Guerrilla Warfare Read online

  In short, Engels's view on guerrilla war was that it could only succeed in Europe in conjunction with regular army units; on one occasion he argued that the Spanish guerrillas had been able to hold out only because of "a great number of fortresses [sic]" to which they had been able to retreat. Small and outmoded as these fortresses had been, they could not be captured short of a regular siege operation.125 Outside Europe he saw the conditions for guerrilla warfare as more propitious.

  Nor were Marx and Engels oversanguine with regard to the prospects of urban insurrection. While they commented in great detail on the political lessons of the Paris Commune they did not provide a similar analysis in depth of the military lessons. But the military experience of the Commune was not lost on them and it contributed to Engels's skepticism which became almost total towards the end of his life. He did not, of course, despair of the victory of socialism nor did he think that future revolutions would necessarily be nonviolent. Precisely because armies had become so powerful did they carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction: they had become so costly to maintain that they made financial catastrophe virtually inevitable. Furthermore, the "armies of princes" could be rapidly transformed into people's armies, thus bringing about the collapse of militarism from within (Anti-Dühring). Since 1848 the techniques of warfare had completely changed and the revolutionary socialists would have to adjust their own tactics accordingly. The main reason for the occasional success of the insurgents prior to 1848 was that a civilian militia had stood between the army and the insurgents and either it had taken the side of the revolution or else was so lukewarm and indecisive as to make the regular army units vacillate likewise. In every case of revolutionary success the fight had been won because the troops failed to obey. The effect of the barricade, in any event, was felt mainly on morale. By 1849 the chances for success in an old-fashioned urban uprising had already become "pretty poor."126 The spell of the barricade was broken, the soldiers saw behind it not so much "the people" but rebels, plunderers and the scum of the earth. Army officers had learned the art of street fighting, they no longer tried to take barricades by frontal assault— but outflanked and seized them with a little skill in nine cases out often.

  The changes that had taken place were all to the advantage of the military. Garrisons in the capital cities had become bigger, it was now easier to concentrate troops, and rifles and heavy guns were proving more effective. In 1848 sappers had to use pickaxes to break through walls, fifty years later they had dynamite cartridges at their disposal. On the other hand the insurgents found it more and more difficult to concentrate their forces, and almost impossible to arm them. In 1848 it had still been possible to use homemade ammunition of powder and lead, in the 1890s this was no longer feasible. The workers' enemies wanted the revolutionaries to engage in precipitate military adventures that would lead to their defeat; the ruling classes were far more afraid of the results of elections than of rebellions.

  Engels did not altogether rule out street fighting in a revolution but "only if the unfavorable situation is compensated by other factors": the insurgents ought to be numerically stronger and would have to opt for attack rather than passive barricade tactics.

  Engels's views were shared by Marx who, though hailing the Paris workers (after the event) for daring to "storm heaven" in 1871, had warned them against a premature revolt and was not in the least surprised by the outcome — the fall of the Commune. The barricade was a mere symbol: only if the enemy forces yielded to moral (i.e., political and psychological) factors would the insurgents win. If, on the other hand, the self-confidence of the ruling class remained unbroken, if it did not panic, the insurgents would easily suffer defeat. This would apply even if the military were in a minority, because their better equipment, training, discipline, unified leadership and organization would outweigh any numerical superiority. The insurgents would win, in other words, only if at least part of the army joined them, and this could happen only in a grave crisis, perhaps after a defeat or a split in the ruling class, a loss of its self-confidence, a failure of the ability and will to exercise the power in its hands. Engels preferred not to speculate about such eventualities, nor did he and Marx reveal much interest in such guerrilla warfare as was likely to occur outside Europe. He was by no means opposed to guerrilla warfare; he simply believed, like almost all military thinkers at the time, that it was not likely to be of great practical importance. The same reasons that made barricade fighting obsolete made guerrilla warfare so much more difficult — except perhaps in the most distant parts of the globe. He did not belittle the importance of the colonial wars, but he would have found it difficult to accept that the fate of the world would be decided in the jungles of Asia or Africa. The revolution would occur in the highly industrialized countries where he foresaw no scope for guerrilla warfare.

  Most

  It is one of the ironies of history that Marx and Engels, who showed little enthusiasm about the prospects of guerrilla warfare, nevertheless became the idols of subsequent generations of guerrillas, whereas Johannes Most, the nineteenth-century German socialist who provided an elaborate strategy for conducting "urban guerrilla" warfare, has been virtually forgotten. Born in 1846, a bookbinder by profession, a man of little formal education but of wide reading, he became one of the most successful Social Democratic propagandists of his day. He was one of the first German Social Democrats to be elected to the Reichstag (1874) but had to leave Germany as a result of Bismarck's antisocialist emergency laws. Settled in London, he became editor in chief of Freiheit, which gradually departed from Marxism, extolling the "propaganda of the deed," i.e., terrorism. In 1880 he was expelled from the German Social Democratic Party. Following the publication of a paean on regicide, he was sentenced by a British court to sixteen months hard labor.127

