Primitive Warriors Versus Civilized Soldiers
The general claim that the difference between civilized and primitive warfare is analogous to that between serious business and a game is invariably bolstered by the observation that civilized soldiers can always defeat primitive warriors. But while it is true that European civilization has steadily and dramatically extended itself to the utmost parts of the earth during the past four centuries, it is by no means clear that this expansion is a consequence of superior weaponry or specialized military technique. In fact, civilized soldiers have often lost to warriors in combat despite superior weaponry, unit discipline, and military science. But they have seldom lost campaigns or wars.
A review of the history of warfare between tribal warriors and civilized soldiers uncovers a number of interesting general features that are not very flattering to Western military bombast. For one, when civilized soldiers have been caught in the open by superior numbers of primitive warriors, they often have been defeated, whereas if the soldiers have been fortified, even behind wagons or in shallow rifle pits, they could hold off many times their number until they could escape or be rescued. Let us consider a few examples.
In the many struggles between the Roman legions and undisciplined barbarian hosts of Celts and Germans, the latter inflicted some notable annihilations on the former, usually when they caught or enticed the Romans far from their fortified encampments, as in the case of Sabinus’s reinforced legion in 54 B.C. and Varus’s three legions in A.D. 9. Whatever Julius Caesar’s excuses, it is clear that the blue-painted barbarians of Britain defended their island vigorously and effectively against the cream of the Roman army. The raid and ambush tactics the Britons quickly adopted after being defeated in formal battles were so troublesome for the Romans that a century passed after Caesar’s retreat before Rome made another attempt at conquest.
The Norsemen, or Vikings, of Scandinavia were among the most fearsome fighters in medieval Europe. When Vikings were defeating every fighting force worthy of the name in Europe and conquering England, warriors from a few bands of Newfoundland Indians drove them out of their North American (Vinland) colony.1 In one battle, the Vikings, armed with their swords and shields, were routed by Skraeling (the Norse word for the North American natives) arrows and an unnerving native weapon that seems to have been an inflated bladder on the tip of a pole that “made a frightening noise when it fell.” They were saved from this flying whoopie cushion and ignominious defeat only when one of the Viking women alarmed the Skraelings by uncovering her breasts and slapping them with a sword. Despite a better climate, richer pastures, and more plentiful natural resources than in Greenland, the colonists decided they had seen enough of North America’s dangerous natives and abandoned their colony. During their prolonged journey back to Greenland, the colonists revenged themselves by killing a few more Indians they surprised along the way. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison emphasizes the key role that native hostility played in the Viking decision to abandon Vinland, especially the Skraelings’ “ability to deliver surprise attacks at will” (in other words, their expertise at the tactics of primitive war).2
Until the nineteenth century, Europeans in most parts of sub-Saharan Africa were restricted to fortified places on the coasts. The Portuguese in Mozambique, for example, could not penetrate the interior during the seventeenth century because the “natives with their assegais were normally able to destroy the small groups of Portuguese as soon as they strayed outside of their few fortified bases.”3
During the Indian Wars in the United States, when U.S. Army units were caught in the open and outnumbered, they usually suffered severe defeats.4 The series of victories engineered by the Seminoles in late 1834, the annihilation of the artillery-equipped Grattan command in 1854, and the destruction of Fetterman’s unit in 1866 are examples of defeats in the open. The Battle of the Little Bighorn clearly illustrates the general character of primitive and civilized clashes. Colonel Custer, with 200 men, was caught in the open by 1,800 Sioux and Cheyenne warriors and destroyed. Custer’s subordinates, Major Reno and Captain Benteen, hastily fortified a small hillock with 400 men and survived the attacks of the same warriors for another day and a half. With their food and grazing exhausted and more soldiers approaching from the north, the Indians abandoned their siege. Thus behind breastworks, however flimsy, soldiers could repulse many times their number of warriors.
