites) and
discounted the self-defense units of the
GUERRILLA WARFARE
workers and peasants (such as existed in Colombia and Peru). Debray thought
that the peasant syndicats' struggle was essentially defensive in character, and
did not aim at seizing political power. Even if such defense associations did
manage to survive for several years (as they had in the south of Colombia),
they would be defeated in the long run because they constituted a fixed target
for the government forces. Furthermore, the peasants merely wanted to
defend their families and their possessions whereas only total partisan warfare
stood any chance of success. The Chinese Communist bases, according to
Debray, could not serve as a model for Latin America: China was a far bigger
country, and the enemy forces there had been relatively weak. The Latin
American foci, the centers of insurrection, on the other hand, had to be
military in character rather than territorial; he excepted only the universities,
but these were regarded as of secondary importance, mere centers of
recruiting and propaganda. By itself afoco could not overthrow the system, it
was merely a detonator planted in the most exposed enemy position, timed to
produce an explosion at the moment of choice. The Latin American guerrillas
would not survive the early stages of the armed struggle if they were to
engage in static defense; they would (as Fidel put it) have to carry their foci
with them like supplies in their knapsacks. It might be possible and even
desirable to establish territorial foci at the very beginning of the struggle but
this ought not be a strategic aim; the Cubans only set up their first foci after
seventeen months of fighting in the Sierra Maestra and they would have ceded
them if this had been necessary from an operational point of view.
Castro and Guevara firmly believed in the absolute primacy of the armed
struggle, and their conviction grew, if anything, in the years after the Cuban
revolution. They maintained that the struggle would have to incorporate
many Latin American countries, creating two, three, many Vietnams. Castro
stated quite specifically that the Andean region would be the Sierra Maestra of
Latin America. His call was based on the assumption that the chances of
success existed almost everywhere if only there were enough revolutionary
enthusiasm. On the other hand, there was the realization that, in view of the
political situation, that is the growing pressure of imperialism, it would
become increasingly difficult to defeat the enemy and stay in power in any
single country (Guevara). The regular armies had after all learned the Cuban
lessons and were psychologically and militarily much better prepared for
irregular warfare than they had been at the time of the Cuban insurrection
(Debray).
These theses of revolutionary strategy were based on a genuine belief that

an almost unlimited revolutionary potential existed over the entire continent,
though the desire to reduce the pressure on Cuba must have also been a
factor. Fidel, in his second Havana declaration, provided the keynote: the
conditions of each country could either hasten or impede the revolution, but
sooner or later it must occur everywhere. Guevara added that it was criminal
not to make use of the opportunities that offered themselves. The weakest link
in the eyes of the Cubans was Venezuela and, after the struggle there had
failed, Guevara chose, with disastrous results, Bolivia as the most promising
area for installing his "detonator."
This strategy was bound to lead to bitter controversies with the Marxist-
Leninist parties. The two main bones of contention which led to open schism
were the relationship between the military guerrillas and the political party,
and the Cuban insistence that, as a matter of principle, the rural areas would
have to be the main battlefield. The Cubans argued that the countryside had
much more to recommend itself than the cities from a military point of view, if
only because access was more difficult. Furthermore, the revolutionary
potential of the peasantry had hitherto been virtually untapped. In the early
days of the Cuban revolution Fidel's slogan had been "All guns, all bullets, all
reserves to the Sierra," despite the fact that resistance to Batista in the towns
had all along been far more intense and better organized. Ten years later he
was, if possible, even more emphatic about the subject: it was absurd, even
criminal, to try to lead a guerrilla movement from the city. Given the Cuban
example, an urban guerrilla movement could not develop into a revolutionary
force, capable of seizing power. The urban guerrilla was at best an instrument
for agitation, a tool for political maneuvers, a means for political negotiation. 10
The city, as Fidel put it, was the "grave of the guerrilla." In the towns, where
there could be no single command and centralized leadership, the guerrillas
were forced to disperse, particularly in the early phase of the struggle,
weakening the insurgents far more than it hampered the government forces.
This is not to say that the Cubans regarded the struggle in the mountains as a
peasant war; essentially it would be a revolutionary partisan war which the
peasants would support and which some would gradually join.11
There were other, equally weighty reasons in favor of waging war in the
countryside; a war which would be expanded to the small cities and, in the
end, be carried to the metropolitan centers. "As we know," Debray wrote, "the
mountain proletarianizes the bourgeois and peasant elements, and the city can
bourgeoisify the prole-
GUERRILLA DOCTRINE TODAY
tarians."12 The spokesmen of the Cuban revolution regarded the urban

working class on the whole as a conservative element and they did not except
the Communist parties. Living conditions in the towns were fundamentally
different from those prevailing in the countryside; even the best comrades
were corrupted in the cities, infected by alien patterns of thought. Life in town
was tantamount to an "objective betrayal." The guerrilla movement was the
real proletariat, with nothing to lose; the guerrilla leadership in the towns or
aboard was the "guerrilla bourgeoisie." The city was the place where politics
were made, the countryside the scene of revolutionary action. And the
guerrillas, needless to say, wanted to get away from urban politics. Unitl
about 1965 Debray believed that it might be possible to win over most
Communist parties to the idea of the armed struggle and that this would lead,
of necessity, to the old-guard Communist leadership of mere politicians being
replaced by a younger, more dynamic leadership. Only after the setbacks in
Venezuela and elsewhere was he inclined to write off the Communists as
altogether hopeless. He regarded the guerrillas as representing the interests of
the proletariat even if their social background was anything but proletarian.
Guevara's handbook of guerrilla warfare contains much practical combat
advice: how terrain should affect an attack against an enemy convoy or
position; the order of fire in battle; the establishment of a good supply system
and medical service; the planning of acts of sabotage; the setting up of a war
industry in the liberated zones. Special sections deal with the role of women
in the struggle, with the conduct of propaganda, the establishment of an
intelligence network, the civil organization of the insurrectional movement.
But there is not much that is novel in these suggestions. What Castro and
Guevara knew about guerrilla combat, they had learnt from Alberto Bayo, a
native Cuban, who had emigrated to Spain and acquired his expertise in the
war against Abdel Krim. Bayo served as an air force officer in the Spanish
Civil War, later moved to Mexico where, in 1955, he gave a crash training
course to the insurgents about to embark on their expedition to Cuba. His
instruction manual, 150 Questions to a Guerrilla, was widely read (among
the Weathennen, for instance) and contained a wealth of practical
information.13 Bayo died in 1967, having attained the rank of "com-
mandante," the highest in the Cuban army.
Guevara noted three stages in guerrilla warfare; first, the tactical defense,
when the small guerrilla force would be hunted by superior enemy forces;
gradually, the point of equilibrium, when the
possibilities of action for both the guerrillas and the enemy become equalized.
At this point, large columns would be employed by the guerrillas in a war of
movement; this would not replace the guerrilla war but would merely be
guerrilla warfare on a larger scale — something akin to Mao's "mobile
warfare." Finally, a popular army would crystallize, overrun the government
forces and seize the big cities. The critical period, as Guevara saw it, is the
very early one, and he posited three preconditions for the guerrilla's survival
— constant mobility, constant vigilance and constant distrust. 14 These are
sensible observations but guerrilla fighters throughout the ages have
instinctively known these home truths, and they were noted by many writers
before Guevara.
Of greater interest are his remarks about the human, psychological factor,
even though his thoughts on this subject emerge only incidentally from his
writings. Emphatic stress is given to the "political will" and "decision":
"Generally, guerrilla warfare starts from a well-considered act of will; some
chief with prestige starts an uprising for the salvation of his people, beginning
his work in difficult conditions in a foreign country." But what if there should
be no great leader such as Fidel? Guevara's answer is simple but not
altogether convincing. The leaders would learn the art of warfare in the
practice of war itself— struggle is the greatest teacher. In short, Napoleon's on
s'engage, puis on voit. Religious terminology is frequently invoked, reference
is made to a "special kind of Jesuitism"; the revolutionary, clandestinely
preparing for war "should be a complete ascetic." There is much
preoccupation with honor, courage, vengeance, hatred and death; hatred for
the enemy drives a man beyond his physical limits and transforms him into an
effective, selective and cold machine for killing—"our soldiers have to be that
way." Or elsewhere, "Death will be welcome to us wherever it will surprise us
if only our call will be taken up by the others. . . ." Or, on another occasion, the
reference is to "the people willing to sacrifice itself in a nuclear war so that its
ashes might serve as the cement for a new society. . . ."15
The se are appeals by a prophet or a mystic, reminiscent of D Annunzio or
Codreanu rather than Lenin or Trotsky. They lead us a little closer to the
metapolitics of Cuban guerrilla doctrine. It is not of course that Fidel was a
paradigm of asceticism or that the guerrillas all wanted to commit suicide. Rut
there certainly is a revolutionary romanticism, with its pessimistic, even tragic
undertones, to which Raoul Castro and others have referred. 16 Purity is the
ideal, revolution is a mystical adventure, a struggle to the death
for something enigmatical. Although these observations refer more to

Guevara (and to Camilo Torres, about whom more below) than to Fidel
Castro, almost all Latin American revolutionaries have certain features in
common: their character and mental makeup present a curious mixture of
contradictory qualities, admirable and not so admirable. In many ways they
were the most attractive revolutionary heroes to have emerged in Latin
America; enthusiastic, courageous, idealistic, willing to make sacrifices,
genuinely concerned about the fate of the poor, impatient with bureaucracy.
They had a sense of mission and were free of the corruption and the egotism
of the society surrounding them. They became the heroes of many of the best
young people in Latin America and beyond. But there was another side to it.
Their heroism was by no means free of machismo or showing off, their
concern for the poor was paternalistic, they were anything but democrats and
the idea that the masses could or should be trusted in free elections was quite
alien to them. The dividing line between selfless heroic action, caudillismo,
terrorism, and gangsterism has never been quite distinct in Latin America and
the same lack of delineation was true of the Cuban revolutionaries. Castro,
who began his career as a university gun fighter, wrote about the companions
of his youth:
. . . the young men who, moved by natural yearning and the legend of a heroic era,
longed for a revolution that had not taken place and at the time could not be started.
Many of those victims of deceit who died as gangsters could very well be heroes
today.17
Conversely, it would appear that many, perhaps most, of the apostles of

Communism, Latin American style, in the late 1950s and 1960s could with
equal ease have become fighters for Fascism, Latin American style, twenty
years earlier. This applies to elements in their ideology and traits in their
character alike. They were children of their time; in the last resort action was
more important than ideologies which had always been imported to Latin
America anyway. One element remained constant — nationalism, populist
and elitist at the same time; the rest was given to continual change, according
to the prevailing intellectual fashion. It is quite true, as Theodore Draper has
noted, that ideologically Castroism never lived a life of its own:
historically, it is a leader in search of a movement, a movement in search of

power, and power in search of an ideology. From its origins
to today, it has had the same leader and the same "road to power" but it has
changed its ideology.18 . . . A caudillist movement of a new type, it uses power not
for power's sake and needs an ideology to justify power ideologically, a mixture of
the Latin American revolutionary tradition and European communist elements.19
The apparent break in the ideological continuity of Castroism can be

understood only against this background. The same goes for the constant
changes in doctrine, the debates whether objective conditions were of any
importance for a revolutionary, whether armed struggle was the inevitable
road to power everywhere, whether Cuba was an example for the whole of
Latin America. There is, as already noted, a great and growing discrepancy
between the doctrine of Castroism as it developed after i960 and the realities
of the Cuban revolution. It is true that similar discrepancies exist between the
doctrines of all revolutions and the real course of events, but it is particularly
striking in the case of Cuba. The Castroist doctrine is a myth, which is not to
say that it is irrelevant. Taking the Castroist doctrine of revolution at face
value, one would never glean the facts that Castro and his comrades had not
originally intended to launch guerrilla warfare, that the "masses" played an
insignificant role in the fighting, that, generally speaking, there was little
fighting at all, that the Batista regime collapsed, in the final resort, because it
was rotten to the core and not because the insurgents were so strong. There is
no recognition of the fact that there was relative prosperity in Cuba at the time
and even relative freedom; Castro's Sierra Maestra appeal for a rising was
reported in the Havana press.20 It is never acknowledged that Castro's
intelligent manipulation of the mass media (including the foreign press and
television) was of the greatest importance, that he received decisive financial
help from bourgeois political leaders inside and outside Cuba, that America
turned against Batista and imposed an arms embargo. The importance of the
revolutionary struggle in the towns, which involved more fighting and cost
more lives than in the countryside, is systematically played down in Castroist
literature. A Marxist critic later wrote that Fidel's victory over Batista's army
was not achieved by force of arms; corruption, the great Cuban vested
interests, the Church, and in the final analysis, Yanqui imperialism, all assisted
in Batista's defeat.21 In moments of candor, Cuban official sources have
provided explanations that come close to this analysis: that the revolution was
won largely because of Castro; that U.S. imperialism was disorientated; that
support was
given by a large segment of the bourgeoisie and some big landowners; and
lastly, that most sections of Cuba's peasants were prole-tarianized. Only the
last part of this official formula is quasi-Marxist in character and it is also the
one which is incorrect. In short, the revolution prevailed in Cuba because of a
unique set of circumstances, and thus attempts to reproduce it elsewhere in
Latin America were bound to fail — not for lack of "objective revolutionary
situations" or courageous guerrilla leaders, but because it was unlikely that
the United States or the non-Communist circles would support a movement
of this kind in the post-Cuban situation. By 1965 one observer noted that the
counterinsurrectionists knew more about guerrilla warfare than the guerrillas
themselves.
DEBRAY
The orthodox Communists rejected Castro's "adventurism," partly because

they opposed his policy for tactical reasons, but mainly because they could
not accept the subordination of the party apparatus to the military leaders.
The polemics usually proceeded by proxy: Castro did not want to attack
Moscow openly so instead accused the Latin American Communists of
cowardice — for not supporting Douglas Bravo's guerrilla operations in
Venezuela, for instance. The Latin American Communists on the other hand
were reluctant to engage in a dispute with the Cubans because of their
tremendous prestige in radical circles all over the continent. In the
circumstances, Debray became the main butt for their attacks; he was merely
an unofficial spokesman of the regime and could be criticized with greater
impunity. Inter alia Debray was charged with not presenting a detailed
Marxist class analysis in his writings, with trying to prescribe for the whole
continent, with not taking into account decisive local peculiarities, with
"liquidating" theory, with having a wrong model of revolution. It was pointed
out to Debray that the armed struggle was no panacea; it did not necessarily
unite the revolutionaries as events in Venezuela and elsewhere had shown. It
was explained to him that urban revolutionaries did not enjoy a dolce vita,
that he was an "ultra-voluntarist," an elitist, distrustful of the masses.22
Some of this criticism was quite to the point. Castro, Guevara and Debray
had admitted the existence of "national peculiarities" in principle but had paid
them scant attention in practice, assuming,
apparently, that the Cuban model was equally applicable to Honduras and
Brazil. Some criticism was correct but irrelevant: all revolutionaries are elitists
and voluntarists even though some admit this more openly than others. Other
charges were quite unfounded: a Marxist class analysis of Latin American
society, however interesting per s e , was not, as experience proved, the
answer to the feasibility of a revolution. The Cuban experience demonstrated
that the "subjective" factor was of decisive importance, that revolutionary war
was a contest of will: if Batista lost his nerve while Fidel maintained supreme
self-confidence, this had little to do with the social tensions in Cuban society.
Tensions exist in every society and it would be impossible to prove that there
were more tensions in Cuba than elsewhere in Latin America. Orthodox
Marxists could argue that the Cuban experience was unique, an exception, but
the exception had been successful, whereas guerrilla movements operating in
objectively favorable conditions had failed.
The Castroist-Guevaraist doctrine was most fashionable throughout Latin
America until about 1968, the year after Guevara's failure in Bolivia. In the
years that followed, Cuba began to toe the Soviet line more closely (a fact for
which Soviet economic pressure might account in part). The Cuban leaders
also lost some of their illusions about an imminent victory of the revolution in
Latin America in view of the guerrillas' minimal progress on the continent; the
revolutionary spirit of 1960-1968 gave way to internal splits, interminable
polemics, and mutual recriminations. Ironically, Castro, who had bitterly
attacked the Communist parties because most of them had not opted for the
armed struggle, found himself by 1970 at the receiving end of similar charges.
Douglas Bravo contended that Cuba had retreated, declared a truce, choosing
to sacrifice the revolutionary cause in favor of economic development. Cuba,
he argued, had refused to unleash a war on the grand scale. True, Cuba would
be lost in such a war but the Cuban revolutionaries would be able to carry the
revolutionary struggle to other Latin American countries. 23 The Cuban leaders
were in no mood to accept such advice; they preferred the establishment of
closer relations with nationalist regimes, such as in Peru, which had carried
out "progressive changes." Finally, the vacilations of Cuba's overall political
strategy quite apart, Cuba's prestige declined among those who had
enthusiastically welcomed the revolution a decade earlier. As they saw it, the
great promise of i960 had not been quite fulfilled, the regime had become
bureaucratized despite all the good intentions,
the revolutionary spirit was slowly petering out. It was still regarded as a
progressive regime, but the image of Cuba no longer quickened the heart.
Debray's approach also changed markedly over the years. After his release
from a Bolivian prison, he went to Chile, eventually returning to France where
he joined the socialists. In La Critique des Armes, published in 1974, he stated
that the hypothesis he had previously advanced had been belied by
experience. The theory of foci had been wrong insofar as it had dissociated the
military from the political, the clandestine from the legal, struggle. Debray now
considered the political training of cadres and contact with the masses as of
paramount importance. One had to return to the ABC of the great
revolutionary teachers, beginning with Marx. For the zealous revolutionaries
who continued to believe in theories he had advocated only a few years earlier,
he felt nothing but contempt: "Schizophrenia as a norm of organization is the
last stage of individual megalomania." He saw nothing but irresponsibility and
revolutionary delirium in their pronouncements and noted sarcastically that
the revolutionary phrase begins its flight, like the owl of Minerva, when night
falls and when revolution has reached the stage of agony.24
Thus ended a chapter in the history of Latin American revolutionary
doctrine. The same Debray, who had rejected the very idea of the urban
guerrilla in 1965, now came to regard the Tupamaros as the most intelligent
and politically sophisticated of all Latin American guerrillas — but even they
were defeated. Venezuela, as he saw it, had acquired a hypertrophied and
omnipresent repressive apparatus, but despite this, it still functioned as a
liberal republic with elections and a normal political life; in these conditions,
too, revolutionary violence failed. 25 He had come back full circle in 1974, to
the position adopted all along by Communist leaders like Prestes or by
Guevara in i960 before he announced the inevitability of the armed struggle.
REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY IN LATIN AMERICA
Although the Cuban leaders were at the very center of the debate on
revolutionary strategy, they had no monopoly in this field. The political splits
of the Latin American radicals into dozens of factions and hundreds of
groupuscules were reflected in a bewildering
multitude of theses and platforms; even an encyclopedia would not do them

justice. They ranged from those who advocated cooperation with
"progressive" bourgeois-nationalist groups within a parliamentary
framework, to the Posadistas, a Trotskyite faction, who took the Soviet Union
to task for not waging nuclear war. Of the guerrilla ideologists only the
advocates of urban terrorism deserve more than cursory mention; the views
of the others can be summarized briefly, since they coincide, broadly
speaking, with the concepts developed by Fidel, Guevara and Debray.
Douglas Bravo, the Venezuelan guerrilla commander, was in the forefront
of the armed struggle on the continent for several years. A former leading
Communist, who broke with the party, he established his first rural foco in
1962. The conditions facing him and his men differed in some important
respects from those in Cuba: there was a greater degree of urbanization in
Venezuela, where more than sixty percent of the population lived in cities; the
enemy confronting the insurgents was not a Batista but a democratically
elected mass party, the Action Democratica. Guerrilla strategy manifested
itself on the one hand in collaboration with criminal elements and the
indiscriminate use of terror (such as attacks against trains carrying urban
holiday-makers). The slogan was to kill at least one policeman a day. Since the
policemen were usually of lower class background than the guerrillas, this
topsy-turvy class struggle did not always endear them to the very groups they
wanted to win over. Bravo's manifestos on the other hand were quite moder-
ate; one would look in vain for any radical program of social change. He
demanded agrarian reform and criticized the government for not conducting a
friendlier policy vis-a-vis Cuba and North Vietnam. He referred at length to
the glorious struggle for national liberation of 1810 and the fight against
Yanqui imperialism, but the se same motifs could be found in the programs of
most Latin American parties.26
In later years the guerrilla movement split and some of Bravo's erstwhile
lieutenants sought explanations for the mistakes committed: the guerrillas
could have won in 1962, said Teodoro Pet-koff, if they had combined the
armed struggle in the towns with an insurrection in the anny. The decisive
battles were fought in the cities, not in the countryside, where the rural
guerrillas could not survive without help from the towns. Hence the
conclusion drawn by another Venezuelan guerrilla leader: in future it would
be necessary to concentrate on the urban centers, building a powerful civilian
and military base on the strength of clearly formulated, concrete
political goals. Foreign models were only of limited assistance and a specific
Venezuelan road to socialism would have to be developed.27
Despite the fact that Peru was far more rural in character than Venezuela
the Peruvian guerrilla leaders, Hector Bejar and Hugo Blanco, reached very
similar conclusions when they too looked back on the reasons for their failure.
Bejar wrote that the guerrillas had fought in the forests, while the peasant
population was concentrated in valleys and high zones; unless they mastered
the tactics of operating on high open plateaus, they would have to stay in the
forests, militarily secure but politically ineffective. More importantly, "our
attitude was based on an underestimation of the cities," therewith blocking the
road to successful revolutionary agitation among the urban masses. He also
critically reappraised the apolitical attitude of the guerrillas: "Our groups were
oriented towards action and found in it their only reason for existence." 28 Bejar
mentioned in passing yet another important handicap: the cultural gap
between the city-born, educated guerrillas and the campesinos was enormous.
Quite literally, they did not speak the same language; the former, with a very
few exceptions, did not understand Quechua (the Indian language) and the
latter hardly spoke any Spanish.
Hugo Blanco attained fame as a successful organizer of peasant
associations. The struggle for land control was carried out under his
leadership, with the slogan Tierra o Muerte (Land or Death). These
associations were to be the nucleus of a new society, they would run their own
schools, courts of justice, health services. To all intents and purposes they
would constitute a "dual power" on the lines of the Soviets in Petrograd in
1917. But again, in retrospect, Blanco admitted that the basic weakness of the
guerrilla struggle had been its lack of support by a mass party: "We did not
attach sufficient importance to the fundamental role of the party." The
peasantry in Peru, Blanco said, was the major revolutionary force, but in the
long run, once they were given land, they would become bourgeois. In the
final analysis, therefore, the working class was the only guarantor of a socialist
revolution.29
Camilo Torres, the revolutionary priest, who joined the Colombian
guerrillas, made no major theoretical contribution to the actual conduct of
guerrilla warfare; he was killed in the very first engagement in which he took
part. His writings were devoted to the necessity of implementing social
change and land reform, and to attacks against the establishment of the
Catholic Church, which identified
itself with the propertied classes. He tried to prove that the revolution was not
just compatible with Christian ethics but was a Christian imperative.30 He
realized that the precondition for the success of the revolutionary cause lay in
a united front of the various opposition forces who were engaged in intense
internal feuds. But his great prestige as the most eloquent spokesman of the
left was quite insufficient to achieve this aim; the Colombian insurgents, more
than any other Latin American guerrilla movement, remained deeply split
and frequently engaged in bloody purges of their own ranks. They probably
lost more of their cadres in killing each other than by enemy action.31
PHILOSOPHY OF THE "URBAN GUERRILLA"
During the late 1960s the center of gravity in Latin American guerrilla
fighting shifted from the countryside to the cities and this soon gave rise to the
new doctrine of the "urban guerrilla." The basic idea was of course as old as
the hills, and in Latin America in particular there was a hallowed tradition of
urban insurrection, assassination and kidnappings. A radical critique of rural
guerrilla fighting was provided by the Bolivian Trotskyite leader, Guillermo
Lora: the guerrillas in Bolivia (and elsewhere) were an alien body in the
countryside. As Guevara wrote in his Bolivian diary: the campesinos were
"impenetrable like stones." When one talked to them one could not be sure
whether or not they were ridiculing the guerrillas. Revolutionary impatience
had been the reason for neglecting political work among the peasants; but,
even if the guerrillas had succeeded in raising the banner of truth in a whole
district, they would still have failed because they were cut off from the
workers in the cities. Guerrilla "impertinence and adventurism," therefore,
made a decisive contribution to the defeat of the whole left. As for the Cuban
model with Castro as an undisputed leader of the Latin American revolution,
this was according to Lora as much an imposition as the Russian Communists'
pretensions after 1917 to dominate the international working-class
movement.32
Michael Collins and Menahem Begin were "urban guerrillas" as, in a way,
were many nineteenth-century revolutionaries. But the nineteenth-century
insurgents believed in golpismo, the seizure of power following one short,
violent battle. This belief had been
shared by the old IRA in 1916. The Irgun believed that the struggle would be a
protracted one but it did not develop any specific new guerrilla doctrine. In
Venezuela there had been urban terror on a large scale during the early 1960s;
in Caracas in 1963 the insurgents came very near to victory. Defeated, they
transferred their operations to the countryside. It was only after the
spectacular failure of Guevara in Bolivia, and the earlier setbacks in Peru,
Venezuela and elsewhere that urban terror in Latin America came into its
own. Cuban revolutionary doctrine was inconsistent on the subject; although
the towns were rejected as the grave of the revolutionaries, there are
occasional references in the writings of Guevara and others to the unjustified
neglect of urban operations. Mention has been made of the fact that the
Cubans must have been aware of the fact that they owed far more of their
eventual success to assistance from sympathizers in the towns than they were
willing to admit.
If the Cubans were opposed to "urban guerrilla" warfare but did not
altogether exclude it, few of the advocates of urban terrorism rejected rural
guerrilla operations in principle. It was simply a matter of different conditions
and priorities. They considered their city-based operations either as the first
stage of a general insurrectionary movement or as part of an insurrectionary
pincer movement based on the cities and the countryside. The starting point
for an "urban guerrilla" doctrine was the undisputed fact that the rural
guerrilla movements had been unsuccessful on the whole. They pointed to
basic social and demographic facts which their predecessors ignored to their
detriment. Latin America has not only the highest rate of population growth in
the world but also the fastest rate of urbanization and there is an enormous,
constant inflow of poor, unskilled, jobless people to the towns. 33 Of the
population of Argentina, forty-five percent live in Greater Buenos Aires; forty-
six percent of all Uruguayans reside in Greater Montevideo. The population of
Mexico City and Sao Paulo is nearly ten million, and Rio de Janeiro will have
twelve million inhabitants by 1980. In view of these facts, the idea of the
countryside "encircling" the cities seemed outdated, however propitious the
"objective" revolutionary situation in the villages. "Urban guerrilla" strategy is
based on the recognition of the fact that the political-military-economic center
of power is in the great conurbations, that it could and should be attacked
there, not from the periphery.34
The first, but also the least known of the advocates of this strategy was
Abraham Guillen, an "anarcho-Marxist" (Hodges) of Spanish origin, who
settled in Uruguay, after working for many years in
Argentina. He did not exclude cooperation with the rural milizias but did
maintain that in highly urbanized countries revolutionary battles ought to be
waged in the urban areas "for the revolutionary potential is where the
population is."35 These observations referred primarily to Uruguay and
Argentina; in Brazil, on the other hand, revolutionary warfare should
preferably be rural (Guillen later revised his views and criticized Marighela
for assigning a merely tactical character to the urban guerrillas and strategic
significance to the rural guerrillas). Guillen argued that Carlos Lamarca (the
other important Brazilian urban terrorist leader) would not have been killed
had he stayed among the nine million inhabitants of Sao Paulo instead of
venturing into the countryside, where he was betrayed by a hostile
population.36 To endure the struggle the small armed minority would have to
lead a consistently clandestine existence with the support of the population.
Guillen does not clarify how this contradiction, clandestine existence and
mass support, might be overcome in practice. Their basic principle should be
to live separately and fight together. Urban guerrillas should use light amis,
but machine guns and bazookas would have to be employed as well to give
them the advantages enjoyed by a highly mobile infantry. They should not try
to seize large objectives and engage in "Homeric battles" but concentrate on
small, successive actions. As a result of facing a hundred guerrilla cells of five
persons, the police would have to cede terrain, especially at night: "If at night
the city belongs to the guerrilla and, in part, to the police by day, then in the
end the war will be won by whoever endures longest."37
Writing shortly after the Paris events of May 1968, Guillen attributed a
leading role in the revolutionary process to the students; he was one of the few
Latin American guerrilla strategists to give them first place in the list of
revolutionary forces. (Students were, of course, the strongest element in most
guerrilla movements but guerrilla strategists usually felt self-conscious about
this fact and preferred not to mention it.) The support of eighty percent of the
population was needed according to Guillen. If they received such support,
the guerrillas could win the war even though imperialism held an overall
superiority of a thousand to one; for at a given place and time the guerrillas
could still be superior to the enemy in numbers and firepower by five to one.
Guillen agreed with the Guevara-Debray thesis about the role of the vanguard.
In Brazil there was no working-class vanguard, but there was a Marxist
vanguard of professional revolutionaries and, in the final analysis, it was of no
importance from which class the cadres hailed. Guillen's impact on
the Tupamaros was considerable in the early years of their struggle but he
was by no means their uncritical admirer. He repeatedly dwelled on certain
errors, tactical and fundamental, which he thought they committed. 38 They
had rented houses in the cement jungles of Montevideo, thus establishing a
"heavy rearguard" and "fixed fronts" for billeting, food, medical supplies and
armaments. This exposed them to mass detentions and the seizure of their
arms. They had excelled during the first hit-and-run phase of the struggle but
then failed to escalate their operations by using larger units. Such advice
smacks of armchair strategy. The main problem for all "urban guerrillas" was
one of broadening their ranks. While their cadres were few and the scale of
their operations small, they were relatively secure. The more numerous they
became, the more difficult were the problems of housing and supply, and the
easier they could be identified and captured.
Guillen opposed unnecessary violence: in a country in which the death
penalty had been abolished, it was self-defeating to condemn to death even
the most hated enemies of the people. A popular army that was not a symbol
of justice, equality, liberty and security could not win popular support in the
struggle against a dehumanized tyranny. Hence his opposition to the
Tupamaros' "prisons of the people," to indiscriminate execution of hostages, to
the use of violence against subordinates: surely there was little point in de-
feating one despotism only to replace it by another. Guillen opposed the cult
of leadership (of which, however, the Tupamaros were much freer than other
Latin American guerrilla movements), and he complained about their
ideological shortcomings. In many ways they had become overly
professionalized and militarized, and did not really know what kind of
revolution they wanted. On the one hand they forbade their members to
criticize the pro-Moscow Communists, on the other they gave publicity to
conservative nationalists. The kidnapping of the alleged CIA agent Dan
Mitrione was a success, his execution a mistake. When the Brazilian consul in
Uruguay was kidnapped, his wife appeared as a heroine of love and marital
fidelity: "Every cruzeiro she collected" in an appeal for his release "was a vote
against the Tupamaros and indirectly against the Brazilian guerrillas." By
demanding large sums of money for political hostages, the Tupamaros came
perilously close to resembling a political Mafia. There was a historical irony
about would-be liberators who indirectly lived off the surplus of the very
people they wanted to liberate.
In later years, Guillen became more appreciative of the oper-
ations of the Chilean MIR and the Argentinian ERP, who demonstrated their
ability to mobilize large masses, and who, unlike the Tupamaros, were more
critical of both right-wing nationalism and Communist opportunism.
Towards the end of 1972 he was inclined to write off the Tupamaros
altogether; they had served as the best revolutionary academy in the world
with regard to "urban guerrilla" warfare but their tactical brilliance was
unmatched by their strategy and politics. Their supreme command had
become centralized, it knew all, said all, did all. Such excessive centralization
proved fatal in the end.
Carlos Marighela is more famous than Guillen, partly in view of his active
participation in the armed struggle, partly because his Minimanual was
banned in so many countries — though it contained very little that was not
known to any experienced urban terrorist. After he left the Communist party
in 1966 he was primarily concerned with tactical questions. His views on
strategy were quite inconsistent: in 1966 he regarded guerrilla warfare merely
as one form of mass resistance and did not expect that it would be the signal
for a popular rising; he thought that the center of gravity should be in the
countryside. Yet he proceeded to act quite differently.39 Three years later he
still argued that the decisive battles should be fought in the rural districts (the
"strategic area") and that the fighting in the city was tactical and
complementary only.40 His own activities were however concentrated on the
"complementary" front and he would frequently and incongruously refer to
the strategic importance of the great conurbations.
Marighela's basic approach was as radical as that of Fidel and Guevara. Not
only was it the duty of every revolutionary to make the revolution, not only
was his single commitment to the revolution, not only did the guerrilla
constitute both the political and military command of the revolution, "the
urban guerrilla's reason for existence, the basic action in which he acts and
survives, is to shoot" (Minimanual). Towards the end of his life, he no longer
revealed any interest in political goals, let alone political agitation. Robert
Moss rightly noted that his later writings read like manuals of military drill,
not political manifestos.41 A left-wing Brazilian critic later wrote that the
"fetishist attachment" to, and the over-estimation of, unlimited terrorism led to
confusion, profound mistakes and, ultimately, to defeat. 42 Marighela's
approach, very briefly, was one of provocation, compelling the enemy to
"transform the political situation into a military one." He assumed that, in the
process, the government would alienate large sections of the
population, particularly the intelligentsia and the clergy. North American

imperialism would have to be called in for help, and this would add to the
popularity of the insurgents' struggle. The fundamental objective was to shake
the basis upon which the system rested — the Rio-Sao Paulo-Belo Horizonte
triangle (whose baseline runs from Rio to Sao Paulo) — for it was there that
the economic, political and military power was concentrated. In Mari-ghela's
scheme, a great deal of freedom of action was left to the small units; they were
to decide whether to launch an attack without reference to the high command.
They were perfectly entitled to assassinate not just the commanders of the
security forces but also low-ranking "agents." The struggle should proceed on
three fronts — the guerrilla front, the mass front (meaning a combat front, not
agitation among the masses) and the support network. Ideally, all these fronts
ought to be equally effective, but Marighela realized that the revolutionary
movement was bound to develop unevenly. He insisted that the constantly
expanding guerrilla front carry out a scorched-earth policy to create alarm
among the dictators. His aversion to any bureaucratic hierarchy dominated by
apparatchiki came to the fore time and again: in the revolutionary
organization only missions and operations were to be prized, not rank and
position; only those prepared to participate actively in the struggle and bear
the sacrifices had the right to be leaders. No complex chain of command, no
political commissars or supervisors should be set up; a strategic command and
regional coordination groups would direct the military organization. The
regional command, in Marighela's scheme, would not be allowed permanent
contact with the mobile units: no one should know all about everything and
everybody. Like many other guerrilla leaders before him, Marighela stressed
the importance of training ("everything depends on marksmanship"). The
personal qualities needed by an urban guerrilla were, above all, initiative,
unlimited patience, and fortitude in adversity.
The basic unit in the urban guerrilla army "is the firing group," consisting
of no more than four or five people; a "firing team constituted two such
groups operating separately. Motorization was absolutely essential in the
logistics of urban terrorism. The great advantages for the urban guerrilla were
surprise in attack, a better knowledge of the terrain, greater mobility and
speed, a better information network. Basic tactics always employed the hit-
and-run principle, to attack and to get away. Attacks should be launched from
all directions, in an endless series of unforeseeable operations, thereby
preventing the enemy from concentrating his apparatus of re-
pression; combat and decisive battle should always be avoided. Bank raids,
Marighela noted, were the most popular form of action: "we have almost made
them a kind of entrance exam for apprenticeship in the technique of
revolutionary war."43 In addition there were to be ambushes, occupation of
schools, factories and radio stations, provided that the withdrawal from fixed
targets was well planned. The list of the urban guerrilla's revolutionary
assignments was long and varied; he should defend popular demonstrations,
liberate prisoners, seize weapons from army barracks, execute agents of the
government, kidnap policemen and Americans. Public figures such as artists
or sportsmen should be kidnapped only in special circumstances when one
could be reasonably sure that popular opinion would favor such action.
Transport should be sabotaged, oil pipelines cut, and fuel stocks
systematically depleted. Bomb attacks should be undertaken only by those
technically proficient, "but they may include destroying human lives."
Spreading baseless rumors was part of the war of nerves waged by the guer -
rilla, and "information" should be supplied to foreign embassies, the U.N.,
human rights committees and other such bodies. Marighela ended his treatise
with some reflections about the political results of urban guerrilla war: the
people would blame the government not the terrorists for the various
calamities that befell them. He apparently regarded democratic reforms as the
great danger on the road to revolution, and he hoped that in the chaos brought
about by the "urban guerrilla" war, elections would appear a mere farce and
the political parties thoroughly discredited. The future society, as he saw it,
would be built not by long-winded speakers and signers of resolutions but by
those steeled in the struggle, an armed alliance of workers, peasants and
students. The participation of intellectuals and artists in urban guerrilla
warfare would be of the greatest advantage in the Brazilian context. Of great
importance, too, was the support of the clergy, with regard to communication
with the mass of the people. "This is especially true of workers, peasants and
the women of the country [sic!]."
It is only too easy to detect major ideological inconsistencies in Marighela's
writing. But there is no doubt whatsoever about his fanatical dedication to the
cause, the burning fervor pervading all his writings, and it was this single-
minded advocacy of the revolutionary deed which attracted so many young
followers, willing to engage in suicidal operations. In theory, urban terror was
only one element in a broader revolutionary strategy, but Marighela was not
prepared to wait in vain for the rural guerrilla foci to emerge. So
great was his preoccupation with his spectacular exploits in the towns that
there was no time and energy left to promote insurgency in the countryside.
Marighela was killed in a gun battle in Sao Paulo in November 1969; his
successor met a similar fate, and Captain Lamarca, the head of the even more
militant and action-orientated VPR, was shot two years later. By 1971 the
Brazilian security forces had defeated the terrorist challenge even though
sporadic operations continued. Economic prosperity may have played a part
in this, but the growing modernization of counterinsurgency and the use of
torture by the police were more decisive. Debray mentions American financial
assistance to the Brazilian police; according to the figures he provides, these
grants amounted to a million dollars per year. Latin American guerrillas are
known to have seized bigger sums in a single bank raid or as ransom for their
hostages. Under torture, even some of the most trusted and steadfast
guerrillas betrayed their comrades and, since urban terrorists were far more
vulnerable than rural guerrillas once one link of the organizational chain was
broken, they suffered irreparable losses. The Brazilian "urban guerrillas" could
effect the downfall of a quasi-democratic regime and promote the emergence
of a dictatorship which would not hesitate to apply torture and other means of
counterterror, but they were not strong enough to survive the backlash.
Torture evoked much protest but did not provide new recruits; the terrorists
became more and more isolated, their heroism was admired but not emulated;
even the left came to consider their action as, at best, pointless.
Urban terror in its most sophisticated and, for a while, most effective form,
made its appearance in Uruguay, the very country which Guevara thought the
least likely scene of armed struggle because it was the most democratic. The
Tupamaros (MNL) came into being in 1963; the heyday of their movement
was between 1968 and 1972. 44 The movement did not, however, produce a
great deal of literature; its programatic writings were few and far between.
Their doctrine was first outlined in the form of a catechism, "Thirty questions
to a Tupamaro," circulated in late 1967. 45 The basic difference between the
Tupamaros and other left-wing organizations was, as they put it, the emphasis
on revolutionary action rather than theoretical statements; revolution is not
made by the elegant phrase. Once accepted that the basic principles of socialist
revolutions are given and tested in countries such as Cuba, "there is nothing
more to discuss." An armed movement can and should start operating at
any time. The Tupamaros shared the conviction of the early Fidel that action
should proceed "with or without a party." Strategies adopted elsewhere in
Latin America could not be applied to Uruguay if only because the prospects
for rural foci were almost nonexistent. This was compensated for, however,
by the fact that the enemy was exceedingly weak. The Uruguayan security
forces counted only some twelve thousand men, badly equipped and trained,
"one of the weakest organizations of repression in America." Montevideo was
a city sufficiently large and polarized by social conflict to make it an arena
more suited to the struggle than many other centers on the continent.
Overcoming their distaste for political programs, the Tupamaros produced a
platform in 1971 but it contains little of interest since it closely resembled the
programs of other left-wing movements on the continent, referring to agrarian
reform, the nationalization of big factories, the expulsion of "imperialism," etc.
More revealing were their occasional pronouncements on practical issues. The
Tupamaros specialized in kidnappings, and for three years the government
failed to retrieve a single hostage. A Tupamaro leader stated that the
kidnappings were part of an overall strategy designed both to obtain the
release of captured comrades and to undermine the foundations of the re-
gime.46 In contrast to other Latin American guerrilla movements, the
Tupamaros endeavored to keep out of the ideological quarrels of the left; this
was probably easier for them to do successfully than for guerrillas elsewhere,
for the Tupamaros had a virtual monopoly as far as guerrilla operations in
Uruguay were concerned. They were the most internationally minded of all
Latin American guerrillas and took up Camilo Torres's idea of a continental
organization of armed forces. This internationalism was probably not
unrelated to the exposed situation of Uruguay; they very much feared an
invasion from Brazil or Argentina. Their social composition was even more
middle and upper class than that of other guerrilla movements: these were the
sons and daughters of the establishment. (According to an apocryphal
account, a Ph.D degree was aconditio sine qua non for membership.) In 1971
they decided to join the other forces of the left in a broad popular front (frente
amplio) to contest the election; their candidate, however, did rather badly,
receiving less than twenty percent of the vote.
Organizationally, the experience of the Tupamaros is interesting; they
managed to combine "strategic concentration" with tactical decentralization
and compartamentacion of the basic units. This made it difficult for the
security forces to paralyze their organiza-
tion despite frequent arrests. The Tupamaros were the only Latin American
guerrillas to establish something akin to a countergovern-ment with "prisons
of the people" and hospitals. They greatly undermined the authority of the
government, disrupting the civil administration and the economic life of the
country. Eventually, the democratic regime was replaced by a dictatorship,
the army was brought in and liquidated Tupamaro activities with surprising
ease. Some observers have explained the defeat of the Tupamaros in 1972
with reference to their mistaken decision of the previous year to open their
ranks to many new members. But while this may have contributed to their
downfall, the main reason was apparently the loss of revolutionary elan.
Although the decline of the Tupamaros took place (unlike the downfall of the
ALN in Brazil) against a background of severe economic crisis, there appears
to be no close connection between guerrilla success (Cuba) or failure with the
economic situation. Debray correctly noted in retrospect that, in digging the
grave of liberal Uruguay, the Tupamaros also dug their own.47
THE USES OF TERROR
The shift from rural guerrilla warfare to operations in the cities was by no
means limited to Latin America. There had been urban terrorism in Palestine
during the last years of the British Mandate, in Cyprus and Aden, and, of
course, in Ireland. In some instances only sporadic actions by very small
groups were involved, elsewhere the struggle lasted for years and was well
organized. "Urban guerrilla" factions were plagued by internal division not
less than their precursors in the countryside. Ulster and Spain provide typical
examples. The IRA split into two factions in 1969: the more militant "Provi-
sionals" advocated the establishment of a thirty-two county Democratic
Socialist Republic based "on the 1916 Proclamation, justice and Christianity,"
and attacked the "Officials" of the IRA for their Leninist ideological bias and
their failure to launch massive terrorist action in Northern Ireland. 48 The
Basque nationalist movement split into several factions. ETA VI propagated a
Trotskyism of sorts, dissociating itself from Basque "bourgeois nationalism"; 49
while supporting terrorist operations in principle, it concentrated on political
activities. Meanwhile ETA V, another faction of young militants (who derived
their inspiration from the Algerian insur-
gents) engaged in spectacular terrorist acts, decrying the Marxist

