Guerrilla Leader

by James Schneider

  After following Shakir’s winding trail, they arrived at the battle of Aba el Naam just as the mountain howitzer opened up with a dull crump. The Egyptian gunners were immediately successful in knocking out the station’s pump room and holing the water tower. Another lucky shot hit one of the train’s boxcars, setting a furious blaze. This hit shook up the train crew, who immediately uncoupled the locomotive and tried to slink away to the south. At that move, Lawrence winked knowingly at Mohammed and they both strained to see it depart. A short time later, they heard a muffled explosion in the distance and saw a ragged plume of smoke rise into the air. When the engineers leapt off the train to assess the damage, Lawrence expected them to be mown down by the concealed machine-gun crew. As it transpired, the machine gunners had suffered pangs of loneliness and ran off at the first sounds of the attack. The train somehow managed to recover some clanking mobility and trundled off to the south.

  By now, smoke was pouring out of the station. Under cover of the bombardment, the tribesmen were able to seize one outpost and destroy another. The enemy withdrew to the center ring of his defensive trenches and prepared for the worst. At this point, the fight reached its crisis: the smoke from burning tents, wood, and boxcars made it impossible to shoot accurately. The decision was made to break off the attack. In Lawrence’s first battle, he could reasonably claim a draw. His forces had captured thirty prisoners, a mare, two camels, and more sheep. They had killed or wounded seventy of the garrison, with the loss of only one man, slightly wounded. Perhaps of even greater importance, the line was shut down for three days and offered proof that Lawrence’s revolutionary raiding strategy could be successful.

  AFTER LEAVING TWO detachments to observe the station, Lawrence returned with the main body to Abdullah’s camp at Ateiba on April 1. The camp greeted the warriors with a huge celebration, with Shakir taking center stage as the primary celebrant, performing an ancient tribal dance before hundreds of cheering Ateiba tribesmen.

  The next day, Lawrence formed another group to return and test a new automatic detonator for the explosive mine. The action had seemed to operate improperly at Aba el Naam. The trek was uneventful, but as the day passed the heat became a cloying, oppressive mugginess. All morning there had been crackles of thunder over the low hills. The two distant peaks of Serd and Jasim were shrouded in gaseous clouds, blackish blue and jaundiced. Like a golden column of papier-mâché, the towering cloud over Serd advanced down toward the riders, throwing up an escort of dust devils in its wake. The escorts now coalesced into two guardian columns on either side of the wall cloud. Dakhil-Allah, hereditary law-giver of the Juheina tribe, looked right and left for shelter, then looked at Lawrence and warned him that the storm cloud would lay a heavy hand upon them. As it closed in, the once hot, fetid air now blew chilly and wet into their backs with a hissing wind that seemed to snuff and blow out the sun itself. The gale raged for eighteen minutes, smothering them in an ocherous wet pigment. They backed their camels into the storm, but the swirling wind spun them this way and that; shards of desert pelted them, driven hard by ropes of rain. Grit and flying debris blinded their ragged advance.

  At last, when the front passed them by, a strong, cold, numbing wind blew down from the north. By midafternoon, they reached the top of the escarpment that paralleled the rail line, but the howling storm swept them off the wet, greasy ridge. Lawrence tried to observe the valley below, but observation was impossible. As the group retreated from the gale, the trusty Ateibi servant of Sultan el Abbud, one of the chiefs of the Ataiba, slipped and fell to his death forty feet below. At this time, the slower, explosive-laden camels caught up with Lawrence and his advance party. The wind now carried with it the Turkish bugle call to supper, and the party then realized they were near the small station of Madahrij. With the encroaching night plunging them into darkness, they decided to camp at a random location near kilometer marker 1121, ironically—and mockingly—the distance to Damascus. The storm made any campfire impossible, so they chose to work instead.

  The charge Lawrence set was an intricate mine with a central detonator primed to fire simultaneous charges placed thirty yards apart. This would catch a train, going either north or south, in the wake of its blast. The placement of the charges took four long hours because the pounding rain had hardened the desert into a caked concrete. The activity created telltale signs of their presence, so it became necessary to trample the camels repeatedly across their path. After nearly a mile of trampling, the evidence was obliterated and the party slunk off, shivering and chattering, to find shelter from the gripping cold.

  At sunrise, the storm was well past. Dakhil-Allah now took tactical control of the mission and led the party in ones and twos back up the hill to observe the railway. The sun soon rose higher and began to dry the storm-soaked clothes of the raiders. They observed a small work party on a handcar pass across the mine without exploding it—as designed. An hour and a half later, a detachment of sixty men stormed out of the station and seemed to head for their concealed position. At the last instant, they veered off down the line to replace five telegraph poles that had been knocked over in the storm. As they continued their work, a section wandered near kilometer 1121 and began to scrutinize the track bed and the disturbed, trampled ground around it. Poking and prodding the area, they found no evidence of the mine and soon went on to other tasks. But just then, farther to the south, Lawrence spied a heavily laden train puffing toward Madahrij. Nine of the boxcars were crammed with women and children and household baggage being deported from Medina to Syria. As the train approached the mine, the Juheina crowded around the top of the ridge, finally visible to the garrison below. The train soon passed over the mine—with no result. In an instant, Lawrence was overwhelmed with decidedly mixed emotions: “As artist I was furious; as commander deeply relieved: women and children were not proper spoil.”7

  Two hundred Turks below began a ragged fire at the onlooking Arabs up on the ridge, and Lawrence was certain the outpost at Hedia, six miles distant, would soon rouse its eleven hundred men as well. A quick council of war was in order. The party relied on its tactical mobility for its survival. The captured German Maxim machine gun was sled-drawn by an overworked and underfed mule. The crew itself were either on foot or on the slower mules. It was decided, therefore, that the camelry would allow the gun crew a long head start back to Wadi Ais and cover their retreat. The detachment of the slower gun crew allowed Lawrence’s party to regain its mobility and offered the opportunity to return to the scene later in the afternoon.