The same strictures apply to their tribal foes.5 Fifty Modoc braves ensconced in the natural fortifications of the Lava Beds in northern California withstood the assaults and artillery of 1,200 U.S. soldiers for almost five months, while inflicting heavy casualties on the besiegers. Only dissension among the Modocs and a shortage of water led to their ultimate surrender. When Indians were caught in the open, especially by surprise attacks on their villages by more numerous U.S. cavalry, they were defeated. When numbers were approximately equal and the Indians were not encumbered by women and children, however, victory could go to either side. United States soldiers were defeated at Rosebud Creek in 1876 and Big Hole in 1877; the Indians lost at Four Lakes and Spokane Plains in 1858 and at Bear Paw in 1877. The supposed tactical superiority of the civilized soldier was not especially obvious. In several instances, however, outnumbered fortified Indians were defeated—including at Horseshoe Bend in 1814, Apache Pass in 1862, and Tres Castillos in 1880—as a result of U.S. and Mexican artillery and mass assaults.6 One disadvantage the Indians faced when fortified was that, unlike the whites, they seldom had anyone available to ride to their relief. In addition, logistical superiority, artillery, and other aspects of nonmilitary engineering (for example, tunneling and bridging) gave Europeans a very marked superiority in siege operations over any primitive warriors, however well fortified they might have been.
European soldiers and military historians have sometimes impugned the discipline and fighting qualities of American and Mexican soldiers.7 But the proudest armies of Europe did not avoid debacles against African tribesmen in the late nineteenth century. During the Zulu War (1879), when caught in the open, the redcoats of the British Army—with their breech-loading rifles, artillery, and Gatling guns—were soundly defeated at the battles of Isandlwana, Myer’s Drift, and Hlobane by superior numbers of Zulus armed primarily with thrusting spears. When they were behind fortifications, the British survived, as at the famous battle of Rorke’s Drift where 140 soldiers held off 4,000 overaged and unfed Zulus for two days. Only at the last battle of Ulundi did a huge British “square” with shrapnel and Gading guns defeat a larger but dispirited Zulu force in the open.8
In the 1890s, the French fighting the Tuareg of the Sahara met similar disasters in the open and survived attacks when behind solid walls. For example, at Goundam, 150 French soldiers, with artillery and behind a filmsy stockade of thorn bushes, were destroyed by an equal number of Tuareg.9 Germany’s army, too, met embarrassing reverses when it fought file Hehe in Tanganyika (1891–1898) and Herero and Nama tribesmen in Southwest Africa (1904–1907). In the latter case, the outcomes of fights were predictable: “Against stone walls and machine guns, the Hereros lost; when the Germans were caught in the open, the Hereros defeated them.”10 As with the Modocs in America, when African tribesmen could fight behind fortifications, they could hold off superior European forces for long periods and inflict grievous losses on the attackers. In 1879, for example, 300 Pluthi tribesmen in a hilltop fortress held off 1,800 soldiers and artillery for eight months.11 Again, we find no clear evidence of the tactical superiority of civilized over primitive methods, only the eternal advantages of fortifications and superior numbers.
In most cases, civilized soldiers have defeated primitive warriors only when they adopted the latter’s tactics. In the history of European expansion, soldiers repeatedly had to abandon their civilized techniques and weapons to win against even the most primitive opponents. The unorthodox techniques adopted were smaller, more mobile units; abandonment of artillery and use of lighter small arms; open formations and skirmishing tactics; increased reliance on ambushes, raids, and surprise attacks on settlements; destruction of the enemy’s economic infrastructure (habitations, foodstores, livestock, and means of transport); a strategy of attrition against the enemy’s manpower; relentless pursuit to take advantage of civilization’s superior logistics; and extensive use of natives as scouts or auxiliaries.12 In other words, not only were civilized military techniques incapable of defeating their primitive counterparts, but in many cases the collaboration of primitive warriors was necessary because civilized soldiers alone were inadequate for the task.
Several historians of Indian Wars of colonial times in the northeastern United States note that the borrowing of military techniques was rather one-sided: the Indians were the “military tutors,” and the Europeans were the “trainees.”13 One grateful New Englander wrote in 1677, “In our first war with the Indians, God pleased to show us the vanity of our military skill, in managing our arms, after the European mode. Now we are glad to learn the skulking way of war.”14 Similarly harsh tutorials were administered by tribal warriors to civilized soldiers in many regions of the world. Frontier militias, composed of men who had learned the “skulking way of war” by direct and prolonged experience, were thus usually more effective at fighting tribesmen than were European regulars. And when these “tribalized” colonial militiamen fought European regulars, they proved to be extremely tough and frustrating opponents themselves, as the American Revolutionary and the two Anglo-Boer wars illustrate.