"vegetarianism" of their opponents. Unlike Guillen and Marighela few of the
leaders of these urban terrorist groups attempted to provide a new doctrine,
but they were very ready to furnish personal accounts of impressions and
explanations. Pierre Vallieres, one of the leaders of the Quebec separatists
(FLQ) combined Paris Left Bank anarcho-Communism with a Fanonian belief
in the cathartic effects of revolutionary violence.50
For a somewhat more systematic ideological exposition and an attempt to
present a coherent strategic concept one has to turn to the advocates of urban
guerrilla warfare in West Germany and the United States. The groups
involved were small in numbers, the effect of their operations insignificant,
but they attracted a great deal of publicity and, at least to that extent,
succeeded in achieving their aims. The Baader-Meinhof group (RAF — Rote
Armee Frak-tion), whose origins were in the student movement of the 1960s,
stated in their first manifesto that the formation of armed resistance groups for
purposes of "urban guerrilla" operations was both possible and justifiable.51
The overall aim was the seizure of power; the main obstacle facing the RAF
was, according to the leaders of the group, the unfortunate fact that the public
had been immunized by counterrevolutionary propaganda.52 With attacks
against state oppression however, the masses could be revolutionized —
bombs would help to awaken their consciousness. The state apparatus was to
be demoralized, and partly paralyzed, thereby destroying the myth of its
invulnerability and ubiquity.53 In the first phase of the struggle the main task
would be to disseminate the idea of an armed struggle, to collect arms, and to
organize small units of three, five or ten members. During the second phase
the actions of a minority would turn into a mass struggle; with the support of
the masses, militias were to be formed in those areas where the enemy was so
much weakened as to be no longer able to concentrate his forces. Critics noted
that the concept up to this stage closely followed Maoist strategy — simply
transferring it to the cities. 54 During the third and final phase, mass action
(street demonstrations, strikes and barricades) would support the terror of the
guerrilla units. Following the Latin American example, the RAF aimed at
provoking the authorities into using increasingly brutal retaliation, massacres,
and "Fascist concentration camps." The RAF regarded their struggle as part of
a worldwide campaign against American imperialism, but this emphasis on
the connections with national liberation movements in Asia, Africa, the
Middle East and Latin America evoked
criticism from within. A former leading member of the group, the lawyer
Horst Mahler, noted that operations in such a context were no longer urban
guerrilla warfare but the establishment of a fifth column of the Third World
inside West Germany — a concept unlikely to appeal to the masses.55 He also
criticized the elitist character of the RAF, "the total isolation from the masses."
In their very first declarations the RAF announced the intention to combine
legal political activity (Basisarbeit) with the armed struggle. Such a
combination, however, soon came to be regarded as impractical be it only
because it would not escape the attention of the police. Mahler argued that
even though it was exceedingly difficult for individuals to engage
simultaneously in legal and illegal activities, the RAF as such should have
found a way to overcome this obstacle. The movement needed a (civilian)
base; some of the operations initially envisaged against absentee landlords
and speculators were highly appropriate and it had been a mistake for the
RAF to discontinue them.
According to their original concept, the Raader-Meinhof group
acknowledged that the revolutionary proletariat was the only force capable of
guaranteeing victory over capitalism. In time the RAF would become the
mailed fist of a (new) Communist party. This concept too fell by the wayside
and was replaced by a new strategy which (Mahler claimed) was rooted in the
anti-authoritarian phase of the student movement, with its counterculture, its
"moralistic" attitude towards politics and other "petty bourgeois" ideological
remnants.
The leaders of the RAF group were neither "instinctive" guerrillas nor well-
educated theoreticians, but activists whose imagination had been caught by
the armed struggle in other parts of the world. They wanted to apply the
"lessons" of the Far East and Latin America to conditions that were utterly
different. It would be unrewarding to submit their military concepts and
political ideas to rigorous analysis. They never made it clear what kind of
revolution they had in mind, or whether a political party was needed to carry
it out. They argued that the urban insurrections of the past such as the Paris
Commune or the Russian revolution of November 1917 were of no use as a
model for Germany in the 1970s. But they never indicated a more
appropriate historical model, nor did they develop one of their own. On the
other hand, they were heirs to a German tradition in which at least lip service
ought to be paid to theory. They could not possibly reject ideology as did
segments of the American New Left. ("Fuck programs! The goal of the
revolution
is to abolish programs and turn spectators into actors. It's a do-it-yourself

revolution. . . .56) What mattered in the last resort, however, was the thirst for
action not a conviction based on "scientific theory."
But for the Germans' belief that all self-respecting terrorists needed a theory
there were obvious similarities between the RAF and the small groups of
white American "urban guerrillas" who developed out of the civil rights and
anti-Vietnam demonstrations, and the university sit-ins. They were rooted in
the age of radical chic when instructions for the fabrication of Molotov
cocktails were featured on the cover of a journal dedicated to the critical study
of English letters. Ideologically, these groups were inchoate and their
manifestos were illiterate — the illiteracy of liberal, middle-class schools, not
of the ghetto. Their common denominator was the destruction of the present
political and social order, but beyond this it was a case of everyman-his-own-
urban-guerrilla.
The main white "urban guerrilla' faction, the Weathermen, emerged when
the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) split into three groups in late
1969. Many of its members had visited Cuba and Vietnam and wanted to
bring the war back home: "We are adapting the classic guerrilla strategy of the
Viet Cong and the urban guerrilla strategy of the Tupamaros to our own
situation here in the most technically advanced country in the world."57
While guerrilla movements elsewhere fought for national liberation, the
Weathermen maintained that in America the urban guerrilla has to be
antinational. For the revolution to be defined in national terms within so
extreme an oppressor nation as the U.S. would be tantamount to "imperialist
national chauvinism." But there was at least one section of the American
people to which the concept of national liberation was applicable. Hence the
appeal to build a movement which would support the blacks who, in the past,
had fought almost alone. The Weathermen contacted the Black Panthers but
these rejected the call for a joint urban guerrilla war, instead suggesting a
mere alliance.
The Weathermen were not sanguinely optimistic about the prospects of
revolution in America; they saw it occurring, if at all, as a belated reaction to a
successful world revolution. They were aware that it was pointless to appeal
to workers or peasants, and they regarded the university campus as their
main base. If Guevara (sic) had taught them that revolutionaries moved like
fish in the sea, the alienation and contempt of the young people for America
had created the ocean they needed. Guns and grass were united in the
youth underground, freaks were revolutionaries and revolutionaries were

freaks, as one of their communiques put it. The manifestos of the Weathennen
and of the SLA (Symbionese Liberation Army) betrayed the influence of a
hedonistic counterculture; whatever they had learned from Guevara, it was
not his appeal for an ascetic life. Making love, smoking dope and loading guns
were all part of the revolutionary process, as they envisaged it. The "most
potentially explosive conflict" brewing in America was between men and
women and the program of the SLA stated expressis verbis that a system had
to be created whereby people would not be forced to stay in personal
relationships when they preferred to be free of them. 58 The Weathermen's
interest in politics was strictly limited; they were not concerned with training
revolutionary cadres, let alone the education of the masses. The main aim was
to scare and shock "honky America" and to this end all violent means,
however barbaric, were appropriate. They approved of the murder by the
Manson gang of the actress Sharon Tate, eight months' pregnant; to shoot a
"genocidal robot policeman" was regarded as a sacred act. 59 Subsequently, the
Weathermen copied, without marked success, the strategy of certain black
groups who saw the Lumpenproletariat and criminal elements as their natural
recruits. Even later the SLA, with its emblem of a seven-headed cobra ("a
170,000 -year-old sign signifying god and life"), aimed specifically at enlisting
nonpolitical convicts into its ranks; they, after all, were only the victims of the
system. What attracted a few young men and women (more women
apparently than men) was not ideology but a life style, above all,
"togetherness." A member later recalled that what had struck him was "that
they were a family, a big very tight family. I wanted to be part of that. People
were touching each other... ."60
The aims of the black urban extremist groups by comparison were far more
tangible. They did not complain about "our colossal alienation" but did
demand full employment, decent housing, education, and the power to
determine the destiny of the black community. Some of them, such as the
Cleaver faction of the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army, were
advocates of urban terror. The policeman was the representative of the
occupation army in the black ghetto; the weapon was needed to educate the
masses. Negro youth were called upon to show their mettle by brandishing
guns. America was to be burned and looted, to be cleansed with fire, blood
and death. Founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, the Black Panthers
were subsequently plagued by as much internal
guerrilla doctrine today
division as their white counterparts. Stokely Carmichael, their erstwhile prime

minister, a "cultural nationalist," was denounced for "not maturing to
embrace" the ideology of the party, i.e., "the historical experience of Black
people in America translated through Marxism-Leninism."61
The fullest exposition of their doctrine was provided by Eldridge Cleaver,
minister of propaganda. Marxism-Leninism was an outgrowth of European
problems and a new ideological synthesis was called for to suit American
conditions. There was no all-American proletariat just as there was no ail-
American Lumpenproletariat. The working class, as he saw it, was the right
wing of the proletariat, the Lumpen constituting the left wing. It was not the
Lumpen who were the parasites, but the working class. The streets belonged
to the Lumpen, and it was in the streets that the Lumpen would rebel. They
could not strike because they had no secure relationship with the means of
production: they had been locked outside the economy. Their immediate
oppressor was the pig police who confronted them daily. Thus the Lumpen,
who had been analyzed out of the revolution by the (white) Marxists-
Leninists, would hit out at all the structures around them.62
The Cleaver faction was eventually ousted from the Black Panther party
which, under Huey Newton, moved more and more towards community
action. The Cleaverists on the other hand advocated the combination of above-
ground political action with antipolice terror, bank robberies, the execution of
businessmen and the kidnapping of diplomats. George Jackson, who was
killed during an attempted jailbreak in August 1971, envisaged in his book
Blood in My Eye (1972) resistance to the Fascist American government as a
"fluid, mobile, self-impelled attrition of people's urban guerrilla activities
lying in wait inside the black colony." Other spokesmen stressed that they
regarded themselves as the "Babylonian equivalent" of the Tupamaros,
Frelimo and the NLF.63 If there was only a thin line between bandits and
revolutionaries this (they assured the flock) should not cause undue
apprehension, for many famous revolutionaries had started their careers as
bandits before becoming politicized. Furthermore, there were good tactical
reasons for letting revolutionary acts seem like acts of banditry.64
The bark of the American "urban guerrilla" was considerably worse than
his bite. By late 1970 the Weathermen had failed; the operations of the SLA in
1974 were no more than the actions of a few unstable individuals, the like of
whom have always existed on the margins of a violent society. Eldridge
Cleaver, after a prolonged
stay in Algiers, discovered that the "Babylon" from which he had fled in anger
and disgust had much to recommend itself. Thus the appeals to conduct
"urban guerrilla warfare" petered out.
During its heyday urban terrorism had presented a problem for the
American and West German police but politically it failed to become a force to
be reckoned with. The white American revolutionaries, in the words of a
friendly critic, were the children of middle-class families who knew no
oppression. They substituted their own personal hang-ups and moods for the
demands of "the people," claiming to speak for a people they had never met.
The black militants were acting in a milieu far more congenial to violent
action and their revendications were much less far-fetched. But they too found
little sympathy for their cause within their community. Their protest was
nationalist in inspiration, or, to be precise, racialist — a response to the racial
oppression American Negroes had encountered throughout their history. The
occasional invocations of Marxism should not be given too much weight, and
the same goes, a f o r t i o r i , for the Weathermen and the SLA. Their
problem was not the lack of freedom but a surfeit of freedom; their godfather
was neither Lenin nor Mao but liberalism running wild.
FANON
Except when they were made in conjunction with separatist national

movements, all attempts in the 1960s to conduct guerrilla warfare in the
economically developed, industrialized societies of Western Europe and the
United States generally failed. Guerrilla warfare was more successful in Africa
against the remaining European colonial outposts. Most African countries
attained national independence without an armed struggle but some did not,
and it was in these parts that fighting occurred and that attempts were made
to formulate a specific African guerrilla doctrine. Of the ideologists of armed
struggle, Frantz Fanon, a native of Martinique and a psychiatrist by
profession, was the most important by far — not so much as regards his actual
impact on guerrilla warfare, but certainly with regard to the repercussions of
his writings outside Africa. Fanon did comment on occasion on military issues
in the narrow sense — such as the question of arms supply to the Algerian
FLN (which had become difficult to secure following French
counterinsurgency measures).65 But it was not for such technical
advice that his fame spread; rather he provided a new ideology on the
cathartic role of violence in the African revolution. Violence, as he saw it, was
a cleansing force, liberating the African from his inferiority complex, his
despair and inaction; it made him fearless and restored self-respect; it bound
the Africans together as a whole. 66 "Violence alone, violence committed by the
people, violence organized and educated by its leaders makes it possible for
the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them." The Mau
Mau insistence that each member of the group strike a blow at the victim was
a step in the right direction, since it required each guerrilla to assume
responsibility for the death of a settler. Marxism-Leninism was acceptable as
far as it went, but it did not encompass the colonial situation, ignoring its
racist aspects.
The idea of violence is central to Fanon's thought but he was a stranger to
Africa, and it is interesting to note that he has been far more widely read and
admired among American blacks than among Africans. He also had many
white admirers among the European and American left even though certain
aspects of his views were sometimes regarded as embarrassing or disturbing:
in part because such murderous humanism was difficult to digest, and partly
because the origins of the cult of violence were not, to put it cautiously,
altogether respectable. It is not really material whether Fanon had been
familiar with Sorel's writings67 — the uncomfortable fact still remained that
the ideological precursors of Italian Fascism, such as Corradini, had already
argued that the proletarian nation has a moral obligation to resort to noble
violence. Mussolini himself had declared that there was a violence that liber-
ated and a violence that enslaved, a moral violence on the one hand and a
stupid, immoral violence on the other. Whereas Sorel had created his
mystique of violence in the context of the struggle of a working-class
vanguard, Fanon saw the peasantry and the Lumpenproletariat as the
spontaneously revolutionary forces. The peasants, with nothing to lose and
everything to gain, he argued, were the first to discover that violence paid off.
The working class, however, pampered by the colonial regime, was in a
comparatively privileged position. The Marxist idea about the history-making
role of the urban proletariat had been disputed before by Wright Mills and
others: but Fanon went even beyond Bakunin in his enthusiasm for the role of
"the hopeless dregs of humanity," the Pimps, petty criminals, hooligans and
prostitutes. He thought that their revolutionary potential was enormous and,
if the insurgents did not give it full attention, colonialism would make use of
it.68
This concept was not likely to endear him to the Communists and neither was
his argument that there was "no true bourgeoisie" in Africa.
The critics argued that Fanon had got his facts wrong, that he j
confusion and division to the revolutionary movement. 69 In fact, Fanon was
brought
more acute than his critics; the Lumpenproletariat (given a broader definition
than his own) was about as patriotic as the rest of the population, and did play a
part in the armed struggle. There were few workers in the guerrilla units simply
because there were not many of them in Africa in the first place; the rank and
file consisted of peasants. In other respects Fanon revealed a naivete uncommon
among students of the human psyche. He argued that the people who played a
violent role in the national liberation would allow no one to set themselves up
as "liberators"; one could hardly think of a more mistaken prediction of the
political future of Africa. It is true that on various occasions he expressed grave
misgivings about the political regimes likely to emerge after decolonization
which, he feared, would only constitute a "minimal readaptation." He suspected
that the new leaders would not heed his appeal to turn their backs on European
civilization, to destroy European institutions, to make an end, not only to
colonial rule, but also to the corruption of the settlers, to the brightly lit towns
with their asphalt and garbage cans.
Fanon died at the early age of thirty-six. His influence on the African
political elites was not lasting; their main interest was not in the cultural
aspects of the African revolution; they were preoccupied with economic and
administrative problems, or with simply bolstering their own positions. What
Fanon had written on the evils' of bureaucracy and one-party, one-leader
dictatorships was not of the slightest use to them.70
CABRAL
Passing on to the writings of Amilcar Cabral, one descends from the rarified
heights of existentialism to the well-trodden paths of Marx-ism-Leninism,
from a Dostoyevskian novel to sober and unexciting political-socioeconomic
analysis. Cabral, who hailed from the Cap Verde islands, was assassinated in
Conakry in 1972 by political rivals. Like many other guerrilla leaders in the
Portuguese colonies, he was of mixed mulatto rather than of pure Negro
origin
and, like Mondlane, the head of Frelimo, he married a white woman. He

studied agriculture in Lisbon, became a Leninist, and for several years
worked as an adviser to the Portuguese government in Africa. Cabral agreed
with Fanon about the necessity of an armed struggle. Although he wrote from
time to time about the liberating role of violence without which there could be
no national liberation, he never engaged in the fetishization of violence. From
time to time, he even submitted offers to the Portuguese authorities to
negotiate a settlement. Like Fanon, he stressed the importance of the
participation of African women in the struggle for liberation, and agreed with
Guevara's thesis that there was no need to wait for a revolutionary situation,
one could create it.71 In contrast to Fanon's emphasis on psychological and
cultural issues, however, he was far more interested in economic
development. While Fanon hardly ever mentioned the role of the political
party in the struggle, this was a central issue for Cabral, whose assessment of
the forces likely to support the armed struggle also differed greatly from that
of Fanon.
To begin with Cabral and his comrades of PAIGC faced great difficulties in
winning over the peasants. The slogan "the land to him who works it" could
not be applied to Guinea-Bissau, as he admitted, because there the land did
belong to the peasants; neither were there big land holdings — the land was
village property. Without concentrations of foreign settlers (Cabral wrote), it
was not at all easy to prove to the peasant that he was being exploited, as
Fanon had argued.72 Extreme suffering alone did not produce the prise de
conscience needed for the national liberation struggle.
Cabral's view on the role of the petty bourgeoisie in the armed struggle is
of considerable interest; he admitted that in Guinea-Bissau, as in other parts
of Africa, it played a leading role in the struggle. Yet, economically, it was
without a power base and hence could not seize political power. The
historical dilemma facing it was in Cabral's words either to betray the
revolution or to commit suicide as a class. 73 This assumption was not however
shared by a close and very sympathetic observer of the Guinean scene, who,
on the contrary, reached the' conclusion that the lower middle class was the
natural holder of power in tropical Africa because it was the only class
possessing knowledge, know-how and organization.74
The political party which Cabral founded was organized according to the
Leninist principles of "democratic centralism," and though its statutes
provided for "collective leadership," all important decisions were taken by
Cabral himself. He acted not only as
head of the Central Committee, and as commander in chief, but also as

secretary for political and foreign affairs. While expressing strong support for
the Soviet Union, he tried not to become implicated in the Soviet conflicts
with Cuba and China. The Chinese initially supported PAIGC but later grew
markedly cooler in view of Cabral's "opportunism" vis-a-vis Moscow.
Cabral had no military experience when he launched the guerrilla war but
he devoted more time and energy to providing guidelines for the armed
struggle than most other African guerrilla leaders. PAIGC enjoyed several
important advantages in its fight. The army facing it represented the weakest
of all European colo--nial powers; when the insurrection broke out there were
altogether one thousand Portuguese soldiers in Guinea-Bissau. (The total num-
ber of inhabitants was about half a million.) Furthermore, PAIGC had a
permanent base in neighboring Conakry for the training of its cadres and for
supplies. (There was no such base to support guerrilla warfare in the Cap
Verde islands and no armed struggle took place there.) Early on in the
campaign, almost one-half of Guinea-Bissau passed into the hands of the
PAIGC. Admittedly, this was the less important part; the Portuguese had
never really controlled the whole country, and Cabral noted that "we had
established guerrilla bases even before the guerrilla struggle began." Within a
year or two after the start of the war, Cabral's forces organized semi-regular
units and popular militias, and soon a Northern and Southern front came into
being.75 The Portuguese forces were too few in number to engage in systematic
on-the-ground attacks against rebel bases, and their air force insufficiently
strong to inflict decisive damage on the rebels. The greatest obstacle with
which PAIGC had to contend in the early phase of the struggle was the tribal
structure of the population. There was no lack of enthusiasm to join the
struggle, but guerrilla chieftains tended to act independently; there were, in
Cabral's words, "isolationist tendencies." The command decided to carry out a
major purge and at a later stage it became official policy to appoint a member
of one tribal group as commander of another. 76 Furthermore, PAIGC had to
contend with rival groups supported by Senegal. PAIGC carefully avoided
criticizing religious beliefs and superstitions and did not ban the use of fetishes
and amulets (Mezinhas), on the assumption that the guerrillas would soon
learn that a "trench was the best amulet" (Cabral). It should be noted in passing
that the religious issue was of considerable importance to most African
liberation movements. Replying to European left-wing criticism, an Algerian
writer stressed that in
a colonial country, where the dominant religion was persecuted, rejection of
Islam was a sign of snobbery on the part of a Western-assimilated, intellectual
elite, who were not only detached from the people but neutralized and
corrupted by the ideology of the oppressor.77 The journal of the FLN
frequently noted that, of all the Islamic peoples, the Algerians were perhaps
the most attached to their faith. 78 But a distinction must be drawn between the
Algerian rebels, most of whom were devout Muslims quite irrespective of
whether Islam was "persecuted" or not, and the Marxist-Leninists, who
tolerated religion for tactical reasons, hoping that sooner or later it would
disappear.
Cabral's realistic approach can also be gauged from his attitude towards
nationalism and Panafricanism. He was on close terms with other African
revolutionary leaders, but unlike Fanon, or Nkru-mah in his last years, he did
not think that African unity was an aim attainable in the forseeable future. He
was perhaps the most intelligent, certainly the most sober, of the African
guerrilla leaders; comparisons with Guevara, therefore, seem a little far-
fetched. Marx-ism-Leninism was the great formative influence in his youth,
but when in later years he referred to the overriding importance of the
"historical reality" of each people, the fact that social and national liberation
were not for export, the necessity of conducting policy and warfare according
to widely varying local and national conditions, these assessments reflected
the maturing of a mind not given to slavish imitation of foreign models.
Cabral paid his respects both to the Kremlin and the pope; but as the years
passed, the specifically African elements in his thought reasserted themselves
to a certain extent. Like all intellectuals in backward countries, he was a
socialist, but not of the democratic-socialist variety. His socialism was largely
synonymous with nationalism, anti-imperialism, and national liberation, an
ideology very different from the European socialist tradition and impossible
to define within the language of that tradition.
FATAH DOCTRINE
Many guerrilla wars took place in the Middle East and North Africa in the
postwar period — from Algeria to Kurdistan, from southern Sudan to Dhofar
in southern Arabia. But only the Palestinians in their struggle against the state
of Israel developed a more or less
coherent strategic doctrine. Its military models were highly eclectic in

character; there were innumerable references to the lessons of China, Vietnam,
Cuba, Algeria and other wars, even when these were of little relevance to
Arab-Israeli conflict.79 In their choice of tactics, the Palestinians were more
innovative: the Cubans apart, they were the first to hijack planes on a large
scale; they dispatched letterbombs; they attacked Israeli nationals abroad and
non-Israeli Jews. Their operations were launched from bases outside Israel
and some were undertaken by foreigners rather than Arab nationals (the Lod
airport massacre for instance). But these innovations would not be discussed
on the theoretical level. On the contrary, the leading Palestinian organizations
dissociated themselves from operations which made for bad publicity. They
would be attributed to some new ad hoc organization, of which no one had
heard before, and which would evanesce as suddenly as it appeared. Fatah
doctrine adopted guerrilla warfare as the most suitable approach for the
destruction of Israel; it was skeptical of the Arab governments' adherence to
conventional warfare. The Palestinians did not trust the Arab governments on
the assumption that even if they were to decide to go to war and succeed in
defeating the Israelis, this would not result in the destruction of Israeli society
— the ultimate aim of the Palestinians. Furthermore, the conflict had to be
Pales-tinianized for psychological reasons: having tasted the bitterness of
defeat, the shame ought to be wiped out by the Palestinians themselves.
Echoing Fanon, the spokesmen of Fatah argued that violence has a therapeutic
effect, inculcating courage, purifying the individual, and forging a nation. 80
For a variety of reasons the Palestinians wanted to emulate the Cuban
example. The wars in China and Vietnam, unlike the Palestinian struggle, had
been sponsored by Communist parties; furthermore, Mao had uttered doubts
as to whether a protracted war was at all possible in small countries.
Conditions in Algeria had been different, where a great majority of the Arab
inhabitants supported the FLN against a minority of French settlers.
Moreover, unlike Algeria, most of Israel was a plain and thus unfavorable
guerrilla territory. Again unlike Algeria, the insurrection had to be prepared
for from outside the borders of the state.81
Palestinian Arab doctrine frequently referred to the formation of a
"revolutionary vanguard," to a "revolutionary explosion," to various stages in
the struggle for liberation, but these phrases were simply copied from other
guerrilla movements. Less vague were the explanations about the aims: there
would be a long series of
small battles, the Israeli enemy would be worn down, the army would
constantly have to deploy strong forces against the fedayeen. The financial
burden would become intolerable, foreign investment would cease,
immigration would be discouraged, and there would be growing political
polarization within Israel. The rise in casualties would create a climate of
confusion and fear, the "grievance community" would widen, and eventually
the Israelis would realize that unless they successfully resisted Zionism, they
would be crushed by it.82
The critics of the Palestinians have argued that theirs was neither a war of
national liberation nor a guerrilla war. It was not a war of national liberation
because the Palestinians did not want to liberate the inhabitants of Israel, but
to replace them: it was, in other words, a conflict between two peoples for the
same territory. The Palestinians counterclaimed that the Israelis are neither a
nation nor a people. The Jews were to be thrown into the sea according to an
earlier Palestinian guerrilla doctrine; after 1968 this slogan was no longer
used. The aim was not physical destruction but merely the return of the Arab
refugees and the establishment of a democratic, secular state. The slogan of the
"democratic state," however, created further ideological difficulties: the
guerrilla organizations had to insist at the same time on the Arab character of
the future democratic state, intending it to be an inalienable part of the wider
Arab homeland. Because the Palestinian movements failed to establish bases
inside Israel, the guerrilla nature of their operations was open to dispute. If
agents who were not Arabs were enlisted to hijack airplances that were not
Israeli, this was certainly not a "people's war" in any meaningful way. The
spokesmen of the Palestinians would answer that all that counted was the
political effect, namely to publicize the Palestinian cause all over the world.
That the political content of Fatah doctrine remained vague was no mere
accident. The ideologists of Al-Fatah declared that the aim of the movement
was to bring together all the revolutionary forces engaged in the struggle for
liberation, and that "Byzantine discussions" about the social structures to
emerge after liberation were to be eschewed. Unless there was ideological
neutrality, the patriotic effort would be dissipated and the Arab masses
alienated: in a battle for survival ideological differences had to be put aside. 83
Other Palestinian organizations, such as the two factions of the "Popular Front
of the Liberation of Palestine" (PFLP and PDFLP) refused to accept such
ideological neutralism. This group, originally known by the name ANM (Arab
National Movement, Kau-
miyun el arab) was founded in Beirut in the 1950s. Among its slogans, the
concept of "vengeance," with its connotations of Arab tribal vengeance,
featured prominently, and it was also known as the "fire and iron" group. In
the words of its historian, the ANM gradually gave up these slogans under the
pressure of charges of Fascism and fanaticism. 84 They supported Nasserism at
first but later many members announced that they had embraced "scientific
socialism." In 1969 the group split into two factions — one led by Dr. Habash
(PFLP), the other headed by Naif Hawatme. The doctrinal differences between
the two factions were insubstantial, but Hawatme's PDFLP did place greater
emphasis on political rather than terrorist activity; it also regarded itself as the
more Marxist of the two groups, stressing its affinity with Cuban and
Vietnamese socialism. In actual fact the cause of the split was not a clash of
political views so much as a clash of temperaments between the leading
figures. Both factions agreed on certain theoretical formulations, such as the
necessity to conduct the war under the leadership of a revolutionary Marxist-
Leninist party, and to transform the guerrilla war into a "people's war of
liberation." In contrast to Fatah, they inveighed against Arab "reactionary
circles," threatening to blow up installations in the oil-producing countries. On
several occasions they even threatened that a revolution in the Arab world
was the prerequisite for the liberation of Palestine. The leadership of the
Palestinian resistance, as they saw it, had to be taken out of the hands of "petty
bourgeois elements"; only the working class, in coalition with poor peasants,
would safeguard the revolution.85
As so often, however, guerrilla practice was by no means coincident with
guerrilla doctrine: the PFLP did not carry out its threats against Saudi Arabia
or Kuwait, and no attempt was made to put working-class cadres at the helm
of the guerrilla movement. If the PFLP spokesmen proclaimed that they did
not fear the prospect of a third world war for they had nothing to lose, this
assertion also has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Of all guerrilla movements
in history, the Palestinian resistance groups appear the richest by far; the
annual contributions by Arab governments were estimated in 1973 as being
in the range of fifty to a hundred million dollars. 86 The Arab guerrillas have
more to lose than their chains. Neither PFLP nor PDFLP showed any intention
of forming a Marxist-Leninist party, or of cooperating with the existing
Communist parties.
There were many unique elements in the history of the Palestinian
organizations. They became involved in large-scale fighting in their host
countries (Jordan and Lebanon) which felt threatened by
the emergence of a "state within a state." The Palestinians showed great

aptitude in the conduct of propaganda warfare abroad; it was a major political
victory that by the mid-1970s there was growing acceptance of the fact that
the Palestine issue was not just a refugee problem but involved the restoration
of a people's legitimate national rights. This achievement was not however the
result of a successful guerrilla war but of the oil weapon and the increasing
weight of Arab governments in international politics.
NKRUMAH, NASUTION, GRIVAS
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s guerrilla warfare was a topic of the greatest
interest; one U.S. Marine Corps officer called the sixties "the decade of the
guerrilla."87 Those recently engaged in guerrilla warfare were asked to make
their thoughts and their experiences more widely known. Others like Kwame
Nkrumah who had no obvious expertise in the field, practical or theoretical,
nevertheless volunteered obiter dicta on the subject. Nkrumah wrote his book
during his Conakry exile, shortly before his death. 88 On the basis of various
diagrams, he tried to show that colonialism was "primitive imperialism,"
Fascism was "extreme capitalism," that revolutionary warfare was the key to
African freedom, and that a new African nation ought to be established within
the continental framework. His blueprint envisaged the establishment of an
All African People's Revolutionary Army (AAPRA) under the command of an
All African People's Revolutionary Party. The main enemy was neo-
colonialism, and though Nkrumah called for its unmasking, he finally
restricted himself to innuendoes about certain, unnamed regimes. Nor did he
elaborate in his Handbook on the fact that the guerrillas, in all probability,
would have to fight Africans rather than foreign neo-colonialists. Since
Nkrumah had no firsthand knowledge of guerrilla warfare, the military
sections of his book are not original; he borrowed quite indiscriminately from
Mao, Castro, the Algerian and other guerrilla leaders. The resulting admixture
was so vague that it could be applicable to every country and none. The
Communists were ambivalent towards Nkrumah: they welcomed his attempt
to apply Marxist-Leninist ideas to Africa, but were dismayed by his
ideological pretensions, his claims to have established an original system
("Conscientism," "Nkrumahism"). In addition, there were differences on
matters of substance; to give
but one example — neo-colonialism for Nkrumah was "collective
imperialism," whereas the Communists always emphasized the
contradictions between the various imperialist powers.
Abdul Harris Nasution was not among the trailblazers of guerrilla warfare
either, but he commanded more respect as a military authority, in view of his
personal involvement. He was twenty-three years of age when the Japanese
invaded his native Indonesia and had just been commissioned in the
Netherlands Indies armies. He then served in the Civil Defense Forces
established by the Japanese. In the war against the Dutch he first commanded
a division and was later made chief of the operational staff of the Indonesian
armed forces. Subsequently, as Indonesian minister of defense, he had
considerable counterinsurgency experience. His guerrilla handbook, written
in 1953, reminds one of Mao with the politics left out. As a precondition of
success in guerrilla warfare, according to Nasution, the guerrilla's roots must
lie in the people. The counterguer-rilla had to try to sever the guerrilla from
this base, not only by military operations but by political, psychological and
economic action.89 He is not an uncritical admirer of guerrilla warfare, and
time and again stressed its limitations: "How great were the setbacks and how
great the amount of confusion and difficulty that befell us because we played
the role of the guerrilla too long." In his view, guerrilla-mania (the lack of
discipline, planning, the belief that everyone could fight as he wished) was
the most dangerous enemy of the guerrilla movement, having the effect of a
counter-guerrilla movement. Like Mao, Nasution accepted the general fact
that guerrilla warfare alone could not ensure victory; hopefully, it weakened
the enemy by draining his resources. Final victory, as he saw it, could only be
achieved by a regular army in a conventional war.90
An axiomatic statement of this kind might have been true with regard to
China. But it certainly did not apply to Indonesia where resistance against the
Dutch never proceeded beyond sporadic acts of violence. General Grivas's
experience in Cyprus is further proof that generalizations about guerrilla
warfare are of doubtful value; according to the classics of guerrilla warfare, it
should never have happened because the territory was too small. Yet a
handful of combatants, variously estimated between sixty and two hundred,
who never had more than a hundred automatic weapons and five hundred to
six hundred shotguns between them, sustained a fight against several
divisions of British soldiers for four years and eventually ousted the British.91
Conditions were not propitious for a variety of reasons: EOKA was right wing
whereas many Cypriots
gravitated towards Communism; the Turkish minority needless to mention

saw in the EOKA fighter the enemy par excellence. Metaphorically, EOKA was
anything but a fish in a friendly ocean. One unique feature of guerrilla warfare
in Cyprus was the smallness of the units involved, which only rarely exceeded
eight to ten men. Grivas's original plan had been to concentrate his units in the
Olympus and Pentadactylos mountains where the terrain seemed most
suitable. But he soon changed his plan; most of the fighting proceeded in the
lowlands, and eventually in the towns and the suburbs. On the basis of his
experience, Grivas wrote that leadership was more important than terrain.
Some of his best results were achieved in flat and nearly treeless terrain: "It
remains axiomatic that in guerrilla warfare, with able and courageous
leadership, one can take on any undertaking, whatever the nature of the
terrain."92 Most of his observations are in the mainstream of guerrilla doctrine:
there is not set, textbook approach and no universal tactics, each case is
special. Attacks should be sudden blows of short duration, boldly executed,
and followed by instant and rapid withdrawal. The entire territory should be a
single field of battle, without distinction between front and rear. The enemy
should never know where one might strike. The overall strategy should be to
wear the opponent down by prolonged attrition. All this was unexceptional
but it is most unlikely that Grivas would have made any progress had he faced
an enemy more resolute than the British forces in Cyprus. Britain was about to
liquidate the last outposts of its empire in any event and, given these
circumstances, even very slight armed resistance was bound to precipitate the
process. General Grivas's experience shows that guerrilla operations can be
launched in the most unlikely conditions, but they are likely to succeed only if
the enemy is either weak or refuses to take drastic action. There are no
universal lessons to be drawn from the Cyprus experience. The political
constellation was auspicious and this more than compensated EOKA for the
adverse topographical conditions. Guerrillas trying their luck in similar
conditions against a different enemy would have been destroyed.
GUERRILLA WARFARE AND COMMUNIST DOCTRINE
Contrary to widespread belief there is no specific Communist guerrilla

doctrine. Communists have of course been concerned with the seizure of
power, be it as the result of armed insurrection, civil war,
or political process. Soviet and European Communists assumed that more

probably than not this would involve the use of military force, but they have
never argued that it was the only possible way to power. Guerrilla warfare for
the Russians was just one manifestation of the revolutionary process, which
ought to be utilized in the fight for the worldwide victory of Communism. For
the Chinese it was one specific stage in an armed struggle which would
inevitably lead to national and social liberation in the Third World and thus
prelude the triumph of Communism in the industrially developed countries.
Such general observations do not, however, suffice for an interpretation of
Soviet and Chinese policies vis-a-vis guerrilla movements. For the approach
towards individual groups depended upon a great many factors, doctrinal
considerations being only one of them. The Soviet policy of detente did not in
principle preclude support for movements of national liberation in Asia and
Africa. On the contrary, the Soviet leaders had a genuine interest in their
success for they assumed that as a result there would be a shift in the overall
global balance of power in their favor. They knew, furthermore, that unless
they supported these liberation movements the Chinese would appear as the
champions of national liberation. On the other hand detente, or to be precise,
Soviet reluctance to become involved in a world war in the nuclear age, did
inhibit to a certain extent the amount of help that could be given to the propo-
nents of armed struggle in various parts of the world. For the Soviet leaders
assessed, quite correctly, that it would be difficult in the long run to prevent a
major war unless some control was exercised over the conduct of small wars
outside their own immediate sphere of interest. This assessment gave rise in
Latin America, and to a certain extent in the Middle East, to complaints about
"Soviet betrayal." Most guerrilla movements would have instinctively turned
to China but for the unfortunate fact that China could be of much less help as
a supplier of arms and money, and could not lend them much political
support either. They also did not like certain aspects of Chinese theory and
practice which were thought too primitive for Latin America or simply
inapplicable to other parts of the world.
On the whole, Soviet leaders took a dim view of guerrilla warfare in
developed countries. In their book it was the task of the Communist parties in
these countries to make the revolution; meddling petty bourgeois elements
only caused trouble. More likely than not their endeavors would fail, bringing
harm upon the Communists too. On the other hand Communist spokesmen
justified an armed
struggle in Third World countries and, on certain conditions, elsewhere;*

