Guerrilla Warfare Read online

  Successive generations of Balkan freedom fighters could resist the Turkish armies for comparatively short periods only, and then only if they had the support of some outside power. Thus Skanderbeg was assisted in his struggle by the Venetians and the Pope (Paul II) with men, weapons and money. The Serbians were supported by the Austrians; the great Serbian revolt known as the Insurrection of St. Sava lasted for thirteen years (1593-1606). When the Austrians made peace with the Turks the rebellion disintegrated.18 The Greeks in their freedom struggle had the support, moral and material, of the whole of Europe.

  Alone among the Balkan peoples, the Montenegrins continued their struggle from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century almost without external help; but even they could not have fought forever had they not had the supply line from the harbor at Cattaro, on the Adriatic, to their capital, Cetinje. In later years they had the active support of the Russians. They were further favored by the inaccessible nature of their Black Mountains (Chernagora). The country was exceedingly poor, roads were all but nonexistent; thus it held altogether no particular appeal for the Turks. A small Turkish army constituted no danger to the local inhabitants and supply difficulties prevented a large army from staying for any length of time in so uninviting a land.

  The Montenegrins, like Skanderbeg and the Greeks, committed acts of great brutality, though it has been argued that this was the natural reaction to the barbaric oppression to which they were subjected. However, while the Turks were not exactly paragons of humanism, it is difficult to find in the annals of Ottoman history up to the nineteenth century many incidents like Danilo's massacre of the Turks in 1702 or the mass murder of Turks (and Jews) in Greece in 1821.19 In some cases there was the deliberate intent of provoking the Turks to countermassacres; without the atrocities in Morea, Philhellenism would not have attracted so many supporters. The Turks, nevertheless, had a bad press in Europe; a British nineteenth-century traveler, with no axe to grind, noted, with some surprise, that there had been a mistaken tendency in Europe to invest the southern Slavs with almost supernaturally noble qualities. In actual fact, the Turks, "whether it be from a consciousness of their own decrepitude or some other reasons," behaved on the whole better.20 He also noted that the Montenegrins greatly exaggerated their successes against the Turks, and that "they forget that they owed their present position not to their own prowess, but to foreign intervention."21 Such exaggerations frequently occur in the reports about their struggle against the Turks; the Christians usually did not face Turkish elite troops and, more often than not, they had numerical superiority.

  Brigandage was no less widespread in the Balkans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Many ballads celebrated the daring exploits of Haiduks and Klephts — both terms meaning robbers. It has been said that, given the severity of Turkish rule, a young Christian villager could either become a cleric, emigrate or turn to robbery. This is a somewhat simplified analysis of the opportunities open to the Balkan Christians, quite apart from the fact that the Turks and Albanians were at least as numerous among the Haiduks. Paul Ricaut, an attache at the British embassy in Constantinople, who chose the overland route on his way home, reported that even the strongest convoys were attacked by the Haiduks in the forests, and that rocks thrown in narrow passes did as much damage as an artillery salvo.22 According to the Haiduk sagas, many of them were shepherds, underpaid and bored, who knew the terrain extremely well and were lured by the romanticism and the material rewards of brigandage. There was also a fair proportion of escaped criminals among them. The gang was usually led by a voivode; the second in command was the bairaktar, the standard-bearer, in charge of accounting, which meant in this context the distribution of the booty. Their work was seasonal; since there were hardly any travelers to rob during the winter, these months would be spent preparing a camp and storing provisions at, if possible, a reasonable distance from their summer field of action.23 Judging by accounts, they kept their weapons (rifles, pistols, yatagans) in excellent condition. They did not rob the peasants in their immediate neighborhood, since they had to rely on them for intelligence, and they also needed their help for a quick escape in an emergency. As it was mostly strangers they robbed they became the object of something like a Robin Hood or Rob Roy cult, not only on the part of the village population but, in later years, among town dwellers as well. The orthodox clergy blessed their weapons and gave them absolution for murder. As the popular poets saw it, the Haiduk was the only free man in an empire of slaves. Whether they were really rebels against Turkish oppression is doubtful, but it is certainly true that, while they did not discriminate between Christian and Muslim insofar as robbery was concerned, Christians had a better chance of escaping alive whereas Turks, including women and children, were killed without compunction. The Greek Klephts, particularly those in the Morea, showed less national spirit; they lived mainly at the expense of poor Christians and "rarely ventured to waylay a rich Greek primate, still more rarely to plunder a Turkish aga."24 To kill compatriots, to burn a Greek village, caused them not a twinge of conscience. Koloktronis, who was the leading Klepht of his age, later became commander in chief of the Greek army and a member of the government. Even the Philhellenes were appalled by the savagery of the Klephts and the Greeks in general. One of them wrote: "Whatever national or individual wrong the Greeks may have endured, it is impossible to justify the ferocity of their vengeance, or to deny that a comparison instituted between them and the Ottoman generals . . . would give to the latter the palm of humanity."25

