Guerrilla Warfare Page 15

  When the Bourbon forces entered Naples, the republican sympathizers were lynched and their property looted. It was later bruited about that the British had first suggested that the government of Sicily should be relieved of the great burden of maintaining so many convicts and transport them to Calabria, making them useful to the public cause. Ruffo, according to this version, made the best of a difficult situation by reeducating the cutthroats with the help of his chaplains who were acting as political commissars: "He turned this unpromising human clay into brigadier generals and saints."98 Ruffo's efforts, as subsequent events were to demonstrate, were not altogether successful.

  Why certain bandits defended the existing order while others fought for the revolution depended partly on the general character of the gang, partly on the political and social background, but also on the character of the gang leader. In many cases this was a matter of sheer accident. Su San, herself turned bandit and then a leader of the Taiping through unordained circumstances, is reported by some to have later married Lo Ta-kang, another prominent ex-bandit. Together with seven other leaders of river pirates, Lo had shown up in Chin-t'ien, the main base of the Taiping, in 1851 or 1852. He became one of the most distinguished generals of the movement, and after his death in battle he had bestowed on him by the Heavenly King the noble title of Fen wang (Endeavour King).99 The other chiefs of the water pirates deserted the Taiping and went over to the emperor's army. There is no known way of sociological or psychological analysis to explain why Lo became a pillar of the Taiping whereas the other pirates rejoined the antirevolutionary forces, why Mina fought with the Cristinos and Merino with the Carlists, Fra Diavolo with the Bourbons and Andrea Orlando with the Napoleonic forces. In a war against a foreign invader the choice for patriotically inclined bandits was more obvious than in a civil war.

  The Outlook for Guerrilla War: 1901

  The days of guerrilla wars seemed to be over as the nineteenth century drew to its close. One of the few who dissented was that remarkable Russo-Polish-Jewish businessman and strategist Jean de Bloch, author of The War of the Future, who claimed that the modern rifle favoring individual action and sharpshooting and requiring the abandonment of close formations, was primarily a guerrilla weapon and tended to put the civilian on a level with the regular soldier. A guerrilla war, he declared on more than one occasion, would inevitably follow regular resistance in the future.100 A German officer, writing in Deutsche Revue, sharply disagreed; it was not true that, as Bloch had argued, a guerrilla war in Europe would make a decisive result impossible. The action of the franc tireurs in 1870 had been quite ineffectual. Futhermore, a highly civilized nation could not carry on a guerrilla war, it would not have the patient capacity to endure the burdens, privations and sacrifices of such a war and the longing for peace would become over-whelming.101 Bloch retorted that the case of the franc tireurs proved nothing, and that anyway a protracted war with large standing armies such as foreseen by the leading strategic thinkers of the day could only lead to social cataclysms and violent revolutions. Both Bloch and his Prussian critic were to be proved right by the events of the next two decades. With a few exceptions, the nations of Europe were indeed too civilized for guerrilla warfare, but the social cataclysms and the revolutions came with a vengeance.

  3

  The Origins of Guerrilla Doctrine

  In the nineteenth century "small war," partisan and guerrilla warfare fell into disregard in Europe's more developed countries. When irregular warfare was rediscovered towards the middle of the twentieth century its antecedents had been forgotten. It was generally assumed that the history of guerrilla warfare began with the Spanish insurrection against Napoleon — as if there had been no wars of liberation and wars of opinion throughout history. But since they had not been "revolutionary wars" in the fashionable twentieth-century sense they were thought to be of little interest. It was widely believed, even among experts, that previous to Mao Tse-tung no military thinker had ever systematically studied guerrilla warfare — with the possible exception of Τ. E. Lawrence, an amateur of genius, but no military philosopher. In actual fact the problem had preoccupied eighteenth- and nineteenth-century students of war in many lands; it is of some interest to establish why exactly their writings have been forgotten.1

  Small-war strategists of the last two centuries have anticipated most present day guerrilla tactics. Furthermore, already in the 1820s and 1830s some of them were perfectly aware of the political potential of guerrilla warfare. To retrace the genealogy of guerrilla warfare and doctrine is not a purely academic exercise; the assumption that guerrilla warfare in the post-1945 era is an essentially new phenomenon is not only historically incorrect, it is bound to give rise to misconceptions about the origins, the character, and the future course of "revolutionary war."