Communist parties have on occasion engaged in guerrilla warfare not only in
Asia but also in Greece, Venezuela and the Philippines. But more often than
not the initiative seems to have come from the local leadership. During the last
decade Moscow appears to have counselled prudence and caution: more than
a spark was needed to kindle the flame in countries in which the working class
was weak and disorganized. The main problem facing the newly independent
nations was, in the Soviet view, to overcome backwardness and poverty and to
consolidate their political and economic independence. The leaders of the main
Communist parties in Latin America, such as Prestes, Corvalan and
Arismendi, have echoed these warnings against "adventurism." Only mass
movements led by the experienced vanguard party of the working class, anned
with Marxist-Leninist theory, could guarantee the victory of the revolution. Or
to quote the leader of the Peruvian Communists, Jorge del Prado: international
experience has shown that "revolutions are made by the masses" and though
"the majority of our people feel the need for radical changes . . . the masses
have not yet come to see the need to fight for political power." 93 Venezuela in
1962 was the one major exception to the rule in Latin America but the leaders
of the party soon had second thoughts there too and discovered that an armed
struggle was after all only an "auxilary form" of the general fight. Orthodox
Communists quite justifiably suspected the loyalty of pro-guerrilla elements
for the very same Venezuelan leaders who had been most enthusiastic about
guerrilla warfare (Bravo, Petkoff, Marquez) were later to display a disturbing
lack of loyalty, criticizing Soviet policy in Czechoslovakia, for instance.
Eventually they all left, or were excluded from, the party.
The Soviet leaders faced problems whenever they had to deal with radical
elements who had come to power after a successful guerrilla war. In both
Cuba and Algeria the Communist parties had stood aside initially or had even
opposed the struggle. In Cuba the problem was solved, after some minor
altercations, by the merger of Fidel's supporters and the local Communists.
The Algerian FLN, on the other hand, did not wish to transform itself into a
Marxist-Leninist party, and the Soviets had to desist from giving open support
to the Algerian Communist party. In Angola, Mozambique and
* On some occasions Soviet support was apparently given to urban terrorist groups in Western
countries. Such assistance was not, however, given openly but through various intermediaries
such as the Cubans.
Guinea-Bissau there were no Communist parties of standing and, for that

reason, no complications arose in the relationship between the Russians and
the local guerrillas. In the Arab world the Communist parties supported the
Palestinian guerrillas in principle without however actively participating in
the fighting. There was political rivalry but it did not reach a critical stage.
Ideological reservations quite apart, their own experience with the
Yugoslavs, the Albanians and the Chinese has taught the Soviet leaders to
view the guerrillas with concern. One only had to scratch these self-styled
Communists to discover that they were fiercely nationalistic underneath.
Worse still, they disputed Soviet hegemony over the Communist camp and
even pursued policies contrary to Soviet interests. There was a real danger
that victorious guerrillas elsewhere would prove no more amenable. On
balance, Soviet policymakers found it much easier to cooperate with non-
Communist military dictators than with radical revolutionaries unwilling to
accept guidance, let alone control.
Soviet spokesmen did stress that they favored the armed struggle provided
conditions were right. But this raised the question as to what "ripeness" really
meant. According to the orthodox interpretation guerrilla war in Malaya and
the Philippines, in Burma and in Greece had failed because the mass base of
the insurgents was too narrow. It was admitted, in retrospect, that in Malaya
and the Philippines a revolutionary situation had not existed, and the hope
that it would come about under the impact of a guerrilla war had been
misplaced: "The maturity of the national liberation struggle had been
overestimated."94
The Chinese were not plagued by such doubts and reservations; if a
guerrilla struggle failed it simply meant that the guerrillas had not tried hard
enough. Violent revolution, as they saw it, was the universal law. This
approach found its extreme formulation in Lin Piao's famous article of 1966
on the international significance of Mao's theory of People's War. Lin Piao
wrote that to despise the enemy strategically was an elementary requirement
for a revolutionary, for without the courage to despise him and without
daring to win, no revolution could be made. All over Asia, Africa and Latin
America, where the basic political and economic conditions resembled those
of old China, the people were being subjected to aggression and enslavement.
Only the countryside provided the broad areas in which revolutionaries could
maneuver freely and proceed to final victory: "Taking the entire globe, if
North America and Western Europe can be called 'the cities of the world' then
Asia,
Africa and Latin America constitute the 'rural areas'. . . . The contemporary
world revolution presents a picture of the encirclement of the cities by the
rural areas."95
Pronouncements of this kind are closely studied in the West without,
however, sufficient attention being paid to the fact that there is no greater
congruence of theory and practice in China than in the Soviet Union, and that,
furthermore, theories change as do the fortunes of those who enunciate them:
Lin Piao did not survive his famous article for long. Though the Chinese are
committed to support the forces of revolution all over the world, they also
have a solemn commitment to coexist peacefully with the countries of the
Third World. Chinese experience has shown that guerrillas can create a mass
base while fighting an enemy, but this happened in very specific
circumstances, during a full-scale war against a foreign invader. With all their
belief in voluntarism the Chinese leaders never stated that everyone could
start a revolution. Only a truly popular revolutionary movement, with a mass
base, would stand a chance of prevailing over its enemies, and therefore a se-
cretly organized coup could be successful in the Third World only in
exceptional circumstances.96 Chinese willingness to support revolutionary
movements was not unlimited; it did not, for instance, extend to "urban
guerrilla" groups.
In practice Chinese policy was conducted on pragmatic lines: the
competition with the Soviet Union for influence in the Third World no doubt
played a greater role than did ideological considerations. The Chinese have
supported certain guerrilla movements because, in the main, their rivals were
assisted by the Russians; the political orientation of the factions was by no
means the deciding factor. Thus the Chinese supported ZANU against ZAPU,
UNITA and GRAE against MPLA, SWANU against ANC. In the ideological
exchanges between Peking and Moscow, the question of revolution and the
armed struggle in Africa, Asia and Latin America has been one of the central
issues. The Chinese argued that these were the most vulnerable areas under
imperialist rule and "the storm centers of the revolution." 97 They accused the
Soviets of revisionism, pusillanimity, defeatism and capitulationism, of trying
to demoralize the revolutionary movements. But in the final analysis, the
policies pursued by the Soviet Union and China vis-a-vis national liberation
struggles and guerrilla wars were not that dissimilar, whatever the doctrinal
differences.
COUNTERINSURGENCY AND THE INTERPRETATION

OF GUERRILLA WARFARE
The spread of guerrilla warfare after 1945, and the many setbacks suffered by
Western armies and local government forces against the insurgents, caused
much heartsearching among political leaders and military commanders; it also
precipitated the emergence of new doctrines of counterguerrilla warfare. In the
present context these doctrines are of interest only insofar as they attempt to
explain the essence of revolutionary warfare. Since some proponents of these
new theories were apparently unfamiliar with previous guerrilla wars and of
the history of revolutionary movements, they tended to assume that the
phenomenon was of recent date. It was designated "subversive warfare" or
"revolutionary warfare," whereas counterinsurgency was termed "modern
warfare."98 In the words of one author, "Mao Tse-tung was the first to treat
guerrilla battlecraft as a proper subject of military science and nobody has
made a greater contribution to the guerrilla strategy than he. . . ."" At the very
least Mao was said to have been the first to pull together into a single
operational theory the disparate ideas and data previously available, and to
have abstracted a set of principles.100 Such false assumptions about historical
origins may well appear of little practical consequence, but this is not so; for
Mao, after all, was a "Marxist" and hence the conclusion that the study of
Marxism would provide the key to modern, revolutionary, subversive, guer-
rilla warfare. The works of Marx, Engels and Lenin were subjected to minute
examination, all their sayings about war and civil war were collected and
analyzed, as though their writings have relevance to what happened in
Indochina, Algeria, Cyprus, Kenya, Latin America and the Middle East in the
1950s and 1960s. French generals and colonels were particularly attracted by
Mao's thoughts on total war and its political function and they became almost
as enthusiastic as the young Chinese Communists waving the Little Red Book
at the time of the cultural revolution.101 A strong philosophical-theological
element in French thought developed in the 1950s; this was reflected, for
instance, in General Nemo's aside on guerrilla warfare: "There is no true war
but religious war." The new doctrine became a new orthodoxy and was
accepted by the Ecole de Guerre in 1956; the Algerian war was waged
according to the lessons learnt in Southeast Asia.102 The proponents of the
doctrine of "modern warfare" were among the first to realize that in the age of
the bomb, nuclear war was out of the question, conventional war unlikely, but
there were good prospects for revolutionary wars. They noted, again correctly,
that the French army (and Western armies in general) were quite unprepared
to counter such wars from a military-technical point of view and, even more
so, in view of their lack of psychological preparation and political sophisti-
cation. As they saw it, the third world war already had begun. There was one
enemy from Hanoi to Algiers — international Communism.103 True, in some
instances the enemy was merely the unconscious tool of Communism but this
hardly mattered in practice. The guerre revolutionnaire could be effectively
combatted only if, at an early stage, strong measures were taken against
subversion, for otherwise it would lead inevitably to guerrilla warfare. This
meant, in practical terms, turning the rebels' organizational weapons and
propaganda against them — to combat fire with fire. 104 Some theorists of
guerre revolutionnaire saw the main problem as the indoctrination of the
masses, the conquest of hearts and minds; whereas others, such as Trinquier
and Godard, thought that the FLN had succeeded through terror and coercion,
and that (Western) propaganda could only succeed once the physical threat
was removed. Yet other proponents of this school chose to emphasize the very
real grievances underlying the Algerian revolution.105
Policies such as those proposed by these theorists could not possibly be
carried out within the framework of a democratic society — hence the great
frustration they felt. They were sure that they could win the war, but only on
condition that they were given a free hand. Politically some of them tended
towards right-wing Catholicism, others to "national Communism." While
Communism was the enemy from which they wanted to save France, they
held the highest admiration for their foes and the greatest contempt for liberal
democracy with its self-deception about the nature of the danger facing it, its
irresolution and cowardice. One of the leading advocates of revolutionary
warfare told an American correspondent that he was a "Communist without
doctrine," and Trinquier stated that if he was forced to choose between
Communism and international capitalism, he would opt for the former. 106 Ten
years later France partly opted out of NATO, ideological-military fashions in
Paris changed, and the defense of Christian (or Western) civilization against
international Communism in North Africa gave way to close military and
political collaboration with yesterday's enemies.
The impact of Maoism on the French generals was by no means unique;
perhaps even more dramatic was the influence on the
young Portuguese officers fighting in Africa of Frelimo and Cabral's theories.

From Frelimo they learned the principles of conspiracy, from Cabral the
theory about the "progressive role" of the petty bourgeoisie in the social
struggle. Since they too were of petty bourgeois origin this doctrine suited
well their social position and their political aspirations. Thus the
counterinsurgents of 1973 turned into the "revolutionaries" of 1974, a
modern edition of the story of Saulus-Paulus.
American thinking on guerrilla warfare was influenced by the approach of
modern political science, mostly behaviorist in character; there was, as one
critic noted, a tendency to concentrate on techniques of manipulation and
control and administrative measures.107 There was also the same trend as
among the French to see in guerrilla warfare more than meets the eye; the
military philosophy of Mao Tse-tung "is much more than it at first seems to
be" wrote one author, and another noted that "modern guerrilla movements
are armed with elaborate psycho-political weapons."108 Compared with
Pancho Villa or with Zapata these observations were no doubt of a certain
validity; in China, Vietnam and elsewhere, guerrilla warfare was not just a
localized insurrection or old-fashioned banditry but part of an overall political
strategy. But this had been the case, mutatis mutandis, in other guerrilla wars
in ages past. The key to Mao's success and to that of the Vietminh lay not in
the elaborate character of their psycho-political weapons but on the contrary
in its simplicity;. The failure of Communist guerrilla movements in some
countries and the success of non-Communist insurgents in others ought to
have been sufficient proof that "Marxism" was not the solution to the riddle.
The real explanation is, of course, that the former colonial powers no longer
had the strength to hold on to their possessions and, at the same time, classless
intellectuals had managed to establish themselves as the vanguard of the
masses in the underdeveloped countries. "Since in a backward country all
classes of the population with the exception of a thin oligarchic stratum and a
few merchants, feel cheated and exploited by foreigners, it is fatally easy to
work up a head of steam behind any nationalist movement that promises to
end this state of affairs."109 These national revolutionaries may turn to any
radical ideology combining socialist and nationalist elements; they cannot
possibly embrace liberalism and democratic rule. Democracy has flowered
only in the presence of certain historical conditions which in most Third
World countries do not exist and which elsewhere too have progressively
weakened.
Some of the writings of American counterinsurgency experts contain much

that is of interest and deals with the technique of guerrilla warfare, conspiracy,
the preparation of armed insurgency, the motives of guerrilla fighters, the role
of propaganda, and other aspects. But for a realistic explanation of the wider
political context one looks in vain — not because the military or bureaucratic
mind is incapable of understanding the ideological subtleties of highly
sophisticated guerrilla movements; there is nothing subtle about them. It is not
that these writings are necessarily too prejudiced: on the contrary, there is
quite often a tendency to lean over backwards and give the enemy the benefit
of all possible doubt. Thus the Field Manual of the U.S. Army on the motives
of guerrillas: "Resistance begins to form when dissatisfaction occurs among
strongly motivated individuals who cannot further their cause by peaceful
and legal means."110 As if there was no dissatisfaction in every known society,
and people unable or unwilling to further their cause by peaceful means. A
strong modern dictatorship, whether Communist, Fascist or any other variety,
has nothing to fear from these dissatisfied, highly motivated individuals,
however deep and justified their grievances. Dissatisfaction there is always,
but resistance only has any chance of success against a liberal-democratic
regime, or an old-fashioned, ineffectual authoritarian system.
British authors on the subject have been inclined to take an empirical
attitude towards guerrilla warfare; while stressing the need for social and
political reform, they have reservations about the French and American
concepts of psychological warfare. As Julian Paget noted, the cause of the
guerrilla has to be simple, inspiring and convincing. 111 If French writers such
as Trinquier thought that the support of the population was the conditio sine
qua non of victory, was it not true that EOKA killed more Greeks than British,
and that the same applied, as regards their local populations, to the Malayan
guerrillas, the Vietcong, the Fatah, the Mau Mau and others? The great
importance of an effective intelligence system and of territorial defense was
noted by these authors; the French authorities had not been aware that the
Algerian nationalists had established a combat organization in Cairo in 1954
and, as a result, were taken by surprise by the armed insurrection. There was
no territorial defense in either Malaya or Algeria; North Africa, an area four
times bigger than France, was soldiered by fifty thousand French soldiers, and
as a result the French lost Aures and Kabylia at the very beginning of the
rising.112 McCuen detected three main phases in an urban insurgency:
organization, civil disorder, and
terrorism. The French author Hogard discerned five stages in guerrilla

warfare, with agitators fomenting resentment in the first stage to a general
offensive in the last. Brigadier Kitson noted that in most guerrilla wars there
was an incubation period of several years; it lasted four years in Cyprus, the
Philippines and Kenya, three years in Malaya. It was during this period (of the
mobilization of the masses) that the movement was most vulnerable. 113 But in
Algeria the incubation period lasted only for eight months, and in Cuba there
was no incubation period at all. Robert Thompson, who acquired much
experience in revolutionary warfare in Malaya and Vietnam, also pointed to
three stages: subversion leading to insurgency, guerrilla warfare, and lastly
the takeover. He saw the most vital feature of guerrilla war in organization; he
held little sympathy for the view that it was a spontaneous uprising of the
people, directed against a repressive, inefficient and corrupt government. The
main weakness of the West, Thompson wrote, lay in the attitude of the
intellectual community which never gave its own government the benefit of
the doubt, even though a Communist regime might prove far more repressive.
A similar point was made by the French author Jean Baechler: in a pluralistic
political system there was inevitably a party in favor of a negotiated peace.
The prime strategy of the insurgents was to try to turn this party into the ma-
jority. If the insurgents held out militarily long enough for war-weariness to
set in, they would win the war. 114 According to Thompson, the aim of
revolutionary war, in contrast to guerrilla war, is political. It might perhaps be
more correct to say that in a Communist-led guerrilla movement political and
military strategy are more closely connected. For the aim of any war is
political even if this is not clearly stated or perceived. Revolutionary war, as
Thompson defined it, provides a technique for a small ruthless minority, with
neither a good cause nor genuine popular support, to overthrow a
government.115 When the organization was good and the cause weak, the
strategy of a protracted war was called for. Thus it was essential to assess at
the outbreak of any guerrilla war (i.e., during the second phase of
revolutionary war) whether its organization or its cause was the vital factor. If
organization were the vital factor, the revolutionary movement could not be
defeated by political or social reforms but only by superior organization.
Thompson s formula (given here in the briefest detail) is one of the more inter-
esting contributions to the understanding of guerrilla warfare. But it still left a
great many questions open, inevitably, perhaps, because reality is always
richer and more complicated than any for-
inula, however ingenious. Every movement, revolutionary or not, has a cause,

and whether this is "good" or "bad," "strong" or "weak" depends upon a great
many factors that defy measurement. It depends above all on the correlation
of force — not just military force — in a given country. A gifted leader (or a
demagogue) can work up enthusiasm for an almost nonexistent cause. It
depends, needless to say, on the political culture of the country. In the early
phase of most guerrilla wars, accident is perhaps more important than any
other single factor. It is doubtful whether the Chinese Communists would
have won if Mao had indeed been killed in the late 1930s, as the Soviet press
announced at the time. It is almost certain that the Yugoslav partisans would
not have lasted beyond winter 1941 but for Tito, and the Cubans were the first
to admit that without Castro the invasion of Cuba would have failed.
Counterinsurgency theorists all agree that guerrilla warfare is cheap, and
the fight against it very costly indeed. The budget of the Algerian FLN was
about thirty to forty million dollars a year, whereas the French spent a sum of
this magnitude in less than two weeks. The cost of killing a single rebel in
Malaya was more than two hundred thousand dollars. Writers on
counterinsurgency have pointed to the great importance of outside support in
guerrilla war, of supply lines and sanctuaries. They noted that guerrilla wars
have started almost unnoticed in some countries (Vietnam), and with a big
bang in others (Cuba, Algeria). They drew attention to the fact that the size of
basic units varied from country to country according to geographical and
other conditions; in Cyprus the basic unit consisted of five to eight men,
elsewhere it was much larger. The investigations into the origins of guerrilla
movements usually raised more questions than were answered. Many writers
on the subject have stressed the close connection between guerrilla war and
agrarian unrest. J. L. S. Girling maintained that Chinese Communism was
based on peasant support, but he also noted that the Chinese (and the
Vietnamese) leaders later turned against peasants; in any case, he attributed
rural poverty more to overpopulation than feudal abuse.116 David Galula
observed that the slogan "land to the tiller" was unlikely to be very effective in
northern China where seventy-six percent of the land was in the hands of the
owners, and twenty-two percent more in the hands of part-owners; the
redistribution of land, on the other hand, could have been a factor of greater
importance.117 The land grievances on which the propaganda of the Mau Mau
leaders focused had been relatively minor. Land tenure was not an issue at all
in Guinea-
Bissau. These and other illustrations show that the connection between
agrarian unrest and guerrilla warfare is more tenuous than some observers
have claimed.
It has been asserted that nationalism alone could not explain the fact that
Algerian farmers were ready to risk their lives: they summoned up such
resolution only when they felt morally alienated from their rulers. 118 But the
great-grandfathers of the Algerian guerillas had fought for many years under
Abd el-Kader without any sense of moral alienation. Liberal observers
usually pointed to the link between guerrilla war, social change, and the
satisfaction of popular aspirations. This theory has been formulated most suc-
cinctly by Eqbal Ahmad:
Organized violence ol the type used in revolutionary warfare is dis couraged,

rarely breaks out, and so far has not succeeded in a single country where the
government made a genuine and timely effort to satisfy the grievances of the
people. . . . A regime unwilling to satisfy popular aspirations begins to lose
legitimacy. This results in the moral isolation of the incumbents, the desertion of
intellectuals and moderates. . . . Popular support for the guerrilla is predicated
upon the moral alienation of the masses from the existing government.
Conditions of guerrilla warfare are inherent in a situation of rapid social change.
The outbreak normally results mainly from the failure of a ruling elite to respond
to the challenge of modernization.119
This takes us back to the grievance theory. Unfortunately, griev-inces are part
of the human condition: they always exist, however c-erfect the society.
Furthermore, there is no way to measure the ntensity with which grievances
are felt. Even if a "grievance :cale" did exist, it is by no means certain that a
revolutionary war is nore likely to break out in a country replete with
grievances. Guerilla war succeeded in Cuba but failed in other Latin
American countries despite the fact that Cubans had less objective reason to
eel aggrieved than many other Latin Americans. The guerrilla vic-ories in
Yugoslavia and Albania (and in many other countries) had lothing
whatsoever to do with modernization; rapid social change vas not the issue
in China in 1940, or in Vietnam in 1950. A dem->cratic, or semidemocratic
regime unwilling to satisfy popular ispirations, indeed gradually loses
legitimacy. A totalitarian regime, on the other hand, can afford to disregard
popular aspirations vithout fearing that it will be "morally isolated," or that
the moder-ites and intellectuals will desert it. If revolutionary war has
usually ailed in democratic societies this does not mean that the griev-
ances are insubstantial. It simply shows that some societies are less violent
than others.120 History has demonstrated that guerrilla war stands a better
chance of success against foreign domination than against one's own kind —
nationalism is, by and large, the single most potent motive force. But
nationalism per se, pure and unalloyed, is an abstraction; in the real world it
appears only in combination with other political and social concepts, and
programs. It is in this context that the infusion of radical — not Marxist—
ideas takes place.
9
A Summing Up
Guerrilla wars have been fought throughout history by small peoples against
invading or occupying armies, by regular soldiers operating in the enemy's
rear, by peasants rising against big landowners, by bandits both "social" and
asocial. They were infrequent in the eighteenth century, when strict rules for
the conduct of warfare were generally observed. Guerrilla methods were used
in the southern theater in the American War of Independence and in the
Napoleonic age by partisans in countries occupied by the French (Spain,
southern Italy, Tyrol, Russia). With the emergence of mass armies in the
nineteenth century, guerrilla warfare again declined but it lingered on in the
wake of major wars (the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War of
1870-1871, the Roer War) and in the campaigns of national liberation
movements (Italy, Poland, Ireland, Macedonia). Furthermore, guerrilla tactics
played an important role in nineteenth-century colonial wars of which the
campaigns of the French against Abd el-Kader and the Russians against
Shamyl were the most noteworthy. In all these instances the guerrillas failed
to achieve their aims except when acting in cooperation with regular armies.
The imperial powers, as yet unfettered by moral scruples about the
inadmissibility of imposing their rule on lesser breeds, were not deflected
from their policies by pinpricks: the Russians did not withdraw from Poland,
the Caucasus or Central Asia, the French did not give up North Africa, the
Rritish did not surrender India, and if the Italians attained their indepen-
dence, it was not as the result of a protracted guerrilla campaign. There was
not one case of outright guerrilla victory, but in some
instances guerrilla campaigns indirectly contributed to eventual political

success. Thus, the military outcome of the Cuban insurrection in the late
nineteenth century was inconclusive, but by fighting a protracted war the
rebels helped to trigger off U.S. intervention which led to the expulsion of the
Spanish. The tough struggle of the Boers after their regular armies had
collapsed hastened the British decision to grant South Africa a large measure
of independence. In Latin America guerrilla war continued to be the
prevailing form of military conflict in the absence of strong regular armies.
The First World War saw mass armies pitted against each other; the few
instances of guerrilla war (Arabia, East Africa) occurred in minor theaters of
war and were certainly not ideologically motivated. The Mexican, the Russian
and the Chinese civil wars of the twentieth century saw a good deal of
partisan warfare but mainly because neither side was strong enough to
mobilize, train and equip a big regular army. Guerrilla war in these
circumstances was not so much the war of the weak against the strong, but of
the weak against the weak. Revolutionary movements had not yet opted for
the guerrilla approach; before the Second World War the prospects for the
anticolonial struggle were as yet unpromising. The Soviet Communists
established a large regular army as quickly as they could after the revolution;
twenty years later the Chinese Communists tried to do the same, though in
their case the guerrilla phase was to last much longer.
With the Second World War there came the great upsurge in the fortunes of
guerrilla warfare. Hitler's predicament resembled Napoleon's insofar as his
forces were dispersed all over Europe and his lines of communication and
routes of supply overextended and vulnerable. Like Napoleon before, the
Germans had insufficient forces to impose full control on all the occupied
territories or even to destroy partisan concentrations. On the other hand, the
military importance of the Second World War partisan forces was not very
great and did not decisively influence the course of the war. Their main
impact was political inasmuch as they resulted in the emergence of
Communist governments (Yugoslavia, Albania) or caused protracted civil
wars (Greece, Philippines). The European colonial powers, gravely weakened
as a result of the war, lacked the financial and military resources and the
political will to retain their overseas possessions against the rising tide of
independence movements. Public opinion in the metropolitan countries which
had once regarded the possession of colonies as a source of pride was no
399 A SUMMING UP
longer willing to shoulder the military and financial burden; imperialism
became morally reprehensible. This turn in Western public opinion was of
decisive importance for the success of Asian and African national liberation
movements. In the Far East and some African countries the leadership of the
independence movements was taken over by Communist or pro-Communist
forces. Their superior organization and an ideology which corresponded to
the cultural level and the emotional needs of the population made them better
equipped to act as agents of modernization than their political rivals.
Nevertheless,, the wars of liberation in Asia and Africa were fought without
exception under the nationalist rather than the Communist banner; even in
the countries of Latin America, which had been independent for almost a
hundred and fifty years, the guerrilla campaigns of the 1960s had strong
patriotic undertones.
Guerrilla warfare has not only been practiced since time immemorial, its
doctrine too is by no means of recent date. The many illustrations provided in
these pages show that the notion that the theory and practice of guerrilla
warfare was invented in China in the 1930s is altogether erroneous.1 Guerrilla
techniques were exhaustively described by de Jeney, Decker and other
eighteenth-and nineteenth-century authors. The experience gained during the
Napoleonic wars provided more systematic and more detailed analyses and
prescriptions. Le Miere de Corvey and in particular the Italian and Polish
military writers of the 1830s and 1840s were fully aware of the political
aspects of guerrilla warfare. Their writings coVer almost all the problems that
were to preoccupy twentieth-century guerrilla authors — the importance of
bases and sanctuaries, the questions as to whether the war would be short or
protracted, whether it should be "pure" guerrilla war or be conducted in
coordination with regular forces, whether guerrilla units should be gradually
transformed into a regular army. Even the relationship between the guerrilla
forces and the political movement supporting it was discussed in the writings
of Carlo Bianco and Mazzini. These precursors fell into oblivion; Mao and Ho
Chi Minh, Castro, Guevara and Debray were not in the least aware of the fact
that their ideas had been expounded before and even tried, albeit not very
successfully. The twentieth-century guerrilla theorist discovered his strategy
quite independently, based on his own experience, instinct, and, of course,
native traditions of guerrilla war of which there were more than enough in
both Asia and Latin America. As Eric Hobsbawm has noted, there is nothing in
the purely military pages of Mao, Giap or Che Guevara which a tradi-
tional guerrillero or band leader would regard as other than simple common
sense.2 If so, the novelty of twentieth-century guerrilla warfare would seem to
be not so much military as political. The author of a valuable recent study has
maintained that revolutionary guerrilla war evolved out of Marxist-Leninist
modes of political behavior and organizational principles on one hand, and
out of the exigencies of anti-Western revolt in predominantly agrarian so-
cieties on the other.3 In the light of the historical evidence this thesis is tenable
only subject to far-reaching reservations. The character of guerrilla warfare,
needless to say, has changed greatly over the ages, partly through
technological developments, partly as a result of changing social and political
conditions. But it cannot be maintained that before the 1930s guerrilla wars
were apolitical and parochial.4 Too much importance has been attributed to
Leninist doctrine in the guerrilla context, too little to the nationalist-populist
component in the motivation and the ideology of these movements.
(Populism is used in this context not in the nineteenth-century meaning of the
tenn but as rural and urban opposition to class differentiations and the
capitalist form of modernization.) Many twentieth-century guerrilla wars
from Pancho Villa to the Mau Mau and IRA, from IZL, Fatah to EOKA owe
little to Marxist-Leninism. Neither the Algerians in 1954 nor the Cubans in
1958 were influenced by this doctrine and even Chinese and Vietnam guer-
rilla warfare evolved more in opposition to classical Marxism than in
accordance with its basic tenets. The impact of Marxism-Lenin-ism among
contemporary guerrilla movements has been strongest with regard to the role
of the political party in mobilizing the masses, the function of propaganda in
the struggle, and the emphasis placed, generally speaking, on organization.
But political propaganda and organization were not altogether unknown in
previous ages. More women have participated in modern guerrilla
movements than in the past, but this again is by no means an unprecedented
development.5
These new developments in the character of guerrilla movements should
not be belittled but nor should their ideology be regarded as the master key to
their understanding. Communist guerrilla movements have failed, non-
Communist groups have succeeded. The importance of guerrilla movements
was underrated for a long time; more recently the pendulum has swung to the
other extreme, and the general tendency has been to exaggerate their
historical role.
Attempts to explain the causes of guerrilla warfare and of guer-
401 A SUMMING UP
rilla success have certainly enriched the political language, but they have not
greatly contributed to a clarification of the issues involved. "Revolutionary
warfare," defined as "partisan warfare plus political propaganda" is an
unfortunate formulation which has nevertheless gained wide currency.
"Subversive warfare," "internal war," "low intensity warfare," "modern
unconventional warfare," "people's war," "subversive insurgency," "guerrilla
insurgency," "irregular warfare" — these and many other terms have been
used without adding precision or helping our understanding of the
phenomenon.6 There is a wide range of theories to choose from; some take as
their starting point the questionable assumption that insurgency is "deviant
social behavior" — as if acceptance of foreign occupation or domestic tyrants is
the norm, and the decision to oppose them a deviation. Nor is it permissible
without qualification to regard political and social harmony as the norm and
conflict and violence the unfortunate exception to the rule, to be explained by
excessive aggression or ambition, or by deprivation, absolute or relative. The
very asking of the question "Why do men rebel?" implies a great many
assumptions about both human nature and the perfectibility of society.
Quantitative techniques have been of little help in understanding the guerrilla
phenomenon, partly because some of the essential ingredients involved cannot
be measured, partly because the differences between guerrilla movements are
such that even measurable factors become meaningless when added or
multiplied. A formula encompassing both Mao and Castro (let alone Pancho
Villa, the IRA and Mau Mau) will be of no help as an analytical tool. A
comparison between China and Vietnam, or between Angola and
Mozambique, or even between the IRA and the Basques may be of value and
interest. Moving further afield in time or space, generalizations can be made
only with the greatest of caution; for the guerrilla phenomenon presents
endless variety. Some were Communist inspired, others were not; some were
led by young men, some by old; some of the leaders had military experience,
others lacked it entirely; in some movements the personality of the leader was
of decisive importance, in others there was a collective leadership; some wars
lasted for a long time, others were short; some bands were small, others big;
some guerrilla movements transformed themselves into regular armies, others
degenerated into banditry; some benefitted from external circumstances (such
as difficulty of terrain, or the presence of dissatisfied national minorities),
others on the contrary derived no advantage at all from such conditions. Some
won and some lost. The possibilities are
endless; so are the theories, hypotheses and concepts, monocausal and

multicausal, to explain guerrilla warfare, ranging from those stressing
socioeconomic conditions to others putting the emphasis on political-
psychological factors. The theory that has certainly gained widest currency is
the grievance-frustration concept, which has been accepted, in various forms,
by liberals and Marxists alike. Men and women will not rebel, risking their
lives and property, without good reason — the occupation of their country by
foreign armies, economic crisis, a tyrannical political regime, great poverty, or
great social discrepancy between rich and poor. The concept seems plausible
enough; it can indeed be taken for granted that if people had no grievances
and felt no frustration, they would engage in the pursuit of happiness. But the
nature of grievances and of frustration is not at all an easy problem.* It has
been argued that, if governments only fulfilled popular aspirations, they
would not lose legitimacy and there would be no violent opposition and even
the intellectuals would happily sing their praises. Unfortunately, the principle
of virtue rewarded applies no more to politics than to private life. The state,
however well-meaning, may face difficulties through no fault of its own and,
as a result of this, its inhabitants will have to suffer. The resources of a
government may be limited, it may have to establish priorities, thus
discriminating against some people. Nor is there any reason to assume that a
state or a social system can be more perfect than the individuals constituting it.
It has been argued that the most traditional and the most modern societies are
relatively immune to upheaval whereas those in between suffer from
instability. As far as rich countries are concerned this is merely stating the
obvious; the rural population in these countries is usually small and would-be
guerrillas would not be welcomed with enthusiasm in the American corn belt,
or among British, French, German or Danish fanners. It would be equally
difficult to launch a guerrilla movement in a country in which the bulk of the
population suffered from acute starvation and endemic disease, since there
might not be enough men and women able to march and to fight. In actual
fact, there has been a great deal of guerrilla warfare in very poor countries
such as the Congo, Sudan, Oman and Eritrea.
* The inhabitants of Calabria and Basilicata have every reason to feel aggrieved and frustrated
for these are among the very poorest provinces of Italy. But they are at the bottom of the scale
inasmuch as the rate of suicide and the crime rate are concerned whereas prosperous Piemont,
Lombardy and Liguria are on top. Social statistics in other countries show a similar picture.
403 A SUMMING UP
An extremely unequal distribution of wealth and an acute eco

nomic crisis have frequently aggravated political unrest, but it so happens
that neither factor was decisive in the major guerrilla wars of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. Agrarian grievances have played a paramount role
in Mexico and the Philippines but elsewhere guerrilla war took place in
countries with enough land for all (Africa) or in predominantly urban
societies (Venezuela, Uruguay). Guerrilla warfare has occurred in countries
with low population density and high density alike, in societies with high
social mobility and low mobility with a high rate of literacy and a low rate.
Frequently the break up of traditional societies and the process of
modernization has been considered the main agent: social change results in
insecurity and the loss of identity, attempts at reform weaken the
government's political position. This has led observers to opposite
conclusions. On the one hand governments have been advised to go full
steam ahead with social reform programs, on the other they have been
counseled to slow down so as to reduce the impact of the negative political
effects of social change. There is general agreement that socioeconomic
improvement does not immediately result in increased popular support; these
programs usually give tangible political results only after many years, even
decades — except perhaps in the case of a radical redistribution of land.
Demographic pressure, growing ecological disequilibrium and the weakening
of social ties connecting hinterland and center have been mentioned as
important factors conducive to insurgency and revolution. These processes
are part of the general crisis in the Third World, but again there is no obvious
connection between them and the spread of guerrilla warfare.
So after a great many detours and false scents, the student of guerrilla wars
finds himself back at his starting point. If a government has the support of the
people it will not be challenged and overthrown. Or, to put it more obscurely,
social change will be peaceful if the ruling elites respond to the needs of
repudiating the old institutions and relationships and creating new ones. If
they fail to do so, it is argued, political violence becomes inevitable. Effective
and virtuous governments have nothing to fear, corrupt and ineffective ones
are doomed. But "corruption" and "ineffectiveness" are by no means synonyms
and in any case the relevance of this thesis to insurgency and guerrilla warfare
is not at all obvious. The new institutions and relationships if established may
be rejected by part of the population. There may be real but unsoluble
grievances, such as the separatist demands of minorities, that
would result in the crippling of society and the emergence of a nonviable

state.
Other theories have put the emphasis on politics (the presence of conflicting
social myths), on cultural-political-moral factors (such as the alienation of
intellectuals), or on psychological moments ("terrorist personality").7
These theories help to shed some light, at best, on one or a few insurgencies
and are quite inapplicable to others. In short, they are quite useless. This sad
state of affairs has not escaped the attention of social scientists. One of them
has concluded that the actual instances of insurgency observed in our time fail
to reveal a correlation with the gravity of socioeconomic, cultural and related
ills.8 Another has said that a Western doctrine on guerrilla war comparable to
the principles of war between nations has not developed because the character
of insurrections is largely determined by the peculiar social structure of the
society in which it takes place. 9 Guerrilla movements, in other words, are an
awkward topic for generalization. Yet another observer decrying the "chaotic
and inadequate" state of existing etiologies of internal war has pointed to more
promising venues to be explored.10 At the bottom of every protest movement
there is a feeling of grievance. But how to measure these grievances, how to
account for the fact that at one time a major grievance may be fatalistically
accepted, whereas at another time (or place) a minor grievance may produce
the most violent reaction? Is it not the perception of the grievance that matters
rather than the grievance per se? How to explain that conditions perceived as
tolerable at one time (or in one country) become intolerable at another time (or
in another country)? Such a change in attitude could be produced by a variety
of circumstances — the accumulation of reasons for discontent, or a successful
revolution in another country (the "echo effect") or the emergence of a new
leader, or a new generation of leaders who are driven by a greater sense of
justice or ambition or fanaticism than their predecessors. But if such analysis is
difficult enough with regard to the spread of political violence in one specific
country, it is impossible on a worldwide scale. The great differences in the
prevailing conditions are too deep and too numerous to be digested in cross-
national surveys.
More fruitful perhaps is the suggestion that the obstacles to internal war
should be examined. Students of guerrilla war have almost invariably
concentrated on insurgents rather than on incumbents, on the forces which
propel societies towards violence, rather than
405 A SUMMING UP
those which inhibit it. This omission explains to a certain extent the
misunderstandings that have prevailed among some Western writers. It has
been argued both on the left and the right that guerrillas are "invincible"
("Regular armies have almost never succeeded in gaining the ascendancy over
guerrilla operations of any importance" — Colonel Nemo). 11 It is easy to
understand this pessimism in the light of recent French history but it does not
at all correspond with the experience gained elsewhere. Liberal democracies
and in particular ineffective authoritarian regimes indeed found it impossible
to cope with colonial insurrections in the 1950s and 1960s. Other political
regimes have suppressed guerrilla insurgencies with great ease. Guerrilla
movements are, as Mao said, the fish that needs water—the water being a
minimum of freedom. Such freedom exists if the government is relatively
liberal or relatively inefficient. If government control and coercion is really
effective, a guerrilla movement cannot possibly develop as the Communist and
Fascist experience has shown. Some governments are inhibited in their action
by public opinion, others are not. The Iraqi government liquidated the Kurdish
rebellion in 1974 with great ease yet the Rritish government failed to suppress
the civil war in Ulster. This did not mean that the Iraqi government had
greater legitimacy or that it was more virtuous.
Dictatorships, needless to say, are not free of grievances, for all one knows
they may be even more acutely felt there. Yet there is no outlet for them; the
rebel will be arrested, sent to prison and perhaps shot. His arrest will not be
reported by the mass media, it will have no political consequences, his
sacrifice will be in vain. If intellectuals are alienated, they keep the fact strictly
to themselves for fear of losing their jobs — or worse. Much of Western
guerrilla literature is curiously parochial in its stress on the importance of
public opinion; in a great and growing number of countries there is no public
opinion — or it has no way of expressing itself. It is hardly necessary to
describe in detail the means of control and coercion which make resistance in
an effective dictatorship very nearly hopeless as long as the leader (or the
leaders) have not lost their self-confidence and feel no compunction in using
their means of repression to the full. The argument that repression is a two-
edged sword, that guerrillas always benefit from government repression, that
power is weakest when it uses violence (Merriam) applied perhaps to pre-
modern dictatorships, and to liberal regimes whose powers of repression are
strictly limited. By and large it is no longer true.
Not only have sociologists and political scientists found it impossible to

come to terms with the guerrilla phenomenon, lawyers have encountered the
very same difficulties. Since the Second World War many attempts have been
made to establish a new basis of legality, a more humanitarian status, for
guerrilla forces under the laws of war. For many decades the status of the
partisan was based on the Brussels Declaration of 1874 and the Hague
Convention. Guerrilla tactics, meaning hostile activities committed by small
bodies of soldiers in the enemy's rear during a real war were considered legal,
whereas guerrilla war was not. According to this argument organized
resistance had ceased and the individuals who engaged in guerrilla war were
not bound by the laws of war. Thus private individuals were entitled to
commit hostilities against the enemy — international law being a law between
states could not issue prohibitions to private individuals. But these individuals
did not enjoy the privileges of members of armed forces and the enemy had
the right to consider them as war criminals. 12 The Geneva Conventions of 1949
tried to legalize the status of the partisans in internal conflicts, but the lawyers
could not agree on what constitutes a state of war and the question whether
insurgents could possibly be bound by a convention which they had not
themselves signed.13 For a predominantly terrorist movement the acceptance of
the enemy's rules of war would be a negation of their whole strategy. But even
guerrilla movements with a lesser emphasis on terror might not be in a
position to adhere to the rules of war, for instance with regard to prisoners. A
dictatorship may want to give a reward to captured guerrillas rather than
execute them, but it will be guided in its actions by expediency rather than
law. Guerrilla wars are conducted brutally and Western officers and soldiers
have been guilty of excesses and even torture. But in democracies such
practices quickly become known, they are denounced and have to be
discontinued; in the struggle between a democratic government and a guerrilla
movement at least one side is bound by law; in a dictatorship neither is, hence
the failure to apply the principles of international law.
There is no theory which can predict the course of guerrilla war, and there
is no reason to assume that there ever will be. Concepts and definitions have
been postulated but usually this was simply "retranslating from one language
of definition to another without hypothesizing anything."14 One such recent
conceptual scheme differentiates between "truly qualitative insurgency" and
"unsophisticated armed uprisings," stressing that the basic thrust of a
407 A SUMMING UP
"qualitative insurgency" is psychological, that the guerrilla force component

