Guerrilla Warfare Read online

  "Gotovo, charge," shouts the Prince and we are down on them like an avalanche. A cloud of dust, the panting of horses, the rattle of harness, a flash of sabres and we are there.

  But the Turcomans are not. Three hundred yards further on we see them, they are going in a gentle canter, not seeming to be in the slightest hurry, and evidently not in the least apprehensive of our overtaking them. We continue the chase a short distance with no result. It is exasperating. We may as well charge a flock of wild geese and we give things up.46

  The Russians were exasperated, but not for very long. The Turcomen were excellent horsemen, brave in individual combat. But like the Red Indians, indeed like all primitive people, they were incapable of fighting in large units, and since guerrilla operations, no less than regular warfare, called for an overall strategy and careful organization, they never had a chance.

  During most of the nineteenth century Great Britain engaged in what some contemporaries termed, crudely but not altogether inaccurately, "nigger bashing" — small, and not so small colonial wars in various parts of the empire. Each of them came into its own due share of publicity at the time; there are many streets in London named Magdala, Gwalior, Cawnpore and Khartoum after the sites of notorious battles fought there, and as many after the generals who led the British troops. (There are four Outram streets in the British capital, five were named after Kitchener, three in honor of Brackenbury.) Up to about 1860-1865, the majority of these wars took place in Asia, subsequently the scene shifted primarily to Africa. Most of them were not really guerrilla in character; the Afghans whom the British fought thrice had a regular army, so had the Egyptians, and even the Zulus, and the Mahdi in the Sudan. The native armies were ill equipped and their leadership was usually not very competent, but they nonetheless practiced regular, not guerrilla warfare; the British commanders were frequently surprised by the lack of enterprise they displayed. In the Abyssinian campaign, as an example, the British expeditionary forces under Sir Robert Napier eventually reached Magdala, a seemingly unassailable fortress, Napier himself writing later that if old women had been at the top and, hiding behind the brow, had thrown down stones, they would have caused any force a serious loss.47 The British were still, however, defeated on more than one occasion — in the Afghan wars, for instance, the Zulu wars, and against the Boers at Majuba Hill — this usually as a result of underrating the opposition's numerical strength or fighting qualities. During the Indian Mutiny there were incidents of guerrilla warfare, such as Tantia Topi's raids, especially in the later stages of the rebellion. The talukhdars attacked British convoys, surprised small detachments and engaged in general brigandage. But this was the exception, not the rule, and many observers, including Marx and Engels, expressed astonishment that guerrilla warfare had not been more widely applied by the insurgents; in view of the wide spaces of India and the small number of British troops, guerrilla warfare would have been infinitely more effective than sieges and open field battles. But the mutiny lacked a broad popular base, and the precondition for a successful people's war did not exist.48

  The forces facing the British in India were numerically quite strong — perhaps sixty thousand men in the second Sikh war; the British had to fight fifty thousand dervishes near Orndurman, and forty thousand Zulus, But invariably the natives were subdued in the end, again for the standard reasons of poor leadership and the needed discipline for fighting in large platoons. They were incapable of carrying out any complicated maneuvers once the battle had started. Whenever, on the other hand, a colonial army had to cope with guerrilla tactics, the war was likely to be undramatic, costly and prolonged. The Pathans went on fighting in the Northwest Frontier region for many decades, while the French needed a long time to "pacify" Indochina until at last Gallieni and Lyautey hit on the right tactics in the 1890s — surprise raids by converging columns along with simultaneous doses of political warfare, aimed at depriving the rebels of the support of the local population. Often the colonial armies were hampered by adverse conditions. Wolsely, for one, found the going rough in the steaming jungles of Ashanti-land, what with the Ashantis harrying the British lines of communications, and the Black Watch prone in the confusion to mistake the Welch Fusilliers for the enemy.