  Large-scale banditry was not, of course, limited to Europe. To provide but one example: during the last two decades of the Ming dynasty, from 1628 to 1644, guerrilla warfare was endemic in northern China, particularly in Shensi, which was the birthplace of two of the main gang leaders of the period, Li Tsu-cheng and Chang Hsien-chung. With the cooperation of many smaller bands of army deserters and peasants, they virtually divided the country among themselves. Gradually these bands became armies, headed by warlords. The central government, far too weak at the time to defeat these internal enemies, tried to buy them off, or integrate them into the Chinese army. The generals sent to fight them usually preferred to let them escape. On the whole it was a fairly lackadaisical guerrilla war, despite the fact that it profoundly affected Chinese history and that a great many people perished in the recurring combats.26

  Partisan warfare played a notable part in the American War of Independence. It was certainly not a crucial factor in the eventual outcome but it did have a delayed influence on military thinking; Clausewitz and the many theoreticians of the petite guerre frequently referred to it.27 In some important respects it was different from previous wars. American soldiers did not have a good reputation; Wolfe, at Quebec, had called the American rangers the worst soldiers in the universe. They had little training and no discipline; another contemporary European observer wrote about a "contemptible body of vagrants, deserters and thieves" fighting on the American side. A recent historian has drawn attention to the fact that the American settlers were anything but noble savages — they belonged to a wealthy and sophisticated society with a high standard of living; they were willing to defend their homes but it was difficult to make them serve outside the militia area.28 They were not very useful as regular soldiers. Circumstances made them choose a kind of warfare more congenial to their upbringing and more suited to their territory. They acquitted themselves well in the small enclosures and narrow lanes near Bunker Hill. This became the general pattern of the war; the Duke of Wellington was one of the first to point out that military operations were impractical by large bodies in North America (a thinly populated country, producing little food) except where there were navigable rivers or extensive means of land transport. Though their discipline was lamentable, the Americans were good shots and skilled horsemen and had learned about scouting from the Red Indians, whom they had fought for years around Fort Ticonderoga, at the Susquehanna River, and elsewhere.