by its very design is not geared to win a military victory, and that there were
altogether five insurgencies that correspond with this "sophisticated" pattern
(China, Cuba, the two Vietnam wars and Thailand). Such schemes tend to
restate the obvious in somewhat arcane language; they are quite harmless but
for the tall claims made for these exercises ("A qualitative insurgency becomes
an activity lending itself to systematic and reliable analysis"15).
Even the broadest formula cannot possibly cover all guerrilla wars. It may
be difficult to improve on the definition provided by Professor Huntington:
Guerrilla warfare is a form of warfare by which the strategically weaker side

assumes the tactical offensive in selected forms, times and places. Guerrilla
warfare is the weapon of the weak. . . . Guerrilla warfare is decisive only where
the anti-guerrilla side puts a low value on defeating the guerrillas and does not
commit its full resources to the struggle.16
This definition certainly does not apply to Castro's campaign nor can it be
maintained that the French in Algeria or the Portuguese in their African
colonies put a "low value" on defeating the guerrillas. Various guerrilla
movements have succeeded without taking any offensive at all, simply by
outlasting the enemy. Guerrilla war is decisive only when the antiguerrilla
side is prevented for military or political reasons from committing its full
resources to the struggle.
The concept of stages in the preparation of an insurrection figures highly in
the writings of counterinsurgency specialists. It implies that the outbreak of
guerrilla war is preceded by an incubation period in which the emphasis is on
organization, propaganda and conspiracy. That an insurgency in modern
times cannot be launched without some form of organization goes without
saying: there have been few, if any "spontaneous uprisings of the people. It is
also true that the guerrilla movement is particularly vulnerable in the period
of early mobilization. But it is equally true that such an organization, be it
Communist or nationalist, usually exists already and that not that much
preparatory work is needed for launching an insurgency. There was no
incubation period in Yugoslavia during the war, or in Cuba, or in many
African and Latin American countries. The concept of stages is the result of
the Southeast Asian
experience but what may be true in Vietnam, Malaya and the Philippines
does not necessarily apply to other parts of the world.
Such criticism of existing definitions and models is not based on the
assumption that more refined techniques would have resulted in superior
insights. The multiple "objective" and "subjective" factors involved in guerrilla
warfare and their complicated interaction rule out all-embracing formulas and
explanations that are scientific, in the sense that they have predictive value. To
recognize these limitations is not to deny that certain patterns are common to
many guerrilla movements and that a study of these patterns could be of help
in understanding why guerrilla wars have occurred in some conditions but
not in others, and why some have succeeded and others have failed. The
following attempt to summarize experience is concerned with probabilities
not certainties.
1. The geographical milieu has always been of importance. Guerrilla
movements have usually preferred regions that are not easily accessible (such
as mountain ranges, forests, jungles, swamps) in which they are difficult to
locate, and in which the enemy cannot deploy his full strength. Such areas are
ideal in the early period of guerrilla warfare, during the period of
consolidation, and they retain their uses later on as hideouts in a period of
danger. In such areas the guerrillas will be relatively unmolested, but at the
same time there are obvious drawbacks. If the enemy has to undergo the
hardships of a mountain climate, the guerrillas, too, will have to suffer. It is
difficult to obtain food and other supplies in distant, sparsely populated areas.
Restricting their operations to these regions the guerrillas will be safe but they
will be ineffective, for they will be able to harass only isolated enemy outposts,
they will not be in a position to hit at the main lines of communication and
they will lose contact with the "masses." Thus the ideal guerrilla territory
while relatively inaccessible should be located not too far from cities and
villages. Of late, topographical conditions have lost some of their erstwhile
importance. On the whole it has become easier for the antiguerrilla forces to
locate the rebels. Furthermore, with the rapid progress of urbanization, the
countryside has lost much of its original political importance. The village
cannot encircle the city if the majority of the population resides in urban areas.
For this reason, and for some others, the main scene of guerrilla operations has
shifted from the countryside to the city in predominantly urban societies, with
a simultaneous shift in strategy from hiding in nature to finding cover in
town.
Guerrilla movements need bases and they cannot operate with-
409 A SUMMING UP
out a steady flow of supplies. Ideally a sanctuary should be on foreign territory

outside the reach of the antiguerrilla forces. Bases are needed for guerrilla units
to recover from their battles, to reorganize for new campaigns and for a great
many other purposes. While movement is one of the cardinal principles of
guerrilla tactics a guerrilla unit is not a perpetuum mobile. The main drawback
of a base is that it offers a fixed target for enemy attack. Thus guerrillas may be
compelled to change their bases from time to time, unless they have established
"liberated zones" which the enemy, with his resources overextended, can no
longer destroy. The question of supply was not of decisive importance before
the nineteenth century, when guerrillas (as regular armies) lived off the land,
when weapons were unsophisticated and could be locally manufactured. The
more complicated the arms, the greater the guerrillas' dependence on supply
routes, frequently from abroad. There are but two cases in recent history in
which major guerrilla armies survived and expanded without outside supply of
arms — China and Yugoslavia. But this was exceptional in that these guerrilla
armies came into being during a general war that offered many opportunities of
acquiring arms. The decisive victories of Mao's army and of Tito's partisans
came only after they had the opportunity of rearming themselves from outside
sources.
2. The etiology of guerrilla wars shows that it very often occurs in areas in
which such wars have occurred before. The Spanish war against Napoleon took
place in the same regions in which Viriathus and Sertorius had fought the
Romans. Guerrilla wars had occurred before (or had even been endemic) in the
Tyrol, Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Algeria, the Philippines, north China, North
Vietnam, Cuba, Mexico and other countries. This may be partly due to
geographical factors, for these are all regions that favor guerrilla warfare. It is
also true that the hold of the central government over peripheral areas with a
long guerrilla tradition such as Oriente in Cuba, Kabylia in Algeria or Nghe An
province in Vietnam has never been as strong as on more centrally located
districts. Furthermore, there are cultural traditions favoring or militating against
large-scale political violence. Beyond a certain stage of cultural development it
is difficult for a guerrilla movement to gain mass support. Neither the middle
class nor workers and peasants in civilized countries feel sufficient enthusiasm
to "go to the mountains" even at a time of grave crisis. What Engels wrote in
1870 — that our tradition gives only barbarians the right of real self-defense and
that civilized nations fight according to established etiquette — is a fortiori true
now. Even in the case of foreign invasion and occupation the great majority of
the population in a civilized country will not engage in a war risking total
destruction.
3. To this extent there is a (negative) correlation between guerrilla warfare
and the degree of economic development. There have been few peasant
guerrilla wars in modern times in which acute agrarian demands constituted
the central issue (Mexico, the Philippines). On the other hand, in many more
countries the peasantry has been the main reservoir of manpower for guerrilla
armies led by nonpeasant elites. The breakdown of traditional peasant society
under the pressure of capitalist development, absentee landlordism,
demographic pressure, falling prices for agricultural produce, natural
catastrophes and other misfortunes have created in many Asian countries (and
to a lesser extent in Africa and Latin America) conditions in which there has
been great sympathy among poor peasants, landless laborers, but also middle
peasants for popular movements promising land to the landless, even if this
promise was not the immediate issue in the war. The difficulty facing the
guerrilla leaders has always been to harness this revolutionary potential on a
nationwide basis in view of the traditional reluctance of peasants to fight
outside their neighborhood. This could mostly be achieved only in the
framework of a national struggle transcending the parochial framework such
as a war against a foreign enemy (China, Algeria).
4. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there have been
three main species of guerrilla wars. They have been directed against foreign
occupants, either in the framework of a general war or after the defeat of the
regular army and against colonial rule. Secondly, guerrilla warfare has been
the favorite tactic of separatist, minority movements fighting the central
government (the Vendee, IMRO, IRA, ELF, the Basques, the Kurds, the FLQ,
etc.). And thirdly, guerrilla warfare against native incumbents has been the
rule in Latin America and in a few other countries (Burma, Thailand, etc.). But
the national, patriotic element has always been heavily emphasized even if
domestic rulers were the target; they were attacked as foreign hirelings by the
true patriots fighting for national unity and independence. In China, Vietnam,
Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece, the Philippines and Malaya partisan units were
established to fight foreign occupants but they became civil war forces with
the end of the general war. Throughout the nineteenth century the
achievement of national independence has been the traditional goal of
guerrilla movements; more recently
411 A SUMMING UP
social and economic programs have featured prominently. But the patriotic
appeal has always played a more important role than social-revolutionary
propaganda. Castro's war was fought for the overthrow of Batista's tyranny;
most Latin American guerrilla movements have stressed general reform
programs rather than clearly defined socialist-Communist slogans in their
fight against domestic contenders. As the outcome of these wars show,
guerrillas succeed with much greater ease against foreign domination than
against native incumbents.
5. The character of guerrilla war has undergone profound changes during
the last two centuries, but so has regular war on the one hand, and the
technique of revolution on the other. However, there is no justification for
regarding modem guerrilla warfare (or "people's war," or revolutionary
insurgency) as an entirely new phenomenon which has little connection with
the guerrilla wars of former periods. Organization (the role of the political
party) and propaganda play an infinitely more important role in present day
guerrilla war than in the past, and it is of course true that in some Third World
countries guerrilla war is merely one stage in the struggle for power. Guerrilla
war was never "apolitical," it was always nationalist in character and became
national-revolutionary in an age of revolution. Too much importance has been
attributed to the use of Marxist-Leninist verbiage on the part of Third World
liberation movements. This has led Western observers to interpret their
progress either in terms of a worldwide Communist conspiracy or as a great
new liberating promise. While the common denominator of most of these
Third World movements is anti-imperialism and the rejection of the capitalist
form of modernization, the ideology guiding them is a mixture of agrarian
populism and radical nationalism (with "nationalism" and "socialism" often
interchangeable). Such political movements have certain similarities with
European Communism (dictatorship, the role of the monolithic party) but on a
deeper level of analysis they are as distant from socialism as from liberal
capitalism. Elsewhere the basic inspiration for guerrilla warfare has been
sectarian-separatist (religious-tribal) with revolutionary ideology as a
concession to prevailing intellectual fashions and modes of expression.
6. The leadership of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century guerrilla
movements was usually in the hands of men of the people (Mina, the
Empecinado, Andreas Hofer, Zapata, the Boer leaders, the IMRO). In
backward countries they were traditionally led by tribal chiefs or religious
dignitaries. More recently they have
become, by and large, the preserve of young intellectuals or semi-intellectuals;
this refers particularly to Latin America and Africa with only a very few
exceptions (Fabio Vasquez, Samora Machel).
The social origin of the twentieth-century guerrilla elite in Latin America and
also in Asia and the more backward European countries is usually middle
class, especially the administrative stratum (the "lower mandarins") which has
no independent means of its own. Equally frustrated by their own limited
prospects and the real or imaginary plight of their country, they have opted for
revolutionary violence, the transformation of an old-fashioned, ineffective
autocracy into a more modern, more effective and by necessity also more
despotic regime. To seize power, the civilian intelligentsia transforms itself into
the military leadership. A formula of this kind does not apply to every single
guerrilla movement, even less to all of its leaders; nor does it do justice to the
idealistic motivation of leading guerrilla cadres. But in historical perspective
this has been the political function of radical guerrilla movements. Students
were hardly represented in the classical guerrilla movements, more recently
their share has been very prominent indeed, and the greater their role, the more
radical the character of the guerrilla movement; this is shown for instance by a
comparison between Fatah and PFLP, between the Angolan FLNA and the
MPLA. Military men have occasionally appeared as prominent guerrilla
leaders: Denis Davydov, Yon Sosa and Turcio Lima in Guatemala, the young
Prestes and later on Carlos Lamarca in Brazil, Grivas, Kaukji Mi-hailovic, the
Wamphoa graduates among the Chinese Communists. Some guerrilla leaders
had limited military experience, for example the Vendeans and Spanish
guerrillas who fought Napoleon, the Yugoslav Communists who participated
in the Spanish Civil War, Nasution, the Algerians who fought in the French
army. But the most important guerrilla leaders of our time, including Mao,
Tito, Giap, Castro, Guevara, as well as the foremost theoreticians among them,
were self-made men in the military field. Most guerrilla leaders were in their
late twenties or early thirties when they launched their campaigns, old enough
to impose their authority, uniting the experience of age and the activity of
youth, and capable of withstanding the exertions of guerrilla warfare. Some,
however, were already in their forties (Tito, Mao), and some even older
(Grivas, a few of the Boer generals, Chu Teh, Marighela). Few manual workers
have joined guerrilla movements (Korea and Malaya were significant
exceptions) and even fewer emerged as guerrilla leaders. Guerrilla leaders,
certainly the more successful
413 A SUMMING UP
among them, have always been strict disciplinarians. What Gibbon wrote
about Skanderbeg applies to most of them: "His manners were popular but
his discipline was severe and every superfluous vice was banished from his
camp."
7. Social composition: Attention has been drawn to the fact that peasants
traditionally constituted the most important mass basis of guerrilla
movements, but conditions varied considerably from country to country even
in the nineteenth century and there have been further changes since. The
Chouans and the Spanish guerrilla units fighting the French came almost
exclusively from rural areas, and the same applied, of course, to the Boer
commandos and the Zapatistas. On the other hand there was not a single
peasant among Garibaldi's "Thousand." IMRO was initially overwhelmingly a
rural movement, whereas the IRA derived most of its support from the cities;
IZL and the Stern Gang (in contrast to Hagana) were almost exclusively city-
based. Smugglers, poachers, bandits and various declasse elements played a
significant part in certain nineteenth-century guerrilla movements (southern
Italy) and also in Latin America and the Far East. Usually the smaller the
guerrilla army, the larger the middle-class element. This applies above all to
the Cuban revolution and the various urban guerrilla groups such as the
Tupamaros. Women have participated in almost all guerrilla movements. They
have been most prominent in the small urban guerrilla groups (West
Germany, the U.S.) and in Korea (more than a quarter of their total force).
Available data are insufficient to establish whether the occupation of
insurgents reflects the occupational pattern of the population as a whole. This
may have been the case in some countries (Philippines, Algeria) but not in
others (Latin America). A poll taken by the French during the first Vietnam
war showed that almost fifty percent of their prisoners were classified as
"petty bourgeois," and in African guerrilla movements, too, the urban petty
bourgeoisie was apparently represented far above their share in the
population. The small urban guerrilla movements are preponderantly
constituted of students, or recent students, the IRA being the one major
exception.
8. The motives that have induced men and women to join guerrilla bands
are manifold. Historically, patriotism has been the single most important
factor — the occupation of the homeland by foreigners, the resentment
directed against the colonial power — often accompanied by personal
grievances (humiliation, material deprivation, brutalities committed by the
occupying forces). Secessionist guerrilla movements have based their appeal
on the discrim-
ination against and the persecution of ethnic or religious minorities. Guerrilla
movements fighting domestic contenders stress obvious political or social
grievances such as the struggle against tyranny, unequal distribution of
income, government inefficiency, corruption and "betrayal," and, generally
speaking, the "antipopular character of the ruling clique." Land hunger, high
interest rates (Philippines), the encroachment by the haciendaclos on Indian
land (Mexico) have been important factors in predominantly agrarian societies.
On top of these causes there has been a multiplicity of personal reasons
ranging from a developed social conscience to boredom, the thirst for
adventure and the romanticism of guerrilla life to personal ambition — the
expectation of bettering oneself socially or of reaching a position of power and
influence. The dynamic character of guerrilla movements has always exerted a
powerful attraction of young idealists — the prospect of activity, of respon-
sibility for one's fellows, of fighting with equally enthusiastic comrades for the
national and social liberation of the homeland. As Maguire wrote seventy years
ago and Denis Davydov well before him, a partisan must be a kind of military
Byron, his enterprise requires a romantic imagination. What induces guerrillas
to stay on is above all esprit de corps, loyalty to his commander and fellow
soldiers. The feeling of togetherness and team spirit seems to be more
important than ideological indoctrination. Guerrilla warfare usually opens
larger vistas to personal initiative and daring than regular warfare; it has been
said that slavish imitation produces good military tailors but not guerrilla
leaders. But the motives are by no means all idealistic; guerrilla war is an
excellent outlet for personal aggression, it provides opportunities for settling
accounts with one's enemies, and conveys a great sense of power to those
hitherto powerless. While sadism has never been official guerrilla policy, there
has always been more deliberate cruelty inflicted in guerrilla wars than in the
fighting of regular anny units, subject to stricter discipline. This is true for the
partisan wars of the Napoleonic period and also for many subsequent guerrilla
wars. The gentlemanly guerrilla war has been a rare exception (the Boer War);
on the other hand there were many guerrilla wars in which sadism was
established practice (IMRO, IRA, Arab and African guerrillas). The cause
legitimizes both the fulfillment of personal ambition and the infliction of
cruelty which in other circumstances would be considered inhuman. As Le
Miere de Corvey noted more than a hundred and fifty years ago, there can be
no guerrilla warfare without hate and fanaticism. There is a tendency not just
to employ
GUERRILLA WARFARE
violence but to glorify it; in this respect there are parallels between modern
guerrilla movements and Fascism. Guerrilla warfare and, a fortiori, urban
terror implant a pattern of dictatorial practices and brutality that perpetuates
itself. Graduates of the school of violent action do not turn into practitioners of
democracy and apostles of humanism after victory.
9. Organization, propaganda and terror have always been essential parts of
guerrilla warfare, but their importance has greatly increased over the years
and the techniques have been refined. Organization implies the existence of a
political party or movement or at least a noncombatant fringe, semilegal or
underground, providing assistance to the guerrillas — money, intelligence
and special services. In some instances the guerrilla movement has been more
or less identical with the party (Cuba, Uruguay, Algeria); elsewhere it has
acted as the armed instrument of the party. Wherever guerrillas had no such
connection with a political party (EOKA, the Stern Gang, many African and
Latin American guerrilla movements) they could at least rely on a periphery of
sympathizers, which, albeit unorganized, provided support. In most recent
guerrilla wars political propaganda has been of equal or greater importance
than military operations (Cuba was the most striking example). Elsewhere
propaganda has played a subordinate role; this is especially true for guerrilla
wars waged by secessionist movements. These had the support of their own
people anyway; but no amount of propaganda would have persuaded the
Turks of the justice of the Macedonian or the EOKA cause, nor would have
made Ulstermen join the IRA, or persuaded the Iraqis to make common cause
with the Kurds. But even secessionist guerrillas want to influence world public
opinion. Public opinion is a more effective weapon than fighting against the
governments of small countries dependent on the goodwill of others. Urban
guerrillas will get far more publicity than rural, because there are more
newspapermen and cine cameras in towns. Some countries are more in the
limelight than others. An unex-ploded hand grenade found in an Israeli
backyard will be reported, major operations resulting in dozens killed in
Burma, Thailand or the Philippines may not be reported. Hence the endeavor
of urban terrorists to concentrate on eye-catching operations.
Propaganda is of particular importance in civil wars when the majority of
the population, as is often the case, takes a neutral, passive attitude in the
struggle between incumbents and insurgents. The apathy of the majority
usually favors the guerrillas more than their enemies. No guerrilla movement
has obtained its ob-
jectives solely through propaganda; equally none has succeeded by terrorism

alone.
Terror is used as a deliberate strategy to demoralize the government by
disrupting its control, to demonstrate one's own strength and to frighten
collaborators. More Greeks were killed by EOKA than British soldiers, more
Arabs than Jews in the Arab rebellion of 1936-1939, more Africans than white
people by the Mau Mau. The terrorist element has been more pronounced in
some guerrilla movements than in others; in "urban guerrillaism" it is the
predominant mode of the anned struggle, in China and Cuba it was used
more sparingly than in Vietnam, Algeria or in Greece. While few guerrilla
movements have been opposed in principle to terror, some, for strategic
reasons, have only seldom applied it because they thought it tactically
ineffective or because they feared that it would antagonize large sections of
the population. It is impossible to generalize about the efficacy of terror as a
weapon; it has succeeded in some conditions and failed in others. It was used
with considerable effect in Vietnam and Algeria; elsewhere, notably in Greece
and in various Latin American countries, it had the opposite effect. Much
depends on the selection of targets, how easy it is to intimidate political
opponents, whether it is just a question of "liquidating" a few enemies, or
whether the political power of the incumbents is widely diffused. Guerrilla
war has been defined by insurgents and counterinsurgents alike as the
struggle for the support of the majority of the people. No guerrilla movement
can possibly survive and expand against an overwhelmingly hostile popu-
lation. But in the light of historical experience the measure of active popular
support required by a guerrilla movement need not be exaggerated.
10. The techniques and organizational forms of guerrilla warfare have
varied enormously from country to country according to terrain, size and
density of population, political constellation, etc. Thus, quite obviously,
guerrilla units in small countries have normally been small whereas in big
countries they have been large. In some countries guerrilla units gradually
transformed themselves into regular army regiments and divisions (Greece)
and yet failed, in others they won the war though they never outgrew the
guerrilla stage (Cuba) or despite the fact that militarily they were beaten
(Algeria). In some guerrilla movements the personality of the leader has been
of decisive importance. One need recall only Shamyl and Abd el-Kader in the
nineteenth century; the same goes for more recent guerrilla wars (Tito, Castro,
Grivas). On other occa-
417 A SUMMING UP
sions personalities have been of little consequence; the fact that the French
captured some of the leaders of the Algerian rebellion did not decisively
influence the subsequent course of the war. The leaders of the Vietnam
Communists were expendable, Mao probably was not.
There are, by definition, no Blitzkrieg victories in guerrilla war, yet some
campaigns succeeded within a relatively short period (two years) whereas
others continued, on and off, for decades. Some involved a great deal of
fighting, resulting in great losses, others were, on the whole, unbloody (Cuba,
Africa). There has been a tendency to explain the defeats of guerrilla
movements by referring to their strategic errors. Thus the Greek Communists
have been blamed for their premature decision to adopt regular army tactics,
and the Huks for not carrying the war to the cities. But this does not explain
why other guerrillas succeeded, despite the fact that they made even graver
mistakes. Success or failure of a guerrilla movement depends not only on its
own courage, wisdom and determination but equally on objective conditions
and, last but not least, on the tenacity and aptitude of the enemy. Castro won
because he faced Batista and similarly the Algerians were dealing with the
Fourth Republic, a regime in a state of advanced disintegration. The Greek
partisans and the Huks, on the other hand, had the misfortune to encounter
determined opponents in the persons of Papagos and Magsaysay. But beyond
all these factors, subjective and objective, there is still the element of accident
which cannot possibly be accounted for, which defies measurement and
prediction. Objective conditions help or hamper guerrilla movements, they
make success or failure more likely. Given a certain historical process such as
decolonization, the victory of a guerrilla movement, however ineffectual, is
almost a foregone conclusion. But decolonization has been concluded and the
old rule no longer applies as the guerrillas confront native incumbents, nor is
it true with regard to separatist movements. Guerrillas have succeeded even
when "objective" conditions were adverse and they have been defeated even
when everything pointed to their victory. The presence of a great leader is a
historical accident: without Tito the Yugoslav partisans would probably not
have taken to the mountains; but for Castro the invasion of Cuba would not
have taken place. The same applies, of course, to the antiguerrilla camp. Under
a more forceful, more far-sighted and more gifted leader than Chiang Kai-
chek, the KMT might have won the war; Mao was perfectly aware of this
possibility. Other accidents can be decisive for the outcome of a guerrilla
war, for instance the presence of a government spy high up in the guerrilla
command. During the early period of insurgency the accidental death of a
leader or his arrest could be a fatal setback. Thus, the Huks never recovered
from the arrest in Manila, by accident, of most of the members of the
Communist party leadership. On the other hand a small, isolated guerrilla
movement may achieve a breakthrough early on in its struggle owing to sheer
good fortune rather than superior strategy. On at least two occasions the
fortunes of the Chinese Communists were decisively affected by sudden
changes in the international political constellation. The political orientation of
more than a few guerrilla movements has certainly been a matter of accident;
it was not from historical necessity that the Ovambo (SWAPO) should turn to
the Soviet Union, whereas the Herero and Mbanderu should study Chairman
Mao's Little Red Book.
1 1 . Urban terrorism in various forms has existed throughout history;
during the past decade it has become more frequent than rural guerrilla
warfare. Some modern guerrilla movements were predominantly city-based;
for instance, the IRA, EOKA, IZL and the Stern Gang, others were part urban
(Algeria). Neither the nineteenth-century anarchists nor the Russian pre-
revolutionary terrorists regarded themselves as guerrillas; their assassinations
were largely symbolic acts of "punishment" meted out to individual members
of the forces of oppression — they were not usually part of an overall strategy.
Whereas guerrilla operations are mainly directed against the armed forces of
the enemy and the security services, as well as installations of strategic
importance, modern urban terror is less discriminate in the choice of its targets.
Operations such as bank robberies, hijackings, kidnappings, and, of course,
assassinations are expected to create a general climate of insecurity. Such
actions are always carried out by small groups of people; an urban guerrilla
group cannot grow beyond a certain limit because the risk of detection
increases with the growth in numbers. A successful urban guerrilla war is
possible only if the strength of the establishment has deteriorated to the point
where anned bands can move about in the city. Such a state of affairs has
occurred only on very rare occasions and it has never lasted for any length of
time, leading within a few days either to the victory of the insurgents or the
incumbents. The normal use of "urban guerrilla" is a euphemism for urban
tenorism which has a negative public relations image. Thus the Tupamaros
always advised their members to dissociate themselves from "traditional
terrorism" and only a few
fringe groups (Marighela, Baader-Meinhof) openly advocated terror. Urban

terrorism can undermine a weak government, or even act as the catalyst of a
general insurgency but it is not an instrument for the seizure of power. Urban
terrorists cannot normally establish "liberated zones"; their operations may
catch headlines but they cannot conduct mass propaganda nor build up a
political organization. Despite the fact that modern society has become more
vulnerable than in the past to attacks and disruptions of this kind, urban
terrorism is politically ineffective, except when carried out in the framework
of the overall strategy of a political movement, usually sectarian or separatist
in character, with an already existing mass basis.
12. Guerrilla movements have frequently been beset by internal strife,
within their own ranks or between rival groups. Internal dissension has been
caused by quarrels about the strategy to be pursued (China, Greece) or by the
conflicting ambitions of individual leaders (Frelimo, Columbia). The rivalry
between the political and the military leadership, unless these were identical,
has also been a frequent cause of friction. Contemporary Far Eastern and
Southeast Asian Communist guerrilla movements have been relatively free of
such internal struggle; elsewhere splits have been the rule rather than the
exception. The Algerian rebels and the PAIGC succeeded in immobilizing
their competitors early on in their struggle. In other countries as much effort
has been devoted by the insurgents to fighting against their rivals as against
the common enemy (IMRO, Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece, Angola). Sometimes
a division of labor between rival organizations prevented open clashes while
the struggle against the common enemy lasted. This was true for instance of
Mexico, Mandatory Palestine, the Palestine Arab resistance and Ulster. But
once the fight against the foreign enemy has been won the struggle for power
frequently results in a free-for-all between rival guerrilla groups (Congo,
Angola) or sets former comrades-in-arms against each other (the Irish Civil
War).
THE FUTURE OF GUERRILLA WARFARE
The assessment of the future prospects of guerrilla warfare has to take

historical experience as its starting point: in what conditions did such warfare
occur, and why did it succeed or fail? The historical record shows, to repeat
once again, that nineteenth-century
guerrilla wars invariably failed to achieve their objectives except with the
support of a regular army, domestic or foreign. During the Second World War
guerrilla movements had limited successes against overextended enemy
units; but they used the war to consolidate their power and in the political
vacuum after the war they emerged as the chief contenders for power (China,
Yugoslavia, Albania, Vietnam).
A powerful impetus was given to guerrilla war after 1945 with the
disintegration of colonial empires. The colonial powers no longer had the will
to fight, and even if guerrilla operations were militarily quite ineffective, to
combat them became so costly that the imperial power eventually withdrew
its forces.
Guerrilla war against domestic rulers has succeeded in the past — with one
exception — only during a general war or immediately following it, with the
collapse of central state power. Weakened as the South Vietnam regime was
by Vietcong activities, the decisive assault was launched by a regular army.
Separatist guerrilla movements have not so far scored decisive victories. Their
future prospects will depend to a large extent on the amount of foreign aid
they receive. If their political demands are limited in character
(administrative-cultural autonomy) or if their secession would not decisively
weaken the state they may succeed in certain cases. If on the other hand the
loss would be unacceptable, their chances must be rated low, except at a time
of general crisis such as war. The appeal of a separatist guerrilla movement is
of necessity limited; its survival and success depends on the assumption that
the authorities will not apply extreme measures ranging from resettlement on
a massive scale to physical extermination.
The conditions conducive to the success of guerrillas have become much
less promising with the virtual end of decolonization and the absence of
general war. Could the Cuban example be emulated elsewhere? Could, in
other words, a guerrilla movement succeed in peacetime in undermining an
existing government to such an extent that its collapse became a distinct
possibility? Certain developments favor insurrection: urban terrorism has
become transnational, supported by foreign governments or by terrorist
movements abroad. At the same time, the destructive power of the weapons
used by terrorists has greatly increased. While the rifle, the machine gun and
the hand grenade (or the bomb) were the classical weapons of the guerrilla
during the last hundred years, the guerrilla of the future will have advanced
weapons such as missiles at his disposal; he may be able to manufacture a
crude atomic bomb
421 A SUMMING UP
or steal one.17 But the political uses of nuclear blackmail by terrorist groups
should not be exaggerated — it is not an instrument for the seizure of power. 18
In any case, the destructive power of the weapons in the hands of the state has
grown even more and the outcome will depend in the last resort on the will
and the ability of the government to apply this force. The military balance of
power has shifted to the detriment of the guerrillas; they can seldom operate
in the open country, and the scope of terrorist activities in urban centers is
limited (the decline of hijacking).
It has been maintained that large-scale conventional wars have become so
difficult and expensive that terrorists may be employed by foreign
governments to engage in surrogate warfare and that terrorism may become
the conventional war of the future. This seems unlikely for both military and
political reasons. Recent technological advances such as precision-guided
munitions provide more destructive energy in smaller packages than ever
before and have revolutionized delivery accuracy. These new weapons how-
ever are effective above all against tanks and combat aircraft. But tanks and
combat aircraft were never the guerrilla's worst enemies whereas in fighting
in urban areas precision-guided munitions will be of strictly limited use. It is
quite likely that in a future war massed forces will count for less and small
forces with great firepower will be of considerable importance. There may
well be a dispersal of forces, a return, on a higher level of technological de-
velopment, to the partisan tactics of the eighteenth century with
comparatively small, highly mobile units raiding the enemy's rear. But it is
unlikely that guerrilla units operating in peacetime will derive much benefit
from these innovations. They will not be able, as a rule, to retransfer their
activities from the cities to the countryside, for means of detection in the open
have greatly improved. If it is true that military power will become more
diffuse, it is equally true that military power without a central command,
close coordination, supply and logistics is ineffective.
In peace a determined army or police force will always be able to destroy
the guerrillas and terrorists. The guerrillas have to rely on the government's
inability to use the full power at its disposal, the constraints imposed by
world opinion and public opinion at home. But this applies only to liberal-
democratic regimes. Their number has been shrinking and guerrilla or
terrorist activities could well hasten this process. What Regis Debray said
about the Tupamaros applies mutatis mutandis to guerrillas and terrorists
operating in democratic societies in general; that digging the grave of the "sys-
tem" they dig their own grave, for the removal of democratic restraints spells
the guerrilla's doom. Is it safe to expect that governments will be either so
inefficient or so permissive as not to employ effective antiguerrilla or
antiterrorist measures in an emergency? This is becoming less and less likely.
The strategy of guerrilla war may be used between sovereign states with
attacks launched from sanctuaries beyond state borders. But such war by
proxy will usually be dangerous for it may lead to full-scale war; it is unlikely
in time of peace that the Chinese will instigate guerrilla warfare in Siberia or
vice versa. A guerrilla campaign may still be possible against a small country
in certain circumstances if support by a major power discreetly (or not so
discreetly) is provided to various separatist or opposition groups.
Democratic regimes always seem highly vulnerable to terrorist attack. The
constitutional restraints in these regimes make it difficult to combat terrorism
and such failure exposes democratic governments to ridicule and contempt. If,
on the other hand, they adopt stringent measures they are charged with
oppression, and the violation of basic human rights. If terrorists are put on
trial they will try to disrupt the legal procedure and to make fair
administration of justice impossible. Having been sentenced, terrorists and
their sympathizers could then claim that they are victims of gross injustice. Up
to this point, the media (always inclined to give wide publicity to acts of
violence), are the terrorists' natural ally. But as terrorist operations become
more frequent, as insecurity spreads and as wide sections of the population
are adversely affected, there is a growing demand for tougher action by the
government even if this should involve occasional (or systematic)
infringements of human rights. The swing in popular opinion is reflected in
the media focusing no longer on the courage and unselfishness of the terrorists
but on the psychopathological sources of terrorism and the criminal element—
sometimes marginal, at others quite prominent, but always present in "urban
guerrilla" operations. Unless the moral fiber of the regime is in a state of
advanced decay, and the political will paralyzed, the urban terrorists would
fail to make headway beyond the stage of provocation, in which, according to
plan, public opinion should have been won over to their cause, but is in fact
antagonized.
Prospects for urban terror seem a little more promising in the Third World,
but only in certain rare constellations, some of which have already been
discussed. The security forces in these countries are less experienced and
effective than in Communist regimes, but
423 A SUMMING UP
usually they will be capable of coping with challenges of this kind unless the
rebels receive powerful support from abroad. Irrespective of how brutally a
guerrilla movement is suppressed it will be next to impossible to mobilize
foreign public opinion against an oil-producing country or one that has good
relations with its neighbors and other Third World nations. World public
opinion can be mobilized only against a relatively weak country that has
powerful enemies among its neighbors, and few friends.
Even if the authority of the state is fatally undermined, even if a power
vacuum exists, the prospects of guerrilla or terrorist victory have dimmed, for
there is a stronger contender for power — the army. Military coups have
become more and more frequent: they may in future become the normal form
of political change in most parts of the world.
Latin American Communist leaders have noted that the revolutionary
process largely depends on enlisting the "patriotic forces" among the military
on the side of the Communists.19 The same applies mutatis mutandis to the
Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia. But such military coups can turn right
as well as left. The slogans will be nationalist-populist in any case and the
difference in policy between left- and right-wing military dictatorships may
not always be visible to the naked eye. Those with a more pronounced left-
wing bias will steal much of the guerrillas' thunder, those inclined more to the
right will effectively suppress them. The army command seizes the key
positions of the state apparatus and quite frequently establishes a state party.
The help of civilian (or guerrilla) political activists may be accepted in this
process but they are regarded at the same time as rivals and since the army
officers have no desire to share power the civilians will be kept at a safe
distance from the levers of power.
During the last fifteen years some hundred and twenty military coups have
taken place whereas only five guerrilla movements have come to power; three
of them as the result of the Portuguese military coup in 1974; Laos and
Cambodia fell after the collapse of Vietnam. The military dictator may be
overthrown but the challenge will again come from within the army. Not
being overextended and weakened by foreign wars, the army in Third World
countries is in a strong position as a contender for domestic power.
The conditions that caused insurgencies have not disappeared — men and
women are still exploited, oppressed, deprived of their rights and alienated.
"Objective, revolutionary situations" still abound and will continue to exist.
But the prospects for conducting
successful guerrilla war in the postcolonial period have worsened, except,

perhaps, to a limited extent in the secessionist-separatist context. Guerrilla
war may not entirely disappear but, seen in historical perspective, it is on the
decline, together with its traditional foes — colonialism on the one hand and
liberal democracy on the other. Thus the function of guerrilla movements is
reverting to what it originally was — that of paving the way for and
supporting the regular army. In the past such assistance was military — today
it is mainly political. It is holding the stirrup so that others may get into the
saddle.
The transition from high to low tide in the fortunes of guerrilla war has
been sudden. This is not to say that the conditions that once favored its rise
may not recur— following a major war or a natural catastrophe or the
weakening of the authority of the state for some other reasons. But at present
the age of the guerrilla is drawing to a close. The retreat into urban terror,
noisy but politically ineffective, is not a new departure but, on the contrary,
the end of an era.
Notes
CHAPTER ONE: PARTISANS IN HISTORY
1. C. W. Abeli, Savage Life in New Guinea (London, 1901), 138; James Adair, The History of the
American Indians (London, 1775), 382 et seq; H. H. Turney-High, Primitive War, Its Practice
and Concepts (New York, 1971), 128.
2. Niese, ed., Josephus Flavius (Berlin, 1887), Book 2, chapter 19.
3. Dio Cassius, chapter 69, 12-13.
4. Thucydides, III, 94-98, quoted in F. E. Adcock, The Greek and Macedonian Art of War
(Berkeley, 1957), 17.
5. The main sources for the Battle of Teutoburg Forest are Tacitus's Annali, Dio Cassius, and
Suetonius.
6. Caesar, De hello Gallico, Book VII. See also Camille Jullian, Vercingetorix (Paris, 1921), and
T. Rice Holmes, Caesar's Conquest of Gaul (London, 1899).
7. Antonio Garcia y Bellido, "Bandas y Guerrillas en las luchas con Roma," His-pania,\, No. 21,
548.
8. The main sources are Appian, Diodorus, Dio Cassius. The best short summary is Hans
Gundel's "Viriathus" in Pauly and Wissowa, Real Encyclopaedic d. klassischen
Altertumswissenschaft, 1893-.
9. Appian, Roman History, I, trans. Horace White (London, 1958), 258.
10. Cambridge Ancient History, VIII, 316.
11. "Su coincidencia con los practicados por las guerrillas en nuestra Guerra de la
Independencia es absoluta." Bellido, "Bandas . . . ," 589.
12. The question whether Viriathus should be considered Portuguese or Celtibero
remains in dispute.
13. Plutarch 12-13. See also the dissertation by Stahl, De Bella Sertoriano (Erlan-gen, 1907);
Mommsen, Romische Geschichte, III, and Schulten, in Pauly and Wissowa, Real Encyclopaedic
14. Mommsen,Romische Geschichte, III, 37.
15. See G. Kohler, Die Entwicklung des Kriegswesens und der Kriegsfuhrung in der
Ritterzeit (Breslau, 1886) II; Hans Delbriick, Geschichte der Kriegskunst, (Berlin, 1907) III;
Emil Daniels, Geschichte des Kriegswesen (Leipzig, 1910).
16. Oeuvres de Froissart, VI, 32.
17. The main source for the Tuchins is M. Boudet, La Jacquerie des Tuchins 1363-84
(Paris, 1895).
18. H.W. V. Temperley, History of Serbia (London, 1919), 125.
19. F. S. Stevenson, History of Montenegro (London, 1912), 123; G. Finlay, History of the Greek
Revolution (London, 1861), I.
20. Lieutenant G. Arbuthnot, Herzegovina or Omer Pasha and the Christian Rebels
(London, 1862), 152.
21. Ibid., 266.
22. The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1668).
23. G. Rosen, Die Balkan Haiducken (Leipzig, 1878), 26-27.
24. Finlay, History . . . ,32.
25. General Gordon, History of the Greek Revolution, I, 313.
26. J. B. Parsons, "Attitudes towards the late Ming Rebellions," in Oriens Ex-tremus, VI
(1959); Erich Hauer, "Li Tsu-cheng and Chang Hsien-chung," in Asia Minor, II (1925). For a
short general description see Roland Mousnier, Fureurs Paysannes (Paris, 1967), 238-306.
27. Basing himself on Ewald (Abhandlung), Clausewitz refers to the many incidents in
which American riflemen had abducted English generals (Vorlesungen iiber den kleinen Krieg,
Schriften, I [Gottingen, 1966], 439). Frederick the Great, on the other hand, took a dim view of
the importance of the lessons of the war in America. On one occasion he wrote: "The people who
come back from America imagine they know all there is to know about war, and yet they have to
start learning war all over again in Europe." (Quoted in Peter Paret, York and the Era of
Prussian Reform 1807-181$ [Princeton, 1966], 43).
28. Piers Mackesy, The War for America (London, 1964), 30,366.
29. The most recent biography of Marion is Hugh F. Rankin, The Swamp Fox (New
York, 1973). Of the earlier works K. T. Headley, Washington and his Generals (New York,
1847), II, and W. Gilmore Simms, The Life of Francis Marion (New York, 1846) should also be
mentioned.
30. Rankin, op. cit., 173. See also Mark Boatner, ed., Cassell's Biographical Dictionary of
the American War of Independence, 1773-1783 (London, 1966).
31. A. K. Gregorie, Thomas Sumter (Columbia, 1931).
32. James Graham, The Life of General Daniel Morgan (New York, 1859).
33. Esmond Wright, Washington and the American Revolution (London, 1973),
135-
34. Jac Weller, "Irregular but Effective: Partisan Weapons Tactics in the American
Revolution: Southern Theatre," Military Affairs (Fall 1967), 120.
35. W. D. James, A Sketch of the Life of Brigadier General Francis Marion (Charleston,
1824), 59.
36. Weller, loc. cit., 126.
37. Ibid., 119.
38. Ch. I. Chassin, La Vendee Patriotique (Paris, 1892), II, 293.
39. This account is based mainly on the works of Ch. I. Chassin, Emile Gabory, Joseph
Clemenceau and Savary. Of the recent literature A. Montagnon, Une guerre subversive (Paris,
1959), Charles Tilly, The Vendee (London, 1964), and Peter Paret, Internal War and
Pacification: The Vendee I78g -i7g6 (Princeton, 1961) are the most important.
40. P. Paret, Internal War..., 34.
41. Quoted in Tilly, The Vendee, 333.
42. Chassin, La pacification de I'ouest, II.
43. Gabory relates the story of the peasant Guitton who killed twenty-seven soldiers
after having found his wife and children dead after a punitive raid (Napoleon et la Vendee
[Paris, 1914], 12).
44. Chassin, La preparation, 111,441.
45. Chassin, La Vendee patriotique, 1,439.
46. Tilly, The Vendee, 334.
47. Chassin, La Pacification, 1,187.
48. Paret, Internal War . . . , 33.
49. For a military analysis of the Vendean wars see A. Montagnon, Une guerre
subversive.
428 NOTES
50. Chassin,La Pacification, III, 219.

