Guerrilla Warfare Read online

  Having concentrated his checkered little army after Borodino, Davydov chose the area due west of Moscow as his field of operations. At first his men were attacked by the villagers, who thought they were French. To prevent any further such misunderstandings, Davydov decided to wear a peasant's caftan, let his beard grow, carried a large picture of St. Nicholas, and tried to talk to the peasants in their own language.82 He attacked marauders, of whom there were a great many constantly molesting the villages, and in addition taught the villagers how to cope with the menace themselves; they should make the marauders drunk and kill them at night. Their bodies and their uniforms should be buried in the far depths of forests so as to avoid detection.

  Davydov's units liberated convoys of Russian prisoners, seized French supplies, cannon and ammunition. On 12 September, near Viazma, he took two hundred and seventy prisoners including six officers; on the fifteenth he captured two hundred and sixty. Of the released Russian prisoners, two hundred and fifty joined his troops, besides which he also mobilized the peasants so that for special occasions he could count on the assistance of twenty-five hundred men. By trial and error he learned the essentials of partisan warfare; while camping, some horses had always to be saddled, guards had to be changed every two hours, and he was alert to the great value of information to be gleaned from the local population. He wrote with a certain sarcasm that some of his lieutenants had not yet mastered the art of guerrilla warfare but behaved like old generals in the tradition of Austrian military textbooks. The ideal position for a partisan was to be perpetually on the move, the enemy should never know one's whereabouts; the best slogan was ubit-da-uiti (kill and get away).83 On one occasion he captured a Belgian colonel who was out hunting ("O malheureuse passion!" the poor man moaned), on another he seized a giant load of shoes. He also arrested and punished traitors who had collaborated with the enemy. He noted in passing that the peasants as a rule killed every enemy soldier they laid hands on; these had a chance of surviving only if one of Davydov's soldiers was present. In late October the French began to retreat and Davydov wrote: "Even if I had ten times as many Cossacks, even if everyone had ten arms, we could not have taken the tenth part of the booty."

  In due course Davydov's forces united with those of Figner and Seslavin, two other partisan chiefs. Figner was a very brave man but a sadist who killed French soldiers even after they had surrendered. Such cruelty was abhorred by most Russian officers, who refused to serve in his unit.84 The peasants, on the other hand, as already indicated, were not beset by such scruples; one Russian village elder reportedly asked the partisan leaders whether he could advise him of any new way to kill the French — all known methods had already been used on them.85 Seslavin was also a daring officer but prone even more than the others to exaggerate the importance of his operations. He was the first to report to Russian headquarters that Napoleon was advancing to Maloyaroslavets. Commenting on his discovery, he wrote in his dispatch: "The enemy has been forstalled, the French destroyed, Russia saved, and universal peace concluded. . ." — all this as the result of his report. The bureaucrats also engaged in similar rodomontade; the local police chief of the Sytch region wrote in a report to the minister of police: "In 36 days the partisans have killed 1,720 French soldiers for the loss of only 93."86

  Nor was Davydov free from such weaknesses, but he disarmingly admitted that in all armies the number of those killed on the other side are exaggerated.87 He had no illusions about the limits of partisan warfare; as he put it: "Even on the retreat from Moscow, Napoleon's Old Guard went through the Cossack crowd like a warship with a hundred guns through a flotilla of fishing boats." Davydov made some interesting comments on partisan warfare both in his "diary" and in a theoretical essay published in 1836.88 Partisan warfare, as he saw it, was neither the burning of one or two granaries nor a major frontal attack against the enemy's main forces but something in between. He referred both to the Spanish guerrilla experience and to the Suvorov tradition, to the importance of surprise and flexibility. "The partisan acts more through his skill than his strength." General staff officers and bureaucrats were quite unsuitable for this kind of warfare. The partisan needed enterprise, sagacity, strictness, unselfishness. He should not be fussy, should be ready to sleep on straw in the open. His life was a daily encounter with death.