Primitive (and guerrilla) warfare consists of war stripped to its essentials: the murder of enemies; the theft or destruction of their sustenance, wealth, and essential resources; and the inducement in them of insecurity and terror. It conducts the basic business of war without recourse to ponderous formations or equipment, complicated maneuvers, strict chains of command, calculated strategies, time tables, or other civilized embellishments. When civilized soldiers meet adversaries so unencumbered, they too must shed a considerable weight of intellectual baggage and physical armor just to even the odds. Once soldiers match their tactics to those of their primitive adversaries, their superior manpower, economic surplus, transportation technology, and logistical expertise—if vigorously exploited—enable them to win most such campaigns and wars. By attrition, they gradually erode the primitives’ small and inelastic manpower pool; by destruction of food and materiel, they exhaust the slim economic surpluses of the warriors, often inducing them to surrender to avoid starvation. These are precisely the techniques of primitive war, as well as those of civilized total war. The only difference is that civilized societies can apply vastly greater resources to their efforts to execute these techniques. Thus by exploiting their logistic superiority, civilized soldiers could continue harrying and abrading primitive social groups, especially during the harshest seasons, giving them no time to rest, recuperate, or replenish supplies of food and ammunition. To a great extent, the superior transportation and agricultural technology of Europe and its efficient economic and logistic methods made possible its triumph over the primitive world, not its customary military techniques and advanced weapons.
The U.S. Army campaigns against the Plains tribes and the Apaches illustrate these points. In 1865, General Pope sent large units attended by the usual slow supply trains on great sweeps through the Plains, with the result that, as historian Robert Utley put it, “only the most careless Indians failed to get out of the way.”15 Like so many other similar civilized campaigns, it failed to bring tribal enemies to battle and only exacerbated their raiding and other depredations. A similar excursion by General Hancock in 1867 did little more than provoke subsequent raids against settlers. Relative calm reigned for a few years, after a number of “peace policy” treaties (which neither side fully observed) separated the contending parties. But the anger of the Indians over pioneer incursions into their treaty territories and the settlers’ mounting irritation at the continuing Indian raids reached the boiling point in the early 1870s. By this time, Generals Sherman and Sheridan were in charge and were prepared to visit on the “hostiles” the total war they had so brilliantly and ruthlessly inflicted on the Confederate rebels during the Civil War. The U.S. Army won the Red River War against the southern Plains tribes almost without combat, by relentlessly pursuing the hostile bands during the winter of 1874/1875. Exhaustion, hunger, and worry over the ever-present danger of an army attack broke the tribes’ resistance. In the northern Plains, after the defeats of traditional columns at the Rosebud and Little Bighorn in the summer of 1876, the army, aided by Indians scouts, pursued the scattered Sioux and Cheyenne bands throughout the following autumn and winter, burning tipis and food stores and killing ponies whenever it caught a hostile band. By the end of spring, except for a few who went to Canada, almost all the Sioux and Cheyenne were on the reservations.16 These successful campaigns coincide almost exactly with the final destruction of first the great southern and then the great northern herds of bison, which were central to the life of the defeated tribes.
Various Apache bands had defied the power of local agricultural tribes, the Spanish, the Mexicans, and the United States for three centuries, raiding and pillaging at will. During the Civil War, an extremely ruthless campaign involving a “general rising” by troops, citizens, and the settled tribes failed to end Apache raids. The Apache “scourge” was a fact of southwestern life until the eccentric General Crook mounted campaigns in the early 1870s and early 1880s using small mobile units consisting mostly of Indians (specifically Apaches) and supplied by mule rather than wagon trains. His units’ excellent scouting, relentless pursuit, and surprise attacks on encampments broke first the resistance of the Yavapai and Western Apaches and then the last “wild” bands of the Chiricahua. Thus, in all its successful western campaigns, the U.S. Army employed primitive methods (and tribal warriors) backed by civilized resources to defeat natives who could match them only in the former.