51. Some of their leaders, such as Bonchamp, had participated in the American War of
Independence. But it would be wrong to attribute undue importance to this fact, just as it is no
doubt accidental that some of the Vendeans (and their conquerors) subsequently saw service in
Spain. It is possible to establish a genealogy of guerrilla warfare — from South Carolina to the
Vendee, from there to Spain, from Spain to North Africa to the Fenians (John Devoy). But such
exercises are of no great significance.
52. Raymond Carr, Spain 1809-1939 (Oxford, 1966),passim.
53. Quoted in Geoffrey de Grandmaison, L'Espagne et Napoleon (Paris, 1931), IV, 219.
54. The main sources used in this account are Gomez de Arteche y Mora, Guerra de la
Independencia (Madrid, 1868-1903), 14 vols.; A. Grasset, La Guerre d'Espagne, 1807-1813
(Paris, Nancy, 1914); Toreno, Histoire du Soulevement de la Guerre et de la Revolution
d'Espagne (Paris, 1836-38), 5 vols.; Oman, A History of the Peninsular War (Oxford, 1902-22),
6 vols.; Geoffrey de Grandmaison, Espagne et Napoleon (Paris, 1931), 3 vols.; Diccionario
Bibliogrdfico de la Guerra de la Independencia Espanola (Madrid, 1944-52), 3 vols. Most
recently: Juan Priego Lopez, Guerra de la Independencia (Madrid, 1973), 3 vols.
55. The main sources for Mina are A Short Extract from the Life of General Mina
published by himself (London, 1825); Memorias del General Don Francisco Espoz y Mina (New
Edition) (Madrid, 1962), I; I. M. Iribarren, Espoz y Mina el guerrillero (Madrid, 1965); Hermilio
de Oloriz, Navarra en la Guerra de la Independencia. Biografia del guerrillero Don Francisco
Espoz y Mina (Pamplona, 1955).
56. Oman, loc. cit., Ill, 489.
57. Mina, Memorias, 86-87.
58. A Short Extract, 31.
59. Archives de la Guerre, 20 April 1813. Quoted in Grandmaison, III, 246.
60. There is a great deal of literature, much of it apocryphal, on the Empecinado, some of
it also in English, e.g., "Passages in the Career of the Empecinado" in Peninsular Scenes and
Sketches by the author of "Student of Salamanca" [Frederick Hardman] (Edinburgh, 1846), 1-97.
The following account is based mainly on French sources and on The Military Exploits etc. etc.
of Don Juan Marin Diaz the Empecinado who First Commenced and then Organized the
System of Guerrilla Warfare in Spain (London, 1823).
61. The Military Exploits, 153.
62.See documents quoted in Grandmaison, III.
65.C. F. Henningsen, The Most Striking Events of a Twelve Months Campaign with
Zumalacarregui (London, 1836), 1,177.
66. On Somaten and Miqueletes, see Arteche, VII, 56; and Boucheman, "Apergu sur
l'organisation d'Armee espagnole et des corps de partisans de 1808-1814," Le Spectateur
Militaire, XXII (1859).
67. About the subsequent fate of the guerrilla leaders see Diccionario Bibliogrdfico; E.
Guillon, Les Guerres d'Espagne sous Napoleon (Paris, 1902), and Grandmaison.
68. Mina, Memorias, 112.
69. Toreno, III, 340.
70. Mina, Memorias, i6g. ,
71. Jac Weller, "Wellington's Use of the Guerrillas," Royal United Services Institute Magazine
(May 1963), 155.
72. Grandmaison, 219.
73. Toreno, III, 3°-
74. Aus dem Leben des Generals der Infanterie z.D. Dr. Heinrich von Brandt,
429 NOTES
(Berlin, 1870), 76, 212; Soldats suisses au service etranger (Geneva, 1909), II, 35; Arteche,
VII, 64; Grandmaison, 246.
75. R. Wohlfeil, Spanien und die deutsche Erhebung (1965), 180 et seq., 230 et seq.
76. The following account is based chiefly on the three main works on the Tyrolean rising: Josef
Hirn, Tirols Erhebung im Jahre 1809 (Innsbruck, 1909); Hans von Voltelini, Forschungen und
Beitrage zur Geschichte des Tiroler Aufstandes in Jahre i8og (Gotha, 1909); Karl Paulin, Das
Leben des Andreas Hofer (Innsbruck, 1959). A full bibliography is in Hans Hochenegg, Beihefte
zu Tiroler Heimat (Innsbruck, i960).
77. Hans Kramer, Andrea* Hofer (Vienna, 1970), 40.
78. Tirolund die Tiroler im Jahre i8og (1810), 32.
79. F. Schulze, ed., Die Franzosenzeit in deutschen Landen (Leipzig, 1909), I, 244; Helden der
Ostmark (Vienna, 1937), 135.
80. Kramer, 47.
81. The most important source is Denis Davydov, Voennie Zapiski (Moscow, 1940). There is
much interesting material in Russkaya Starina, e.g., Lowenstern's Zapiski, serialized in 1900-
1901. One of the earliest major analyses of the war of 1812-13 ls Mikhailovski-Danilevski,
Opisanie otechestvennoi voini v 1812 godu (St. Petersburg, 1839), 3 vols, and the same author's
Imperator Alexander I i evo spodvizhniki v 1812, 1813, 1814 i 1815 godakh (St. Petersburg,
1849). Among Soviet accounts E. Tarle's Napoleon's Invasion of Russia (London, 1942) and V.
A. Garin, Izgnanie Napolona iz Moskvi (Moscow, 1938) should be mentioned.
82. Davydov, op. cit., 209.
83. Ibid., 22.
84. Ibid., 158. See also Memoires du General Lowenstern (Paris, 1903), I, 296.
85. Mikhailovski-Danilevski, Opisanie, III, 132.
86. D. Cherviakov, "Partisanskie Otryadi v otechestvennoi voine 1812," Voenno-Istoricheski
Zhurnal, 6-7 (1941), 54.
87. Davydov, 177.
88. Sovremennik 3, 1836. Pushkin wrote to him: "Your essay did not escape the red ink.
Military censors wanted to show that they can read."
89. Davydov, 424.
90. Quoted in Tarle, 250.
91. Garin, 93.
92. Mikhailovski-Danilevski, Opisanie, III, 102.
CHAPTER TWO: SMALL WARS AND BIG ARMIES
1. On Tupac Amaru, L. E. Fish, The Last Inca Revolt (Norman, 1966); Daniel Valcaral, La
Rebelion de Tupac Amaru (Mexico, 1947); idem, Rebeliones indi-genas (Lima, 1946); German
Arciniegas, Los Comuneros (Bogota, 1959); Bo-leslao Lewin, La Rebelion de Tupac Amaru
(Buenos Aires, 1963).
2. Fish, Last Inca Revolt, 214.
3. On Pumacahua, I. C. Bouroncle, Pumacahua. La Revolucion de Cuzco de 1814
(Cuzco, 1956); Juan Jose Vega, La Emancipacion frente el indio peruana (Lima, 1958).
4. Pedro M. Arcaya, Insureccion de los negros de la serrania de Coro (Caracas, 1949),
31-32.
5. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York, 1963), 54, 116-117. For the military
aspects of the campaign see A. Metra, Histoire de Vexpedition des Frangais a Saint Domingue
(Paris, 1825), and Lemmonier-Delafosse, Seconde campagne de Saint Domingue (Le Havre,
1846).
6. Oswald
o Diaz Diaz, Los Almeydas (Bogota, 1962); Raul Rivera Serna, las Guer-rilleros del centro en la
emancipacion peruana (Lima, 1958). •v
7. Memoirs of General Miller, quoted in John Lynch, The Spanish American Revolutions
(London, 1973), 181.
8. Robert L. Gilmore, Caudillism and Militarism in Venezuela, 1810-1910 (Athens, [Ohio],
1964), 71; Paez,Autobiografia (New York, 1946), I, 7.
9. Gilmore, Caudillism and Militarism, 83.
10. Jasper Ridley, Garibaldi (London, 1974), 185.
11. The standard works in English are Hugh M. Hamill Jr., The Hidalgo Revolt (Gainesville,
1966), and Wilbert H. Timmons, Morelos of Mexico (El Paso, 1963). An important early work is
F. Robinson's Mexico and her Military Chieftains, first published in 1847, reprinted in 1970.
12. J. A. Dabbs, The French Army in Mexico (The Hague, 1963), 70.
13.Julio C. Guerrero, La Guerra de guerrillas (La Paz, 1940), 89.
14. Hugh Thomas, Cuba (London, 1971), 254. See also Ramiro Guerra, Guerra de los diez
anos (Havana, 1960), and Antonio Pirala, Anales de la guerra de Cuba (Madrid, 1896).
15.The chief sources are Wyler's autobiographical account, Mi mando en Cuba (Madrid, 1910) 6
vols. See also Hugh Thomas, Cuba, and M. F. Almagro, His-toria politico de la Espana
contemporanea (Madrid, 1959), II.
16. "A nossa Vendeia" is the title of two articles by Euclides da Cunha in O estado de Sao
Paulo, March 17 and July 17, 1897, reprinted in Canudos e ineditos (Sao Paulo), 1967. Da
Cunha's classic Os sertoes, published in English under the title Rebellion in the Backlands
(Chicago, 1944), is devoted to the campaigns against Canudos.
17.While da Cunha's epic presents a magnificent literary account, its historical accuracy has
been disputed. The literature on Canudos is considerable; for a modern biography of
Consilheiro see Abelardo Montenegro, Antonio Conselheiro (Fortaleza, 1954); for the general
historical background, Jose Maria Bello, A History of Modern Brazil 1889-1964 (Stanford,
1966); for a modern interpretation, Ralph della Cave, "Brazilian Messianism and National
Institutions: A Reappraisal of Canudos and Joaseiro," Hispanic American Historical Review
(August 1968); for the military aspects of the campaigns, U. Peregrino, Os sertoes como historia
militar (Rio de Janeiro, 1956).
18. Da Cunha, Rebellion, 149.
19. Ibid., 194.
20. Ibid., 475.
21. Edgar Holt, The Carlist Wars in Spain (London, 1967), is a recent historical study.
Antonio Pirala, Historia de la guerra civil (Madrid, 1868), 6 vols., is the most detailed account.
See also A. Risco, Zumalacarreguy en campana (Madrid, 1935); T. Wisdom, Estudio historico
militar de Zumalacarreguy y Cabrera (Madrid, 1890); and most recently Roman Oyarzuni: Vida
de Ramon Cabrera (Barcelona, 1961).
22. Holt, Carlist Wars, 117.
23. Franz von Erlach, Die Freiheitskriege kleiner Volker gegen grosse Heere (Bern, 1867),
323.
24. George Finlay, History of the Greek Revolution (London, 1861), I, 189. See also T.
Gordon, History of the Greek Revolution (Edinburgh, 1832), 2 vols. C. W. Cranley, The
Question of Greek Independence (Cambridge, 1930); C. M. Woodhouse, The Philhellenes
(London, 1968), and his earlier The Greek War of Independence (London, 1952). For a modern
Greek view of the war of independence, see G. K. Asporas, Politika historia tes neoteras
Hellados (Athens, 1930).
25. Finlay, Greek Revolution, 194-195.
26. W. F. Reddaway et. al., Cambridge History of Poland (London, 1941), II, 161. The
standard (Polish) biography of Kosciusko is by T. Korzon (Cracow, 1906).
27. Friedrich von Smitt, Geschichte des polnischen Aufstandes (Berlin, 1839), II,
159-
28. William Ansell Day, The Russian Government in Poland (London, 1867), 131.
431 NOTES
29. Smitt, Polnischen Aufstandes, 383.

30. Ludwik Mieroslawski, Kritische Darstellung des Feldzuges vom Jahre 1831 und
hieraus abgeleitete Regeln fur National-Kriege (Berlin, 1847), I, 302. See also the Mieroslawski
biography (in Polish) by M. Zychowski (Warsaw, 1963).
31. Pisacane, quoted by J. Ridley, Garibaldi, 253.
32. G. M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi's Defence of Rome (London, 1933), 89. See also the
Autobiography of Giuseppi Garibaldi (London, 1889), 3 vols.
33. Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Thousand (London, 1933), 218.
34. Ridley, Garibaldi, 605.
35. H. d'Ideville, Memoirs of Marshall Bugeaud (London, 1884), I, 211. Of the many
Bugeaud biographies, Lucas-Dubreton (1931), E. de Lamaze (1943), M. Andrieux (1951), and L.
Morard (1947) should be mentioned.
36. Geo. Wingrove Cooke, Conquest and Colonisation in North Africa (London, i860),
211-212. For a general account see also J. Pichon, Abd el-Kader (Paris, 1899), and A. Bellemore,
Abd el-Kader, sa vie politique et militaire (Paris, 1863).
37. Count P. Castellan, Military Life in Algeria (London, 1853), I, 204.
38. d'Ideville, Marshall Bugeaud, 1,299.
39. Ibid., 252.
40. The literature on the Caucasian campaigns is immense. The most detailed Russian
account is General Potto's Kavkazkaya voina (St. Petersburg, 1887-1897), 4 vols.; the standard
English history is John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (London, 1908).
Modem descriptions are Lesley Blanch, The Sabres of Paradise (London, i960), and Paul
Chavchavadze, The Mountains of Allah (London, 1953). An interesting account from a Turkish
point of view is M. M. Zihni's Seyfo Samil (Ankara, 1958).
41. Baddeley, Conquest of the Caucasus, 146.
42. Friedrich Wagner, Schamil als Feldherr, Sultan und Prophet (Leipzig, 1854),
9543. W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields (London, 1953), 51.
44. Compare N. I. Pokrovsky, "Miuridism u vlasti," in Istorik-Marksist, 2 (1934), with
the debate in Voprosy istorii, II, 1947. The extensive literature on the subject is analyzed in Paul
B. Henze, "The Shamil Problem" in W. Z. Laqueur, ed., The Middle East in Transition (London,
1958), 415-443. For a post-Stalinist appraisal of Shamil see N. A. Smirnov, Miuridism na
Kavkaze (Moscow, 1963)-
46. J. A. MacGahin, Campaigning on the Oxus and the Fall of Khiva (London, 1874),
378.
47. Byron Farwell, Queen Victoria's Little Wars (London, 1973), 169. Another recent
account is Donald Featherstone, Colonial Small Wars (Newton Abbot, 1973)-
48. A recent Indian analysis is Dharm Pal, Tantia Topi (New Delhi, 1957). The most
detailed account is Kaye and Malleson, History of the Indian Mutiny (London, 1888-89), 6
vols.
49. Edgar Holt, The Strangest War (London, 1962), 150. The most detailed account is
James Cowan, The New Zealand Wars (Wellington, 1922), 2 vols. For a recent account, Keith
Sindar, The Origins of the Maori Wars (Wellington, 1957).
50. Frederick W. Turner III, Geronimo: His Own Story (London, 1974), introduction, 23;
according to the same source, Che Guevara found considerable inspiration in reading about
Geronimo.
51. C. L. Alderman, Osseola and the Seminole Wars (New York, 1973), 72.
52. John B. Trussell, "Seminoles in the Everglades," Army (December 1961).
53. V. C. Jones, Gray Ghosts and Rebel Raiders (New York, 1956), introduction.
54. Carl W. Breiham, Quantrill andhis Civil War Guerrillas (Denver, 1959), 42.
55. C. F. Holland, Morgan and his Raiders (New York, 1942); Jones, Gray Ghosts;
L. L. Butler, John Morgan and his Men (New York, i960); James Williamson, Mosby's
Rangers (New York, 1909); J. Scott, Partisan Life with Col. J. S. Mosby (New York, 1867);
A. R. Johnson, The Partisan Rangers (New York, 1904).
56. Williamson, Mosby's Rangers, 23.
57. Stanley F. Horn, The Army of Tennessee (Indianapolis, 1941), 195.
58. Mark M. Boatner, Cassel's Biographical Dictionary of the American Civil War
(London, 1973), 568.
59. Holland, Morgan, 170,350.
60. Wyeth, Forrest, 635.
61. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records (Washington, 1864-
1927), series I, vol. 39, 121.
62. Quoted in Carl E. Grant, "Partisan Warfare, Model 1861-5," Military Review, (Nov.
1958), 45.
63. Lieber's comments were published under the title Guerrilla Parties Considered with
Reference to the Laws and Usages of War (New York, 1862).
64. La Guerre de 1870: la defense nationale en Provence; mesures generates
d'organisation (Paris, 1911), 553. See also Freycinet, La Guerre en Provence (Paris, 1871).
65. Ibid., 557.
66. Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War (London, 1961), 254. The most detailed
histories of the war are Pierre Lehautcourt, La Defense nationale (Paris, 1893-1898), 8 vols.; and
Histoire de la guerre de 1870-71 (Paris, 1901-1908), 7 vols. The multivolume official German
and French accounts provide comparatively little material about partisan warfare.
67. H. Genevois, Les Coups de main pendant la guerre (Paris, 1896), 111.
68. See for instance, Fritz Hbnig, Der Volkskrieg an der Loire (Berlin, 1893-1897), 6
vols., passim, and A. Ehrhardt, Kleinkrieg (Potsdam, 1935), 49.
69. Georg Cardinal von Widdem, Der Krieg an den riickwdrtigen Verbindungen
(Berlin, 1893-1899), pt. II, 14.
70. Ibid., pt. Ill, 35.
71. Howard, Franco-Prussian War, 252-253.
72. Christian Rudolf de Wet, Three Years War (London, 1902), 78.
73. The main sources are the (semiofficial) history by General Frederic Maurice and
Captain M. H. Grant in 4 vols. (London, 1906-1910), and the Times History of the War in South
Africa, 1899-1902 in six vols. (London, 1900-1909). In addition there are countless eyewitness
reports, autobiographical and biographical accounts.
74. History of the War in South Africa, TV, 265.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid., 397.
77. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Great Boer War (London, 1903), 404.
78. The raid is described in the most vivid eyewitness account of the whole war in
Denys Reitz's Commando (London, 1942), 199 etseq.
79. De Wet, Three Years War, 305.
80. Ibid., 321 et seq.
81. Reitz, Commando, 310.
82. J. C. Smuts,Jan Christian Smuts (London, 1952), 83.
83. De Wet, Three Years War, 279-282.
84. Ibid., 93.
85. Richard L. Maullin, The Fall of Dumar Aljure, a Colombian Guerrilla and Bandit
(Santa Monica, 1968).
86. Constancio Bernaldo de Quiros, El Bandolerismo en Espana y en Mexico (Mexico,
1959), 296 et seq.; F. Lopez Leiva, El Bandolerismo en Cuba (Havana, 1930), 28 et seq. On the
genera] phenomenon of banditry see E. Hobsbawm, Bandits (London, 1969), and with reference
to Brazil, Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz, Os congaceiros (Paris, 1968).
41 6 GUERRILLA WARFARE
87. Smitt, Polnischen Aufstandes, 383.

88. Ludwik Mieroslawski, Kritische Darstellung des Feldzuges vom Jahre 1831 und
hieraus abgeleitete Regeln fur National-Kriege (Berlin, 1847), I, 302. See also the Mieroslawski
biography (in Polish) by M. Zychowski (Warsaw, 1963).
89. Pisacane, quoted by J. Ridley, Garibaldi, 253.
90. G. M. Trevelyan, Garibaldi's Defence of Rome (London, 1933), 89. See also the
Autobiography of Giuseppi Garibaldi (London, 1889), 3 vols.
91. Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Thousand (London, 1933), 218.
92. Ridley, Garibaldi, 605.
93. H. d'Ideville, Memoirs of Marshall Bugeaud (London, 1884), I, 211. Of the many
Bugeaud biographies, Lucas-Dubreton (1931), E. de Lamaze (1943), M. Andrieux (1951), and L.
Morard (1947) should be mentioned.
94. Geo. Wingrove Cooke, Conquest and Colonisation in North Africa (London, i860),
211-212. For a general account see also J. Pichon, Abd el-Kader (Paris, 1899), and A. Bellemore,
Abd el-Kader, sa vie politique et militaire (Paris, 1863).
95. Count P. Castellan, Military Life in Algeria (London, 1853), 1,204.
96. d'Ideville, Marshall Bugeaud, I, 299.
97. Ibid., 252.
98. The literature on the Caucasian campaigns is immense. The most detailed Russian
account is General Potto's Kavkazkaya voina (St. Petersburg, 1887-1897), 4 vols.; the standard
English history is John F. Baddeley, The Russian Conquest of the Caucasus (London, 1908).
Modem descriptions are Lesley Blanch, The Sabres of Paradise (London, i960), and Paul
Chavchavadze, The Mountains of Allah (London, 1953). An interesting account from a Turkish
point of view is M. M. Zihni's Seyh Samil (Ankara, 1958).
100. Friedrich Wagner, Schamil als Feldherr, Sultan und Prophet (Leipzig, 1854),
9543. W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, Caucasian Battlefields (London, 1953), 51.
44. Compare N. I. Pokrovsky, "Miuridism u vlasti," in Istorik-Marksist, 2 (1934), with
the debate in Voprosy istorii, II, 1947. The extensive literature on the subject is analyzed in Paul
B. Henze, "The Shamil Problem" in W. Z. Laqueur, ed., The Middle East in Transition (London,
1958), 415-443. For a post-Stalinist appraisal of Shamil see N. A. Smirnov, Miuridism na
Kavkaze (Moscow, 1963)-
46. J. A. MacGahin, Campaigning on the Oxus and the Fall of Khiva (London, 1874),
378.
47. Byron Farwell, Queen Victoria's Little Wars (London, 1973), 169. Another recent
account is Donald Featherstone, Colonial Small Wars (Newton Abbot, 1973)-
48. A recent Indian analysis is Dharm Pal, Tantia Topi (New Delhi, 1957). The most
detailed account is Kaye and Malleson, History of the Indian Mutiny (London, 1888-89), 6
vols.
49. Edgar Holt, The Strangest War (London, 1962), 150. The most detailed account is
James Cowan, The New Zealand Wars (Wellington, 1922), 2 vols. For a recent account, Keith
Sindar, The Origins of the Maori Wars (Wellington, 1957).
50. Frederick W. Turner III, Geronimo: His Own Story (London, 1974), introduction, 23;
according to the same source, Che Guevara found considerable inspiration in reading about
Geronimo.
51. C. L. Alderman, Osseola and the Seminole Wars (New York, 1973), 72.
52. John B. Trussell, "Seminoles in the Everglades," Army (December 1961).
53. V. C. Jones, Gray Ghosts and Rebel Raiders (New York, 1956), introduction.
54. Carl W. Breiham, Quantrill and his Civil War Guerrillas (Denver, 1959), 42.
55. C. F. Holland, Morgan and his Raiders (New York, 1942); Jones, Gray Ghosts;
417 NOTES
L. L. Butler, John Morgan and his Men (New York, i960); James Williamson, Mosby's
Rangers (New York, 1909); J. Scott, Partisan Life with Col. J. S. Mosby (New York, 1867);
A. R. Johnson, The Partisan Rangers (New York, 1904).
56. Williamson, Mosby's Rangers, 23.
57. Stanley F. Horn, The Army of Tennessee (Indianapolis, 1941), 195.
58. Mark M. Boatner, Cassel's Biographical Dictionary of the American Civil War
(London, 1973), 568.
59. Holland, Morgan, 170,350.
60. Wyeth, Forrest, 635.
61. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records (Washington, 1864-
1927), series I, vol. 39, 121.
62. Quoted in Carl E. Grant, "Partisan Warfare, Model 1861-5," Military Review, (Nov.
1958), 45.
63. Lieber's comments were published under the title Guerrilla Parties Considered with
Reference to the Laws and Usages of War (New York, 1862).
64. La Guerre de 1870: la defense nationale en Provence; mesures generates
d'organisation (Paris, 1911), 553. See also Freycinet, La Guerre en Provence (Paris, 1871).
65. Ibid., 557.
66. Michael Howard, The Franco-Prussian War (London, 1961), 254. The most detailed
histories of the war are Pierre Lehautcourt, La Defense nationale (Paris, 1893-1898), 8 vols.; and
Histoire de la guerre de 1870-71 (Paris, 1901-1908), 7 vols. The multivolume official German
and French accounts provide comparatively little material about partisan warfare.
67. H. Genevois, Les Coups de main pendant la guerre (Paris, 1896), 111.
68. See for instance, Fritz Honig, Der Volkskrieg an der Loire (Berlin, 1893-1897), 6
vols., passim, and A. Ehrhardt, Kleinkrieg (Potsdam, 1935), 49.
69. Georg Cardinal von Widdem, Der Krieg an den riickwdrtigen Verbindungen
(Berlin, 1893-1899), pt. II, 14.
70. Ibid., pt. Ill, 35.
71. Howard, Franco-Prussian War, 252-253.
72. Christian Rudolf de Wet, Three Years War (London, 1902), 78.
73. The main sources are the (semiofficial) history by General Frederic Maurice and
Captain M. H. Grant in 4 vols. (London, 1906-1910), and the Times History of the War in South
Africa, 1899-1902 in six vols. (London, 1900-1909). In addition there are countless
eyewitness reports, autobiographical and biographical accounts.
74. History of the War in South Africa, IV, 265.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid., 397.
77. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Great Boer War (London, 1903), 404.
78. The raid is described in the most vivid eyewitness account of the whole war in
Denys Reitz's Commando (London, 1942), 199 et seq.
79. De Wet, Three Years War, 305.
81. Reitz, Commando, 310.
82. J. C. Smuts,Jan Christian Smuts (London, 1952), 83.
83. De Wet, Three Years War, 279-282.
84. Ibid., 93.
85. Richard L. Maullin, The Fall of Dumar Aljure, a Colombian Guerrilla and Bandit
(Santa Monica, 1968).
86. Constancio Bernaldo de Quiros.EZ Bandolerismo en Espana y en Mexico (Mexico,
1959), 296 et seq.; F. Lopez Leiva, El Bandolerismo en Cuba (Havana, 1930), 28 et seq. On the
general phenomenon of banditry see E. Hobsbawm, Bandits (London, 1969), and with reference
to Brazil, Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz.Oi congaceiros (Paris, 1968).
87. Martin Luis Guzman, Memoirs of Pancho Villa (Austin, 1956), 7.
88. Jen Yu-wen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement (New Haven, 1973), 67-68.
89. In 1951 this was watered down to "a very large proportion."
90. Quoted in Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (London, 1963). 176,
196.
91. Mark Seldon, "The Guerrilla Movement in North West China," China Quarterly, 28(1965),
70.
92. C. MacFarlane, Lives and Exploits of Bandits and Robbers (London, 1837),
36-3793.
Ibid., 49.
94. David Hilton, Brigandage in South Italy (London, 1864), 1,48.
95. About Gasparone (or Gasbaroni) who fought the Austrians and the local rulers in the 1820s
see Le Brigandage dans I'etats ponteficaux. Memoirs de Gasbaroni: celebre chef de bande de la
province de Frosinone, redige par Pierre Masi (Paris, 1867).
96. Hilton, Brigandage, 50.
97. Ibid., 60.
98. Ibid., 67. This is based on Sacchinelli's biography of Cardinal Ruffo; he had been Ruffo's
secretary.
99. Jen Yu-wen, Taiping Revolutionary Movement, 210.
100. See Bloch's lecture "The Transvaal War" in London, reported in the Journal of the
Royal Service Institution (1901), 1341.
101. Deutsche Revue (July 1901).
CHAPTER THREE: THE ORIGINS OF GUERRILLA DOCTRINE
1. The only work which gives a short historical survey of partisan and guerrilla doctrine in the
eighteenth and nineteenth century is Werner Hahlweg, Guerilla. Krieg ohne Fronten (Stuttgart,
1968). F. Tudman, Rat protiv rat (Zagreb, 1957) shows familiarity with the literature but does
not discuss it in detail.
2. Jomini, Precis de I'art de la guerre (Paris, 1838), I, 72-75.
3. For instance the Marquis de Santa Cruz de Marzenado, Reflexions militaires et politiques
(Paris, 1735), II, 233 et seq., and before him the works of Bernardin de Mendoza and of Melzo.
4. An English translation by Robert Scott was published in London in 1816.
5. De la Croix's treatise was among the very first of its kind but even previously Folard's
unpublished De la guerre des partisans and Basta's Governo delta cavalleria leggiera had been
written.
6. De la Croix, Traite de la petite guerre (Paris, 1752); see M. J'ahns, Geschichte der
Kriegswissenschaften (Miinchen, 1891), III, 2710.
7. Grandmaison, La petite guerre (Paris, 1756), 15.
8. The Count de Saxe, Reveries or Memoirs upon the Art of War (London, 1757),
1739. Grandmaison, op. cit., 149, 174.
10. De Jeney, Le Partisan ou I'art defaire la petite guerre (The Hague, 1749), 6.
11. The literature is discussed in Jahns, op. cit., 2712-2717.
12. Baron de Wiist, L'Art militaire du partisan (The Hague, 1768), 98-99.
13. The following quotations are from the German translation of Emmerich's book, Der
Partheyganger im Kriege (Dresden, 1791).
14. Emmerich, op. cit., 5-6.
15. Ibid., 106-110.
16. Ibid., 55.
17. Ibid.
, 107. . *■
18. Ibid., 111.
419 NOTES
19. J. von Ewald, Abhandlung von dem Dienst der leichten Truppen (Schleswig, 1796),
and see also his subsequent Belehrungen in three volumes.
20. Von Ewald, Abhandlung, op. cit., IX.
21.Ibid., 274-275.
22. Ibid., 280.
23. His study is quoted here on the basis of the 1829 edition which was incorporated into
a larger book, Die Lehre vom Kriege.
24. Valentini, op. cit., 5-6.
25. Napoleon on the Cossacks, Bulletin, 21 December 1806; on the German Free Corps
see letter to the Empress, 16 May 1813; on the Vendee see Memoires; about Spain see Bulletin, 15
November 1808 and Memorial.
26. Guibet, Essai general de tactique, first published in 1772, in Oeuvres militaires du
comte Guibet (Paris, 1803), I , passim.
27. Biilow,Neue Taktik derNeuern wie sie seyn sollte (Leipzig, 1805), II, 24.
28. Biilow, Militarische undvermischte Schriften (Leipzig, 1853), 52 et seq.
29. Jomini, Precis de I'art de la guerre (Paris, 1838), I, 72.
30. J. B. Schels, Leichte Truppen; kleiner Krieg (Vienna, 1813-1814) and Felipe de San
Juan, Instruccion de guerrilla (Santiago, 1823).
31. See for instance M. Tevis, La Petite Guerre (Paris, 1855).
32. Carl von Clausewitz, Schriften —Aufsatze — Studien — Briefe, ed. W. Hahl-weg
(Gottingen, 1966), 226-539.
33. Ibid., 240.
34. Ibid., 381.
35. Ibid., 309.
36. Ibid., 436.
37. Ibid., 413-414.
38. Preussische Gesetzsammlung, no. 184 (1813), 79.
39. Carl von Decker, Der Heine Krieg im Geiste der neueren Kriegsfiihrung (1822) — I
have quoted from the French edition De la petite guerre . . . (Paris, 1845) — and Karol Bogumii
Stolzman, Partyzantka czyli wojna dla ludow pow-stajacach najwlasciwcza (Paris and Leipzig,
1844).
40. Le Miere de Corvey, Des partisans et des corps irreguliers (Paris, 1823).
41. Ibid.,X.
42. Ibid., 105.
43. Ibid., 145.
44. Decker, op. cit., 318, 325.
45. Carl von Decker,Algerien und die dortige Kriegsfiihrung (1844).
46. Ibid., II, 155.
47. Stolzman, op. cit., 192 et seq.
49. General Chrzanowski, Uberden Parteiganger-Krieg (Berlin, 1846), 4, 5, 19; the
original Polish version of this book was not accessible.
50. J. M. Rudolph, Uber den Parteigangerkrieg (Zurich, 1847), 12.
51. Gingens-La Sarraz, Les Partisans et la defense de la Suisse (Lausanne, 1861), 130.
52. Translated under the title Total Resistance (Boulder, Col., 1965).
53. Commandante J. I. Chacon, Guerras irregulares (Madrid, 1883), 2 vols., Matija Ban,Pravila
o cetnikoj vojni (Belgrade, 1848).
54. W. Riistow, Die Lehre vom kleinen Krieg (Zurich, 1864), 12-17.
55. Ibid., 320,340.
56. The Brussels Declaration (1874) was a compromise between countries with great armies,
such as Russia, urging that armed bands should not have the rights of belligerents and Spain,
Belgium, Holland and Switzerland insisting that no limitation be placed on the right of
inhabitants in occupied territory to defend their country. (L. Nurick and R. W. Barret, "Legality of
Guerrilla Forces under the Laws of War," American Journal of International Law [1946], 565.)
57. Albrecht von Boguslawski, Der kleine Krieg und seine Bedeutung fur die Ge-genwart
(Berlin, 1881), 23. Boguslawski was also the author of a history of the war in the Vendee.
58. Published in several installments in the Journal des Sciences Militaires (September-
December 1880).
59. Devaureix, op. cit., 450-451. But on other occasions Napoleon said that Soult was one
of his most gifted generals.
60. V. Charenton, Les Corps francs dans la guerre moderne (Paris, 1900), 172.
61. T. Miller Maguire, Guerrilla or Partisan Warfare (London, 1904). Maguire (1849-
1920) was a barrister and a successful army "coach" lecturing and writing about strategy and
great campaigns. Among his students were Allenby, Gough, Wilson and other military leaders of
the First World War. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 1866. Maguire had
previously published a series of articles in eleven installments in the United Service Magazine
between May 1901 and March 1902. He had first written about the subject in 1896 but "was only
turned into the utmost contempt by experts and politicians for my pains. General Lloyd did the
same in Woolwich, only to be laughed at." (November 1901), 172.
62. Ibid.
63. R. F. Johnson, Night Attacks (London, 1886), and G. B. Malleson, Ambushes and
Surprises (London, 1885).
64. Major L. J. Shadwell, North West Frontier Warfare (Calcutta, 1902), 2-5; Brigadier
General C. C. Egerton, Hill Warfare (Allahabad, 1899), 16; see also Lieutenant Colonel A. R.
Martin, Mountain and Savage Warfare (Allahabad, 1898), passim.
65. Callwell, Small Wars (London, 1899), 8, 104. Callwell was an artillery officer who
had been seconded to serve in intelligence. He saw action in Afghanistan and South Africa and
resigned from the army when passed over for promotion in 1909. He had published sketches
from army life which had apparently offended his superior. He was recalled to duty in 1914,
became chief of operations in the war office, was promoted to major-general and knighted.
Callwell died in 1928.
66. Ibid., 108, and Maguire, op. cit., 106.
67. Maguire, op. cit., 59.
68. Ibid., 61.
69. The following quotations are from the first edition of Callwell's book, pub lished by
Her Majesty's Stationery Office, London in 1896, 107 et seq.
70. Ibid., 115.
71. Ibid., 108-109.
72. T. H. C. Frankland, "Notes on Guerilla [sic] Warfare," The United Service Magazine, New
Series, vol. 33, 183.
73. A. T. Barteniev, Voenno-Istoricheski Sbornik (St. Petersburg, 1912), 137.
74.Voennaia Entsiklopedia (Petrograd, 1914), 303.
75. Colonel Vuich, Malaia Voina (St. Petersburg, 1850), viii, 239.
76. F. Gershelman, Partisanskaia Voina (St. Petersburg, 1885), 11.
77. Ibid., 17.
78. Ibid., 241.
79. "Ostpreussen und der Tartaren Ritt," Allgemeine Militair Zeitung, no. 92 (1883).
80.Partisanskie Deistvia (St. Petersburg, 1894).
81. C. Hron, Der Parteiganger-Krieg (Vienna, 1885).
82. Wlodimir Stanislaus Ritter von Wilczynski, Theorie des grossen Krieges (Vienna, 1869), 121.
On occasion Wilczynski waxed lyrical about partisan warfare: "A war of this kind is the flower, it
is the poetry of strategy . . . it is everything which fantasy can imagine and for this reason it is
quite impossible to put down firm rules for it." (Page 4.)
421 NOTES
83. Hron, op. cit., 6.

