A History of Warfare

by John Keegan

  When in response to forces released by the French Revolution, European states were progressively impelled to remilitarise their own populations, they did so from above, and it was accepted with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Universal service eventually came to be associated, entirely understandably, with suffering and death: there were 20,000,000 deaths in the First World War, 50,000,000 in the Second. Britain and America abandoned it altogether after 1945; when it was reintroduced by the United States in the 1960s, to fight what became an unpopular war, the eventual refusal of the conscripts and their families to ingest warrior values caused the Vietnam War to be abandoned. Here was evidence of how self-defeating is the effort to run in harness in the same society two mutually contradictory public codes: that of ‘inalienable rights’, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and that of total self-abnegation when strategic necessity demands it.

  Indeed, all attempts to bring about profound social change from above have proved difficult in the modern world; many have failed altogether, notably those seeking to alter rights of private property or the relationship of the cultivator with the land. Social change engineered from below — the forte of reformist religious movements — has had a better record of success. It is instructive to follow, therefore, the course of twentieth-century efforts to remilitarise societies from below, of which two deserve particular attention. They are those of Mao Tse-tung in China and his followers in Vietnam, and of Tito in Yugoslavia. Both were rooted in Marx’s directive to ‘create popular armies’ as a means to bring forward the inevitable revolution; both followed remarkably similar patterns; both brought about the political results to which they were directed; neither had anything but calamitous cultural effects.

  In the years after the dethronement of the last emperor in 1912, China descended into an anarchy in which a nominally sovereign republican government disputed authority with local warlords in all the provinces. A third party to the conflict was the nascent Communist party, one of whose leaders, Mao Tse-tung, early put himself at cross-purposes with the Central Committee and its Russian mentors. His opponents were set upon capturing cities. He, by close study of the real grievances of the rural populations among whom his soldiers moved, decided that the best means of capturing cities was by permeating the countryside that surrounded them with revolutionary guerrillas. Out of such guerrilla forces, he came to believe, victorious armies could be created. In a memorandum he wrote in 1929, he described his methods:

  The tactics we have derived from the struggle of the past three years are indeed different from any other tactics, ancient or modern, Chinese or foreign. With our tactics, the masses can be aroused for struggle on an ever-broadening scale, and no enemy, however powerful, can cope with us. Ours are guerrilla tactics. They consist mainly of the following points: Divide our forces to arouse the masses, concentrate our forces to deal with the enemy … Arouse the largest number of the masses in the shortest possible time.52

  Mao was wrong about the unique nature of his tactics. In their emphasis on isolating towns by dominating the surrounding countryside, they derived directly from the methods of the horse peoples who had been such peristent enemies of China for nearly two thousand years. But there were novel features in Mao’s methods: first, his belief that the ‘classless’ — ‘soldiers, bandits, robbers, beggars and prostitutes’ — were grist to the revolution’s mill, ‘people capable of fighting very bravely and, if properly led, a revolutionary force’; second, his perception that in the face of a more powerful enemy a war could nevertheless be won if one had the patience to avoid seeking a decision until the enemy’s frustration and exhaustion robbed him of the chance of victory.53 This theory of ‘protracted war’ will be remembered as Mao’s principal contribution to military theory. After his triumph over Chiang Kai-shek in China, it was adopted by the Vietnamese in their wars, first against the French, then against the Americans.

  Between 1942 and 1944 Josip Broz Tito, General Secretary of the Yugoslav Communist Party, also used this process in the mountains of Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Axis occupiers of Yugoslavia were already engaged against a guerrilla army loyal to the royal government in exile, Mihailovic’s Chetniks. Chetnik policy was to lie low until the Axis had been sufficiently weakened in the war outside Yugoslavia for a general national rising to succeed. Tito would have none of that; for a variety of reasons, including the hope of relieving pressure on the Soviet Union but also his policy of implanting a Communist party apparatus throughout Yugoslav territory, his Partisans campaigned as widely and actively as they could. ‘Wherever the Partisans … occupied a region, they … organised committees of peasants to run local affairs and to maintain law and order. Even when the Partisans lost control of an area, these political auxiliaries remained active.’54 Sir William Deakin, then a British liaison officer with Tito, thus described his observation of the process in action soon after a successful German sweep against Tito’s headquarter brigade in 1943: ‘In the immediate moment of our tired escape from destruction, [Milovan] Djilas [a leading Communist intellectual but also a warrior who had killed Germans] departed with a handful of companions southwards to the desolation of the battlefield. It was an unwritten rule of Partisan war that in a lost free territory the bare elements of Party work must continue, and cells be re-formed in anticipation of a future return.’55