Even so, as we have already seen, not all civilized campaigns against primitives succeeded. For example, it was the most primitive portions of Celtic Europe that gave the Roman army the most difficulty.17 Despite being subjected to repeated military campaigns by one of the finest civilized armies of any era, Scotland was never conquered; Ireland was simply left alone. The Roman conquest of interior and northern Spain demanded 200 years of almost constant warfare, during which the native Celtiberian tribes first demonstrated the Spanish genius for small-scale warfare. These two centuries of extremely bitter and often unsuccessful “pacification” campaigns occupied the full-time attention of four to six of Rome’s twenty-eight legions—as many as were posted to guard against encroachment by the populous and aggressive Parthian (Persian) Empire. Similarly, for over a century, the small predatory tribes of the Alps survived periodic pacification campaigns by the very same Roman armies that had rapidly defeated the more civilized societies around and beyond them. The nomads of North Africa also gave Rome considerable trouble and ruined many military reputations. In general, the Roman legions performed much better against civilized opponents who “fought fair” than against the more barbarous tribesmen and provincial guerrillas who did not.
Although it did not hinge on anything that could properly be called a campaign, the fate of the Norse colonists in Vinland and Greenland provides no support for the notion that civilized people possessed inherent military superiority. Viking accounts (discussed earlier) record that they were driven from Vinland by the hostile natives. But three centuries later something even worse befell them, when southward-migrating Thule Inuit (Eskimo) reached a long-established but declining Norse colony in southwestern Greenland. The last written Norse records recount attacks by the Skraelings, and an expedition mounted from the Eastern Settlement to reconquer the Western Settlement from the Inuit found it completely deserted. The unequivocal traditions of the Inuit, not recorded until 1850, claim that their ancestors administered the coup de grace to the fading Norse colonies in the course of mutual raids and massacres. Archaeology also suggests that the Inuit may have played a role in the final disappearance of the Eastern Settlement.18 In these first military conflicts between the warriors of the New and Old Worlds, all the spoils belonged to the Americans.
Also in the fourteenth century, the Neolithic Gaunche tribesmen of the Canary Islands, armed only with wooden spears and stones for throwing, repulsed several French, Portuguese, and Spanish campaigns of conquest.19 The Gran Canada Guanches held out against these various conquistadors for almost a century and a half (1342–1483). Tenerife resisted until 1496 after pushing two invading Spanish armies into the sea. The prolonged resistance of these Stone Age tribes compares very favorably with the swift defeats suffered by the highly civilized Aztecs and Incas at the hands of Spanish invaders a few decades later. Similarly, the “wild tribes” of tropical South America defeated many Inca, Spanish, and Portuguese campaigns of conquest, as often as not, by completely annihilating the armies sent against them.20
The story was no different in North America. In one case, an early Spanish expedition sent from New Mexico to overawe the ever-troublesome Plains tribes (and detach them from any connection with French traders) was wiped out by the Pawnees in eastern Nebraska.21 The Seminoles of Florida were never completely conquered by the U.S. Army, and it is hardly hyperbole to claim that tourists, armed only with tasteless clothing, have done a better job. One of the biggest American successes was obtained in 1839 when a corrupt Indian agent “bought out” a tough Seminole chief named Billy Bowlegs; when he left for exile in Oklahoma, he was reconciled to his defeat by fifty slaves and $100,000 in gold. A century after the Seminole War petered out in the early 1840s, Florida Seminoles plausibly (but unsuccessfully) claimed exemption from conscription during World War II because they belonged to a sovereign and never subjugated enemy “nation.” After several years of dogged raiding by Chief Red Cloud’s Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, the United States conceded the Bozeman Trail and the Powder River country it transited in the Treaties of 1868, admittedly because there was an alternative (but longer) route to the Montana mines. If not every civilized campaign in the New World was a success, it must be conceded that the great majority were. But the reasons for these victories had little to do with tactics, and even logistics and economics may have been irrelevant to the results.