84. Ibid., 54.
85. Ibid.
86. A. Ehrhardt, Kleinkrieg (Potsdam, 1935), 73-75, and Major General Kerchnawe inMilitar-
Wissenschaftliche Mitteilungen (January-April 1929).
87. The French and Italian literature on Buonarroti is surveyed in Samuel Bernstein, Buonarroti
(Paris, 1949), and Elizabeth Eisenstein, The First Professional Revolutionist (Cambridge, Mass.,
1959).
88. Delia guerra nazionale d'insurrezione per hande applicata all'ltalia. Trattato dedicato ai
huoni Italiani da un amico del paese (Italia, 1830), 2 vols. The book is now exceedingly rare; two
copies have been located in Bologna and Milan. See Piero Pieri, "Carlo Bianco Conte di Saint
Jorioz e il suo Trattato . . . ," in Bolletino Storico Bibliografico Subalpino (Torino, 1957-1958), 2
parts. On Carlo Bianco and Buonarroti see Alessandro Galante Garrone, Filipo Buonarroti e i
rivoluzionari dell'ottocento (Einaudi, 1951), 333-342.
89. Bianco, op. cit., II, 14.
90. Manuale pratico del Rivoluzionario Italiano desunto dal trattato sulle guerra
d'insurrezione per bande (Italia, 1833).
91. Anonimo, "Delia guerra di parteggiani," La Minerva napolitana (February 1821); quoted in
Egidio Liberti, ed., Techniche della guerra partigiana nel Ri-sorgimento (Florence, 1972), 64-65.
92. "Ristrettissimi mezzi grandiosi risultamenti," E. Liberti, Techniche . . . , 166-168.
93. G. Pepe, Memoria su i mezzi che menano all' Italiana indipendenza (Paris, 1833), also
L'ltalia Militare (Paris, 1836). A summary is contained in E. Liberti, 171-181.
94. Studii sulla guerra d'indipendenza scritti da un uffiziale italiano (Torino, 1847); this is a
shorter and modified version of the 1817 manuscript.
95. Enrico Gentilini, Guerra degli stracorridori o guerra guerriata (Capolago, 1848); reprinted
in Liberti, 581 et seq. and (in part) in Gian Mario Bravo, Les Socialistes avant Marx (Paris, 1970),
III; "Stracorridori" is an archaic military term relating to cavalry scouts. On Gentilini, Luigi
Bulferetti, Socialismo ri-sorgimentale (Turin, 1949), 176-194.
96. Guiseppe Budini, Alcune idee sull'Italia (London, 1843); E. Liberti, 181-188.
97. Michele N. Allemandi, "Del sistema militare svizzero applicabile al popolo italiano," Italia
del Popolo (1850).
98. Giuseppe La Masa, Della guerra insurrezionale in Italia . . . (Turin, 1856).
99.Carlo Pisacane, Saggi storici-politici-militari sull'Italia (Milan, 1858-1860), IV, 143; among
the writers of the 1860s G. B. Zafferoni, L'Insurrezione armata (Milan, 1868), should be singled
out.
100. Czy Polacy moga sie wybic na niepodleglosc?
101. I. Bern, O powstaniu narodowym w Polsce (Paris, 1846-1848), republished in Warsaw
in 1956; H. M. Kamienski, Wojna Ludowa (Paris, 1866), part III; see also his O prawda
zywotnich . . . (Brussels, 1844), 283.
102. Bystrzonowski's book Siec strategiczna . . . appeared in French translation in Paris in
1842 (Notice sur le reseau strategique de la Pologne . . .). Like Pisacane, Bystrzonowski had
participated in the war against Abd el-Kader in Algeria and he refers to the experience gained
there.
103. A. Jelowicki,0 powstaniu i wojnie partyzanskiej (Paris, 1835).
104. W. Nieszokoc, O systemie wojny partyzanskiej wzniesionym wsrod emigracji (Paris,
1838), 3-30.
105. "Konspiratomania wloska, szczepiona na swawoli szlacheckiej polskiej," De-mokrata
Polski (February 8, 1845). Mieroslawski's views are discussed in detail in Marian Zychowski's
massive biography, Ludwick Mieroslawski 1814-1878 (Warsaw, 1963), 183 et seq. Further
bibliographical details on the Polish partisan debate are found in L. Przemski, "Zagadnenie
wojny party-
zanskiej w przededniu Wiosny Ludow," Wiosna Ludow (Warsaw, 1948), part I,
349-417106. Guida pratica del perfetto partigiano. The treatise was republished after the
liberation of Rome in 1944: Liberti, 168-171.
107. Emilio Lussu, Theorie de Vinsurrection (Paris, 1971), 26-27; "Instructions pour
une prise des armes," Militant Rouge (December 1926-1928), and in Archiv
fur die Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung (1930).
108. Samuel Bernstein, Auguste Blanqui and the Art of Insurrection (London, 1971), 198.
109. Maurice Dommanget, Auguste Blanqui, Des origines a la Revolution de 1848 (Paris,
1967), 185 et seq.
110. Quoted from Auguste Blanqui, Politische Texte (Frankfurt, 1968), 157-163.
111. A vivid description of barricade fighting was given in Victor Hugo's Les Misera-bles, bearing
out Blanqui's criticism.
112. Bakunin frequently referred to robbers as the most revolutionary element in society. See for
instance his letter to Nechaev on 2 June 1870, published by M. Confino, Cahiers du monde russe et
sovietique IV (1966), 652.
113. "Rules for the Conduct of Guerrilla Bands" in Mazzini, Life and Writings (London, 1864),
1,369.
114. Ibid., 372.
115. Ibid., 378. Istruzione per le bande nazionali, was published in Lausanne in !853; but
Mazzini's first writings on the subject date back to the early 1830s: "L'Istruzione generale per gli
affratellati nella Giovine Italia" (1831); "Delia guerra insurrezionale" published in 1832 in the fifth
number of Giovine Italia; several introductions to new editions of his work first published in 1832;
and lastly Istruzione del condottiere delle bande nazionali (1853).
116. Marx-Engels, Werke (Berlin [East], i960), VIII, 95.
117. From the Abbe de Pradt's Memoires historiques sur la revolution d'Espagne (1816).
118. First published in fheNeui York Tribune (30 October 1845); quoted from Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, Revolution in Spain (New York, 1939), 55.
119. Engels, Der bisherige Verlauf des Krieges gegen die Mauren (January i860), and Marx-
Engels, Werke, XIII, 548 et seq.
120. Marx-Engels, Werke, XVII, 131,169,187.
121. Ibid., VI, 387.
122. Engels, "Die Aussichten des Krieges," Pall Mall Gazette (8 December 1870), andWer/ce,
XVII, 197.
123. "Kriegsfiihrung im Gebirge einst und jetzt," in Marx-Engels, Werke, XII, 115.
124. Engels, "Persien-China," first published in the New York Daily Tribune (5 June 1857) and
Marx-Engels, Werke, XII, 214.
125. Marx-Engels, Werke, XVII, 177.
126. Engels, "Introduction" (1895) to Karl Marx, Class Struggle in France (New York, 1964), 21-
25.
127. "Es lebe der Tyrannenmord," Freiheit (London, 19 March 1881). The newspaper later
appeared in New York.
128. New York, 1884, p. 1. The German title of the opus was Revolutionare Kriegs-wissenschaft.
Ein Handbuch zur Anleitung betreffend Gebrauch und Herstel-lung von Nitro-Glyzerin,
Dynamit, Schiessbaumwolle, Knallquecksilber, Bom-ben, Brandsatzen, Giften usw. The Anarchist
Cookbook published in New York in 1971 was modeled after Most's Revolutionary Warfare and
acknowledges its intellectual debt.
129. General de Brack, Advanced Posts of Light Cavalry (London, 1850).
130. Henry Lachouque,Napoleon's Battles (London, ig66),454.
131. "Precis des guerres de Jules Cesar," Memoires de Napoleon, IV, 18.
423 NOTES
CHAPTER FOUR: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (i): BETWEEN TWO WORLD WARS
1. Gouverneur H. Schnee, Deutsch-Ostafrika im Weltkriege (Leipzig, 1919), 171.

2. General von Lettow-Vorbeck,Heia Safari (Leipzig, 1920), 88.
3. Operations in Waziristan 1919/1920, Catalogue C.W.4 (Calcutta, 1921), 139.
4. Charles Horden, Military Operations. East Africa (London, 1941), 514 (History of the Great
War based on official documents, HMSO).
5. The first and most reliable was Meine Erinnerungen aus Ostafrika (Leipzig, 1920); the
most successful written for the benefit of the young generation was Heia Safari (Leipzig, 1920)
and many subsequent editions; the most recent was Mein Leben (Bibrach, 1957).
6. Horden, Military Operations; only the first volume leading up to September 1916 has
appeared.
7. Brian Gardner, German East (London, 1963); Leonard Mosley, Duel for Kilimanjaro
(London, 1963); J. H. Sibley, Tanganyikan Guerrilla (London, 1971).
8. T. E. Lawrence, Revolt in the Desert (London, 1927), 95.
9. G. Macmunn and C. Falls, Military Operations. Egypt and Palestine (London, 1928), I, 237-
240.
10. Lawrence, Revolt, 44.
11. Ibid., 202, 264,314.
12.Schnee, Deutsch-Ostafrika, 29.
13. Lettow-Vorbeck, Mein Leben, 85.
14. Lettow-Vorbeck, Meine Erinnerungen, 17.
15. R. Meinertzhagen, Army Diary (London, i960), 96.
16. Ibid., 205.
17.Lettow-Vorbeck, Meine Erinnerungen, 17.
18. Lettow-Vorbeck, Heia Safari, 132.
19. Partisanskoe dvizhenie v Zapadnoi Sibiri, 22, quoted in A. M. Spirin, Klassi i partii
v grazhdanskoi voini v Rossii (Moscow, 1968).
20. G. Stewart, The White Armies of Russia (New York, 1933), 141.
21.R. Luckett, The White Generals (London, 1971), 212.
22. On partisan activities in the Civil War, Istoria grazhdanskoi voini (Moscow, 1959),
IV. In addition there are monographs on local guerrilla activities in Omsk (M. V. Naumov,
i960), Irkutsk ( A. G. Solodyankin, i960), and the Soviet Far East (S. S. Kaplin, i960).
23. W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1965), II, 215-217.
24. M. Kubanin, Makhnovshchina (Leningrad, n.d.), passim; for an excellent appraisal of
the Makhno movement in English see David Footman, Civil War in Russia (London, 1961),
245-305.
25. Luckett, The White Generals, 278.
26. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 236.
27. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 437-440. The story of the Antonov movement
has been told in a novel by Nikolai Virta (Odinochestvo) and a collection of essays
(Antonovshchina) by S. Evgenov and O. Litovski.
28. F. Novitski quoted in R. Pipes, The Formation of the Soviet Union (Cambridge,
Mass., 1964), 179. See also J. Castagne, Les Basmatchis (Paris, 1925), and S. Ginsburg,
"Basmachestvo v Fergane/'Noui/ Vostok (1925), 10-11.
29. Malaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya (Moscow, 1958), 1,825.
30. "Borba s kontrrevoliutsionnim vosstaniam," Voina i revoliutsiya, 7-9 (1926).
31. Ibid., 9 (1926). For another interesting Soviet treatment of counterinsurgency see S.
Dubrovski, "Grigorovshchina," Voina i revoliutsiya, 4 and 5 (1928).
32. Hagen Schulze, Freikorps und Republik 1918-1920 (Boppard, 1969), 39. The main
studies on the Freikorps are E. von Schmidt-Pauli, Geschichte der Freikorps (Stuttgart, 1936); F.
W. von Oertzen, Die deutschen Freikorps (Munich, 1938); and R. G. L. Waite, Vanguard of
Nazism (Cambridge, Mass., 1952).
33. Von Oertzen, Die deutschen Freikorps, 21; Schulze, Freikorps und Republik, 41.
There is a very detailed description of military operations in Darstellungen aus den
Nachkriegskampfen deutscher Truppen und Freikorps, edited by the Forschungsanstalt fur
Kriegs- und Heeresgeschichte (Berlin, 1936-1940), 8 vols. It has however little to say about the
spirit of the Freikorps.
34. Ernst Sontag, Korfanty (Kitzingen, 1954); S. Sopicki, Wojciech Korfanty (Katowice,
1935).
35. H. von Riekhoff, German-Polish Relations 1918-33 (Baltimore, 1971), 47.
36. Schulze, Freikorps und Republik, 44.
37. F. Sieburg,Es werde Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1933), 20.
38. On the Freikorps spirit see Schulze, Freikorps und Republik, 54-66; E. von Salomon,
Die Geachteten (Berlin, 1930), and his Freikorpskdmpfer (Berlin, 1938); Amolt Bronnen,
Rossbach (Berlin, 1930). For the resentment against sections of the old conservative officers
corps see Heimsoth, Freikorps greift an (Berlin, 1930), 80-81.
39. Encyclopaedia Britannica (1957), X, 950.
40. Lenin, Selected Works (New York, 1967), I, 581; the article first appeared in
Proletary (29 August 1906).
41. Lenin, Collected Works (New York, 1962), XI, 213; the article was first published
vsxProletary (30 September 1906).
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Lenin, Werke, XI, 159.
45. Lenin, Collected Works, XXII, 311.
46. See for instance V. I. Lenin o voine, armii i voennoi nauke (Moscow, 1965).
47. John Erickson, "Lenin as Civil War Leader," in Lenin, the Man, the Theorist, the
Leader, L. Schapiro and P. Reddaway, eds. (London, 1967), 174.
48. Lenin, Werke, XXIX, 545. See also Werke, 247,281, 514.
49. Lenin, Ausgewahlte Werke, 2 vols. (Moscow, 1946-1947), II, 595.
50. Recent anthologies on Leninism and guerrilla warfare usually cover ground that has
only tenuous guerrilla connection; one would look in vain in them for what Lenin really said
and wrote about partisanshchina. See for instance W. J. Pomeroy, ed., Guerrilla Warfare and
Marxism (New York, 1968).
51. Military Writings by Leon Trotsky (New York, 1971), 25, 54. Trotsky's denunciations of
guerrillaism caused some headaches to his latter-day disciples, who argued that he was merely
opposed to post-revolutionary guerrilla war, not to guerrilla war per se. Before 1917 he had been
neither for nor against it; the question was then scarcely of consequence to him. Like Lenin, he
had found nothing wrong with the Latvian insurrection of 1905, but he could not envisage
guerrilla war playing an important role in revolutionary strategy in the industrially developed
countries. He was not concerned with the rest of the world because he did not expect socialist
revolutions in the colonies.
52. From a speech in April 1922, quoted inMilitary Writings by Leon Trotsky, 81.
53. Quoted in E. Wollenberg, The Red Army (London, 1938), 38.
54. Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question (London, n.d.), 154.
Much importance is attached to this quotation by C. A. Dixon and O. Heilbrunn in Communist
Guerrilla Warfare (London, 1954), 24.
55. Alexander Orlov, Handbook of Intelligence and Guerrilla Warfare (Ann Arbor,
1963), passim.
56. A. Neuberg, Armed Insurrection (London, 1970); the original German edition, Der
Bewaffnete Aufstand, appeared in 1928. "A. Neuberg" was a collective pseudonym for O.
Piatnitsky and other Soviet and foreign Communist leaders including Marshal Tukhachevski
and Togliatti.
57. Neuberg, Armed Insurrection, 259.
58. For instance, A. Kolan, "Partisanskaya voina v okkupirovannikh rayonnakh Kit-aya,"
Kommunisticheskii Internatsional, 6 (1940), 60 et seq.
425 NOTES
59. James Connolly, "Street Fighting—Summary," published first in Workers' Republic

(24 July 1915). Quoted from Connolly's Selected Writings (London, 1973). 230.
60. Major Henri le Carron, Twenty-five years in the Secret Service (London, 1892).
61. John Devoy, Recollections of an Irish Rebel (New York, 1929), 65.
62. Among the recent accounts of the Easter Rising are Desmond Ryan, The Rising
(Dublin, 1957); James Gleeson, Bloody Sunday (London, 1962); Max Caulfield, The Easter
Rebellion (London, 1964).
63. Tom Barry, Guerrilla Days in Ireland (Dublin, 1949), 7-11.
64. On Collins, see Piaras Beaslai, Michael Collins and the Making of a New Ireland
(London, 1926), and Margery Forester, Michael Collins. The Lost Leader (London, 1971).
65. Barry, Guerrilla Days, 26.
66. T. P. Coogan, The IRA (London, 1970), 47.
67. Ibid., 274.
68. J. Swire, Bulgarian Conspiracy (London, 1939), 103. See also J. Perrigault, Bandits
d'Orient (Paris, 1931); Stoyan Christowe, Heroes and Assassins (London, 1935); A. Doolard,
Quatre mois chez les comitadjis (Paris, 1932).
69. F. Tudman, Rat protiv rat (Zagreb, 1957), 109.
70. L. Zarine quoted in Albert Londres, Terror in the Balkans (London, 1935), 171.
71. David S. Woolman, Rebels in the Rif (London, 1959), 80; Augusto Vivero, El
derrumbamiento (Madrid, 1922), 161; and for a general account of the war, Carlos Hernandez de
Huerrera and Tomas Garcia Figueras, Accion de Espana en Marruecos (Madrid, 1929), I.
72. Stanley G. Payne, Politics and the Military in Modern Spain (Stanford, 1967), 168.
73. Woolman, Rebels in the Rif, 155.
74. Major General C. W. Gwynn, Imperial Policing (London, 1936), 300.
75. There is no satisfactory detailed account of the rebellion of 1936-1939. John Marlowe,
Rebellion in Palestine (London, 1946) is a brief and reliable survey; Sefer Toldot Hahagana
(Jerusalem, 1964), II, pt. 2, is a survey with the emphasis on Jewish defense rather than Arab
attack.
76. Marlowe, Rebellion in Palestine, 158.
77.Sefer Toldot Hahagana, 766.
78. Marlowe, Rebellion in Palestine, 190.
79. Sefer Toldot Hahagana, 765.
80. On the "Plan of Ayala," John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (London,
1972), 175 et seq,; on Pancho Villa, Guzman, Pancho Villa, and Celia Herera, Francisco Villa
(Mexico, 1964). For the general background, Robert E. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution 1914/5
(Bloomington, i960); Alfonso Taracena, La tragedia Zapatista (Mexico, 1931), and Venustiano
Carranza (Mexico, 1963); F. Tannenbaum, Peace by Revolution (New York, 1933); Jose T. Melen-
dez, ed., Historia de la revolucion Mexicana (Mexico, 1936), 2 vols.
81. On the military aspects of the Zapatista operations see Juan Barragan Rodriguez, Historia
del ejercito y de la revolucion constitucionalista (Mexico, 1946), and Jesus Silva Herzog, Breve
historia de la revolucion Mexicana (Mexico, i960), 2 vols.
82. On Prestes's attitude to guerrillaism see R. H. Chilcote, The Brazilian Communist
Party (New York, 1974), 88-89.
83.For an excellent summary of the Prestes campaign see F. R. Allemann, Macht und
Ohnmacht der Guerilla (Munich, 1974), 25-45; more detailed descriptions are Helio Silva, 1926:
A grande marcha (Rio de Janeiro, 1971); N. Werneck Sodre, Historia militar do Brasil (Rio de
Janeiro, 1967); and L. M. Lima, A Coluna Prestes: marchas e combates (Sao Paulo, 1945).
84. The only detailed account is Neil Macauley, The Sandino Affair (Chicago, 1967); on
his anti-Americanism, ibid., 207. For a military assessment R. W.
85. Ph. Auty, Tito (London, 1970), 177; V. Dedijer, Tito speaks (London, 1953), is the
semiofficial biography.
86. Zbornik, series 2, V, 187.
87. Tito, Vojna Dela, 1,129.
88. Hubatsch, Kriegstagebuch, pt. 1,139.
89. Ibid., Ill, part 2, 1253.
90. The Yugoslav Communists had themselves been in touch with the Germans. In
March 1943 Velebit and Djilas, two of their highest-ranking commanders, traveled to Zagreb
and, according to German documents discovered after the war, promised they would stop
fighting the Germans if these would leave them alone in their bases in the Sanjak. "The partisan
saw no reason for fighting our army — they added that they fought against German troops only
in self-defence — but wished solely to fight the Chetniks." (Quoted in W. Roberts, Tito,
Mihailovic and the Allies [Rutgers University Press, 1973], 108.) Kasche, the German minister in
Zagreb, in his dispatches to Berlin advocated a German accommodation with Tito's partisans;
militarily it would be useful if the partisans were given a free hand against the Chetniks. These
negotiations were cut short by Hitler who said, "One does not negotiate with rebels, rebels must
be shot."
91. Auty, Tito, 208.
92. There are no comprehensive statistics; seventy-five percent of the soldiers of one
Slovene division were peasants; in other parts of Yugoslavia the peasants' share was perhaps
even larger (K. Dincic, "La guerre de liberation nationale en Yougoslavie," Revue d'histoire de la
deuxieme guerre mondiale [April i960], 41).
93. W. Venohr,Aufstandfiir die Tschechoslowakei (Hamburg, 1969), 154.
94. V. Prevan, Slovenske ndrodne povstanie (Bratislava, 1965). See also Gustav Husak,
Svedectvo o slovenskom ndrodnom povstani (Prague, 1954).
95. T. Bor Komorowski, The Secret Army (London, 1951), and S. Korbonski, Fighting
Warsaw (London, 1956), are the main accounts as seen from the Home Army. J. Kirchmayer,
Powstanie warszawskie (Warsaw, 1959), gives the Communist version; H. v. Krannhals, Der
Warschauer Aufstand 1944 (Frankfurt, 1962), is the most detailed German monograph.
96. Krannhals, Warschauer Aufstand, 104.
97. The term "intellectuals" means no more in this context than the fact that they had
received an education of sorts. This gave them a decisive advantage over their foes; Abas Kupi,
for instance, was illiterate.
98. Julian Amery, Sons of the Eagle (London, 1948), 53. For an official history of the
partisan movement see L. Kasneci, Trempee dans lefeu de la lutte (Tirana, 1966). See also U.S.
Army Intelligence Division: Resistance Factors and Special Forces Areas, Project No. A-229,
Albania (Washington, 1957).
47. Hubatsch, Kriegstagebuch, III, pt. 2,152.
48. A. Kedros, La resistance grecque (Paris, 1966), 237 et seq.; D. George Kou-soulas,
Revolution and Defeat (London, 1965), 160-169. See also Komninos Pyromaglou, I ethniki
antistasis (Athens, 1975), and Heinz Richter, Griechen-land zwischen Revolution und
Konterrevolution (1934-1946) (Frankfurt, 1973).
49. Woodhouse, in European Resistance Movements, 1,382.
50. N. I. Klonis, Guerrilla Warfare (New York, 1972), 115.
51. Pyromaglou, in European Resistance Movements (Oxford, 1964), II, 317-318.
52. Zachariades, quoted in Kousoulas, Revolution and Defeat, 206.
53. Macksey, The Partisans of Europe, 191.
54. Henri Nogueres, Histoire de la resistance en France (Paris, 1972), III, 162.
55. B. Ehrlich, The French Resistance (London, 1966), 165.
56. From the immense literature on the French resistance and the Maquis, the following special
issues of the Revue d'histoire de la deuxieme guerre mondiale should be singled out: 1,30,35,47,
55,61, 85 and 99.
444 NOTES
57. The standard works on the Italian resistance after 1943 are those by Valiani (1947),
Cadorna (1948), Salvadori (1955), Catalano (1956), Battaglia (1964), Bocca (1966), and the
official Communist histories by Secchia-Frascati (1965) and Longo (1965).
58. G. A. Shepperd, The Italian Campaign, 1943-45 (London, 1968), 302; A. Kes-
selring, Soldat bis zum letzten Tage (Bonn, 1953), 324,330.
59. R. Battaglia, Storia della resistenza Italiana (Turin, 1964), 662.
60. On the major partisan republics see Hubertus Bergwitz, Die Partisanen Repub-lik
Ossola (Hanover, 1972); Anne Bravo, La republica partigiana dell'alto Monferrato (Torino,
1965), passim; G. Bocca, Storia dell'Italia partigiana (Bari, 1966), 458-503. For Longo's views
on partisan tactics see his Sulla via dell'insurrezione 1943-45 (Rome, 1954), 477-479.
61. Bocca, Italia partigiana, 569.
62. Guido Quazza, La resistenza italiana (Turin, 1966), 114; Bocca, Italia partigiana,
607.
63. Heinz Kuhnrich, Der Partisanenkrieg in Europa 1939-1945 ([East] Berlin,
1968), 536-537-
64.Ibid.
65. The most authoritative Soviet work, Istoria velikoi otechestvennoi voini, III, 446,
mentions a total of 120,000 Soviet partisans for 1943, which is lower than the German estimate.
See Armstrong, III, 35-36.
66. Marcelle Adler-Bresse, "Temoignages allemandes sur la guerre des partisans," Revue
d'histoire de la deuxieme guerre mondiale (January 1964), 54.
67. F. O. Miksche, Secret Forces (London, 1950).
68. Lothar Rendulic, "Der Partisanenkrieg," Bilanz des zweiten Weltkriegs (Oldenburg,
1953), and Valdis Redelis,Portisanen/crieg (Heidelberg, 1958).
69. Henri Michel, The Shadow War (London, 1972), 290.
70. S. Hawes and R. White, Resistance in Europe, 1939-1945 (London, 1975), 203.
CHAPTER SIX: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (ill): CHINA AND VIETNAM
1. Interview in Communist International (February 1938), 177.

2. When General Challe, one of the leaders of the right-wing conspiracy in Algiers, was put on
trial he told the judges at great length about the wisdom of Mao. Peter Paret, French
Revolutionary Warfare from Indochina to Algeria (New York, 1964), 112.
3. Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 277.
4. A. M. Rumiantsev, Istoki i evolutsia idei Mao Tse-tunga (Moscow, 1972), 22-33.
5. Jean Chesneaux, Peasant Revolts in China (London, 1973), 78-81.
6. Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking, n.d.), I, 23.
7. Jerome Ch'en, Mao and the Chinese Revolution (London, 1965), 112; Maurice Meissner, Li
Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 81.
8. Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-tung (Peking, 1968), 72, "A single spark can start a
prairie fire."
9. S. B, Griffith, The Chinese People's Liberation Army (London, 1968), 29.
10. Robert Rothschild, La chute de Chiang Kai-chek (Paris, 1972), 308.
11. Mao's report at the Sixth National Congress of the CCP, quoted in Brandt, Schwartz and
Fairbank,A Documentary History of Chinese Communism (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), 162.
12. Ch'en, op. cit., 151; John E. Rue, Mao Tse-tung in Opposition (Stanford, 1966),
82etseq.
13.J. Ch'en, "The Resolution of the Tsunyi Conference (January 1935)," China Quarterly
(October 1969), 26.
14. 445 Mao,
Ch'en, NOTES
loc. cit., 155-156.
15. The most detailed account of these events is in Dick Wilson, The Long March
(London, 1971); see also Veliki pokhod (Moscow, 1959), and Anthony Gar-avente, "The Long
March," China Quarterly (April 1965), 85 et seq.
16. John M. Nolan, "The Long March: Fact and Fancy," Military Affairs (Summer 1966),
81.
17.Detailed comprehensive studies of Communist guerrilla warfare during the Yenan period do
not exist. The general literature is listed in the books by Ch'en, Griffith, Selden and Johnson,
mentioned above. Of the eyewitness accounts Edgar Snow's is the most interesting inasmuch as
the general background is concerned, whereas E. F. Carlson, Twin Stars of China (New York,
1940), is the most illuminating on military affairs. A great many theoretical analyses of Mao's
strategy were published in later years. Among the more interesting are Katzenbach and
Hanrahan, "The Revolutionary Strategy of Mao Tse-tung," Political Science Quarterly
(September 1955); Chalmers A. Johnson, "Civilian Loyalties and Guerrilla Conflict," World
Politics (1964), 287 et seq; Howard L. Boorman and Scott A. Boorman, "Chinese Communist
Insurgent Warfare 1935-1949," Political Science Quarterly (June 1966).
18. Edgar Snow, Red Star over China (New York, 1961), 254.
19. Mark Selden, The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, 1971), 66.
20. Lyman P. Van Slyke, Enemies and Friends (Stanford, 1967), 95.
21. Stuart Schram, ed., Mao Tse-tung Basic Tactics (London, 1967): this is a series of lectures
which has not been included in Mao's Selected Works. It was virtually forgotten, to be
rediscovered around 1970 and published — but only outside China.
22. "On Basic Lessons of Conventional War and the Conditions for Developing Guerrilla
Warfare in Northern China," in Thomas W. Robinson, A Politico-Military Biography of Lin Piao
(Santa Monica, 1971), part 1, ii3et seq.
23. Selected Military Writings, loc. cit., 138.
24. Ibid., 139.
25. Ibid., 141.

26. "Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War against Japan" (May 1938), in Selected
Military Writings, 157-165.
27. Ibid., 168.
28. Ibid., 181.
29. "On Protracted War," in Selected Military Writings, op. cit., et seq.
30.Basic Tactics, 55 et seq.
31. Robinson, loc. cit., 124.
32. Report given at the Seventh Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (April 1945)
republished in The Battle Front of the Liberated Areas (Peking, 1962).
33. Chong-Sik Lee, Counterinsurgency in Manchuria. The Japanese Experience 1931-1950
(Santa Monica, 1967), VII.
34. Griffith, op. cit., 74.
35. Jerome Ch'en, op. cit., 239-240.
36. Roy Hofheinz, Jr., in A. Doak Barnett, Chinese Communist Politics in Action (Seattle,
1967), 67.
37. Chalmers A. Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power. The Emergence of
Revolutionary China 1937-1945 (Stanford, 1962), passim.
38. J. L. S. Girling, People's War (London, 1969), 79.
39. This passage from Mao's "On New Democracy" was deleted from subsequent editions.
Stuart J. Schram, Introduction to Basic Tactics, op. cit., 29.
40. "On the New Stage," in Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (New York, 1963),
113-114.
41. Vo Nguyen Giap, People's War, People's Army (New York, 1962), 174.
42. Col. Roberts E. Biggs, "Red Parallel: The Tactics of Ho and Mao," U.S. Combat Forces
Journal (January 1955).
GUERRILLA WARFARE
43. Douglas Pike, Vietcong (Cambridge, 1966), 8.

44. Bernard B. Fall, Viet-Nam Witness 1953-1966 (New York, 1968), 229; John T.
McAlister, Jr., The Beginnings of Revolution (London, 1969), 206.
45. Joseph Buttinger, Vietman: A Dragon Embattled (New York, 1967), II, 760.
46. Jean Lacouture, Ho Chi Minh (New York, 1968), 14.
47. Bernard Fall, Street without Joy (Harrisburg, 1961), 24. For the general background
of the history of the Communist and nationalist movement in Vietnam during this period, see
Buttinger, op. cit.; Paul Mus, Viet-Nam, Sociologie d'une guerre (Paris, 1950); Philippe
Devillers, Histoire de Viet-Nam de 1940 d 1952 (Paris, 1952); and B. B. Fall,Le Viet-Minh (Paris,
i960).
48. Buttinger, II, 739; for firsthand accounts of Vietminh guerrilla warfare see the books
by Bernard Fall and Wilfred G. Burchett.
49. Buttinger, II, 741.
50. Bernard B. Fall, Truong Chih (New York, 1963).
51. Ibid., 74.
52. Douglas Pike, War, Peace and the Viet Cong (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 142 et seq.
53. Giap, People's War, People's Army, 48.
54. "The Big Victory, the Great Task," in Patrick J. McGarvey, Visions of Victory.
SelectedVietnamese Communist Writings 1964-68 (Stanford, 1969), 40.
55. Giap, op. cit., 108.
56. Ibid., 109.
57. McGarvey, op. cit., 41.
58. Robert J. O'Neill, General Giap (Sidney, 1969), 203.
59. McGarvey, op. cit., 15,45.
60. George A. Carver, "The Faceless Viet Cong," Foreign Affairs (April, 1966), 360.
61.Carver, loc. cit.
62. J. J. Zasloff, Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam, 1954-60: The Role of the
Southern Vietminh Cadres, RAND Memorandum RM-5163/2/ARPA (Santa Monica, 1967), 27.
63. Bernard B. Fall, Last Reflections on a War (New York, 1967), 219, 220.
64. Wesley R. Fishel, ed., Anatomy of a Conflict (Ithaca, 1968), 425.
65. For a study of Viet Cong political motivation see J. J. Zasloff's RAND Memo. RM
4703/2 2-ISA ARPA (August 1966).
66. John Gerassi, Towards Revolution (London, 1971), I, 107.
67. Associated Press (11 May 1975).
68. Douglas Pike, "How Strong is the NLF?" in Fishel, loc. cit., 412.
69. Duncanson, in Fishel, op. cit., 428.
70. Denis Warner, The Last Confucian (London, 1964), 32; Ton Tat Thien, "Vietnam, A
Case of Social Alienation," International Affairs (July 1967).
71. Buttinger, op. cit., 984; Vietnam: W. Burchett, Inside Story of the Guerrilla War (New York,
1965), 84-89.
72. Pike, loc. cit., 418.
73. David Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire (New York, 1965), 167.
74. Quoted in W. R. Fishel, 500-503.
CHAPTER SEVEN: NATIONAL LIBERATION AND REVOLUTIONARY WAR
1. Yehuda Bauer,From Diplomacy to Resistance (Philadelphia, 1970), 319.

2. There are many personal accounts of the anti-British struggle in Palestine between
1944 and 1948 but there is no comprehensive historical study. The paramilitary organizations
involved have all published their official histories. Sefer toldot ha-Hagana (Tel Aviv, 1963),
II, books 1 and 2; David Niv, Ma'arakhot
447 NOTES
ha-lrgun ha-Zvai ha-Leumi (Tel Aviv, 1965-1973), III, IV; Kovetz Lehi (Tel Aviv, 1959);
Sefer ha-Palmach (Tel Aviv, 1953). See also Natan Yalin Mor, Lohame Herat Israel (Tel
Aviv, 1974).
3. M. Begin, The Revolt (London, n.d. [1951?]), 317.
4. Kousoulas, Revolution and Defeat, 236.
5. J. C. Murray, "The Anti-Bandit War" in Greene, The Guerrilla, 98.
6. Edgar O'Ballance, The Greek Civil War 1944-1949 (London, 1966), 181. For a sympathetic
though not uncritical account, Dominique Eudis, The Kapetanios (London, 1972).
7. The fullest account of the Indonesian struggle for independence is George McT. Kahin,
Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca, 1952). Among more recent works with a
bearing on the period are J. M. van den Kroef, The Communist Party of Indonesia (Vancouver,
1965); B. Dahm, Sukarno and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence (Ithaca, 1969); idem,
History of Indonesia in the Twentieth Century (London, 1971).
8. Arnold C. Brackman, Indonesian Communism (New York, 1963), 107.
9. J. H. Brimmell, Communism in South East Asia (London, 1959), 255-262; Ruth McVey, The
Calcutta Conference and the South East Asian Uprising (Ithaca, 1958), passim.
10. Lucian W. Pye, Guerrilla Communism in Malaya (Princeton, 1956), was an early
account of the fighting in Malaya. Others were Gene Hanrahan, The Communist Struggle in
Malaya (New York, 1954), and V. Purcell, Malaya Communist or Free? (London, 1954). The
fullest survey is Anthony Short, The Communist Insurrection in Malaya 1948-1960 (London,
1975); the author was asked by the Malayan government to write the official history of the
"emergency" and had access to almost all relevant sources. In the end the Malayan government
refused however to give the book its blessing. Other important works are Robert Thompson,
Defeating Communist Insurgency (London, 1966); Richard Clutterbuck, The Long Long War
(London, 1967); idem, Riot and Revolution in Singapore and Malaya (London, 1973).
11. Short, Insurrection in Malaya, 39 et seq.
12. Ibid., 51.
13. Clutterbuck, Riot and Revolution, 271.
14. Sir Robert Thompson notes that the initial strength of the guerrillas in Malaya and
Vietnam was about equal — 4,000 to 5,000 (Defeating Communist Insurgency, 47). But unlike
the Vietcong, the guerrillas in Malaya had great difficulty in recruiting new cadres because they
had no "popular," only a jungle base.
15. Short, Insurrection in Malaya, 319.
16. Clutterbuck, Riot and Revolution, 211.
17. Ibid., 272.
18. W. J. Pomeroy, ed., Guerrilla Warfare and Marxism (New York, 1968), 34-35.
19. Aguinaldo came from a well-to-do landowning family of mixed Chinese and Taganlog
stock. He had been municipal captain of his home town and had a reputation as a proficient
street fighter. On the struggle between the American army and Aguinaldo's forces, see J. A.
Leroy, The Americans in the Philippines (New York, 1914), 2 vols.; T. M. Kalaw, The Philippine
Revolution (Manila, 1925); W. Sexton, Soldiers in the Sun (Harrisburg, 1939); G. F. Zaide, The
Philippine Revolution (Manila, 1954), and Leon Wolff, Little Brown Brother (London, 1961).
The most recent study is Major Robert T. Yap-Diangco, The Filipino Guerrilla Tradition
(Manila, 1971).
20. U. S. Baclagon, The Huk Campaign in the Philippines (Manila, i960), 1.
21. Luis Taruc,He Who Rides the Tiger (London, 1967), 24.
22. B. T. Bashore in Osanka, 196.
23. B. Dasgupta, "Naxalite Armed Struggles and the Annihilation Campaign in Rural Areas,"
Economic and Political Weekly, nos. 4-6 (Bombay, 1973).
24. Intercontinental Press (2 June 1975). 741-
448 NOTES
25. De Gaulle in conversation with Pierre Laffont, J. R. Tournoux, La tragedie du

General (Paris, 1967), 597.
26. The most detailed account of the Algerian war so far is Yves Courriere, La guerre
d'Algerie: I, Les fils de la Toussaint (Paris, 1968); II, Le temps des leopards (Paris, 1969);
lll,L'heure des colonels (Paris, 1970).
27. William B. Quandt, Revolution and Political Leadership. Algeria 1954-1968
(Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 91.
28. Edward Behr, The Algerian Problem (London, 1961), 60; Michael K. Clark, Algeria
in Turmoil (New York, 1959), 58.
29. Quoted in C. and F. Jeanson, L'Algerie hors la loi (Paris, 1955), 298.
30. This applies, for instance, to G. Chaliand and A. Humbaraci; Quandt, Revolution and
Political Leadership, 220.
31.Quoted in J. S. Ambler, The French Army in Politics (Columbus, 1966), 331.
32. Title of a book on Algeria by Mohammed Bessaoud (Paris, 1963).
33. Case studies in Insurgency and Revolutionary warfare: Algeria 1954-62, Special
Operations Research Office (Washington, 1963), 19-29.
34. Dickey Chappelle, "How Castro won," reprinted in Osanka, 325.
35. Thomas, "The Origins of the Cuban Revolution," The World Today (October 1963),
490 et seq.; Theodore Draper, Castroism, Theory and Practice (New York, 1965), 103 et seq.
36. Malcolm Deas, "Guerrillas in Latin America: a Perspective," The World Today
(February 1968), 74.
37. Thomas, Cuba, 791.
38. Che Guevara, Episodes of the Revolutionary War (Havana, 1967), 13 et seq.
39. Draper, Castroism, 25.
40. For a discussion of the splits in the Palestinian resistance, the ideologies of the
various groups and a bibliography see below, chapter 8.
41. Precise data have not been published, but occasional figures convey a glimpse of the
magnitude of the sums involved. Thus according to a PLO spokesman, the arrears of the Arab
states alone amounted to sixty million dollars in late March 1974. ("Voice of Palestine," Cairo
Radio, 2 June 1974.)
42. For the general background of Kurdish-Arab relations see C. J. Edmond, Turks and
Arabs (London, 1957); for descriptions of the Kurdish war, D. Adamson, The Kurdish War
(London, 1964), and E. O'Ballance, The Kurdish Revolt 1961-1970 (London, 1973); Rene
Maunes, Le Kurdistan ou la mort (Paris, 1967); D. A. Schmidt, Journey among Brave Men
(Boston, 1964).
43. J. Bowyer Bell, "Endemic Insurgency and International Order: The Eritrean
Experience," Orbis (Summer 1974), 427-450. Originally there were both Muslims and
Christians among the ELF cadres, but they split in 1971 along tribal and religious lines. Both the
Saudis and Ghadafi resented the presence of Christians in the ELF but there seems to have been
friction from the very beginning; it was difficult to get Christian and Muslim cadres even to eat
together. Which did not stop the ELF's proclaiming itself a Marxist movement.
44. Documents of the National Struggle in Oman and the Arabian Gulf (London, 1974),
16; R. Fiennes, Where Soldiers Fear to Tread (London, 1975), is a firsthand account of the Oman
war.
45. Ali Akbar Safayi Farahani, What a Revolutionary Must Know (London, 1973), 67. A
former schoolteacher, Farahani fought with the Palestinians 1967-1969 and later participated in
the Siahkal guerrilla movement in northern Iran. He was killed in 1970.
46. See Organisations et combats du peuple de I'Iran (n.p. [Paris?], n.d. [1974?]), passim.
47. P. Vielle and Abol Hassan Banisadr, Petrole et violence (Paris, 1974), 107 et seq.
48. OnDev Gene and the various commando groups which evolved from it see J. M.
Landau, Radical Politics in Modern Turkey (Leiden, 1974), 41-44.
49. Charles Foley, ed., The Memoirs of General Grivas (London, 1964), 135.
50. There is no detailed history of Grivas's campaign. The fullest account is still his own
autobiography. See also Charles Foley, Island in Revolt (London, 1964); idem, Legacy of Strife
(London, 1964); Robert Stephens, Cyprus. A Place of Arms (London, 1966).
51. For the background of the Mau Mau disorders see L. S. B. Leakey, Defeating Mau
Mau (London, 1954), and F. D. Corfield, Historical Survey of the Origins and Growth of Mau
Mau (London, i960); C. G. Rosberg and J. Noltingham, The Myth of Mau Mau (London, 1966).
For military aspects of the revolt, F. Kit-son, Gangs and Countergangs (London, i960), and Ian
Henderson and Philip Goodhart, The Hunt for Kimathi (London, 1958). For a Mau Mau point of
view, W. Itote, Mau Mau General (Nairobi, 1967); Donald L. Barnett and Karari Njama,Mau
Mau from Within (London, 1966). See also Life Histories from the Revolution, Mau Mau 1-3
(Richmond, Canada, 1974); these were written apparently by Barnett. (The problems with
"autobiographies" of Asian or African guerrillas ghosted by Western well-wishers are manifold.
To mention but one example: in the year 1953, Born of the People, an autobiography of Luis
Taruc, was published in New York. When Taruc later surrendered and left the Communist party,
he revealed that the book had been written "with the help of a friend" and edited by Jose Lava,
general secretary of the Communist party; various chapters on theoretical subjects were inserted
without his knowledge. Pomeroy, on the other hand, claimed that "this book was actually written
by W. J. Pomeroy compiled from interviews with numerous Huk leaders.")
52. Guy Arnold, Kenyatta and the Politics of Kenya (London, 1974), 110.
53. D. L. Wheeler and R. Pelissier, Angola (London, 1971), 178-179.
54. Richard Gibson, African Liberation Movements (London, 1972), 281.
55. The main sources for the war in Guine-Bissau are B. Davidson, The Liberation of
Guine (Harmondsworth, 1969), and Gerard Chaliand, Lutte armee en Afrique (Paris, 1967); Lars
Rudebeck, Guinea-Bissau: A Study of Political Mobilization (New York, 1975), as well as
Cabral's essays, Unite et lutte (Paris, 1975), all from a PAIGC point of view. The struggle in
Angola and Mozambique is surveyed in R. H. Chilcote, Portuguese Africa (New York, 1967),
and John A. Marcum, The Angolan Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1969). See also E. Mond-lane,
The Struggle for Mozambique (Harmondsworth, 1969).
56. Gibson, African Liberation Movements, 261.
57. K. W. Grundy, Guerrilla Struggle in Africa (New York, 1971), chapter 19.
58. "The campaign mounted by the enemy in claiming that the MPLA is a Communist
organization can only be seen as propaganda intended to fool our people." A. Neto, Messages to
Companions in the Struggle (Richmond, Canada, 1972), 27.
59. See chapter 8 below.
60. The best general account of the rise and fall of the Latin American guerrilla
movements is Allemann, Macht und Ohnmacht der Guerilla. Also of interest are the earlier
books by Richard Gott, Rural Guerrilla in Latin America (London, 1973), and Luis Mercier
Vega, Technique du contre etat (Paris, 1968). James Kohl and John Litt, Urban Guerrilla
Warfare in Latin America (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), is a collection of texts with introductory
comments. The most important work in Spanish is V. Bambirra, ed., Dies anos de insurreccion
en America Latina (Santiago, 1971). For Venezuela see Luigi Valsalice, Guer-riglia e politico:
L'esemplo de Venezuela 1962-1969 (Florence, 1973). The most up-to-date bibliography is
Bibliografia guerra revolucionaria y subversion en el continente (Washington, 1973), published
by the Library of the Inter-American Defense College.
61. Deas, "Guerrillas in Latin America," 74.
62. Anti-Mau Mau countergangs had first been used in Kenya and spread much
confusion among the guerrillas. In Latin America right-wing terrorist grqups emerged in many
countries, frequently with the approval of the governriient or
450 NOTES
the army. This applies to the Argentine National Orgainzation Movement (MANO), the
Guatemalan NOA and MANO, the Brazilian Escudrao da Morte. The Spanish anti-Basque
Guerrilleros de Christo Rey should also be mentioned in this context. For the urban
guerrillas these were of course merely hired agents, just as in the eyes of the extreme right
the Communists and Castroists were simply "bandits." Internal war is not the ideal period
for detached political and social analysis.
63. For a comprehensive list, Political Kidnappings 1968-1973, Staff Study by the House of
Representatives Committee on International Security (Washington, 1 973)- See also Brian M.
Jenkins and Janera Johnson, International Terrorism. A Chronology 1968-1974 (Santa
Monica, 1975).
64. Ulster, by the Sunday Times Insight Team (London, 1972), 194 et seq. See also Martin
Dillon and Denis Lehane, Political Murder in Northern Ireland (London, 1973).
65. See chapter 8 below.
66. D. V. Segre and J. H. Adler, "The Ecology of Terrorism," Survival (July-August 1973), 180.
67. B. M. Jenkins, High Technology Terrorism and Surrogate War. The Impact of New
Technology on Low-Level Violence (Santa Monica, 1975), passim. For observations on the
international character of terrorism J. Bowyer Bell, Transnational Terrorism (Washington,
1975).
CHAPTER EIGHT: GUERRILLA DOCTRINE TODAY
1. Boris Goldenberg, Kommunismus in Lateinamerika (Stuttgart, 1971), 361.