  Partisan warfare began in earne
st in 1780, after the fall of Charleston; this was the time of Benedict Arnold's conspiracy, when Washington wrote about the "inevitable ruin of our cause. Threatening plunder and confiscation, Cornwallis tried to compel South Carolina to take the oath of allegiance. Among the patriots who retreated to the swamps and the mountains of the interior was one Francis Marion, aged forty-eight at the time, who became the most successful and most famous partisan commander of the war.29 Marion was of Huguenot parentage, a small thin man, hardy and taciturn, whose favorite drink was a mixture of water and vinegar. He wore a scarlet outer jacket and leather cap. In the beginning he commanded a mere twenty men, among them a few boys and several blacks. Dressed in rags, miserably equipped, their appearance caused great hilarity among regular troops. They shot with bullets of pewter, buckshot and swan shot. Their swords had been fashioned from saw blades; they had neither tents nor baggage trains. "We had not seen a dollar for years," Marion was to write later. As the raids continued, the number of men under his command grew to a hundred and fifty, and eventually to several hundred, but there was a constant coming and going; he seldom had the same people serving under him for as long as two weeks at a stretch.30 With the beginning of winter many recruits returned home. The raiders had continuously to be taught the essentials of partisan warfare. Some of them were desperate characters who were out for plunder and would change sides from time to time. "Many who fought with me, I am obliged to fight against," Marion sadly wrote on one occasion. Nevertheless, Marion constantly engaged platoons vastly superior to his own, broke up British recruiting parties, cut off Cornwallis's supplies and forever eluded Tarleton, who had been sent out to catch and destroy his forces. The mobility of his units was impressive; there were days on which they rode sixty miles and more. He instructed his men in the skills of night attack and in the techniques of small war. Whenever a bridge was to be crossed near the enemy camp, it was to be covered with blankets, so that the clatter of hooves on loose planks would not warn the foe. His scouts, frequently posted in the thick tops of trees, were taught a distinctive shrill whistle that could be heard at great distance. Sometimes his men went into action with only three rounds of ammunition apiece; they obtained rifles and cartridges from their prisoners or the enemy soldiers killed. He never informed his men of the anticipated length of a raid. When he established camp in the midst of the swamps, he had all boats in the vicinity burnt but his own. When the British forces burned the houses of the patriots, Marion retaliated by shooting enemy pickets, a practice that was considered unethical according to prevailing military convention. By his tactics of constantly retreating, he exasperated the British, who called him a robber and challenged the "Swamp Fox" to "come out and fight like a Christian." Marion did not deign to reply. He suffered defeat and setbacks: on one occasion, one of his recruits betrayed him; on another, the British discovered and devastated his main base at Snow's Island. Toward the end of the war, his raiders came under increasing pressure by the British, who had meanwhile mastered his tactics. But by now the tide had turned in favor of the colonists; Marion returned to civilian life, married a woman of means and became a state senator.

  Among the other generals who engaged in partisan warfare, Andrew Pickens, Williams and, above all, Thomas Sumter ought to be mentioned. Sumter, like Marion, was a man in his forties when the war broke out. He had been a sergeant in the campaign against the Cherokees in 1762 and subsequently a captain in the mounted rangers. At the beginning of the war, he raised a militia force in Carolina. Unlike Marion, who took infinite pains over detail, he tended to neglect preparations for an assault, failed to reconnoiter and to coordinate his forces, and was forever becoming embroiled in quarrels with fellow officers.31 A courageous and imaginative soldier and a man of great physical endurance, he would attack when the odds were overwhelmingly against him, sometimes against Marion's advice. He lacked strategic sense and, more often than not, his campaigns ended in defeat. The practice established in his units — "Sumter's Law," according to which his militia was recruited for a period of ten months and paid in plunder taken from the Tory loyalists — did not work too well; there was periodic discontent among his troops. He retired from military life before the end of the war and died in 1832 at the great age of ninety-eight. General Daniel Morgan was a greater strategist than either Marion or Sumter but he was not primarily a partisan leader. He employed irregulars of the militia in conjunction with the territorial army — with considerable success, as in the Battle of Cowpens.32

  It has been argued that Washington did not win the war but that, owing to the terrain rather than to the enemy, Britain lost it.33 Washington had realized early on that the war must be defensive in character, that the colonists — even with the help of the French — were not capable of facing the British in open warfare. Thus, the Americans developed their own style of conducting war, and partisan operations became frequent in the South, where the brutal behavior of the British forces had antagonized the local population. Furthermore, only relatively small detachments of cavalry could be deployed and there was only limited scope for artillery in the punishing terrain — wild and mountainous, with impenetrable woods and swamps, with no roads or negotiable rivers.