  After his release from prison (1882), Most moved to the United States and in 1884 his Science of Revolutionary Warfare was published with the subtitle "A handbook of instruction regarding the use and manufacture of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Arsons, Poisons etc. 128 Modern explosives, he wrote in the introduction, were to be the decisive factor in the future social revolution; revolutionaries of all countries should therefore acquire them and learn how to use them. Terrorist acts were to be carried out by individuals, or at most by small groups, so as not to endanger the organization. Bombs should be put into public places such as churches and ballrooms; the whole "reptile brood" should be extirpated, and science was providing the means to accomplish this task. But it was not only the rulers, the nobility, the ministers, the clergy and the capitalists that Most wanted to annihilate, "pigs" too should be liquidated. Murder, as Most noted, was defined as the willful killing of a human being and he had never heard that a policeman was a human being.*

  For several years Most had a substantial following among American workers, but after the Haymarket affair he gradually lost influence. Liebknecht thought that Most was a madman, Eduard Bernstein on the other hand called him a genius not amenable to discipline. Bebel wrote in his memoirs that if Most would have remained under the influence of men able to guide him and restrain his passionate temper, the party would have found in him a self-sacrificing and indefatigable fighter. But under the antisocialist laws he went astray and although he had once been a model of abstinence ended in the United States as a drunkard.

  Most's propaganda for "direct action" was based on the assumption that more and more bombs would have to be thrown and more "reptiles" killed before the enemy would collapse. Unlike Blanqui he was not interested in mass action because he felt that the army and the police would always prevail in a confrontation of this kind. Unlike other socialists of his time he thought that the development of modern science favored the revolutionary terrorist — provided the fruits of science were correctly applied.

  The technique of small warfare hardly changed between 1750 and 1900, nor did the practical advice given by the military thinkers of the period. The de
finition of partisan warfare, in a famous early-nineteenth-century textbook, covers the Pandurs and Croats, the franc tireurs of 1870-1871 and the Boer commandos:

  A detachment is partisan, when it operates detached and isolated from the army, and under the genius of its leader, which is not controlled except by orders given in a general manner. . . . The profession of a partisan is a hazardous one. It can only be properly carried out by a skilful, rapid and bold leader, and by a body of men resembling him. . . . The war which he carries on is piratical. The strength of his warfare lies in surprise.129

  In the period under review a fundamental change took place in the function of partisan warfare. In eighteenth-century military doctrine, even among the advocates of the small war, the partisan always appeared in a supporting role, never at the center of the stage.

  The battles of the Spanish War of Succession had been very costly for both sides. At Malplaquet the losses on both sides, killed and wounded, were 36,000, one-fifth of the total strength of the two armies; at Blenheim the percentage of casualties was even higher. The battles of the Seven Years' War were equally bloody; at Zorn-dorf one-third of the participants were killed or wounded, and at the end of Kunersdorf, Frederick the Great was left with 3,000 soldiers out of an army of 48,000 with whom he had entered battle. In view of these losses, more and more critics maintained that a small war was less risky, that it could save a great deal of bloodshed — and achieve the same result in the end. It was also, incidentally, a more interesting kind of warfare, allowing greater scope for individual initiative and inventiveness.

  But the advice was not heeded. The French revolutionary armies used a new system of operations which had been advocated, however, by certain military thinkers for several decades previously. Its main features were rapidity of movement, flexibility, the use of tirailleur tactics, dispersing forces for maneuver and concentrating them for decisive action. Napoleon perfected the "new warfare"; his genius was in the performance, for the basic rules were few and simple: "if I were to give my principles formal expression one day," he told Saint Cyr, "their simplicity would appear surprising." It was all a matter of the economic use of force, a concentration of the greatest number of troops where a strike was intended, a sudden move against the enemy's rear, cutting off his line of retreat, swinging round toward him, encircling and destroying him.130 Such tactics had been used by military commanders of genius throughout history. Napoleon applied them on a more massive scale than ever before. The armies had substantially increased in number; in the biggest battle of the Thirty Years' War, Breitenfeld (1631), 70,000 soldiers were involved, at Malplaquet (1709) the number of combatants was 183,000, and Napoleon invaded Russia with a Grande Armée of some 612,000 men. In Napoleonic strategy, there was no scope for small, let alone guerrilla, warfare; his ideal was Caesar not Vercingetorix. In his comment on Caesar's wars he wrote: "Every nation which loses sight of the importance of a regular army always in a state of readiness, and which opts instead for levies or 'national armies' [i.e., militias] will suffer the fate of the Gauls."131 In the Napoleonic era, as the Prussian General Berenhorst noted, the small war was swallowed by the big war.

  The revolution in warfare lay not so much in the application of new methods and novelty of approach as in the changed nature of war itself. The regular, professional armies of the absolutist age were replaced by citizens' armies and the levée en masse. The war between kings became a war between nations, a people's war. The military system of the absolutist age was based on pressure, threats and punishment. Drilled to behave like an automaton on the parade ground, the soldier fought because he was more afraid of his corporal than of the enemy. With the wars of the French Revolution a new soldier appeared, spurred on by patriotic enthusiasm.