  This ‘heroic’ aspect of the Partisan struggle, deeply inspiring to scholars-turned-soldiers like Deakin, reads well on the page. But in practice the policy of waging a politico-military campaign over the length and breadth of Yugoslavia brought untold suffering to its peoples. Their history was already one of bitter and violent rivalry, which the war had reawoken. In the north leaders of the Catholic Croats had taken advantage of Italian sponsorship to unleash a campaign of expulsion, forced conversion and extermination against the Orthodox Serbs. Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina took a hand in the civil war also, while in the south the Serbs of Kossovo were attacked by their Albanian neighbours. The Chetniks, for their part, contested authority in the Serb lands with the Partisans, with whom they had failed to agree a joint strategy, but did not open war with the German occupiers lest that provoke reprisals. Tito hardened his heart against reprisals; indeed, he saw Axis atrocities as a spur to recruitment. He deliberately drew the Germans after him in seven so-called ‘offensives’ that left the countryside through which his Partisans marched a wasteland. The villagers had either to follow the Partisans ‘into the woods’ (a traditional description of the whereabouts of resisters to the Turks) or stay and await reprisals. Kardelj, Tito’s deputy, was emphatic about the desirability of confronting the uncommitted with such a dilemma: ‘Some commanders are afraid of reprisals and that fear prevents the mobilisation of Croat villages. I consider the reprisals will have the useful result of throwing Croatian villages on the side of Serb villages. In war we must not be frightened of the destruction of whole villages. Terror will bring about armed action.’56

  Kardelj’s analysis was correct. Tito’s policy of superimposing a pan-Yugoslav, pro-Communist, anti-Axis campaign on the web of local ethnic and religious, collaborationist and anti-collaboration conflicts already raging, but also of disrupting all truces where he found them, did indeed have the effect of turning many small wars into a single large war, in which he became the principal commander on the anti-Axis side. At his behest most Yugoslav males, and many Yugoslav women, were forced to choose sides. The population was indeed remilitarised from below. At the war’s end, at least 100,000 of those who had chosen the wrong side were as a direct consequence killed by the Partisans, joining in death the 350,000 Serbs killed by the pro-Italian Croats. Yet, since the Royal Yugoslav Army had collapsed in only eight days in 1941, most of the 1,200,000 other Yugoslavs who died between 1941 and 1944, in a total of 1,600,000, must be reckoned active or passive victims of the policy of Partisan warfare. It was a terrible price to pay so that Tito should make his political point.

  The externals of such warfare —
whether Yugoslav, Russian, Chinese or Vietnamese — have made arresting raw material for the art of Socialist Realism. The life-size bronze of the young defiant, trembling with the urge to die for his country, that dominates the central hall of the Yugoslav military museum in Belgrade, brilliantly dramatises the idea of popular resistance; in a different mood so too do Sergei Gerasimov’s canvas of the Partisan Mother, pregnant with a new combatant, impassively confronting the German soldier who has burnt her house, Tatyana Nazarenko’s The Partisans Have Arrived, an ironic pietà of help brought too late to a scene of German atrocity, and Ismet Mujesinovic’s Liberation of Jacje, which, through an episode of Tito’s war, evokes Géricault’s magnificent denunciations of Ottoman oppression painted during the Greek War of Independence. There is much in the same, if very imitative, vein from Mao’s and Ho Chi Minh’s wars in the east: People’s Army men, in neat, worn campaign dress, comforting the victims of Chiang Kai-shek, working shoulder to shoulder with peasants to gather the harvest from their threatened fields, or massed for the advance to final victory under the Red Dawn.57