  Davydov made the important point that large modern armies had become especially vulnerable to the effects of partisan warfare. They needed ammunition and food, hospitals, clothes; their supply lines could easily be cut by light cavalry units. The partisan could also destroy bridges, collect important intelligence and, in general, demoralize the enemy and give a moral uplift to one's own side.89 He polemicized against foreign military theorists who maintained that cavalry units should only be used as mounted infantry in the general battle. The Russian cavalry, he claimed, was exceedingly mobile and courageous, and could operate independently.

  Davydov was not taken quite seriously by many of his contemporaries; he felt himself forever persecuted by enemies and not entirely without reason. The great partisan leader whose fame had spread all over Europe was only slowly and with great reluctance given promotion, and this despite the fact that General Ermolov, his cousin and protector, was one of the leading Russian commanders of the day. He was pensioned off in 1823, but at his own insistence was permitted to rejoin the army, took part in the Polish and Turkish campaign and died in 1839 of a stroke at the age of fifty-five.

  Davydov's unit was active between Gzhatsk and Viasma, about a hundred miles from Moscow; Seslavin and Vadbolski raided the countryside between Mozhaisk and Moscow; Kudashev operated in the direction of Serpukhov, Figner near Zvenigorod; while there were others, like Benkendorf and Dorokhov, who also took a prominent part in partisan warfare. Napoleon later maintained that he had not lost a single courier, and not a single convoy, a claim anything but supported by his correspondence with his generals. In a letter to Berthier, for instance, Napoleon wrote that Marshal Ney was losing more soldiers in providing protection for his supply convoys than on the field of battle. Of course, if the accounts of the various partisan leaders themselves are to be believed, each of them had defeated Napoleon single-handedly. Only a few displayed modesty and a sense of proportion. One of them was Prince Volkonsky, the future Decembrist, who was to write in his memoirs: "In describing the actions of my guerrilla detachment, I shall, unlike many partisans, refrain from mystifying my readers with stories of unprecedented exploits and dangers. Thus, by scrupulous avoidance of the exaggerated accounts of other partisans, I shall inspire confidence in my notes."90 The fantastic accounts of the partisan leaders, the quarrels between them as to who had committed more heroic acts (and who should be given the higher orders and distinctions) made the public doubt whether partisan activities had played any significant part at all. Regular army officers returning after victory over Napoleon had finally been won also denigrated the role of the partisans. It was Soviet historians who, later on, were inclined to put the emphasis on the role of the peasants in the war against France.

  That the partisan leaders performed acts of great individual heroism has been fully established. Figner—"a Northerner by birth with a round face, bright eyes who knew half a dozen languages"91 — went alone into occupied Moscow, and with the help of some urban ruffians killed French stragglers at night. Disguised as a muzhik, he even tried to enter the Kremlin but was stopped by the guards. Another time, dressed in a French officer's uniform, he entered an enemy camp without even knowing the password. With an air of authority he ordered the sentinels to stand to attention. Figner was killed when the Russian army crossed the Elbe in 1813. Seslavin on one of his reconnaissance raids crept up to a French sergeant, lifted him onto his saddle and bore him off to his unit. Similar tales of bravery were related about Dorokhov who appealed to the peasants to "arm yourselves and unite with us for the destruction of the enemy of the faith and the fatherland who destroys our churches."92 Soviet historians have uncovered the valiant action of a
peasant woman, Praskovia of the village of Sokolovo, who allegedly defended herself with a pitchfork against six Frenchmen including a colonel, killed three and put the others to flight. Chetvertakov, a former private in the Russian army, reportedly gathered a detachment of three hundred partisans which was joined on occasion by several thousand peasants and defeated an entire French batallion. Other peasant partisan units were headed by Samus, Stepan Eremenko, Ermolai Vasilyev.

  There was some resistance in the villages and the exploits of individuals were magnified by patriotic historians. The attitude of the authorities toward such manifestations of patriotism was ambivalent. On the one hand there was the appeal of Rostopshin, the governor of Moscow, calling for a people's war; on the other, there were orders not to arm the peasants — even to disarm them. For there was always the danger that in the end they would turn against their masters.

  If the war against Napoleon became a people's war, it was in part the French themselves who were responsible. During their invasion of Russia they burned villages, killed civilians and prisoners. "Is this the civilization we brought to Russia?" Caulaincourt complained in a letter to the emperor.