2. The basic texts of Latin American guerrilla writing are available in English, French
and German. Among the more important general studies are the following: Vania Bambirra,
ed., Diez Afios de Insurreccion (Santiago, 1971), 2 vols.; Richard Gott, Guerrilla Movements
in Latin America (London, 1970); Luis Mercier Vega, Guerrillas in Latin America (London,
1969). Hugh Thomas, Cuba or the Pursuit of Freedom (London, 1971) and Theodore Draper,
Castroism, Theory and Practice (London, 1965) are essential for the understanding of the
Castro ideology. Some of the best studies on the subject are in German; this refers in
particular to Boris Goldenberg, Kommunismus in Lateinamerika (Stuttgart, 1971) and Fritz
Rene Allemann, Macht und Ohnmacht der Guerilla (Miinchen, 1974). The following are also
of interest: Giinter Maschke, Kritik des Guerillero (Frankfurt, 1973); Wolfgang Berner, Der
Evangelist des Cas-troismus-Guevarismus (Koln, ig6g); Richard E. Kiessler, Guerilla und
Revolution (Bonn, 1975); Robert F. Lamberg, Die castristische Guerilla in Lateinamerika
(Hanover, 1971). Of great help to students of the subject are the following bibliographies:
Ronald H. Chilcote, Revolution and Structural Change in Latin America: a Bibliography on
Ideology, Development and the Radical Left (1930-1965) (Stanford, 1970), 2 vols.; Anon.,
Bibliografia: Guerra Revolu-cionaria y Subversion en el Continente (Washington, 1973).
3. Interview with Andrew St. George, 4 February 1958; Ronald E. Bonachee and
Nelson P. Valdes, Revolutionary Struggle, 1947-1958; Volume I of the Selected Works of
Fidel Castro (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 369.
4. The second Declaration of Havana, 4 February 1962 in M. Kenner and J. Petras,
Fidel Castro Speaks (London, 1972), 164.
5. Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare (London, 1969); the article was originally
published inCuba Socialista (September 1963), 1-17.
6. Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, 14.
7. Debray,Revolution in the Revolution (New York, 1967), 104-106.
9. Regis Debray, Strategy for Revolution (London, 1973), 46-47.
GUERRILLA WARFARE
10. Speech at the University of Havana, 13 March 1967, in Kenner and Petras, op. cit., 119.
11.OLAS: Premiere Conference de Vorganisation latino-americaine de solidarity (Paris, 1967),
72.
12. Debray, Revolution, 26.
13. Alberto Bayo, 150 Questions to a Guerrilla (Boulder, 1963).
14.Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare —a Method; in Malin, op. cit., 276.
16.The romantic ("Byronic") inspiration of guerrilla leaders was noted first by Davydov and later
by Maguire, the London lawyer who, around the turn of the century, was one of the first to
present a systematic guerrilla doctrine.
17. "Frente a todos" Bohemia (8 January 1956), in Bonachee and Valdes, 1,299.
18. T. Draper, Castroism: Theory and Practice (London, 1965).
19. Ibid., 55.
20. Bohemia (28 July 1957).
21. Liborio Justo, Bolivia, la revolucion derrotada (Cochabamba, 1967), 261. Quoted in
Goldenberg, op. cit.
22. Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, eds., Regis Debray and the Latin American
Revolution (New York, 1969).
23. Douglas Bravo, "Cuba: Rectificacion tactica o estrategia," French translation in Temps
Modernes (July 1971).
24. Regis Debray, Les Epreuves de Feu. La Critique des Armes (Paris, 1974), II, 121-122.
25. Ibid., 123.
26. Interview with the Mexican newspaper Sucesos, in Vega, op. cit., 242-246.
27. Gott, op. cit., 262-265; Norman Gall, Teodoro Petkoff: The crisis of the professional
revolutionary, part I, "Years of Insurrection." Field Staff Reports 1972, No. 1, 16 et seq; Robert J.
Alexander, The Communist Party of Venezuela (Stanford, 1969), passim.
28. Hector Bejar, Peru 1965: Notes on a Guerrilla Experience (New York, 1970),
124.
29. Hugo Blanco, El Camino de Nuestra Revolucion (Lima, 1964), passim; Robert J. Alexander,
Trotskyism in Latin America (Stanford, 1973), 174-175.
30. For a representative selection of his writings see John Gerassi, ed., Camilo Torres,
Revolutionary Priest (London, 1973). There is a recent biography: W. J. Broderick, Camilo Torres
(New York, 1975).
31. Anon., La Guerrilla por dentro (Bogota, 1971), passim; the author of this book was the
former guerrilla leader Jaime Arenas. Conrad Dentrez, Les mouve-ments revolutionnaires en
Amerique Latine (Brussels, 1972); Allemann, loc. cit., 272-274.
32. G. Lora.iV'eubewertung der Guerilla (Berlin, 1973), 142.
33. Alexander Craig, "Urban Guerrilla in Latin America," Survey (Summer 1971), 124.
34. The writings of Carlos Marighela have been widely translated; the books and articles of
Abraham Guillen are not readily available even in Spanish. A comprehensive bibliography has
been supplied by Russell, Miller and Hildner; "The Urban Guerrilla in Latin America," Latin
American Research Review (Spring 1974). Among the few general studies on the subject, the
following ought to be mentioned: Robert Moss, Urban Guerrillas (London, 1972); James Kohl
and John Litt, Urban Guerrilla Warfare in Latin America (Cambridge, Mass., 1974). Ernesto
Mayans, ed., Tupamaros: antologia documental (Cuernavaca, 1971) is an excellent collection of the
main documents on the urban guerrilla in Uruguay.
35. A. Guillen, Estrategia de la guerrilla urbana (Montevideo, 1966), 63; quoted in
Donald C. Hodges, ed., Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla (New York, 1973),
236.
36. A. Guillen, El pueblo en armas: estrategia revolucionaria (unpublished, 1972),

quoted in Hodges, 257-258.
37. Hodges, loc. cit., 241.
38. Hodges, loc. cit., 263-277.
39. Carlos Marighela, For the Liberation of Brazil (London, 1971), 178-182.
40. Ibid., 47.
41.R. Moss, op. cit., 195.
42. Joao Quartin, Dictatorship and Armed Struggle in Brazil (New York, 1971),
194-19543. Minimanual, in Marighela, op.
cit., 81.
44. More books and articles have been written about the Tupamaros than about any other
Latin American guerrilla movement. The most important are, in addition to Mayans's collection
of documents mentioned above: A. Mercader and Jorge de Vega, Tupamaros: estrategia y accion
(Montevideo, 1969); Alain Labrousse, The Tupamaros (London, 1973); Maria Esther Gilio, The
Tupamaros (London, 1972).
45. Originally published in the Chilean journal Punto Final and frequently reprinted.
Quoted here from Kohl and Litt, op. cit., 227-236.
46. Interview with "Urbano," Kohl and Litt, op. cit., 268.
47. Debray, Les Epreuves de Feu, loc. cit., 277. This is a variation on one of Debray's
favorite theses, first pronounced in the 1960s about the revolu-tionarization by the
revolutionaries of the counterrevolution.
48. Freedom Struggle, "By the Provisional IRA" (n.p., 1973), 11.
49. Patxi Isaba, Euzkadi Socialiste (Paris, 1971), 98. See also Ortzi, Historia de Euskadi
(Paris, 1975).
50. Pierre Vallieres.Negrei blancs d'Amerique (Montreal, 1969).
51. A. Schubert, ed., "Das Konzept Stadtguerrilla," Stadtguerrilla (Berlin, 1971), 111. See also
Holger, der Kampf geht weiter, Dokumente und Beitraege zum Konzept Stadtguerrilla
(Gaiganz, 1975).
52. Kollektiv RAF, Uber den bewaffneten Kampf in Westeuropa (Berlin, 1971), 47.
53. Schubert, op. cit., 137.
54. H.J. Muller-Borchert, Guerilla im Industriestaat (Hamburg, 1973), 108.
55. Erklarungen von Horst Mahler (Rote Hilfe, Berlin, 1974), 8.
56. Jerry Rubin, Do it. Scenario of the Revolution (New York, 1970), 125.
57. "Communique No. 1" in Harold Jacobs, ed., Weatherman (Berkeley, 1970),
12558. Scanlans (January, 1971), 15; The Berkeley Barb (15 February 1974).
59. "Communique No. 4" in Jacobs, op. cit., 518.
60. Scanlans, loc. cit., 14.
61. Philip S. Foner, ed., The Black Panther Speaks (New York, 1970), 107, 122.
62.Eldridge Cleaver, On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party (n.p., n.d.), 11.
63. Break de Chains (New York, 1973), 14.
64. Break de Chains, op. cit., 11-12.
65.Frantz Fanon, Pour la revolution Africaine (Paris, 1969), 186.
66. F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (London, 1967), 64.
67. Irene L. Gendzier, Frantz Fanon (New York, 1973), 203.
68. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 109.
69. Jack Woddis,Netti Theories of Revolution (London, 1972), 174.
70.Nguyen Nghe, "Fanon et les problemes de l'independence," La Pensee (February 1963).
71. Ronald H. Chilcote, "The Political Thought of Amilcar Cabral," Journal of Modern African
Studies, 3 (1968), 386.
72. Amilcar Cabral, Revolution in Guinea (London, 1969), 51.
73. Speech in Havana, January 1966, reprinted in L'Arme de la Theorie, I (Paris, 1975) and in
Portuguese Colonies: Victory or Death (Havana, 1971), 133.
74. Gerard Chaliand, Armed Struggle in Africa (New York, 1969), 114.
453 NOTES
75. A. Cabral, Unite et lutte, II, La pratique revolutionnaire (Paris, 1975), 195 etseq.
76.Havana speech, loc. cit.: see also Amilcar Cabral, Die Revolution der Ver-dammten (Berlin,
1974), 88.
77. Amar Ouzegane,Le meilleur combat (Paris, ig62),300.
78.fi/ Moudjahid (15 November 1957), quoted in Andre Mandouze, ed., La
revolutionalgerienne paries textes (Paris, 1961), 132.
79. This refers, for instance, to Mustafa Talas, Harb al isabat (Damascus, n.d.), which was
published in several editions. Talas later became the chief of staff of the Syrian army. His book
was dedicated to Guevara.
80. Y. Harkabi, Fedayeen Action and Arab Strategy (London, 1968), 14.
81. Harkabi, op. cit., 18.
82. Hisham Sharabi, Palestine Guerrillas (Washington, 1970), 32.
83. Min muntalaqat al amal alfidai (Amman, 1967), 67.
84. Walid Kazziha, Revolutionary Transformation in the Arab World (London,
1975), 5485. The basic ideological texts of the various groups are readily available in many
editions; they were systematically reproduced in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Beirut. A
convenient collection is Bichara et Nairn Khader, ed., Textes de la revolution palestinienne
(Paris, 1975). Among the more important descriptive accounts are Gerard Challiant, La
resistance palestinienne (Paris, 1970); John K. Cooley, Green March, Black September (London,
1973); Ehud Yaari, Strike Terror (New York, 1970); Edgar O'Ballance, Arab Guerrilla Power
(1967-1972) (London, 1973). The central theoretical issues are discussed in books by Naji
Alush, Elias Murgus and Anis Qasim (in Arabic) and Y. Harkabi (in Hebrew).
86. Rolf Tophoven, Fedayin, Guerrilla ohne Grenzen (Bonn, 1973), 109. Fatah alone received
80-85 million in 1973; the Libyan government gave 30 million.
87. Peter Paret and John W. Shy, "Guerrilla Warfare and U.S. Military Policy," in T. N. Greene,
The Guerrilla and How to Fight Him (New York, 1962), 37.
88. Kwame Nkrumah, Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare (London, 1968).
89. Abdul Haris Nasution, Fundamentals of Guerrilla Warfare (London, 1965), 55,
7390.
Ibid., 17.
91. General Grivas, Guerrilla Warfare and Eoka's Struggle (London, 1964), 73.
92. Ibid., 74.
93. World Marxist Review (May 1964).
94. William J. Pomeroy, op. cit., 34.
95. Lin Piao, "Long live the Victory of People's War," People's Daily (August 1966); Peking
Review (3 September 1966).
96. Peter van Ness, Revolution and Chinese Foreign Policy (Berkeley, 1971), 7.
97. The Polemic on the General Line of the International Communist Movement (Peking,
1965), 15.
98. Roger Trinquier, Modern Warfare (London, 1964), 6.
gg. Otto Heilbrunn, Partisan, Warfare (London, 1962), 40.
100. Kenneth W. Grundy, Guerrilla Struggle in Africa (New York, 1971), 42.
101. R. Trinquier, La guerre moderne (Paris, igsg); G. Bonnet, Les guerres insur-
rectionelles et revolutionnaires (Paris, 1958), as well as the books and articles by Chassin,
Souyris, Nemo, Lacheroy, Rocquigny, Hogard and others.
102. Peter Paret, French Revolutionary Warfare from Indochina to Algeria (New York,
1964), 7.
103. Captain Souyris in Revue militaire d'information (October, 1958), 38.
104. For a discussion of the revolutionary war doctrine, J. S. Ambler, The French Army in
Politics (Columbus, 1966), 308-336.
105. Ximenes (pseud.) in Revue militaire d'information (August-September 1.958), 27-40.
106. E. Behr, The Algerian Problem (London, 1961), 140; Ambler, op. cit., 324.
107. David S. Sullivan and Martin J. Sattler, eds., Revolutionary War and Western
Response (New York, 1971), 7 et seq.
108. E. L. Katzenbach, Jr, "Time, Space and Will: The Politico-Military View of Mao Tse-
tung," in T. N. Greene, ed., loc. cit., 19; Virgil Ney, "Guerrilla Warfare and Modern Strategy," in F.
M. Osanka, ed., Modern Guerrilla Warfare (Glencoe, 1962), 38.
109. G. Lichtheim, Imperialism (New York, 1971), 164.
110. Dept. of the Army. Operations against Irregular Forces, Field Manual 31-15
(1961), 5111. Julian Paget, Counter-Insurgency Campaigning (London, 1967), 23.
112. John J. McCuen, The Art of Counter Revolutionary War (London, 1966), passim.
113. Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations (London, 1971), 32.
114. J. Baechler, in Sullivan and Sattler, eds, op. cit., 79.
115. Robert Thompson, Revolutionary War in World Strategy, 1945-1969 (London, 1970), 11.
116. J. L. S. Girling, People's War (London, 1969).
117. David Galula, Counferinsurgenci/ Practice (New York, 1964), passim.
118. Eqbal Ahmad, loc. cit.,4.
119. Ibid., 15.
120. Richard Clutterbuck, Protest and the Urban Guerrilla (London, 1973), 13 et seq.
CHAPTER NINE: A SUMMING UP
1. For instance Otto Heilbrunn, Partisan Warfare (London, 1962), 40, and many other authors.
2. E.J. Hobsbawm, Revoltionaries (London, 1973), 165.
3. G. Fairbarn, Revolutionary Guerrilla Warfare (London, 1974), 16.
4. M. Elliot-Bateman rightly notes that "people's war" is not a new form of war but that it was
forgotten or repressed. On the other hand it is far-fetched, to put it mildly, to consider
Lawrence's exploits in Arabia a case of "people's war" as he does. See "The Form of People's
War," Army Quarterly (April 1970), 38.
5. Juana Azurduy de Padilla, one of the chief guerrilla leaders in the Andes, was made Teniente
Coronet in 1816 (Joaquin Gautier's biography [La Paz, !973L J99-) In the La Plata wars of the
early nineteenth century the guerrilla portidn of the campaign (guerra de recursos) was almost
entirely entrusted to the women of Paraguay by Brigadier General Eliza Lynch and Lieutenant-
Colonel Margaret Ferreira. See also Julio Diaz Arguedas, Guerrilleros y Hero-inas de la
Independencia (La Paz, 1974), 13-15.
6. The term "internal war" in fact antedates "guerrilla"; it was. used in the eighteenth century,
but it appears here in its specific modem sense. "People's war," needless to say, is not a new
expression either but, following Mao, it has acquired a different specific meaning. The use of
"partisan" as a military term can be traced back in English to the early eighteenth century, and in
French and Italian to the late sixteenth.
7. The following is a fairly representative but by no means exhaustive sample for the discussion
of guerrilla theories: Henry Bienen, Violence and Social Change (Chicago, 1968), 40-65; Lucien
Pye and others in Harry Eckstein, ed., Internal War (New York, 1964); Harry Eckstein, "On the
Etiology of Internal Wars," History and Theory 2 (1965), 133-163; Chalmers Johnson, "Civilian
Loyalties and Guerrilla Conflicts," World Politics (July 1963); Samuel P. Huntington, "Guerrilla
Warfare in Theory and Practice" in Osanka, op. cit; J. K. Zawodny,
GUERRILLA WARFARE
Russell Rhyne, Klaus Knorr and other contributors to the special issue o f The Annals (May
1962); Franklin A. Lindsay, "Unconventional Warfare," American Scholar (Summer 1962);
D. F. Robinson, "Irregular Warfare," Army Quarterly and Defence Journal (July 1974); B.
Singh and Ko Wang Mei, Theory and Practice of Modern Guerrilla Warfare (New York,
1971); M. Elliot-Bateman, "The Form of People's War," Army Quarterly (April 1970); P.
Kecskemeti, Insurgency as a Strategic Problem (Santa Monica, 1967); Charles Wolf, Jr.,
Insurgency and Counterinsurgency: New Myths and Old Realities (Santa Monica, 1965);
Eqbal Ahmad, E. R. Wolf and M. Gelden in N. Miller and R. Aya, eds., National Liberation,
Revolution in the Third World (New York, 1971); Roger Darling, "Analyzing Insurgency,"
Military Review (February 1974); Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf, Rebellion and Authority
—An Analytical Essay on Insurgent Conflicts (Chicago, 1970).
8. Kecskemeti, op, cit., 15.
9. Pye in Eckstein, ed., op. cit., 162.
0. Eckstein inHistory and Theory, op. cit., 153.
1. Revue Militaire Generate (January 1957).
2. L. Oppenheim,International Law (London, 1940), Section 254.
3. Jiirg H. Schmid. Die volkerrechtliche Stellung der Partisanen im Kriege
(Zurich, 1956); Carl Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen (Berlin, 1963); Alfred Bopp, Moderner
Krieg und Kriegsgefangenenrecht (Wiirzburg, 1970); Charles Zorgbibe, La Guerre Civile
(Paris, 1975); J. Siotis, Le droit de la guerre et les conjlits armes d'un caractere non
international (Geneva, 1958); M. Venthey, La guerrilla: le probleme du traitement des
prisonniers in Annates d'Etudes Internationales (Geneva, 1972); F. Kalshoven, "The
Position of Guerrilla Fighters under the Law of War," International Society for Military
Law (Ley-den, 1969); J. R. Rosenau, ed., International Aspects of Civil Strife (Princeton,
1964); R. Pinto, "Les regies du droit international concernant la guerre civile," Revue des
Cours de I Academie de Droit International (1965), vol. 114.
4. Bienen, loc. cit., 105.
5. Darling, op. cit.
6. Huntington in Osanka, op. cit., XVI.
7. B. M. Jenkins, High Technology Terrorism and Surrogate War: The Impact of Surrogate
War on Low-Level Violence (Santa Monica, 1975).
8. This is, in any case, part of a wider problem, that of individuals blackmailing
society. A terrorist "movement" will not be needed to engage in nuclear extortion; a small
group of madmen or criminals, or perhaps a single individual will be equally effective,
perhaps even more so, because the smaller the group the more difficult to identify and combat
it.
9. Luis Padilla in World Marxist Review (April 1975) and T. Timofeev in Kommu-
nist (April 1975)-
Chronology of Major
Guerrilla Wars
(Including general wars in which guerrilla

operations played a significant role)
United States War of Independence 1775-1783

Vendee 1792-1796
South Italy (Ruffo) 1799
Spain 1809-1812
Tyrol 1809
Russia 1812
Latin America (Wars of Independence) ca. 1810-1821
Greece 1821-1832
Carlist Wars 1834-1839
Poland 1831, 1863
North Africa (Abd el-Kader) 1830-1847
Caucasus (Shamyl) 1834-1859
Italy 1848-1849 etc.
Colonial Wars Such As:
Anglo-Burmese Wars 1824-1826, 1852, 1885
Sikh Wars 1845-1849
Maori Wars 1845-1870
Kaffir War 1851-1852
AshantiWars 1863-1874
Bhutan 1865
Zulu War 1879
Sudan 1883-1885
Tonkin Uprisings 1883-1895
Madagascar 1884, 1895
Waziristan 1919-1923
American Indian Wars 1850-1890
Russia in Central Asia 1837-1884
Taiping Rebellion 1851-1865
United States War of Secession 1861-1865
Mexico 1862-1867
Cuba 1868-1878, 1895-1898
Franco-Prussian War 1870-1871
GUERRILLA WARFARE
457
FAR Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias Argentina 1973

FAR Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes Guatemala 1962
FARC Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Columbia 1966
Columbia
FATAH Palestinian Arabs (Exile)
FFI Forces Francoises de I'lnterieur France 1942-1945
FLCS Front for the Liberation of Coastal Somalia Somalia 1974
Front de Liberation de Quebec Frente de
Libertagao de Mogambique Front de Canada early 1970s
Liberation National du Tchad Mozambique 1962
Front for the Liberation of Zimbabwe Chad 1966
Frente Sandinista de Liberacion
National Rhodesia 1971 ca.
Franctireurs Partisans Nicaragua i960
Governo Revolucionario de Angola no
Exilio/Frente Nacional de Libertagao de France World War II
Angola Angola late 1950s
Hrvatsko Revolucionarno Bratsvo
Irish Revolutionary Army
HRB Croatia (exile) 1960s
IRA- Irish Revolutionary Army Ulster
Officials
IRA-'rovisio Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Ulster
nals Organization)
Lohame Herul Israel (Fighters for the Palestine 1940-1948
IZL LEHI Freedom of Israel)
Movimiento de Izquierda Palestine 1940-1948 1974
MIR MIR Revolucionaria
Movimiento de Izquierda Bolivia 1965
MIR MIR-13 Revolucionaria
Movimiento de Izquierda Chile early 1960s
MLN MNLA Revolucionaria
Movimiento Revolucionario de Peru
Noviembre 13 1963
Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional Guatemala 1963-1972
(Tupamaros)
Malayan National Liberation Uruguay World War II
Army
and after 1968
Malaya
i960
Movimento Popular para a Libertagao de
Angola Argentina
1956

1968-1969
New People's Army Angola
PartidoAfricanodelndependenciada Guinea
NPA
PAIGC
'Portuguesa' e das Ilhas de Cabo Verde
Philippines
J
458 ABBREVIATIONS
PFLP Popular Front for the Liberation of (Exile) 1968

Palestine
PFLP Popular Front for the (Exile) 1968
General Liberation of Palestine
Command (General Command)
PFLO Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman Oman 1963
(formerly PFLOAG)
PLO Palestine Liberation Organization (Exile) 1965
RAF Rote Armee Fraktion Germany 1970
(Baader-Meinhof)
SIAKHAL Iran 1970
SWANU South West African National Union i960
SWAPU South West African People's i960
Organization
TPLA Turkish People's Liberation Army Turkey 1970
UDA Ulster Defence Association Ulster
UNITA Uniao National para a Independencia Total Angola 1966
de Angola
UVF Ulster Volunteer Force Ulster
ZANU Zimbabwe African National Union Rhodesia 1963
ZAPU Zimbabwe African People's Union Rhodesia 1961-
Bibliography
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
rhere is no comprehensive bibliography on guerrilla literature. The wars in the Sendee and
Andreas Hofer's insurrection in Tyrol have been studied in great detail; whereas the literature on
the Spanish guerrillas, on the Russian partisans (1812), and Cardinal Ruffo's expedition in 1799
is relatively sparse.
Of the early theoreticians of partisan warfare Grandmaison, de Jeney, Emmerich, Ewald and
von Valentini whose works were published between 1750 and 1800 are :he most important; with
the exception of von Valentini they are largely anecdotal in character. Denis Davydov's account
of the Russian partisans is the most vivid.
The books of Decker (1821) and Le Miere de Corvey (1823) encompass the experience gained
in the Napoleonic wars; far more systematic than their predecessors :hey were copied or
paraphrased in countless subsequent works.
Clausewitz and Jomini refer to people's wars and the former taught a course on the :echnique
of "small war." His notes on the subject, published in 1966, have not /et appeared in English.
The writings of the Polish and Italian authors on the technique of military insurrection are of
paramount importance because of their preoccupation with the politics ind the strategy of wars
of national liberation. Some of them thought that partisan nnits would be transformed sooner or
later into a regular army, others were in favor D f "pure guerrillaism." E. Liberti, Techniche della
guerra partigiana nel Risorgi-nento (Florence, 1972) is an excellent, very detailed survey of the
Italian nine-:eenth-century literature; his volume also reproduces Gentilini's Stracorridori 1848)
and Carlo Bianco's Manuale Pratico (1833) though not his more important Crattatto (1830).
There is no such introduction into the equally interesting Polish iterature of the period. Marian
Zychowski's biography of Mieroslawski (in Polish; Warsaw, 1963) contains probably the best
bibliographical guide available. Bern's ind Stolzman's works were republished in Warsaw after
1945, most other works of his period have become exceedingly rare. Mazzini's and Pisacane's
writings are readily available today, but not those of other Italian writers of the 1840s and 1850s
such as Cesare Balbo, Guglielmo Pepe, La Masaef al.
The German and Austrian nineteenth-century literature (Schels, Boguslawski, Riistow, Hron)
deals mainly with partisan operations in the enemy's rear in collabo-ation with the regular army;
the same refers to Russian authors such as Gershelman ind Klembowski. There are very many
British and French accounts of colonial
460 BIBLIOGRAPHY
campaigns in the nineteenth century but only very few studies of a general character. The most
important are those by Callwell (1899) and Maguire (1904). Devaureix (1881) and Charenton
(1900) on the other hand deal only with the European experience. T. E. Lawrence and Lettow-
Vorbeck described their activities during the First World War in considerable detail. The various
Latin American guerrilla wars during the nineteenth century and early twentieth have been
covered in absorbing detail but there were few attempts to generalize on the basis of this rich
experience.
Socialist authors with a very few exceptions were not interested in partisan warfare. Marx and
Engels referred to it on rare occasions, Lenin did so even more infrequently. Blanqui's
Instructions were published only after the First World War. Johannes Most provided the first do-
it-yourself manual for terrorists but even he was not interested in the wider aspects of urban
terror. Thus it was left to Mao to rediscover the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare, and in his
wake, to Giap, Guevara, Debray and the others. Recent, i.e., post-World War II, literature is
readily available; the theoretical works are by necessity didactic and repetitive, the personal
accounts are sometimes fascinating. The only two works dealing with guerrilla war in historical
perspective are Professor Werner Hahlweg's Guerrilla (1968), a short survey with an excellent
bibliography, and F. Tudman's much more voluminous Rat protiv rat (War against War) (in
Serbo-Croat, Zagreb, 1957), heavily preoccupied with theBalkan roots and manifestations of
guerrilla war.
There have been several popular histories of guerrilla warfare from Percy Cross Standing's
Guerrilla Leaders of the World (London, 1912) to Robert B. Asprey's War in the Shadows (New
York, 1975). The anthologies such as those by Osanka (1962) and Pomeroy (1968) cover almost
exclusively contemporary guerrilla warfare.
The following selective list includes works of historical or topical importance. Books on
specific guerrilla wars, terrorism and counterinsurgency have, as a rule, not been included.
Readers may find the references in the footnotes of the present volume of some help in their
search for further literature.
K. Adaridi. Freischaren und Freikorps. Auf Grund von Kriegserfahrungen. Berlin, 1925-
F. R. Allemann. Macht und Ohnmacht der Guerilla, Munich, 1974.
T. Argiolas. La guerriglia. Storia e dottrina. Florence, 1967.
J. A. Armstrong, K. de Witt, eds. Soviet Partisans in World War II. Madison, 1964.
General de Brack. Advanced Posts of Light Cavalry. London, 1850.
V. Bambirra, ed. DiezAnos de Insurreccion. 2 vols. Santiago, 1971.
A. Bayo. 150 Questions to a Guerrilla. Boulder, 1963.
H. Bejar. Peru 1965, Notes on a Guerrilla Experience. New York, 1970.
J. Bowyer Bell, Myth of the Guerrilla. New York, 1971.
Carlo Bianco di St. Jorioz. Delia guerra nazionale d'insurrezione per bande appli-
cata all'Italia. Italy, 1830. H. Blanco. El camino de nuestra
revolucion. Lima, 1964.
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GUERRILLA WARFARE
Index
Abd el-Kader, 69-72, 150, 380, 382, 401. American War of Independence, 18;
See also Algeria Abd el-Krim, 152, guerrilla warfare during, 18, 19, 21,
184-186 Aemilianus, Fabius 22, 382 Andreyev,
Maximus, 9 Afghan wars, 76 V., 207
Africa, 310, 360-362, 388; Frantz Fanon, 359. Angola, 311, 313; guerrilla movement in, 404
360; guerrilla leaders in, 310; guerrilla "Angry Brigade" (British terrorist
warfare in, 314; Sino-Soviet rivalry in, 312, group), 322 Antonov (leader of Tambov
313; tribal feuds in, 312. See also names of guerrillas),
individual countries 163
Agrarian unrest and guerrilla warfare, Arabia: guerrilla warfare in, 170, 171, 383;
379, 380, 388 Albania, 15, 226, 380, 383; World War I guerrilla operations in, 154-
Communist 156. See also Lawrence, T. E.
resistance movement in, 224, 238; Arab-Israeli conflict, 401; Six Days' War, 303;
guerrilla heritage in, 224, internal terrorism in, 304-306. See also Fatah, al-;
strife in guerrilla movement in, 404; Israel; Palestine
resistance movement in, 224; support Argentina, 314, 345; Monteneros, 322;
from Yugoslavia for, 225 Alexander, Tacuara, 322; urban guerrillas in, 319. See
Harold Rupert Leofric also Latin America
George, 232 Algeria, 279, 320, 371, 375, Arminius the Cheruscan, 6
379, 380, Artois, Comte d' (Charles X), 25
402. See also Africa; France Algerian Austria: guerrilla warfare pioneered in, 128;
War for Independence, victory over Frederick the Great, 14; war of
294-299; aftermath of, 299; agrarian the Swiss against, 13; World War I guerrilla
unrest and, 297; FLN, 295, 297-299; units in, 130
guerrilla warfare in, 70; prehistory of, Ayala, Jose, 316
296; socioeconomic causes of, 296
Almeydas (New Granada guerrilla Baader-Meinhof group (RAF), 324, 353,
band), 55 354. See also Germany; terrorism Bagration,
American Civil War, 51; Confederate guerrilla Petr Ivanovich, 44 Bakongo (tribe), 312
leaders, 80-83; guerrilla warfare during, 79- Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 140
83; treatment of Confederate guerrillas by Balaban, General, 15 Balbo, Cesare, 133, 134
North during, 82 Balkans: banditry in, 15, 17
nditry, 56; in Albania, 224; in Balkans, 15, 17; surrection, 138; theoretical writings
in Carlist wars, 63; in China, 18, 249; in on insurrection by, 138 Bloch, Jean de, 99
Cuba, 58, 301; during Greek War Bluntschli, Johann Kaspar, 118 Boer War, 88, 89,
oflndependence, 64; guerrilla tactics used, 13; 93; aroused interest in
guerrilla warfare and, 93-95; in Philippines, study of guerrilla warfare in Great
293; revolution and, 94; in Spain, 30, 63 Britain, 121, 122; guerrilla tactics in,
irazani, Mulla Mustafa, 307 ir Kochba 89, 90; unique features of, 91
rebellion, 5 ismatchi (anti-Soviet group), 164, Boguslawski, A. von, 118, 119 Bolivar,
165 isques, 62; ETA, 323. See also Spain Simon, 55
itanero (Spanish priest), 63. See also Carlist Bolivia, 314, 331, 333, 339, 343; guerrilla
wars; Spain warfare in, 315, 317; President Ba-rientos, 315
itista y Zaldivar, Fulgencio, 300, 301, Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Napoleon I
337; 396- See also Castro, Fidel; Bonchamp, Charles Melchior Artus de, 23, 25
Cuban Revolution Borodino, Battle of, 44, 49
ittle of Borodino, 44, 49 Botha, 89, 90. See also Boer War
ittle of Britain, 202 Boudiaf, Mohammed, 296
ittle of Cannae, 7 Boulaid, Mustapha ben, 296
ittle of Cowpens, 21 Braun, Otto. See Li Te
ittle of Guildford, 22 Bravo, Douglas, 326, 328, 338, 339, 341
ittle of Ocana, 30 Brazil, 314, 345; "long march," 190; Prestes
ittle of Teutoburg Forest, 6 Column, 194, 195
ittle of Wagram, 43 brigandage. See banditry
ittle of Ziklag, 4 Britain, Battle of, 202
attles for Mount Isel, 41, 42. See also Tyrol Brizola, Leonel, 329
ayo, Alberto, 334 Brussels, Declaration of 1874, 391
egin, Menahem, 282, 343 Budini, Giuseppe, 134
ejar, Hector, 319, 328, 342 Bugeaud de la Piconnerie, Thomas Robert, 70,
elgium, resistance to Hitler in, 204 71. See also Algeria
ella, Ahmed ben, 296, 297 Bulgaria, IMRO in, 183
em, Jozef, 67, 136 Biilow, Dietrich von, 108
enedict Arnold's conspiracy, 19. See also Buonarroti, Philippe, 130
American War of Independence en-Gurion, Burma: guerrilla warfare in, 293; inde-
David, 281 ernadotte, Count Folke, 281 pendence, 286; insurrection in, 186
erthier, Louis Alexandre, 24 iafra, 310 Bystrzonowski, Ludwik, 136
ianco, Carlo, 130, 133, 137, 384; concept of Byzanz, 12
"democratic centralism" developed by, 131,
132; experiences in guerrilla war against Cabral, Amilcar, 312; compared to Fanon, 361;
Spain, 131; influence on contemporaries in compared to Guevara, 363; on African unity,
Italy, 133; as neo-Jacobin, 131; on terrorism, 363; on religious issue, 362, 363; on role of
135; Trattato by, 131 ible: guerrilla leaders middle class, 361; and PAIGC, 361,362;
mentioned in, 3, 4 political party organized by, 362
itat, Rabah, 296 Cabrera, Ramon, 62 63. See also Carlist wars
•ismarck, Prince Otto Eduard Leopold von, Caceres, Andres, 58
85, 86, 87 llack Liberation Army, 356 Hack Caepio, 10 Caesar,
Panthers, 355-357 lanco, Hugo, 316, 319, 328, Julius, 6
342 ilanqui, Auguste, 130; author of Instruc- Calcutta Conference of the World Federation of
tions, 139; failure of first attempt at in- Youth and Students, 288 Cambodia, 267, 272,
408 Canada: FLQ, 322, 323 Cannae, Battle of, 7
Capuchino, el. See Mendietta, Jean de
466 INDEX
Carlist wars, 62-64, J44 Chouans, 22; aid from England to, 29; guerrilla
Carmichael, Stokely, 357 movement, 29; movement of national
Castriota-Skanderbeg, George, 15, 16 liberation, 26; organization, 27; social
Castro, Fidel, 279, 301, 315, 328, 329, 384, composition, 398; tactics, 26
396, 397, 401, 402; belief in primacy of Chou En-lai, prospects for revolution in
armed struggle, 332; emphasis on rural Africa, 311 Cho Van
guerrillaism, 333, 334; guided by Tan, 263
nineteenth-century Cuban guerrilla warfare, Chrzanowski, Wojciech, 116, 136; observations
302; manipulation of mass media by, 337; on partisan warfare, 116
political beliefs of, 302, 303; reasons for Chu Teh, 244-246, 255, 256
success of, 300; speeches of, 327, 333. See Clausel, Bertrand, 33, 34
also Cuban Revolution; Latin America Clausewitz, Karl von, 18; lectures on "small
Castro, Raul, 335 war," 110; on specific assignments for
Catalonia, rebellion of the Remensas in, 15 guerrillas, 111; on surprise attacks, 111; on use
Cathelineau, Jacques, 23, 25. See also of artillery, 111
Vendean revolt Caucasus, guerrilla war in, Cleaver, Eldridge, 356, 357
70, 72, 74 Caves of Adullum, 4 Celtic-Iberian Clutterbuck, Richard, 289
tribes, guerrilla warfare Collins, Michael, 180, 343
among, 7, 8 Cestius, Colombia, 342; guerrilla warfare in, 315, 316,
Gallus, 4 Chad, 310 319
Chang Hsien-chung, 18 colonialism, 69, 200, 201; guerrilla resistance
Charenton, V., 121 to, 69, 77, 78, 186, 290, 309-311
Chetvertakov (Russian partisan, 1812), 48 colonial war, in Spanish Morocco, 184
Chiang Kai-chek, 241, 243, 247, 248, 259, 402. colonial wars of Great Britain: Afghan wars,
See also China; Mao Tse-tung 76; Indian Mutiny, 76; Maori wars, 77;
China, 153, 379, 394; agrarian unrest, 242, 243; second Sikh war, 76; Zulu wars, 76, 77. See
"Autumn Harvest uprising," 244, 255; also Great Britain; names of individual
bandits as Communist recruits, 96; countries
Communist party founded, 243; Communist Communism, Chinese, 239
victory, 258-261; Communists in, 239; Communist guerrilla doctrine, 369-373; Soviet
conflict about strategy, 404; encirclement and Chinese policies, 370
campaigns, 247; fall of Manchu dynasty, Communist guerrilla movements, 238
191, 243; "Great Knife," 243; guerrilla Congo, 310, 311, 387, 404
warfare, 176, 177, 239, 240, 242, 246, 372, Connolly, James, 177, 178
373, 383; Japanese invasion of, 239, 242; Conselheiro, Antonio, 59, 60, 61
Kuomintang government, 241, 243, 245, Cottereau brothers (Chouan), 25
259; Lolo tribesmen, 248; Long March, 240, counterinsurgency, 122, 392; doctrine of
244, 247, 249, 251; Manchuria, 257, 258; "modern warfare" and, 374; in Russia, 165;
Marxism-Leninism in, 259, 260; Mukden theories of, 378-380; in United States, 376,
incident, 247; "Red Spear," 243; revolu- 377
tionary potential of peasantry, 244; Sian Cowpens, Battle of, 21, 22
incident, 250; T'ai Ping rebellion, 242; Cristinos, 62. See also Spain; Carlist wars
Tsunyi Conference, 246; terrorism, 401; Cuba, guerrilla war in, 58, 59
urban insurrections, 243; war against Japan, Cuban Revolution, 279, 329, 330, 332, 337,
252, 254, 255-257. See also Chiang Kai- 338, 339, 371, 379, 380; banditry in, 301;
chek; Mao Tse-tung guerrilla warfare in, 299, 300, 301, 302;
Chin Peng, 287, 289 revolutionary romanticism in, 335, 336;
rural guerrillaism, 333, 334; terrorism, 344,
401
Cyprus, 368, 379; EOKA, 368, 369; guerrilla
warfare in, 278, 309; terrorism in, 278
Czechoslovakia: guerrilla units in, 221; Slovak
revolt, 220
467 INDEX
alloz, Pierre, 229 aun, Leopold von, 14 Espoz y Mina, Francisco. See Mina,
avydov, Denis, 44, 47, 126, 397; partisan Francisco Espoz y Espoz y Mina, Xavier. See
warfare against Napoleon, 45, 46 ebray, Mina, Xavier
Regis, 327, 329, 333, 384, 406; approach Espoz y
changed, 340; criticized by Latin American Ethiopia: Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF), 307,
Communists, 338; La Critique des Armes, 308; support for ELF in Arab world, 308;
340; guerrilla doctrine of, 331, 332; terrorist campaign, 307, 308
Revolution in the Revolution, 328 ecker, Eugen, Prince, 14
General von, 114, 115 j Gaulle, Charles, 294, Europe: guerrilla warfare in, 62-69. See
298; supported independence for Algeria, also individual names of countries Ewald,
294 eir Yassin massacre, 281 1 la Rey, Johann von, 104, 105, 106
Jacobus Hercules, 89, 90 emosthenes, 5
ening, B. C., 200 Fabius Cunctator, 7
enmark, 150; resistance to Hitler, 204 Fanon, Frantz, 358; analysis of anti-colonial
evaureix, A., study of guerrilla warfare by, struggle, 328; ideology of, 358, 359. See
119-121 also Africa
5 Wet, Christiaan Rudolph, 89-92. See Fatah, al-, 303, 304, 385; aims of, 365; military
also Boer War models for, 364; strategic doctrine of, 364;
hofar Liberation Front, 308 violence and, 364
'iaz, Juan Martin (the Empecinado), feudal warfare, 12
30, 31, 34, 35; in Carlist wars, 38, 39; Figner (Russian partisan, 1812), 46, 48 Fizur
destroyed robber band, 36; Marx on, (Turkish general, 15th century), 15
142 FLQ. See Front de Liberation de
'iaz, Porfirio, 57, 190, 192 Quebec Forge, Yves, 229 Forrest, Nathan
Udouche, Motirad, 296 Bedford, 81, 83 Fra Diavolo (Michele Pezza),
lien Bien Phu, 267-269. See also 97, 98 France: Algerian War of Independence,
France, Vietnam and Ijilas (Yugoslav 294-299; clash between Gaullists and
partisan), 216 •orokhov (Russian partisan, Communists in, 206; Communists in, 228;
1812), 48 •uguesclin, Bertrand, use of failure of Communist resistance movement,
guerrilla 238; Gaullists, 228; German occupation of,
tactics by, 13 228; guerrilla warfare in, 228; Maquis, 204,
)utch War of Independence, 13 228, 229; sabotage in, 230; Spanish War
against, 29; theories of counterinsurgency in,
•ast Africa: guerrilla warfare in, 154159, 383 374, 375; Vietnam and, 262, 266 Francheschi,
aster Rising of 1916 (Ireland), 178, 179 General, 37. See also Peninsular War;
ehrhardt, Arthur, 199 Mendietta, Jean de Franco, Francisco: and
ighteenth century: guerrilla doctrine in, 384; Spanish Civil War, 197, 198; and war in
guerrilla warfare in, 382 Spanish Morocco, 185, 186 Franco-Prussian
mmerich, Andreas, 104; advice on guerrilla War, 51, 85, 142; guerrilla warfare in, 83-88,
warfare, 104, 105 143 franc tireur. See Franco-Prussian War
mpecinado, the. See Diaz, Juan Martin Frederick II (Frederick the Great), 14 Freikorps,
ngels, Friedrich, 143; on guerrilla warfare, 166; against Bolsheviks, 166; against French
142, 144, 145; on Indian Mutiny, 144; on occupiers, 167; Nazi Party and, 168, 169;
insurrection, 141, 145 against Poles and Spartacists, 166; politics of,
OKA (Ethniki Organosis Kypriakou 166; opposition to Weimar Republic, 168; radi-
Agoniston), 368, 369, 385 calism of, 168, 169 Freycinet, Charles Louis,
remenko, Stepan, 48 84. See also Franco-Prussian War
ritrea, 310, 387
ritrean Liberation Front (ELF), 307, 308
rmolov, General, 47, 72
Front de Liberation de Quebec, 322 Grigoriev (leader of anti-Bolshevik Cossack
irregulars), 162
Galba, Servicius Sulpicius, 8 Grivas, George, 309, 310, 368, 369, 397, 401
Gambetta, Leon, 84. See also Franco-Prussian Guerrilla doctrine: Communist, 369; Cuban,
War 335; in Latin America, 340; Marxist-
Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 67, 68, 95; lack of Leninist tradition, 326, 327, 333; of Che
popular support for, 68, 69; social com- Guevara, 330, 331
position of "Thousand," 398; use of guerrilla leaders: mentioned in Bible, 3; in
propaganda and indoctrination by, 68 Peninsular War, 30-39. See also names of
Geneva Conventions of 1949, 391 individual countries
Gentilini, Enrico, 134 guerrilla tactics: in Boer War, 89, 90; first
geographical milieu: and guerrilla warfare, mentioned, 3; in Greek military history, 5;
393,394 in Greek War of Independence, 63; in
German Peasant War, 14 Hundred Years' War, 13; in Melanesia, 3; in
Germany: Baader-Meinhof gang, 324, 353, New Guinea, 3; in peasant uprising in
354; failure to take Moscow, 208; Freikorps, Middle Ages, 13; in Poland, 132; predating
166-169; guerrillas against Nazis, 202-237; recorded history, 3; in Roman military
Polish resistance to Nazis, 222-224; ro,e of history, 5-7; in World War I, 152
women in guerrilla movements in, 398; guerrilla warfare, 150; and agrarian unrest, 379,
Slovak revolt against Nazis, 220, 221; 380, 388; in American Civil War, 79-83; in
treatment of Slavic peoples during World the American War of Independence, 382; in
War II, 208; use of Russian collaborators, Algeria, 284-299; in Arabia, 383; and
209; Yugoslav revolt against Nazis, 216 banditry, 93, 94, 96; Bloch's discussion of,
Gershelman, Fyodor, 127 99; in Bolivia, 317; in Burma, 293; in Cau-
Giap, Vo Nguyen, 262, 265, 268 casus, 70, 72-74; causes for the proliferation
Gneisenau, August Neithardt von, 112 of, 235; in China, 240, 242, 246; in
Golain, Lieutenant-Colonel (leader of Slovak Colombia, 315; colonialism and, 150, 405;
rising), 220 Communist parties in, 369-373; in Cuba, 58,
Gomez, Camilo, 37 59, 299; in Cyprus, 309; in East Africa, 383;
Gomez, Maximo, 58, 302 economic development and, 395; in
Gomez, Miguel. See also Carlist wars eighteenth century, 382; in Europe, 62-69;
Grandmaison, Lieutenant-Colonel (small Fascism and, 152; in Franco-Prussian War,
warfare theorist), 102 83-88; future of, 404, 409; geography and,
Great Britain: "Angry Brigade," 322; attitude 235, 393, 394; in Greece, 279; in Guinea-
toward guerrilla warfare, 377; colonialism, Bissau, 362; against Hitler, 202-237; impact
121, 123-125; colonial wars of, 76, 77, 186, of new technology on, 153, 154; in Indonesia,
290, 309-311; and Palestine, 280, 282. See 278; and internal strife, 404; in Iraq, 307;
also names o f individual countries Italian authors on, 130-135; in Italy, 133, 134;
Greece, 371, 383; contribution to allied war in Korea, 294; in Latin America, 59, 60;
effort, 227; guerrilla activities in, 227, 228, laws of war, 391; leadership, 3g6, 397; in
278, 279; internal strife in guerrilla Malaya, 287-289; Marxist-Leninism, 385; in
movements, 404; Italian occupation of, 227; Mexican Civil War, 383; in Middle Ages, 12;
near-success of Communists in, 238; in Middle East, 309; military coups and,
resistance to Axis powers, 226; terrorism in, 408; in modern conditions, 199; and modern
401 technology, 200; nationalism and, 380, 381,
Greek Civil War, 282, 286; Communist 396; national wars and, 150; new
guerrillas in, 283; defeat of Communists, developments in character of, 385; in
284, 285; revitalization of Greek anny, 284 nineteenth century, 51, 52, 382; in North
Greek military history, guerrilla tactics in, 5 Africa, 70-72; and Palestinians, 364; in
Greek War of Independence, 63, 65; banditry Peru,
in, 64; guerrilla tactics in, 63
469 INDEX
errilla warfare (continued) 317; in rilla resistance to, 202-237; objections to