  The theory of small warfare (petite guerre) has its origins in the seventeenth century. It was mainly based on the experiences of the Thirty Years' War (which, perhaps more than any other, had been a "war without fronts"), of the Spanish War of Succession, and the wars of Frederick the Great. These early reflections deal with the amount of scope to be given to the activities of relatively small detachments. The American War of Independence provided more examples of the many uses to which small, highly mobile units could be put. However, the literature published before 1810 did not accord an independent role to these units and was exclusively concerned with the operations of professional soldiers acting in close cooperation with the main body of the army. This single-minded approach was modified only in the light of the experience in the Vendee, Spain, Tyrol and Russia. The concept of a national war, "the most formidable of all," as Jomini put it, emerged (or reemerged) only in the Napoleonic age; a war that had to be fought against a united people (or at any rate against its great majority), determined to preserve their independence. Every step in such a war was contested, an invading army only held its camping ground, supplies could only be obtained at the point of the sword, convoys everywhere were threatened or captured. But Jomini also thought that popular uprisings without the support of a disciplined and regular army would always be suppressed, though the suppression could be protracted such as in the case of the Vendée.2

  Eighteenth-century military thinkers were very much preoccupied with surprise attacks, ambushes and other operations which, by necessity, had to be carried out by relatively small units.3 A great many ruses and strategems were listed, such as, to give but one illustration, the despatch of officers and soldiers, pretending to be deserters, to the enemy camp before an attack was launched against it. But there was not much in these proposals that had not been known to the Romans and even before them, and it was perhaps indicative that the Strategemata of Sextus Julius Frontinus (30-104), a collection of such anecdotes, was republished and studied throughout the eighteenth and even early nineteenth centuries.4 Specific works on partisan warfare only began to appear in the mid-eighteenth century and they drew their main inspiration from the activities of the small, light, highly mobile (and semiprivate) units which were employed in the Austrian army since the seventeenth century. These units, composed of Pandurs and Croats, had amassed considerable combat experience in the areas bordering Turkey. Later on, albeit on a smaller scale, such detachments became part of the French army.

  In a book published in 1752, de la Croix, a French officer of English origin, defined the function of "parties" (partis, partidas) as that of moving ahead of the regular army and gathering information about the enemy's movements.5 The author described the many ruses of these "free corps," and defended them against their detractors. In particular, he stressed the need for caution and discipline in all their operations. He had himself served as commander of such a unit and was able to provide many vivid illustrations from his own experience. The book was published posthumously by his son who had served under him. Not all his readers were equally impressed; the Prince de Ligne noted that "every one of our Croats knows as much about war ruses as de la Croix, and if he only could write,
would teach him a few more."6 For a considerable period of time the Croats and Pandurs specialized in attacking isolated enemy outposts, and cutting off supplies. But they did not bother unduly to differentiate between friend and foe, and though no one doubted their courage, their reputation was a bad one; they lacked discipline and hardly ever passed over an opportunity to rob and plunder. A fair example was Isolano (Schiller's Isolani) who was involved in the conspiracy that led to Wallenstein's murder.