  Guerrilla warfare in its modern form was first waged not by the armies of the French Revolution but against them in the Vendée and, later on, against Napoleon, in Spain, the Tyrol and Russia. It was a system of warfare chosen instinctively, without the benefit of preconceived doctrine. The guerrilla detachments in the Vendée, in Spain and in the Tyrol were no longer operating within the framework of a regular army and subject to its command but, for most of the time, acted altogether independently. Their war was insurrectionist and chaotic, revolutionary and subversive, not in its aims but in its implications for the future. It was, therefore, highly suspect to the European monarchies. The Russian partisan units were dissolved the moment the French invaders had been defeated; Gneisenau's memoranda of 1808 and 1811 about preparations for a popular rising (in which all means to defeat the hated enemy would be permissible) and the famous Landsturm edict of 1813 remained largely a dead letter.

  Yet partisan activities in the Vendée, Spain, the Tyrol and in Russia remained isolated episodes and the doctrine of the great war continued to prevail. The emphasis was on large armies and big battles; combat between small detachments was regarded as the exception. The results were sometimes unfortunate, as the Prussian General Willisen, author of a theory of grand strategy, learned to his cost in the war against Denmark (1864). Guerrilla wars continued to be fought throughout the nineteenth century, not in the main theaters of war, such as the Crimea, but in a different context altogether: in the Polish uprisings of 1831 and 1861, the struggle of Caucasian tribes against the Russian invaders, and the campaigns of Abd el-Kader against the French in North Africa. Guerrilla war became an integral part of national wars, fought mainly against colonial powers or other foreign occupiers, by nations (or tribes) without regular armies of their own. Lastly, there was an abiding interest in the theory and practice of urban insurrection among socialist revolutionaries all over Europe. But there were essential differences between the guerrilla wars on the fringes of the European colonial empires, long-drawn-out affairs in which quick successes were neither sought nor achieved, and the revolutionary uprisings in European capitals which could only prove victorious by rapid and decisive action. They were subject to totally different strategies and tactics: the Circassians and the North Africans could win a campaign by a series of escapes, by wearing out their pursuers; the urban revolutionaries would face defeat unless they managed to overthrow the regime within a few days.

  * When Valentinas Abhandlungen first appeared in 1799 they were the most intelligent and comprehensive guide available on partisan warfare. Valentini's subsequent military record was not unblemished. He was York's and Büchief of staff but they were not quite satisfied with his performance. He quarreled bitterly with Gneisenau. Valentini had the reputation of being a highly educated, easygoing commander, a good diplomat. In 1828 he was made chief of the Prussian army education service, an appointment closely corresponding to his talents and inclinations.

  * In Clausewitz's magnum opus one brief chapter (the twenty-sixth) deals with problems arising out of a people's war. He stressed the moral-political importance of people's war. A war of this kind, Clausewitz wrote, ought to be protracted to be successful. He stressed the importance of the terrain; the popular units should disperse, not concentrate and their blows should not be directed against the main enemy force. But Clausewitz envisaged mainly a militia-type (Landsturm) resistance rather than typical guerrilla warfare. Vom Kriege, 16th ed. (Bonn, 1952), 697-704·

  * Stolzman had fought at Leipzig and other battles of the Napoleonic wars. In the emigration he was a leading member of the West European radical-democratic underground. The last time he saw action was during the revolution of 1848 when at the head of a battalion of Polish volunteers he unsuccessfully tried to reach Frankfurt. Eventually Stolzman made his home in England and married an Englishwoman; he is buried in the village of Millon in Cumberland.

  * As a young lieutenant he participated in Napoleon's invasion of Russia and was the first soldier of the Grande Armée to enter Smolensk. He participated in the Russian-Turkish war in 1828 and was chief of staff of the rebel Polish army in 1831 In 1833 he became an adviser to the British government on Ottoman affairs, visited Turkey several times and organized an Arab cavalry r
egiment in Baghdad. In 1849 he was commander in chief of the Sardinian army. Chrzanowski died in Paris in 1861. There is an Italian biography: G. Roberti, II generale Chrzanowski (Rome, 1901).

  * Rüstow was a gifted, prolific and controversial author on military topics. His best-known work was a history of infantry; it induced the young Hans Delbrück to become a military historian. In 1877 Rüstow became the first holder of a new chair for military science at the Zürich Federal Polytechnic. But his contract was not renewed and he committed suicide the year after.

  * Similar ideas had been advocated even before by the first German theoretician of Communism, Wilhelm Weitling, in his Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit (1842). The existing social disorder had to be deliberately exacerbated through organized theft with the urban Lumpenproletariat as the chief revolutionary agent: the poor were to enjoy the growing disorder as the soldier enjoyed war.

  * Most also pioneered the idea of the letterbomb (Revolutionäre Kriegswissen-schaft, 1873/4). Dynamite had been invented by Alfred Nobel in 1867; it was first used by Russian terrorists in the late 1870s. Previously bombs had consisted of nitroglycerine (invented in 1845 by Salvero) or even earlier of fulminate of mercury (discovered in 1805 by the Reverend Alexander Forsyth but first applied in 1816 by an American sea captain, J. E. Shaw).