Philippines, 278, 287, 291; in Poland, 66, Russian volunteers, 209
67, 135; Polish authors on, 135-138; political Hoche, Louis Lazare, 24, 28, 29. See also
impact of, 204; in Portuguese colonies, 310; Vendean revolt
preceded by incubation period, 392; propa- Ho Chi Minh, 384; article on "revolutionary
ganda and, 400; psychological factors in, guerrilla methods," 176; background of,
235; and radical politics, 130, 131; reasons for 263; guerrilla strategy of, 241. See also
success, 402; and revolutionary uprisings, Vietnam
150, 250; Russian authors on, 127; in Hochkirch, Austrian victory at, 14
Russian Civil War, 151, 383; sadism in, 399; Hocine, Ait Ahmed, 296
social composition in, 398; in Spain, 7, 31; Hofer, Andreas, 41-44
techniques and organizational forms of, Hoffman, Max, 200
401; theories of, 386-393; three species of, Holden, Roberto, 312
395; tradition of, 394; in Turkey, 309; in Holland, resistance to Hitler, 204
twentieth century, 152; in Uruguay, 315; in Ho Lung, 245
Venezuela, 315, 338; in Vietnam, 240, 262- Hron, C, 129
277; World War I> 383; during World War Huerta, Adolfo de la, 193
II, 203-214, 233, 234, 383; in Yugoslavia, Huerta, Victoriano, 191
214, 215. See also terrorism; names of Hundred Years' War, guerrilla tactics in, 13
individual countries Huns, 12
levara, Ernesto (Che), 315, 328, 329, 336, Husseini, Amin el-, 187
384, 397; and belief in primacy of armed
struggle, 332; guerrilla doctrine of, 330,331;
Episodes of the Revolutionary War, 301; La
Guerra de Guerrillas (handbook of guerrilla imperialist expansion, 69; in Russia, 69; in
warfare), 330, 334; Guerra de Guerrillas: un United States, 69
Metodo (article), 330; on stages of guerrilla IMRO (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary
war, 334, 335; writings of, 327 Organization), 182; in Bulgaria and
libet (military writer), 108 jildford, Battle of, Yugoslavia, 183, 184; corruption of, 183;
22 jillen, Abraham, 197, 329, 344-346 factionalism in, 184; guerrilla tactics of, 183;
uinea-Bissau, 312, 361, 372; guerrilla warfare internal strife in, 404
in, 362 India, 288; guerrilla warfare in, 293; in-
dependence, 286; Naxalite revolt in, 293,
294
Indian mutiny, 76; Engels on, 144 Indian wars,
in United States, 78, 79 Indochina, 267, 273,
376, 379; guerrilla warfare in, 176, 177. See
also Cambodia; France; Laos; United States;
Vietnam
Indonesia, 368; guerrilla warfare in, 278, 286;
ibash, George, 366 Madium rebellion, 287; United Nations
igana (anti-British Jewish resistance and, 287
group), 280-282 Insurrection of St. Sava, 16
ague Convention, 391 Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Or-
aiduks ("robbers"), 17 ganization. See IMRO.
amza (Turkish general, 15th century), IRA (Irish Republican Army), 178, 180, 182,
15 324, 385, 398; aid from United States to,
annibal, 7 181; in Irish Free State, 181; and nationalism,
aspinger (Tyrolean priest), 44 181; and Nazi Germany, 181; official, 322;
awatme, Naif, 366 provisional, 322, 323; social composition of,
aymarket Square riot, 148 298; terrorism in, 180, 181; in Ulster, 180.
eraud, Javier, 329 See also Ireland
idalgo y Costilla, Miguel, 56 Iran: agrarian reform in, 308, 309; guer-
immler, Heinrich, 213
itler, Adolf, 223, 235, 237; exaggerated
reports of resistance to, 202, 204; guer-
rilla warfare in, 308; Kurdish rebellion in, Khider, Mohammed, 296, 297
307 Khmer Rouge, 267, 272
Iraq: Kurdish rebellion, 307; Pesh Merga and, Klembovski, Victor Napoleonovitch,
307 127, 128 Klephts ("robbers"), 17, 64
Ireland: Civil War in, 404; Clan-na-Gael, 178; Koloktronis (Klepht leader), 18, 64, 65
Easter Rising of 1916, 178, 179; Fenians in, Komorowski, Bor, 202 Korea: guerrilla warfare
178, 179; IRA, 178-182, 322-324, 398; Sinn in, 294; role of
Fein Republicans in, 179; struggle for inde- women in guerrilla movements, 398
pendence in, 178; urban insurrection in, 179; Korfanty, Adalbert Wojciech, 167 Kosciuszko,
World War I and, 179 Tadeusz, 65, 135, 136 Kovpak, Sidor, 207, 211
Irish Republican Army. See IRA Kowaru, Tito, 77 Krim, Belkacem, 296
Irish volunteers. See IRA Krushchev, Nikita, 211 Kurdistan, fighting in,
Israel, 363; Arab rebellion in, 401; al-Fatah, 303, 307 Kutuzov, Mikhail Ilarionovich, 44
306; guerrilla warfare in, 303-307;
Palestinian attacks against, 303; and Six Lamarca, Carlos, 329, 345 La
Days' War, 303; terrorism against, 304,305 Masa, Guiseppe, 134 Laos, 267,
Italy, 67, 69, 231; Communists in, 232; failure 408
of Communist resistance movement in, 238; La Rochejacquelin, Francois Alexandre
first Italian Legion and, 68; geography of, Frederic de, 25
231; guerrilla warfare in, 133, 230; March of Latin America: anti-Americanism, 196;
the Thousand, 68; radical politics, 131-135; Communists in, 338; counterinsur-gency,
resistance to Hitler, 204; resistance to 315, 318, 319, 338; disunity among
Napoleon, 96, 97; surrender in World War guerrillas, 316; geography of, 317; guerrilla
II, 216 doctrine, 332, 340; guerrilla leaders, 328,
IZL (Irgun Zuai Leumi), 280-282, 385 329; guerrilla movements in, 315, 320, 321;
Jackson, George, 357 guerrilla warfare in, 59-62, 190-196, 314;
Jacquerie, the, 14 Indian revolts, 53; Junta of Revolutionary
Jaguncos. See Conselheiro, Antonio Japan, 241; Coordination, 316; Negro slave revolts, 54;
efforts of Huks against, 287; URA, 322, 323; revolutionary strategy in, 340-343; ro-
and war with China, manticism of revolutionaries, 335, 336; rural
guerrilla warfare, 279, 317; terrorism, 279,
252, 253 Jelowicki, A., 136 Jewish war
against the Romans, 4 John of Gischala, 4
314, 318, 319, 341; tradition of guerrilla
warfare, 52, 53; urban guerrillas, 320; wars
Johnson, Adam R., 83 Jomini, Henri, 109
Jordan, 304, 366 of independence, 55; withdrawal of
Juarez, Benito Pablo, 57. See also Mexico guerrillas from countryside, 317
Judas Maccabaeus, 4 Lava, Jesus, 293
Lawrence, T. E.: on Bedouins as soldiers, 156;
Kalmykov (ataman of Ussuri Cossacks), 161 compared to Napoleon, 154; essay on
Kamienski, H.M., 136, 137 Kardelj guerrilla warfare, 169-171; guerrilla
(Yugoslav partisan), 216 Kassem, operations in Arabia, 154-156
Izzed Din, 187 Kaukji, Fawzi, 188 Lebanon, 304, 366
Kazi Mulla, 72. See also guerrilla warfare, in LEHI (Lohame Herut Israel), 280, 281, 282
Caucasus Le Miere de Corvey, Jean Frederic Au-
Kellermann, Francois Christophe, 24 guste, 113-114, 137, 384 Lenin, Nikolai, 160,
Kennedy, John F., 271 175; on guerrilla
Kenya: Kikutu tribe, 311; Mau Mau uprising, warfare, 172; on military strategy, 173;
278, 279, 311, 313, 385 study of Clausewitz, 173
letterbomb, i47n
471
;ttow-Vorbeck, Paul von, 153, 154-159 ddell Marquesito, el, 37, 38 Marti,
Hart, Basil, 235 Li-san, 246, 247 ma, Turcios, Jose, 59
328, 397 n Piao, 372, 373; essay on guerrilla Marxist-Leninism, and guerrilla warfare, 385
warfare, 250; guerrilla strategy of, 241; on Marx, Karl, 142; on Paris commune, 146; and
guerrilla warfare, 255; on global villages, problem of revolutionary violence, 141; on
328. See also China; Mao Tse-tung urban insurrection. See also Engels;
ster, Enrique, 197 guerrilla doctrine
Te (Otto Braun), 247 Mau Mau uprising, 311, 313, 378, 379, 385
Tsu-cheng, 18 >ngo, Mazurov, Kiril Trofimovich, 211 Mazzini,
Luigi, 230, 232 jra, Giuseppe, 130, 133, 137, 384;
Guillermo, 343 ) Ta-kang, and guerrilla bands, 140, 141
98 Medico, el, 37
icullus, Lucius Lincinius, 8 Melanesia: guerrilla tactics in, 3 Mendietta,
isitanian tribes, guerrilla warfare Jean de (el Capuchino), 37 Merino, 37, 38; and
among, 7, 8 Carlist wars, 38, 62.
See also Peninsular War Mexican Civil War,
accabaean revolt, 4 guerrilla warfare in,
cCafferty, Captain (Fenian recruit from
383
Mosby's rangers), 178-179 acedonia, 182;
Mexican revolts, 56
IMRO and, 183, 184 aceo, Antonio, 58, 302
Mexico, 57, 388, 404; guerrilla warfare in, 153,
achel, Samora, 397
190, 191; revolution in, 193
agsaysay, Ramon, 293, 402. See also
M'hidi, Larbi ben, 296
Philippines
Mickiewicz, Adam, 67
ahler, Horst, 254
Middle Ages, guerrilla warfare in, 12, 13
akarios, Archbishop, 309, 310
Middle East, 303; guerrilla warfare in, 309.
akhno, Nestor, 162, 163
See also names of individual countries
alaya, 288; British counteroffensive
Mieroslawski, Ludwik, 67, 136
in, 290; Communist guerrilla warfare
Mikhailovich, Draja, 204, 216-218
in, 287-291; counterinsurgency in,
Military conscription, 50
289; guerrilla warfare in, 278, 286;
Mina, Francisco Espoz y, 31, 40; Carlist wars,
MRLA, 291
38, 39, 62; expels French from Navarre, 33;
alcarado (lieutenant to Francisco Espoz y
Marx on, 142; most important military
Mina), 33 iaori wars, 77
action, 33; pursued by French generals, 32
:ao Tse-tung, 175, 244, 256, 374, 384, 397,
Mina, Xavier Espoz y, 32, 38
402; as de facto leader of party, 244;
Ming dynasty, banditry in, 18
guerrilla strategy of, 241, 255; guerrilla
Miqueletes, 37. Sec also Peninsular War
tactics of, 244, 245; on guerrilla warfare,
Mola, Emilio, 185
250-254; on Long March, 247, 248; military
Moltke, Helmuth von, 84. See also
doctrine formulated by, 250; military
Franco-Prussian War Mondlane, Eduardo,
writings of, 260, 261; and problems of
312 Mongols, 12 Montenegrins, 16 Montes,
grand strategy. 255; and "pure guerrilla war-
Cesar, 329 Moreira Cesar, Colonel, 61 Morelos,
fare," 246; on revolutionary potential of
Jose Maria, 56 Morenga, Jakob, 157 Morgan,
peasantry, 243, 244; and war against Japan,
Daniel, 21 Morocco. See Spanish Morocco
252, 253, 254. See also China
Mosby, John Singleton, 81, 82. See also
larceau, Francois Severin, 24
American Civil War Most,
larighela, Carlos, 329, 345, 349, 350;
Johannes, 147, 148
Minimanual of, 347; views on strategy, 347.
349
larion, Francis ("Swamp Fox"), 19, 20, 21
Mount Isel, battles for, 41, 42. See also Palestine, 404; aid from Axis powers to Arab
Tyrol Mozambique, guerrillas in, 188, 190; Arab-Jewish War,
312 281; counterguerrilla measures, 189; Deir
MRLA (Malayan Races Liberation Yassin Massacre, 281; guerrilla warfare, 187,
Army), 291 278; Hagana (Jewish resistance group), 281;
Muhammad, 12 insurrection in, 152; IZL (Jewish resistance
Mursilis, 3 group), 280, 281; Jewish immigration, 187;
Mussolini, Benito, 230 Mustafa (Turkish LEHI (Jewish resistance group), 280;
general, 15th century), 15 rebellion against British rule, 186, 187;
restrictions on Jewish immigration, 280;
Napier, Sir Robert, 76 terrorism in, 278, 281; United Nations and,
Napoleon I, 29, 235; defeat of, 49; guerrilla 280
warfare against, 47; invasion of Russia by, Palestinian guerrilla movement, 366; aid from
149; Spanish resistance to, 29, 30, 100, 144; third world countries to, 307; hijackings
views on guerrilla warfare, 107 and kidnappings by, 322; large-scale
Napoleon III, 57 fighting in host countries by, 366;
Napoleonic wars, 113; guerrilla warfare during, Nasserism, 366; PFLP (Popular Front of the
382, 384, 399 Liberation of Palestine), and PDFLP
Nasution, Abdul Harris, 368 (militant Palestinian group), 365;
nationalism, guerrilla warfare and, 381 propaganda warfare by, 367; strategic
Nazi Party, 168; resistance to, 202-237. See doctrine of, 364; terrorist activities of, 303-
also Germany 307, 364
New Guinea, guerrilla tactics used in, 3 Papagos, Alexander, 284, 285, 286, 402
Newton, Huey, 356, 357 Paris Commune, 145, 146
New Zealand, Maori wars in, 77 Parri, Ferrucio, 230
Ngo Dinh Diem, 269; corruption of regime, partisans. See guerrilla warfare
269, 270 partisan warfare. See guerrilla warfare
Nicaragua, guerrilla movement m, 195, 196; Paskevich, Ivan Feodorovich, 72
Sardino rebellion, 190 Pathet Lao, 267. See also Laos
Nieh Jung-chen, 245 Paul II (Pope), 16
Nieszokoc (19th century Polish strategist), 137 Pavelic, Ante, 215
Nigeria, 310 peasant revolts, 14; in Middle Ages, 13
nineteenth century: guerrilla warfare during, Pecanac, Kosta, 130, 218
51, 52, 382; revolutionary doctrine during, Peng Te-huai, 240, 244
130, 135; strategists of, 52; theorists of, 137 Peninsular War, 30-34, 36, 40; attitude of
Nkrumah, Kwame, 367, 368 British to guerrillas in, 39; guerrilla leaders
North Africa, 150; guerrilla warfare in, 70-72 in, 30-39; Spanish guerrillas in, 39, 41. See
also Napoleon I; Spain
OAU (Organization of African Unity), 312 People's Front for the Liberation of Oman and
Ocana, Battle of, 30 the Arab Gulf. See PFLOAG
Oman, 387; guerrilla warfare in, 308 Pepe, Guglielmo, 133
Orlando, Andrea, 97, 98 Perez, Crecencio, 301
Oscar, Artur, 61 Peru, 314, 342; guerrilla warfare in, 315, 316,
Ostrogoths, 12 317, 319. See also Blanco, Hugo; Latin
America
Paez, Jose Antonio, 55 PAIGC (Front for the Pesh Merga (Iraqi Kurd resistance group), 307
Liberation of Portuguese Guinea), 361 Pajetta PFLOAG (People's Front for the Liberation of
(Italian anti-Fascist), 230 Pakistan, 288; Oman and the Arab Gulf), 308
independence, 286 Pham Van Dongh, 263
Philhellenism, 16
Philippines, 383, 388; agrarian unrest in, 292;
guerrilla heritage, 292; guerrilla warfare in,
278, 286, 291, 293; Huk-
473
lilippines (continued) Cossacks, 162; banditry in, 161; Bas-matchi,
balanap (Huk) rebellion, 279, 288, 292, 164, 165; Bolsheviks in, 160, 161, 164; guerrilla
293; Muslim revolt, 293 warfare in, 160164, 174, 383; Mao Tse-tung
ckens, Andrew, 20 and, 175; Red Army, 163, in Siberia, 161; White
autius, 9 Army, 161, 163 Riistow, Wilhelm, 117
iland: Burza, 222; guerrilla warfare in, 66,
67, 132, 135, 136; Polish Home Army, 222; Saint Jorioz, Conte di. See Bianco, Carlo
relationship of Communist and non- Samus (Russian partisan, 1812), 48
Communist guerrillas in, 205; Warsaw rising, Sanchez, Ilich Ramirez, 324
222-224 ilish insurrections, 65, 67, 136, 150 Sanchez, Julian, 37
anomarenko, P. K., 207 ipovic (Yugoslav Sandino, Augusto Cesar, ig5, 196
leader), 216 artuguese colonies: guerrilla San Domingo, 54
warfare in, 310 Sanjurjo, Jose, 185
Practical Guide for the Perfect Partisan," 137 Santilan (Spanish guerrilla leader, Peninsular
rado, Jorge del, 371 raskovia (Russian War), 37
partisan, 1812), 48 restes, Luis Carlos, 190, Saxe, Maurice de, 107
194, 195 russia, 118 Scharnhorst, Gerhard Johann David von, H 2
saros, Colonel (Commander of Greek Schels, J. B., 128
EKKA), 226 Schlageter, Albert Leo, 168
umacahua rebellion, 53 Seale, Bobby, 356
Semyonov (Cossack leader), 161
afael, Lucas, 37. See also Peninsular War Sendic, Raul, 328
iding parties, 14 aquillier, F., 137 emensas, Senegal, 362
rebellion of, 15 ennes, Siege of, 13 ibar Serafis, General (leader of Greek "National
(Yugoslav leader), 216 if War. See Spanish Band"), 226 Serbia: guerrilla units in, 130
Morocco omans: guerrilla tactics of, 4; Jewish Sertorius, 10, 11 Servilianus, Fabius Maximus,
war against, 4 ommel, Erwin, 226 ostopchin, 9 Seslavin (Russian partisan, 1812), 48 Seven
Fedor Vasilievich, 48 uffo, Cardinal, 97, 98 Years' War, 120, 149 Severus, Julius, 5
umania, 219 Shamil (Caucasian guerrilla leader), 69,
ussia: attitude to guerrilla warfare in, 371; 72, 73-75. 401
cooperation between guerrillas and Red Shkuro (leader of anti-Bolshevik Cossack
Army, 211; counterinsurgency in, 165; irregulars), 162
expansion in Central Asia, 75; German Siege of Mafeking, 88
attempts to suppress guerrillas in, 209; Siege of Rennes, 13
German occupation, 208; guerrilla warfare Six Days' War, 303. See also Israel
before World War II in, 44, 49, 72-75, 120, Slave revolts, in Latin America, 54
125, 126; guerrilla warfare in World War II Smuts, Jan, 90, 92, 157
in, 205-207, 210, 213, 214; Kurdish rebellion, Socialism, 134; and insurrection, 130
307; NKVD, 207, 208; Red Army, 96, 152, Somaten (Honrados), 37. See also Peninsular
161, 174, 211; social composition of guerrilla War
units in, 207; Soviet guide to insurrection, South Africa, 88-93
176; Soviet reaction to Warsaw uprising, 223: Southeast Asia, 286, 293. See also Indochina,
Ukrainian guerrillas in, 211 ussian insurrections
Revolution, 152; anti-Bolshevik Soviet Union. See Russia
Spain, 29; banditry in, 30; Basque ETA in, 323;
Carlist wars in, 62-64; Dutch War of
Independence against, 13; guerrilla warfare
in, 7, 31, 41; resistance to Napoleon in, 29,
30, 130, 131; Spanish insurrection against
Napo-
leon in, 100; war with Spanish Morocco, Teutoburg Forest, Battle of, 6
184-186; War of Succession, 148 theory of guerrilla warfare: 100-104; Call-well
Spanish Civil War, 196-198; guerrilla on, 122; Chrzanowski on, 116; Clausewitz on,
units in, 197 Speckbacher, Joseph, 44 Stalin, 110-112; Frankland on, 125; La Mieu de
Josef, 175, 223; Greek Civil War Corvey on, 113, 114; and legal questions, 118;
and, 283; Soviet guerrillas and, 207 Stern, Russian authors on, 127, 128; Riistow on, 117;
Abraham, 280 Stern gang. See LEHI Steyn, and small war doctrine, 112; Stoltz-man on,
Martinus, 91 Stofflet, Jean, 23, 25 Stolzman, 115; Swiss writers on, 117; von Decker on, 114
Karol Bogumir, 115, 135 Strokach, T., 207 Thirty Years' War, 14, 149
Students for a Democratic Society Tito, Josip Broz, 184, 206, 217, 218, 397, 401,
(SDS),355 Sudan, 310, 387; insurrection in, 402; achievements of, 214, 215; break with
303 Sufi'ism, 73 Sumter, Thomas, 20 Sun Tzu, Stalin of, 219; Greek Civil War and, 283; as
255 SuSan, 95, 98 Marshal of Yugoslavia, 218; support of
Swiss: war against Austrians, 13 Symbionese allies for, 219. See also Yugoslavia
Liberation Army, 322, 356358 Tone, Wolfe, 179
Syria, 304, 308 Torres, Camilo, 328, 336, 342, 343, 351
Toussaint l'Ouverture, Pierre Dominique, 54,
Taborites: war of, 14 55
Tacfarinas (Numidian chief), 5, 6 TPLA, (Turkish People's Liberation Army),
Taiping Revolution, 95, 242 321, 322
Tambov guerrillas, 163 Trinquier, R., 375, 377
Tantalus, 10 Trotsky, Leon, 160; on guerrilla warfare, 174
Taruc, Luis, 287, 292 Truong Chi, 267, 268 Truong Son, 269
Taylor, Maxwell, 274, 275 Tsitsianov, Count, 126 Tsunyi Conference, 246
Teheran Conference, 219 Tuchin revolt, 14 Tukhachevski, Mikhail, 165
terrorism, 135, 147, 148, 324, 352, 353,^ 401, Tupac Amaru risings, 53 Tupamaros, 346, 350,
403, 404, 409; "Angry Brigade" and, 322; 351, 352; social composition of, 398. See also
Black September and, 322; in Brazil, 350; in Uruguay Turcomans, 75
China, 401; in Cuba, 344, 401; in Ethiopia, Turkey, 308; guerrilla warfare in, 308, 309;
308; FLQ, 322; in Greece, 401; international IMRO and, 182-184; revolutionary youth of,
character of, 323, 324; IRA, 322; against 309
Israel, 304; kidnappings and assassinations, Turks: Danilo's massacre of, 16
321, 322; in Latin America, 279, 314, 317-319, Tyrol, 144; uprising in, 41-43
341, 343, 351, 401; letter-bombs, 364; in
Palestine, 278, 282; and proletariat, 325;
role of students in, 345; in Russia, 172;
skyjacking, 321, 322, 364; Soviet attitude to,
324; strategy of, 345; Symbionese Liber-
ation Army, 322; Third World and, 407;
TPLA, 322; in United States, 355, 356, 358;
in Uruguay, 350-352; in Venezuela, 341; in
Vietnam, 262, 271, 401; vulnerability of
democratic regimes to, 407; weapons used
in, 405, 406 Ungern-Sternberg, Roman N. von, 161
Unimanus, Claudius, 9 United Nations, 280
United States: black extremist groups in, 356,
357; Black Panthers in, 355, 357; Civil War,
79-83; counterinsur-gency in, 78-79;
guerrilla theories in, 376, 377; Indian wars
of, 78, 79; Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS), 355; Symbionese Liberation
Army (SLA), 322, 356; terrorism in, 355,
356, 358; Vietnam War and, 239, 268, 269,
276; Weathermen in, 355, 356
urban guerrilla warfare, 147, 172; intel- Viljoen (Boer commando), 89. See also Boer
lectuals in, 349; in Ireland, 153. See also War
guerrilla warfare; terrorism; urban Villa, Francisco (Pancho), 95, 190-194, 385
insurrection; names o f individual Viriathus, 8, 9, 10
countries Vitelius, 8
urban insurrection, 145, 150, 151; in China, Vojnovic, Kosta, 130
243; in Ireland, 179; Warsaw rising, 222- Volkonsky, Prince Petr Mikhailovich, 47
224. See also guerrilla warfare Voronzov, Mikhail Semenovich, 73
urban terrorism. See terrorism Uruguay, 345, Voroshilov, Kliment Efremovich, 207
348; guerrilla warfare in, 315; Tupamaros, Vuich, Colonel, 127
314, 350, 351, 352
Wagram, Battle of, 43 Wat Tyler's rising, 14
Valentini, George Wilhelm von, 104, 106 Weathermen, 355-358. See also terrorism
Vallieres, Pierre, 353 Werth, Johann von, 14 Weyler, Valeriano, 59
Vandals, 12 Varus, 6 Wilczynski, Wlodimir Stanislaus, 128, 129
Vasilyev, Ermolai, 48 Willisen, General, 150
Vasquez, Fabio, 316, 319, 397 World War I: Arabian peninsula and, 154;
Vendean revolt, 22-29 East Africa and, 154; guerrilla warfare in,
Venezuela, 314, 340, 341, 371, 388; guerrilla 152, 154, 383; new technology in, 153
warfare in, 315, 319, 338; terrorism in, 341, World War II: and collapse of colonial
344. See also Latin America powers, 201; guerrilla resistance to Hitler,
Vercingetorix, 6, 7 204; guerrilla warfare during, 238, 383;
Vershigora, P., 207 Warsaw rising, 222-224
Victor Emanuel II, 67
Vietnam, 241, 265, 379, 408; antiguerrilla Yon Sosa, 328, 397
warfare in, 274; army of propanganda and Yugoslavia, 184, 380, 383, 394, 402; Albanian
liberation in, 265; assassination Communists in, 225; anti-Fascist council
campaign in, 273; Communists in, 240, of, 218; guerrillas in, 205, 404; IMRO in,
242, 276; compared to China, 262; Dien 183; Teheran Conference and, 219; Tito's
Bien Phu, 262, 267, 268, 269; guerrilla partisans in, 204; World War II guerrilla
operations in, 262; guerrilla war in, 239, units in, 205, 213-216. See also Tito
240, 267, 270; Japanese occupation of,
239; military lessons in, 275; Ngo Dinh Zakhariades, Nikos, 283
Diem, 269; NLF (National Front for the Zapata, Emiliano, 190-194
Liberation of South Vietnam), 273; Zeruas, Napoleon, 226 Ziklag,
popular front tactics in, 264; rivalry Battle of, 4
between Buddhists and Catholics, 264; Zionism, 280, 281. See also Israel; Palestine
rivalry between Cao Dai and Hoa Hoa, Zulu wars, 76, 77 Zumalacarreguy,
264; source of Communist appeal in, 263; Tomas, 62, 63
terrorism in, 262, 271, 401; war between
United States and, 268, 276, 277;
Vietcong in, 270-273

Walter Laqueur Guerrilla Warfare

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Guerrilla

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 97-29417

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Laqueur, Walter, 1921- .

— B. H. LIDDELL HART, Preface to the second

Introduction to the Transaction Edition ix

student of guerrilla warfare. It is a misnomer and its widespread use is to be

London-Washington, January 1976

to have outnumbered the Carthaginians. The Iberian and Lusi-tanian tribes

He [Viriathus] drew them all up in line of battle as though he intended to fight

of giving battle. Vitelius's successor, the praetor Plautius, fared no better; he

locksmith, Forestier, the son of a shoemaker. There were not a few

They fought without order, in squads or crowds, often as individual

Hoche, in a letter to Aubet-Dubayet, noted that the Chouans had friends

It consists in greatly extending their front so as to envelop us and throw disorder

Republican uniforms so as to surprise the enemy. They were men hardened

Mina was chased simultaneously by several French generals — Reille, Caffarrelli,

thousand men to desert, again no doubt a greatly exaggerated figure. But it is

but friendly. It is interesting to note, however, that the main resistance

THE RUSSIAN PARTISANS: 1812

a campaign or a war. European armies, in short, prepared for nothing but

civilization — or, to be precise, with the spread of modern technology—

Hedouville, the French commander, was a veteran of the Vendee

still stemmed principally, their greater numerical strength notwithstanding,

really permissible to regard them as guerrilla commanders at all, as some

Guerrilla warfare in post-Napoleonic Europe was limited mainly to the south

march on Madrid. Zumalacarreguy was wounded in the fighting for Bilbao

EMPIRES VERSUS GUERRILLA

During the period of imperialist expansion the European colonial powers

Bugeaud clearly recognized that strategies appropriate for European

THE SMALL WAR IN THE BIG WAR

PARTISANS IN THE FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR

pervasive atmosphere of insecurity generated by franc tireur operations, and

Despite the numerical superiority, the British commanders faced the

silent disability of a regular army in contest with a horde of guerrillas

Hardly a day elapsed, according to another well-known chronicler of the Boer

BRIGANDAGE AND GUERRILLA WARFARE

detachments were almost certainly bound to be destroyed. Murat's lines of

THE OUTLOOK FOR GUERRILLA WAR: 1901

remarkable Russo-Polish-Jewish businessman and strategist Jean de Bloch,

In a book published in 1752, de la Croix, a French officer of English origin,

always successful, causing confusion out of all proportion to the effort

lectual curiosity. Like Emmerich, he stressed that there was no excuse

The experience of the American War of Independence, as he saw t, had

The spectacle of a spontaneous uprising of a nation is rarely seen; and, though

fhe commander of an occupying force in enemy territory could all oo easily

No army, however disciplined, can contend successfully against such a system

It should be recalled, however, that according to Jomini, guerrilla inits

Clausewitz strongly advised against a worst-case-expectation strategy. The

SCHARNHORST AND GNEISENAU

The Spanish experience inspired Scharnhorst's and Gneisenau's drafts and

SMALL WAR DOCTRINE AFTER NAPOLEON

blowing up a wall or a bridge.47 Like other authors he referred to the historical

* As a young lieutenant he participated in Napoleon's invasion of Russia and was the

Swiss writers on guerrilla warfare developed the idea of the popular-

studied" — and, of course, the Franco-Prussian War, Devaureix reached the

BRITAIN AND THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE

Guerrilla warfare as a legitimate subject of study received a new, albeit short

hardly affected by heat or cold, and was j