As the ecological historian Alfred Crosby points out, European conquerors of the “brave new worlds” of the Americas, Australia, the Pacific islands, and the isolated extremities of the Old World were aided by invisible but overpowering allies.22 These silent partners included viruses, bacteria, seed plants, and mammals that disseminated death and triggered ecological transformations that decimated native manpower and disrupted traditional economies. These insidious conquistadors spread far more rapidly and were many times more deadly than the human conquerors who followed in their wake. The deaths meted out by measles, influenza, and (especially) smallpox far exceeded in magnitude the deaths inflicted by the weapons of the Europeans. For example, the highest estimates for the number of Aztecs killed in combat during the Spanish Conquest (mostly by the Spaniards’ Indian allies) are about 100,000, whereas in the decade following, introduced diseases killed at least 4 million and perhaps more than 8 million central Mexicans.23 Many groups in these new worlds commonly lost a third to half of their populations just in the initial epidemic. Certainly, far less effort was needed to defeat adversaries who had just watched half of their comrades and families the of an alien and untreatable disease or had seen the mainstays of their economy choked out by the weeds and feral animals of the invaders. Crosby concludes that the celebrated victories of the small armies of Cortez and Pizarro over the populous Aztec and Inca civilizations were “in large part the triumphs of the virus of smallpox.” The Yukaghir hunter-gatherers of Siberia had no doubt about why the Russians had been able to overpower them. They claimed that the Russians had brought with them a box containing smallpox, which, when opened, filled the land with smoke, and “the people began to die.”
Crosby makes several historical comparisons that illustrate how essential these biological weapons were to European military success.24 Despite using very primitive military technologies and tactics, possessing resources (such as spices, gold, and ivory) that excited the greed of Europeans, and being far closer to Europe than to temperate South America or Australia, many tribal areas were not conquered by Europeans until the late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth century. What distinguished these resistant regions (the prime example being tropical Africa) from those rapidly subdued by Europeans during the previous four centuries was the natural immunity of their populations to Eurasian diseases and, in some areas, endemic diseases to which Europeans were especially susceptible. Also, European commensal species (such as rats and cattle) either were already native to these regions or could not survive there (such as rabbits and many weeds). Where disease-resistant tribal populations were established in the New World—for instance, the “Bush Negroes” of the Guianas—they were victorious over their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European foes.25 In other words, where Europeans were deprived of their biological advantages, their supposed military superiority was useless. Only the advent of modern medicine and public hygiene, the steamship, repeating rifles, and machine guns gave Europeans overwhelming advantages in health, logistics, and firepower over all tribal adversaries. In the face of these facts, the claim that the superior tactics and military discipline of Europeans gained them dominion over primitives in the Americas, Oceania, and Siberia is so inflated that it would be comic were not the facts that contradict it so tragic.
Primitive warriors often more quickly appreciated the military potential of civilized weapons than did soldiers long familar with them. The Indians of New England, in contrast to the first European colonists, preferred the flintlock to the matchlock musket, loading and using the flintlock in such a way as to much improve its accuracy and deadliness in combat.26 In a more recent example, whereas civilized soldiers took a decade or more to translate powered flight into a means of inflicting death and destruction, some New Guinea tribesmen grasped its possibilities in only a matter of minutes.27 The Eipo of highland Irian Jaya were first contacted by an ethnographer (Wulf Schiefenhövel of the Max Planck Institute) and his pilot, who landed their small plane among the tribesmen. Despite never having seen an airplane before, the tribal leader immediately asked for a ride, a request that was granted. When finally seated, he said that he wanted to bring a few heavy stones with him on the the flight. Asked what the rocks were for, he replied that if he were flown over the village of his enemies, he would drop these rocks on them. Although his request for a bombing raid was not granted, this tribal Billy Mitchell had immediately recognized the military value of aerial bombardment—far more quickly than the military leaders of the civilized nations that created and developed the airplane. These leaders assigned the first military aircraft to unarmed observational roles.