  Partisan art is, nevertheless, the art of the freeze-frame, literally the cliché, a moment of apparent realism plucked from an entirely contradictory reality. Indeed, the experience of popular struggle, of forcing peaceable and law-abiding citizens to bear arms and draw blood against their will and in defiance of their interests, is unspeakably awful. The people of the West were mostly spared it in the Second World War, the Americans and British absolutely. The few who witnessed what it meant in practice have left gruesome records of what they saw. William Deakin, a young historian from Oxford who parachuted into Yugoslavia to join Tito in 1943, described an encounter with some captured Chetniks:

  During the action that night, Partisan troops captured the commander of the Chetnik Zenica odred, Golub Mitrović, and two of his staff. I was faced with this group of prisoners in a woodland clearing. It was proposed that I should interrogate them personally. This was the first, and only, occasion that such a situation arose. I refused. The British could not be a party to civil war. The evidence was clear. It was beyond my responsibility to to be implicated in questioning Chetnik prisoners about to be executed. I turned away and walked through the trees. A short burst of rifle fire closed the incident. We advanced past the three bodies a few minutes later. This episode was ill-received by the Partisan command. I had long anticipated such a confrontation, and knew that I should have to assume such an attitude, from which I never deviated — at the price of lack of comprehension and a certain ill-will on the part of our Partisan allies. They felt that we were fighting another war.58

  So, indeed, he should have been. There are no circumstances, in any code of justice which the British army recognises, that justify the shooting of unarmed men, not convicted of capital crimes by a court of law, who have fallen into one’s power.

  Milovan Djilas had the honesty in his magnificent memoir of the realities of the Partisan experience, Wartime, to disclose how much more deeply he had been corrupted by the code of guerrilla combat. This is how he, for his part, treated unarmed prisoners who fell into his hands:

  I unslung my rifle. Since I didn’t dare fire, because the Germans were some forty yards above — we could hear them shouting — I hit the German over the head. The rifle butt broke and the German fell on his back. I pulled out my knife and with one motion slit his throat. I then handed the knife to Raja Nedeljković, a political worker whom I had known since before the war, and whose village the Germans had massacred in 1941. Nedeljković stabbed the second German, who writhed but was soon still. This later gave rise to the story that I had slaughtered a German in hand-to-hand combat. Actually, like most prisoners, the Germans were as if paralysed, and didn’t defend themselves or try to flee.59

  The brutality that Djilas learned in the mountains of Yugoslavia was taught to tens of millions wherever ‘people’s war’ was practised. Its cost in lives scarcely bears contemplating. Tens of millions died, either as participants or more often as unhappy bystanders, in China, Indo-China and Algeria. On Mao’s Long March from south to north China in 1934–5, only some 8,000 of the 80,000 people who set out survived; those who did were to become, like Djilas, pitiless executives of a social revolution which measured its thoroughness in the number of ‘class enemies’ it did to death.60 About one million ‘landlords’ were killed in the year after the Communists came to power in China in 1948, usually by their fellow villagers at the instigation of party ‘cadres’, often survivors of the Long March. This holocaust was inherent in the doctrine of people’s war from the outset.

  Perhaps most tragic of all remilitarisations from below was that played out between 1954 and 1962 in Algeria, where veterans of the first Indo-China war — French officers on one side, ex-soldiers from the French Algerian regiments on the other — inflicted the doctrine of people’s war on whichever sections of the population they managed to bring under control. The Army of National Liberation, in conscious imitation of Mao, deliberately implicated villagers in acts of rebellion wherever they could. Selected French officers (many of whom had been forced to study Marx in Vietnamese prison camps) responded by training ‘their’ villagers as counter-insurgents and swearing with their lives that the loyalists would never be abandoned by France. When the moment of abandonment came, at least 30,000 and perhaps as many as 150,000 loyalists were murdered by the victorious ALN. It had lost 141,000 killed in combat and, during the eight years of war, had itself killed 12,000 of its own members in internal purges, 16,000 other Muslim Algerians and presumably another 50,000 enumerated only as ‘disappeared’. The Algerian government itself today sets the cost of the people’s war at 1,000,000, out of a pre-war Muslim population of 9,000,000.61