  Among the most influential early authors on small warfare was Grandmaison, a lieutenant-colonel in a Flanders volunteer corps, whose book Frederick the Great recommended to his officers. Grandmaison referred to Hannibal's Numidian cavalry, to the Albanian stachiots, to Louis le Grand's light units as forerunners whose exploits were of enduring significance. He dealt in some detail with the qualities necessary for soldiers engaged in partisan warfare: they ought to be robust; not too tall ("better five feet than five and a half"); young but not so young as to be unable to endure fatigue and various privations.7 Similar observations about the suitability of the "shortest sized men" were made by the Count de Saxe:

  It has frequently been proved that a horse which will carry a man thirty leagues a day, whose weight does not exceed eight or nine stones, which is usually about that of a man of five feet, two inches high, will hardly be able to carry one of from ten to twelve stones, half the same distance.8

  Grandmaison recommended muskets, pistols and sabres; the sword (epée) was only good for the parade ground. Hungarian and Ardenne horses were the most suitable for this kind of operation. He was a great believer in night attacks; ambushes at night were almost always successful, causing confusion out of all proportion to the effort required from the attackers.9

  According to de Jeney, one of the leading early small-war theorists, the successful partisan needed an almost impossible combination of talents: a fertile imagination, a penetrating and intrepid spirit, a firm countenance, a good memory, alertness, the gift to size up a situation quickly, and overt self-confidence.10 De Jeney had served as a captain with the French army on the Rhine. His book on partisan tactics, which also appeared in German (Vienna, 1785) and English (it was in Thomas Jefferson's library) was apparently the first of its kind to include maps, sketches, and even advice on first aid. He complained that partisan warfare was the least respected of all the military professions despite the fact that it was the most dangerous and fatiguing.

  In the 1760s and 1770s many more books appeared on the subject, mainly in French and German; one was attributed to Frederick the Great, another to Prince de Ligne, a third to General von Kleist. Some of these books were translated into the main European languages, and a few remained in circulation for almost a century. They contained practical advice on the movement of patrols by night, the capture of prisoners, and gave instructions on how to act if a small detachment was cut off from the main body of the army.11 Some of the authors were not paragons of precision and brevity: Ray de Saint Genie needed six volumes to develop his views on L'Officier partisan (Paris, 1769) and not all the advice was either original or very helpful. Baron de Wüst, a colonel of the Hussars who had served in Southeast Asia, suggested that cats living in haystacks in enemy territory should be caught, soaked in alcohol and set on fire — on the assumption that they would run back to their haystacks and so set fire to enemy supplies.12 But de Wüst also made a great many sensible proposals: the partisan commander should lead an abstemious life with regard to both spirits and women ("il doit se méfier de sexe en général"), he should know several languages, should pay for food (but not punish his soldiers when they forgot to do so), he should never eat dinner where he had eaten his lunch and, at night, he should not sleep at either place. Above all, he emphasized the importance of good intelligence; ideally, the partisan commander should visit a theater of war three months before an outbreak of hostilities. The optimal size of a unit was a thousand horsemen and five hundred infantry, and the commander should have at least the rank of colonel. Among other studies on small war mention should be made of Colonel de la Roche Aymon's Essay sur la petite guerre (Paris, 1770), and Scharnhorsts Militärisches Taschenbuch (Hanover, 1792). The most interesting works, however, were books by Ewald, Emmerich, and Valentinas Abhandlungen über den kleinen Krieg. Andreas Emmerich (1737-1809) and Johann von Ewald (1744-1813) were both born in Hesse, took part in the Seven Years' War and later fought on the English side in the American War of Independence. Ewald joined the Danish army in 1788, eventually becoming a lieutenant-general; in 1809 he fought against Major Schill, the Prussian officer, who started a rebellion against Napoleon. In the same year Colonel Emmerich, aged seventy-two, played a leading part in an anti-French rising in Marburg, and was executed by the French after its suppression. His book, The Partisan in War or the Use of a Corps of Light Troops to an Army, was first published in English in London in 1789.13

  Emmerich insisted that a wartime army could not exist without light troops. He was fairly dogmatic about their number. A unit should consist of not less than a thousand, and not more than seventeen hundred soldiers, all of whom should be volunteers. They should constitute the avant-garde of an army on the march, covering its flanks, and harassing the enemy rear guard. On the other hand, when the main body of their own army was on the retreat, the light troops should cover the rear. Emmerich noted that the commanding officer of such a corps ought to be sober and reliable, a man of initiative and great endurance. Defeat in battle could never be excluded but his unit should never, under any circumstances whatsoever, be taken by surprise. The main danger that faced a detachment of raiders was their own negligence and lack of caution. As an example of unforgivable negligence he cited the American attack in the War of Independence at Trenton, Delaware, in which Colonel Rail, a reliable officer with an unblemished record, was off guard for only a few moments, with fatal consequences for himself and his troops.14