  The Maori wars in the north of New Zealand went on for twelve years from 1860 to 1872 and, more perhaps than any other, bore the characteristics of a guerrilla war. It had begun, strictly speaking, even earlier, with the Wairam incident in 1843 when white surveyors were killed as the result of an incident which they had unnecessarily provoked. The white settlers bitterly complained about the "brutal tortures of the cruel Maoris," but the war had certainly not been started by the Maoris. It was a conflict over the ownership of land, and the local whites were far more avid to attack the Maoris than were the military authorities and the British government. The Christian missionaries, too, sympathized with the Maoris. The British troops soon found that regular army tactics such as fixed bayonet charges were of little avail in this war. The Maoris skillfully used the high grass as cover and built ingenious fighting positions in the form of trenches (pas), access to which was barred by felled trees and other obstacles, and designed not as fortresses but to impede the advance of the British troops and to inflict losses on them.49 The Maoris were led by a gifted chieftain, Tito Kowaru, "the De Wet of the Maoris," who still could not prevent his followers from being gradually pushed back.

  British soldiers saw combat in the jungle, the bush and in mountain passes; the Shundur Pass which was the scene of much fighting in the Clitral campaign (1895) is situated twelve thousand feet above sea level. The Dutch encountered armed resistance in Sumatra (Achim), the French in Tonkin (1882-1895), in Madagascar (1884 and 1895), and in Tunis, the Germans in Southwest Africa (the Herero revolt), the Spanish in Morocco (1892-1895), the Americans in the Philippines (1899-1902). There were many other armed conflicts, some involving small detachments, others, thousands of men. Sooner or later these insurrections were suppressed, sometimes by brute force, on other occasions pacification coming about as a result of combined military and political action.

  These exotic wars frequently caught the contemporary imagination, stirred by what seemed like nothing so much as glorious adventure, laced even with a certain romanticism, at least from a distance. The same applies, a fortiori, to the Indian wars in the United States. But they were only seldom guerrilla wars, and sweeping statements such as "the Apaches were in fact guerrillas,"50 are of not much use toward an understanding of the specific character of these wars. It is perfectly true that the Indian braves showed great resources of courage, that they engaged in hit-and-run attacks, that they were past masters in woodcraft, and at ambushing. But in other essential respects they were anything but guerrilleros. They hardly ever operated in the enemy's rear, certainly not in any systematic way; whenever they could, they refrained from night attacks; their frontal assaults, in wave after wave, were often suicidal owing to the far greater firepower of the enemy. With a few exceptions, Tecumseh paramount among them, the Indian chiefs were quite incapable of leading sizable contingents in their campaigns. The Red Indian tactics, as Fletcher Pratt has noted, were those of the squad — they could not combine their operations and were unable to think in larger terms. The U.S. Army, like the British in Asia and Africa, met with the occasional defeat, as on the banks of the Little Bighorn in 1876, when Custer made the fatal mistake of sending out units that were too small and when he declined to take his Catling guns which might have made all the difference. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, when the Indians were not yet outnumbered by the white man, such reverses were less uncommon. Major Dade's whole force was massacred by Seminole Indians in the swamps of Florida in December 1835. But the forces involved at the time were small; there were altogether only 536 U.S. soldiers in the entire state of Florida.51 The Seminole wars are of interest, be it solely because they cost in their seven-year span more U.S. soldiers' lives than all the other Indian wars of the nineteenth century
put together, plus the staggering sum of forty million dollars.52 In the end some eight thousand men and naval support ships had to be concentrated to subdue the Seminoles. Patrolling, "blind raids," and bloodhounds had proved unproductive; the campaign succeeded only after the troops were ordered to persist in their efforts throughout the summer as well, the great heat notwithstanding, and after their blows were directed no longer against a forever elusive enemy, but against their villages, crops and food supplies. Deprived at last of their sustenance, the Seminoles had no alternative but to surrender.

  With the opening of the West to white settlement and the spread of a railway network, the Indians were still further depleted and their remnants herded into reservations. Dissension had always been rife in their ranks; there was not, after all, one cohesive Indian nation, only a disparate collection of many tribes, frequently on the warpath against each other. Their arms were inferior in quality and they had no powerful outside ally. Their foe gradually became as adept as they were themselves at woodcraft and scouting.