  The warrior generations to which the remilitarisations gave birth in Algeria, China, Vietnam and what was once Yugoslavia, are growing old today. The revolutions for which they and millions of unwilling participants paid such a terrible price in blood and anguish have withered at the roots. South Vietnam, the prize of Ho Chi Minh’s long war, has refused to abandon its capitalist habits. The Chinese greybeards of the Long March have preserved the authority of the party only by conceding economic freedoms wholly at variance with Marxist doctrine. In Algeria a spawning population looks for a solution to economic hardship either in Islamic fundamentalism or in emigration to the richer world on the other side of the Mediterranean. The peoples of former Yugoslavia whom Tito sought to unite by bloodying their hands in a common struggle against the Axis now bloody their hands against each other in a struggle reminiscent of nothing so much as the ‘territorial displacement’ anthropologists identify as the underlying logic of much ‘primitive’ warfare in tribal society. In the borderlands of the dissolved Soviet Union, from which modern revolutionaries took their inspiration, a similar pattern discloses itself, as newly independent ‘minorities’ use their freedom from Russian control to revive ancient tribal hatreds and to re-fight wars, sometimes within rather than between tribes, which to outsiders appear to have no political point whatsoever.

  As we contemplate this end-of-the-century world, in which the rich states that imposed remilitarisation from above have made peace their watchword and the poor states that suffered remilitarisation from below spurn or traduce the gift, may war at last be recognised as having lost its usefulness and deep attractiveness? War in our time has been not merely a means of resolving inter-state disputes but also a vehicle through which the embittered, the dispossessed, the naked of the earth, the hungry masses yearning to breathe free, express their anger, jealousies and pent-up urge to violence. There are grounds for believing that at last, after five thousand years of recorded warmaking, cultural and material changes may be working to inhibit man’s proclivity to take up arms.

  The material change stares us all in the face. It is the emergence of the thermonuclear weapon and its intercontinental ballistic missile-delivery system. Yet nuclear weapons have, since 9 August 1945, killed no one. The 50,000,000 who have di
ed in war since that date have, for the most part, been killed by cheap, mass-produced weapons and small-calibre ammunition, costing little more than the transistor radios and dry-cell batteries which have flooded the world in the same period. Because cheap weapons have disrupted life very little in the advanced world, outside the restricted localities where drug-dealing and political terrorism flourish, the populations of the rich states have been slow to recognise the horror that this pollution has brought in its train. Little by little, though, recognition of the horror is gaining ground.

  There was little television coverage of the war in Algeria, which ended in 1962, but a great deal of the war in Vietnam, where the effect of the medium worked largely to reinforce the resistance of men of draft age and their families, rather than to mobilise repugnance for war itself. But the televised spectacle of starving Ethiopians fleeing from soldiers scarcely better-fed than themselves, of the savageries of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, of the wholesale slaughter of Iranian child soldiers in the marshes of Iraq, of the destruction of Lebanon as a society and of a dozen other squalid, cruel and pointless conflicts has had a different result. It is scarcely possible anywhere in the world today to raise a body of reasoned support for the opinion that war is a justifiable activity. Western enthusiasm for the Gulf War dissipated in a few days when visual evidence of the carnage it had caused was presented.

  Russell Weigley, in an important recent study, has identified the onset of what he calls an impatience with the ‘chronic indecisiveness of war’. Taking as his subject of study the period from the early seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, when states had at their command reliable instruments of military power in a condition of technical equipoise, he argues that war showed itself not as ‘an effective extension of policy by other means … but the bankruptcy of policy’. The frustration engendered by the failure to achieve a decisive result led on, he implies, to ‘the calculated and spontaneous resort to deeper and baser cruelties’ in succeeding centuries, ‘to the sack of cities and the ravishing of countrysides both in search of revenge and in the usually vain hope that larger cruelties [would] break the enemy’s spirit’.62 The trend of his argument and that advanced in this chapter lie in the same direction. It may be summarised in the following terms.