In the present day, the tactics, objectives, and practices typical of primitive war survive in civilized contexts under another name: guerrilla warfare. Like their tribal counterparts, guerrilla units are part-time, weakly disciplined bands of lightly armed volunteers. They prefer hit-and-run raids and ambushes to formal battles, and they rely heavily on their mobility, excellent intelligence, and knowledge of terrain to exploit the advantages of stealth and surprise. Guerrillas gain territory by harassing and terrorizing their enemies into abandoning it. Because of the lightness of their weapons and the weakness of their logistics, they are usually thwarted tactically by fortifications that they cannot take by either assault or siege. But they can sometimes maintain a strategic siege by harassing a fort’s supply lines, as Chief Red Cloud did against Fort Abraham Lincoln on the Bozeman Trail. Antiguerrilla warfare requires exactly the same tactical adjustments by conventional armies as were adopted to counter tribal warriors. Defeating guerrillas is virtually impossible by purely military means; almost invariably, political and economic methods must also be employed.
American GIs in Vietnam acknowledged the similarity between tribal raiders and guerrillas when they ruefully termed their own fortified encampments “Fort Apaches” and Viet Cong-controlled areas “Indian country.” The connection was even more direct for the Soviets in Afghanistan, who could not do any better against actual tribesmen than the British had a century before. Since guerrilla wars have long been recognized as especially destructive, prolonged, costly, and murderous, it is very curious that primitive warfare, being almost identical in means and methods, could ever be regarded as frivolous.
Indeed, every successful guerrilla campaign, however rare, is a demonstration that there is nothing contemptible about primitive military techniques. The nineteenth century witnessed some notably successful guerrilla campaigns, including the “Spanish Ulcer,” which Napoleon could not cure, and the defeat of the best units of Maximilian’s army (mostly French) by the Juaristas in Mexico.28 In this century, guerrillas have been victorious over conventional forces more often than they have lost.29 The fact that most guerrillas who lost either lacked or were cut off from logistical support by a larger and more modern economy highlights the only real weakness of primitive warfare and the decisive advantage of the civilized version. As the military truism asserts, “Amateurs discuss tactics while professionals discuss logistics.”
The elaborate tactics, complex organization, and strict discipline of civilized armies are not just irrelevant rituals or irrational customs. But the techniques of civilized war are focused on winning battles, whereas those of tribesmen and guerrillas are devoted to winning everything else, especially wars. In many cases, primitive warfare requires long periods of time—even generations—to gain its ends, whereas the goal of civilized war is the extremely elusive “knock-out blow.”30 Civilized techniques are much more effective when the fighting is between civilized foes who field large formations of more or less equal size and employ heavy and complex weaponry. This fact is demonstrated by the success of European and European-led armies over those of Asian states during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.31 But in World War II, the superior weaponry and tactics of the Germans and the suicidal courage and superior discipline of the Japanese were eventually ground into powder by the overwhelming weight of the Allies’ manpower and industrial productivity. These twentieth-century cases, as well as those of the American Confederacy and of Napoleonic France in the nineteenth century, demonstrate that faith in “superior” (civilized) military techniques, élan, and discipline as a substitute for a larger population and a stronger economy is criminally insane.
The superiority of the disciplined mass formations and arcane military techniques of civilization over the looser methods of primitives is elusive, if not illusory. A broad survey of warfare indicates that (in the short term or tactically) superior numbers or fortifications and (in the long term or strategically) a larger population and better logistics are the keys to victory. In fact, primitive tactics are superior, since civilized forces must adopt most of them—despite already possessing an often stupendous superiority in weapons, manpower, and supplies—in order to triumph over primitive or guerrilla adversaries. Remarkably, the armies of civilization inevitably suffer some severe and embarrassing defeats before these truths dawn on their commanders. In two full decades of determined fighting, neither the French nor the Americans could defeat the guerrillas of Southeast Asia. But together in the Persian Gulf War, with but a fraction of the strength they employed in Indochina, they decimated one of the largest and best-equipped conventional armies in the world in just three months.32 In contrast to the Iraqi army’s performance in the Gulf War, the Apaches survived civilized military pressure for almost 300 years and were defeated only by primitive methods—literally by other Apaches wearing U.S. Army uniforms. Where is Tactic’s sting and Discipline’s dominion?