  The Small War in the Big War

  In three of the four major wars of the nineteenth century, guerrilla warfare played a certain, albeit minor, role — the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Boer War. Differing as greatly in almost every respect as these wars did, the guerrilla activities in each warrant individual examination. Considerable claims have been made about the impact of the Confederate guerrillas; according to Virgil Carrington Jones, the war would have ended in 1864, eight to nine months earlier than it did, but for the operations of the raiders who prevented Sheridan from clearing up the Shenandoah valley so that Grant could pursue his campaign.53 But even if this claim is accepted, the guerrilla activities merely prolonged the agony of the South. Leading Confederate generals had misgivings about the irregulars from start to finish. "I regard the whole [partisan] system as an unmixed evil," was General Lee's own unvarnished way of putting it. Perhaps it was simply the resentment of the regular soldier against an unconventional manner of warfare, and snobbism vis-à-vis its practitioners who were not always gentlemen. Not that it was snobs alone who objected to William Quantrill, the gang leader who captured Independence, Missouri, and plundered Lawrence (1862-1863). He was a vicious murderer, and his men consisted chiefly of cutthroats like Jesse James and his brothers.54 They developed a strange ritual (a black flag and a black oath), but their prime object, as far as can be ascertained, was to pillage and to destroy, with no great pains taken to distinguish between friend or foe.

  True, it would be unjust to regard Quantrill and his men as the typical Confederate guerrilla; Mosby, Morgan, Johnson, Ashby, Stuart Sheridan and their raiders were men of quite different caliber. To single out only the two most famous and effective among them, Morgan was a businessman in Lexington, Kentucky, thirty-six when the war broke out — a daring cavalryman and lover of thoroughbred horses who had seen action as a captain in the Mexican campaigns. Mosby was a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer, who while a student at the University of Virginia had killed a fellow student in an unprovoked duel, and had read law while in prison.55 Morgan's raiders came from the best families of the South — deep-rooted gentry as for instance the Bullitts, Colemans, Breckinridges — and were themselves lawyers, physicians, merchants, journalists for the most part, drawn at the time to what one Richmond newspaper called "the most attractive of the services for all young men of a daring and adventurous nature. In equipping his troops, Morgan discarded the saber in favor of pistols and carbines; everyone dressed according to his taste — broad-brimmed hats, the pants stuck into high boots, a pair of pistols buckled around the waist. Mosby later denied that his men habitually wore blue overcoats to mislead the enemy; they did so only when they could get no others.56 The question was of more than academic importance, for the Northerners were not at all sure whether captured partisans should be shot or treated as prisoners of war — and those in civilian clothes, it was argued, had forfeited all rights. Mortan was the first to stage long-distance raids into the enemy rear in the cold winter of 1861-1862 after the South had sustained some unexpected defeats. When about to enter battle, the raiders dismounted and fought as if they were an infantry unit.

  Of Morgan's four major raids which took him to Indiana, Ohio and Tennessee, the first and third were the most successful. In the first raid he covered a distance of a thousand miles in twenty-four days and for the loss of a hundred of the eight hundred men with him, did much damage to the Union forces and captured (and paroled) twelve hundred prisoners. In the third raid, this time with four thousand men, he took over eighteen hundred prisoners for the loss of only two men, and destroyed two million dollars' worth of property.57 The fourth (Ohio) raid in July 1863 was the most spectacular but also the most pointless. With some twenty-five hundred men he ventured far afield from his base; on one occasion in Indiana he covered ninety miles in thirty-five hours.58 But eventually his force was surrounded and destroyed and Morgan had to surrender. A new raid into Tennessee ended in total disaster; at Greeneville he was tracked down by Union troops and killed.