  Napoleon was defeated, according to Russian historians, by the combined resistance of the Russian people; the war on two fronts caused great losses to the French and the attacks in the rear compelled Napoleon to withdraw forces from the front. But partisan warfare, in actual fact, only began on a substantial scale, as already pointed out, after the Battle of Borodino. Since the French order to retreat from Moscow was given a mere six weeks later, it becomes clear that partisan warfare could not possibly have been of decisive influence. Some partisan units continued to pursue the retreating French army, rounding up stragglers. But these would have been picked up anyway by the advancing regular army units. The peasants were chiefly preoccupied with protecting their own villages and later on with seizi ng the supply trains of the retreating French army. One of the earliest Russian appraisals of partisan warfare was perhaps the fairest: the partisans were as yet inexperienced, they did not take a single town. But their operations were useful, and caused some harm to the French; above all, their very appearance in the enemy's rear kept up morale among the Russian population. This, in the final analysis, was the main contribution of partisan warfare in Russia in 1812.

  *The Romans used quadrillage and, generally speaking, had fairly developed techniques of counterguerrilla operations as described, for instance, in Sallust's account of the Jugurthan war. For an excellent summary, see S. L. Dyson, 'Native revolts in the Roman Empire,' Historia (Zeitschrift) (1971), 239-274.

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  Small Wars and Big Armies

  The century between Napoleon's fall and the outbreak of World War I saw a notable spreading of military conscription and the steady growth of large standing armies. Firepower increased enormously, while the revolutionary changes in the means of transport made for the first time for the rapid assembling and moving of vast contingents of men. Armies became highly organized and specialized bodies complete with their general staffs, their logistic support and supply departments. Military doctrine everywhere developed along parallel lines and strategy was taught as a (more or less) exact science. Militarists and antimilitarists disagreed strenuously about virtually everything, but on one point there was grim unanimity, a universal recogniton that the coming war would be a war of masses, with the outcome hinging on which side could get fastest with the greatest quantity of men and materiel to the particular area of operations. Pacifists, such as Jean de Bloch, argued that the immense improvement in the mechanism of slaughter and the unbearably high cost of modern war would lead to its abolition. The militarists put their own firm faith in the decisive value of bold leadership and maximum organization.

  In the light of all this, it is hardly surprising that scant attention was paid to the possibility of guerrilla warfare; it seemed that, with the invention of the machine gun and the swift evolution in communications, the age of partisan warfare had come to an end. Small bodies of soldiers, or of civilians acting behind the enemy lines, could perhaps have a certain nuisance value, but it was unthinkable that they could effectively influence the result of a battle, let alone a campaign or a war. European armies, in short, prepared for nothing but regular warfare.

  Such single-minded concentration on war between great masses of men and the unwillingness to consider any other possibilites seems nonetheless a little curious in retrospect, for between 1815 and 1914 there were only very few major wars but a great many guerrilla campaigns. Even the major wars (such as the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871) had been accompanied by partisan operations. Most of the campaigns throughout the British Empire and in Latin America were waged against (or sometimes between) irregular forces. Guerrilla tactics figured prominently in the Polish insurrection, the Italian and Greek wars of independence, as well as in the Spanish civil wars, in the resistance of the Caucasians against the Russians and of Abd el-Kader against the French in North Africa. This list, though by no means complete, shows a discrepancy between military reality and strategic doctrine. All the stranger considering that the regular armies unprepared for irregular warfare had themselves suffered nasty surprises on more than one occasion: the Germans in 1870 were convinced that the war was over after they had defeated the regular French armies; the British in South Africa had similar illusions after the capture of Bloemfontein and Pretoria. In the event, the Germans and the British found it more difficult to cope with the irregulars, and this despite the fact that partisan warfare was almost unplanned and uncoordinated. Surely such experiences should have induced military leaders and theorists to give at least a passing thought to the possibility, however remote, that guerrilla warfare still had something of a future.