  Emmerich analyzed in considerable detail various situations the partisan was likely to face, such as night marches and attacks. Infantry, cavalry, or mixed units could be employed. Drawing on his personal experience, he described the two months he spent with a detachment of infantry behind enemy lines in the depths of winter, seizing couriers and enemy officers, destroying supplies, generally causing damage and spreading confusion. He had to cross frozen rivers and use snowbound roads.15 Emmerich, like other contemporaneous authors, freely offered practical advice: at night, horsemen, whether on patrol or at rest, should play with the reins of their horses lest they neigh and betray their presence. It was essential to prevent the raiders from falling asleep while in the saddle, and to cover wooden bridges with straw so as to minimize noise when crossing them at night. There were strict injunctions that patrols never dismount or remove the saddles from their horses; dogs were not to be kept, for their barking was always a source of grave danger. Guides from among the civilian population should be employed only if they volunteered. Again and again Emmerich emphasized that a partisan officer needed special qualities, particularly the ability to act independently of his commanding general, who could not possibly give him orders covering all eventualities.16 He stressed the importance of changing camps as frequently as possible; he warned against the delusion that bad weather offered a guarantee against enemy attack, again quoting several incidents from the American War of Independence (General Matthew's surprise attack on Young's House in 1780). Spies should be well paid and taught to be punctual; their identity should be known only to the commanding officer. If a partisan discovered an enemy spy in his own ranks it was always advisable to "turn him around."17 He recommended employing women, and officers who had been dishonorably discharged and who badly needed additional sources of income. Emmerich repeated his commanding general's useful advice before one of his first major raids, two hundred miles into the enemy rear: never offend or mistreat civilians; do not permit plunder; and treat prisoners of war decently.18

  Ewald's contribution to the theory of partisan warfare was at least as important
as Emmerich's; he was frequently quoted by Clause-witz and subsequent authors, but a detailed review seems unnecessary in this context because his views overlap with Emmerich's in most essential aspects. His books survey and analyze the lessons of recently fought wars, in particular the Seven Years' War and the American War of Independence. In his later works he also dwelt upon the experiences gained in the war against revolutionary France in the lzgos.19 One of the important points made by Ewald was that officers — especially young officers — all too often lacked even the rudiments of theoretical knowledge. Any lawyer, doctor or forester would read some professional literature, but a young officer all too frequently believed that he could acquire the essentials of his trade at the gambling table, an inn, or perhaps while he was asleep.20 Ewald described the "ideal officer" pace de Jeney: a combination of manly virtues, modesty, courage, humaneness and intellectual curiosity. Like Emmerich, he stressed that there was no excuse whatsoever for being taken by surprise — but as officers are only human, he devoted several chapters to the techniques of surprise attacks and ambuscades. Certain of his suggestions have become part and parcel of guerrilla practice in succeeding ages: for example, that there are hardly any regions from which surprise attacks cannot be successfully launched, and that some have succeeded precisely because they were carried out where least expected — in open terrain, from behind fruit trees, isolated houses, etc. Not only should dogs and horses not be employed on an ambush, soldiers suffering from a cold and likely to cough or sneeze should not be a party either.21 Given the necessity of relying on the population's goodwill, it was of the utmost importance to punish marauders severely — either putting them to death or, at least, giving them a sound beating. It was important to study the psychology of the enemy leader; if he lacked experience and was impulsive, he would tend to be hyperactive and therefore a likely victim for an ambuscade. Ewald's experience in America taught him that however brave the English soldiers, they were not really suitable for a small war, because they lacked sufficient patience for the difficulties and arduousness this kind of warfare entailed.22