  The composition of his band had changed greatly toward the end. The Southern aristocracy was replaced by Southern riffraff; bank robberies as well as petty thieving became quite common. Morgan was a courageous, impulsive, and impatient commander, conspicuously lacking some of the essential qualities of a guerrilla leader. His great achievement was to tie up to thirty thousand Union soldiers with a force which never extended beyond a few thousand men, but usually was far smaller. He excelled in public relations; newspapermen were always welcome at his camp and he had a good press, except, of course, in the North. But his victories, however dashing, never influenced the issue of a campaign, let alone the war.59

  Mosby's rangers, who numbered only two hundred, began their actions on a small scale, cutting telegraph wires; later on they hung around enemy camps, shot at sentinels and pickets, intercepted couriers and supply wagons and forced the Union army to move only in large bodies. On one occasion Mosby captured a Union general in his bed (General Stoughton, not one of the outstanding leaders of the North); on another he seized a payroll of $173,000. His activities were given wide publicity and many Southern soldiers of the line asked for a transfer to this unit or to another raider command.

  Among the generals and colonels in charge of these units, Nathan Bedford Forrest was considered by many to be the greatest. According to some, he was the most accomplished fighter to emerge in the war, and this despite his having had no previous military training.60 A wealthy businessman from Tennessee, he had raised a battalion at his own expense in 1861. In a major raid with a thousand men in July 1862, he overpowered an enemy brigade, destroyed railway bridges and captured a load of supplies. His second raid in December 1862, into Kentucky with twenty-five hundred men, was less successful, but in the Atlanta campaign, during the second half of 1864, he played a considerable role, diverting major enemy units for a dismayingly long time with a force of between two to five thousand men. Sherman was brought to the point of saying that "the devil Forrest must be hunted down and killed if it costs ten thousand lives and bankrupts the treasury."61 His operations resembled those of Denis Davydov in the War of 1812; deep-penetration raids into the enemy's rear rather than guerrilla warfare.

  By mid-September 1862, partisan rangers had been organized into six regiments and nine battalions in half a dozen Southern states, and units of company size existed in Florida and Mississippi. The North, too, had a few rangers, if their activity was mainly confined to the Leesburg area. But the strong opposition partisans and their operations had aroused from the beginning tended to increase rather than diminish in both North and South and cannot readily be explained away, exist though it may well have done at times, as simple professional jealousy. General Heth, commanding the West Virginia military district, wrote that the partisans were just organized bands of robbers, that they were more ready to plunder friends than enemies (because it was less dangerous), that their leaders were unable to enfo
rce discipline and that their interpretation of fighting was roaming over the country, taking what they wanted — and doing nothing.62 Seddon, the Confederate secretary of war, wrote President Davis in 1863 that they (the partisans) had not infrequently caused more odium and done more damage with friends than enemies.

  The treatment of guerrillas by the North varied from state to state. Assistant Secretary of War P. H. Watson wrote that they were the "common enemies of mankind" and should be shot without challenge. Generals McClellan and Halleck issued orders instituting the death penalty for insurgent rebels apprehended in the act of destroying bridges, railway and telegraph lines. When Northern forces threatened to execute two Confederate officers, Lee warned McClellan in a letter that he would retaliate and the Union Command did not carry out its threat (on a previous occasion, after the execution of six of Mosby's men by Custer, Mosby had retaliated by killing six of Custer's soldiers). Grant thought that guerrillas without uniform should not be treated as prisoners of war. Washington consulted Francis Lieber, professor of law at Columbia, about the status of the guerrilla in international law. His treatise, learned and fair as it was, did little to elucidate the issue. Partisans (he wrote) were entitled to the privileges of the law of war provided they opposed the invader openly and in respectable numbers and operated in the yet uninvaded portions of the hostile country; on the other hand, no army and society could allow unpunished assassination, robbery and devastation.63 But this left many questions open. What was "open resistance"? What were "respectable numbers"? And what if the front line was not clearly delineated?

  As resistance against guerrillaism grew, the Confederacy in early 1864 repealed the act which had authorized the formation of partisan units. Some nevertheless continued to operate, and a few continued to fight on even after the South had surrendered. The Union generals responded to the raids during the last year of the war with the systematic destruction of farms, crops and livestock and the carrying off of all men under the age of fifty; in this way, Grant had told Sheridan, "you will get many of Mosby's men.'