  One does not have to look far for the reasons for such blindness. There was, to begin with, instinctive resistance to the employment of forces that could not be fitted into the framework of organized and disciplined armies. Guerrilla warfare was erratic, unprofessional, unpredictable; it violated all established rules. It might dovetail neatly with right- or left-wing anarchist thinking, but it was altogether alien to the makeup of the military mind. To conduct guerrilla warfare was a counsel of despair, an ultima ratio, to be applied by a weaker army in the case of occupation; to prepare for such an eventuality was tantamount to defeatism. It could be argued, in addition, that most nineteenth-century guerrilla wars had taken place outside Europe, between or against backward nations that were as yet incapable of conducting any other form of warfare. It seemed only natural to assume that with the spread of civilization — or, to be precise, with the spread of modern technology — guerrilla warfare would disappear even in distant and underdeveloped lands. Finally, there was the indisputable fact that, with very rare exceptions, partisans, guerrillas and franc tireurs had invariably been defeated in the end, however brave and well led, unless they had fought in conjunction with regular armies. If in later perspective the nineteenth-century strategists were mistaken in belittling or altogether ignoring guerrilla warfare, there were certainly weighty enough reasons at the time to bolster their attitude.

  But even it guerrilla warfare was deemed a thing ot the past, it was still very much in evidence, and it is to its more important manifestations in the last century that we next have to turn. Among the many guerrilla wars of the period it is impossible to find two that were identical; each had its own specific character and political context. In Italy and Spain, in Poland and Greece, regular and irregular warfare were intermingled, professionals applying unorthodox tactics, andguerrilleros playing regular soldiers. Guerrilla campaigns in Latin America differed in basic respects from jungle, mountain and "savage" warfare in Asia and Africa. There were some striking resemblances between Shamil's and Abd el-Kader's campaigns — and not alone because both leaders were pious Moslems — but the political, cultural and physical backgrounds had little in common; one war was conducted in the mountains, the other mainly in the desert, of
necessity making the tactics used by and against the guerrillas in each case markedly dissimilar. The history of guerrilla war, in brief, varied from country to country, and sometimes even from province to province. To attempt in these circumstances to formulate a definitive theory of guerrilla warfare is a vain undertaking.

  Latin America

  Latin America is the guerrilla continent par excellence. In the entire history of Central and South America it is difficult to point to more than a handful of full-scale, regular wars; on the other hand, there were countless external and internal guerrilla wars, too many, in fact, for enumeration. This can be laid, to a certain extent, to their own particular history and geography — the wide-open thinly populated spaces, the governments which were too poor to afford sizable regular armies. It had long been the Latin American military disposition in any event to incline more to the convention of small flexible fighting units than to large, rigidly disciplined armies. Moreover, army and politics have been traditionally closer linked in Latin America than in other parts of the world; the armies were on the whole more politically oriented, and political life more militarized than elsewhere. The dividing line between guerrilla war, banditry, the regular army and politics was, in fact, altogether blurred.

  The Latin American tradition oi guerrilla warfare predates the wars of independence. In the Andean regions a small white minority ruled the exploited and mistreated native Indians who periodically revolted against their masters. The most widespread risings were those of Tupac Amaru (1781-1782), who claimed to be of royal (Inca) descent, and of Pumacahua (1814-1815) — also apparently of Inca ancestry,1 Tupac Amaru's revolt, which almost two centuries later inspired the Uruguayan urban guerrillas, began with a successful ambush in which twelve of his men captured the local corregidor and seized a quantity of guns. His following soon swelled to forty thousand and later to sixty thousand men who were, however, not much of a fighting force; undisciplined and poorly equipped, careless and often drunk. Tupac Amaru made a halfhearted, if somewhat unavailing, attempt to attract a few whites and the Negro slaves, and with his nonetheless still growing army, tried to defeat the enemy in frontal assaults by sheer numbers (the siege of Cuzco). But these operations failed and in the end the Indians were decisively defeated by a slow-moving seventy-year-old Spanish general commanding untrained troops, numerically far inferior to the Indians.2 Tupac Amaru was sentenced to death and his body dismembered, he first having been compelled to watch the execution of his wife along with all his relatives. After his death the rebellion continued under Diego Tupac Amaru. This was the bloodiest period of the rising, the policy of the Indians being to kill all whites and mestizos. They besieged La Paz and Puno but could gain no major victory. These were curious battles accompanied apparently by more noise than actual fighting; the operations were stopped from time to time by agreements which neither side had any intention of keeping.