  The leaders of the Southern irregulars were almost all veterans of the Cherokee campaign of 1761; in the war against the Indians they had learned the importance of taking cover, of moving silently, shooting accurately and other essentials of the petite guerre.34 Their main weapons were the firelock and the saber; except for a short time in 1780, they had no artillery. Marion, considering it a burden, preferred to be free of it to retain his mobility. On the other hand, they occasionally used wooden dummies with good psychological effect. The partisans were mounted although the actual fighting was usually done on foot. In Marion's hit-and-run attacks, frequently carried out at night or at dawn, some of his men charged on horseback, but most would use their firelocks and muskets after dismounting.35 The irregular forces used multiple-pellet loads (buckshot) for their smooth-bore weapons because there was always the chance of hitting more than one man with one discharge.36 But the Americans were also among the pioneers of accurate, aimed shooting, a practice that was not yet widely accepted in the military manuals of the period. Marion applied tactics which Viriathus had so often used in his wars against the Romans: a small detachment would attack the superior enemy, then retreat in apparent disorder and lead the pursuers into an ambush. Furthermore, especially in the early days, the irregular forces would scatter in every direction after an engagement, making effective pursuit quite impossible, and would then meet again after a few hours or days to prepare a new attack.

  Partisan activities in the South caused considerable losses among the British and weakened their resolve (which was not very strong anyway) to pursue the war. It has been argued that the Southern partisan forces were the salvation of the American cause since, if the British and Tories had had only the Continental regulars to contend with, "they would have won a complete victory in the summer of 178ο."37 But this argument ignores the fact that, by 1780, the British had already given up the North, their aim thenceforth being to preserve what they could of the Southern regions of their former colonies. Moreover, the decisive battles in the South, such as Cowpens and Guildford, were fought mainly by regular troops. Lastly, the tactics of the Southern irregulars were used more than once by their British and Tory opponents. While partisan tactics played an important part in the American War of Independence after 1780, they by no means won it.

  The Vendée

  Fighting in the Vendee broke out in 1793 and, after some initial setbacks, the Vendean army was defeated with relative ease by the forces of the Republic. But this was not the end of the affair, for the second phase of the revolt, the Chouannerie, lasted for three more years and there were further, albeit short-lived risings in 1799,1815 and 1832. The fighting affected large sections of western France, the marais and the bocage, the marshes and the forests on the left bank of the Loire; it also spread to Anjou and H
aute Poitou. The rising has entered the annals of history as a classic manifestation of a counterrevolutionary movement, consisting of the most backward, ignorant and fanatical elements among a population that had not yet broken the shackles of their feudal masters, and the clergy, obscurantists unaware of the benefits of the revolution. The army, as the Republicans saw it, consisted of "deserters from all European armies, smugglers, gamekeepers and poachers."38 These men, living in darkness, were manipulated by the royalists and the Church, which had joined forces in a giant conspiracy against the forces of reason and progress.39 This, very briefly, is the traditional interpretation of the Vendean rising and it is, of course, correct in so far as the movement was directed against Paris and the new revolutionary authority. Religious inspiration was strong, stronger, in fact, than royalist influence. But there was no conspiracy; the risings were largely spontaneous, and had more to do with the unwillingness of young people to serve in the army and with the traditional conflict between town and country than with the speeches of Robespierre and the program of the Jacobins. The peasants bitterly resented the attempts of the bourgeoisie to dominate their communes. Aristocrats were prominently represented among the military leaders of the rising but there were even more commanders of very humble origin, more, actually, than among the generals of the Republic; the "nobles," moreover, were not dukes and viscounts but usually mere country squires. Finally, there was the resentment of local people against foreigners speaking another language, heirs to different traditions. The Vendee uprising was, in short, a bloody civil war, cruelly fought on both sides; it devoured about a hundred and fifty thousand victims, more than French losses in Russia.