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 Bussian Civil War true guerrillaism was to be found neither in the Bed 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 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 (Can nae), 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 impossible 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.
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 practitioners 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 Vendée 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 Lissa! 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 Schutztruppe 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 Abercorn 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 generals, he was prone to exaggerate the numbers he faced; he asserted that on one occasion twelve thousand armored cars had been brought into action against him.14 And another thing that should be borne 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 yown-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 his 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 conditions; 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 Wilhelm 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.
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, 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 Bussia, 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 network 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.23 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 Bed 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; Grigoriev, 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.
By 1920, with the execution of Kolchak and the flight of Wrangel, 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 Bolsheviks 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 peasants first set up a partisan band in 19x9. By 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 peasants 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 Panturks 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 1926,30 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
Following the dissolution of the German army after the armistice in November 1918, some hundred and twenty Freikorps (free coips) 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 Thüringen 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 Baltikum 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 observers 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 Beichstag, 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 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 Düsseldorf, 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. But 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 antibourgeois 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 lieutenants, 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 war years were arid insofar as the development of guerrilla doctrine is concerned. The only original contribution was made by Τ. E. Lawrence in an essay published in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 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
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 counterpropaganda 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 LettowVorbeck, 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.
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 demoralized 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 Clause witz 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-ä-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. But 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 "collegiality"; 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-sacrifice, 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 ig20s 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 Kweiehow.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.
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, especi ally 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.
The history of the Irish struggle for independence from the time of Wolfe Tone's "United Irishmen" until the Easter Rising of 1916 is a chain 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 Ireland from the United States and the Continent. The Fenians were internally split and they could not keep a secret; forthcoming operations were widely discussed. The British secret service had effectively penetrated the ranks of the Irish nationalists; one of its agents operated for almost a quarter of a century in the leading councils of the American Clan-na-Gael.60 Last but not least, the clergy, however patriotically inclined, did not support military action; as Bishop Moriarity of Kerry said of the Fenians: "Hell is not hot enough nor Eternity long enough to punish such miscreants."
In the 1860s the Fenians enlisted several American officers of Irish extraction who had gathered guerrilla experience in the American Civil War. Conspicuous among them was a Captain 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.61
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.62
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 (parliament). Independence, however, was still not at hand and was to come only after three more years of bitter fighting.
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, militarily 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. But 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 opportunity 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.
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 1890s 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 crossbones. 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 IMRO 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 Bulgaria, 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 become 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 Protogerovists 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 Yugoslavs 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.
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 supplement 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 Berbers. Abd el-Krim soon acquired the reputation of an inspired guerrilla strategist. But 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 Pétain 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.
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!937 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 concentrated 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 country 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.
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 guerrilla 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 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 warlordism 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 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 or the defense committee in his native village, and emerged during the last year of Díaz'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, ammunition 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 Zapa tistas 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-caudillo, 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 military coup which occurred in São 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 counterguerrilla 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
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. Sandino, 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. Saudino'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 Uberador) 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 contemporaries, 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.
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-Republican, 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 Empecinado 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 those Spanish leaders who were most predisposed toward partisan warfare — anarchists like Durutti — fought at the front in Barcelona and Madrid; there were not enough soldiers to spare for partisan operations. Even a born guerrilla leader such as the Communist El Campesino was appointed a division commander, in which capacity he showed much less aptitude.
Given the long-standing Spanish propensity for guerrilla warfare, the political support of substantial sections of the population for the Republican cause and the inefficiency revealed by the right-wing regular army commanders, would not the Republicans have been better advised to put stronger emphasis on guerrilla warfare? Even with the benefit of hindsight the question cannot be answered in the affirmative. True enough, the Nationalist army (as Stanley Payne has written) never became a first-rate twentieth-century military machine. "It won because it proved less ineffective than the motley contingents of the Popular Front.'88 But however incompetent, the Nationalists would still have been able to seize the major cities within a short time but for the Republican forces concentrated in their defense. Precisely because they were not really a modern army, the Nationalists were not that dependent on supplies, and damage to their lines of supply and communication would not have been fatally harmful. Partisan units could have been concentrated in the mountainous regions of central and northern Spain, but the military decisions fell in the plains. The presence of active, strong and highly mobile guerrilla units in Franco's rear might have made a difference in the battle for the Basque country; it is most unlikely that they would have influenced the outcome of the fighting in the south.
The Nationalists, too, had many irregulars in their ranks; during the first year of the war regular army units were in a minority. There were many banderas — Carlists, Falangists, and other right-wing volunteers, some of them counting a few hundred members, others, such as the Tercio de Navarra, ten thousand or more. But they were gradually integrated into Franco's army and there was never any systematic attempt on the part of the Nationalists to wage guerrilla wars in the Republican rear.
On the eve of World War II, the attitude toward guerrilla warfare that 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 purpose. 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 concentration 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, different 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.