  As they approached the garrison once more hours later, the party drew fire. When they reached the railway, the sun was setting upon them. At that moment Dakhil-Allah, as imam, called the party to sunset prayer. They made their camels kneel down between the tracks and prayed quietly. At the sight of the sunset prayer service, the bewildered Turks stopped firing and looked on with some embarrassment. It was probably the first time the Juheina warriors had prayed in over a year. More momentous was the fact that, as Lawrence recalls, it was the first and last time he ever prayed in Arabia as a Muslim.

  After the service, it was still too light for any further action. Eventually, Lawrence tried to find the location of the mine and dig it up to perform a postmortem of its failure. The other party members eagerly offered to help him in his efforts. To Lawrence’s horror, they began to thrust bayonets and daggers into the ground as though, quite improbably, on an Easter egg hunt. Lawrence knew that the hair-triggered mine would blow a seventy-foot section of the rail to hell and gone, and he would much rather see his efforts spent on a legitimate target. At last he found the mine himself. The postmortem revealed that the previous night’s rain had caused the mine to settle a tiny sixteenth of an inch, enough to disable sure contact of the pressure plate as the train passed over the mine. Lawrence quickly relaid the mine. The party then tore up other parts of the line to spoof their real intentions.

  After more mischief, the raiders cantered for three hours under a d
ull moon until they overtook their detached gun crew. The crew spotted them and, thinking they were attacking Turkish sympathizers, opened up with the Maxim. No real damage ensued after the gun jammed halfway through a belt of ammo. After a joyful reunion, all apologies were accepted and the men slept well into the morning. A casual march took them to breakfast at the first well in Wadi Ais. Just then, as the men smoked and joked after the leisurely brunch, they heard the rolling force of a distant explosion near the rail line. Two scouts had been left behind to hover over the mine and report its effects. The party resumed its advance at a slow pace to allow the scouts to catch up and report the news of the explosion. In any case, the still-wet mud made the march a slog along the flooded Wadi Ais. At dusk, as the party prepared its camp, the scouts lolled into view and were quick to report. The mine was a success, destroying a vital repair train and sending its parts and pieces across the desert like a hammered pocketwatch.

  The tactical importance of the mission was significant: it demonstrated that a carefully laid and concealed mine could become the stealth weapon of choice in the Arab Revolt. Its furtive quality would offer another nail in the coffin of Turkish morale.

  LAWRENCE HAD TRAVELED to the Hejaz to evaluate the leadership qualities of the Arabs to lead their own revolt; that was his chief and essential mission. His own leadership abilities, though latent and still evolving, made his role key in that assessment. Over time, of course, he would himself take on a more central leadership and command role among the Arabs. In his own words he wrote: “I combined their loose showers of sparks into a firm flame: transformed their series of unrelated incidents into a conscious operation.”8

  In Lawrence’s eyes, Abdullah was found wanting as a leader. There was a certain Animal House or frat house ambience in Abdullah’s camp. Most important, Abdullah was never fully committed to the revolt in word and deed, even though the revolt had been his brainchild. Though Lawrence continued to find the emir kind and generous, his initial favorable impression of Abdullah thus changed rapidly.

  Now that the crisis of a Turkish evacuation of Medina had receded—indeed, had been shown to be a false alarm—Lawrence decided that it would be best to return to Feisal. Here he would be close to the true center of gravity of the Arab Revolt and be able to influence it accordingly. On the morning of April 10, Lawrence left Wadi Ais with his party and returned to Wejh armed with the renewed confidence that he had at last grasped the intellectual nettle of the uprising and found its solution. All that remained was to find a true Arab tactical leader who would put Lawrence and Feisal’s strategic vision into effect.

  When Lawrence went off to war, along with virtually every other serving officer, he believed that the war would be short, swift, and decisive; after all, the dead hand of Napoleon and the paradigm of conventional operations had so promised. Four years later, it was evident that the promise had betrayed everyone, though only a few rare and gifted individuals like Lawrence would eventually see beyond Napoleon’s influence and recognize that a revolution in the art of war had truly occurred.

  LAWRENCE’S DESERT EPIPHANY was an extraordinary intellectual and theoretical achievement, generally and historically. Insofar as the accomplishment itself is concerned, it is important to understand that he did not invent guerrilla warfare; guerrillas had long operated throughout military history. Instead, Lawrence was the first theorist and practitioner to revolutionize the guerrilla within the broader context of modern industrialized warfare. The reimagination and reframing of guerrilla warfare was a heresy that few initially grasped. Those who did would follow Lawrence through the halls of legend: Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, Vo Nguyen Giap.

  Reduced to its essence, Lawrence’s heresy consisted of seven Luther-like theses of guerrilla warfare. First, a modern reconceptualization of guerrilla warfare meant that under most circumstances, an irregular force could actually operate hand in glove with a conventional army. Lawrence was able to demonstrate this to the British commander in chief, General Edmund Allenby. This thesis was to become the hardest to prove and the last to be realized. The difficulty concerned the problem of synchronization and coordination between the conventional force and its guerrilla counterpart. Guerrilla forces simply do not possess the command, control, and staff overhead necessary for tight coordination and integration. Lawrence, however, largely overcame these deficiencies thanks to the crucial role of modern wireless communications, as well as his own extraordinary efforts and ingenuity as a one-man commander and general staff.

  Second, a successful guerrilla movement had to have an unassailable base: a base secure not only from direct physical assault, but from attacks in other forms as well, especially psychological attack. A secure base meant that a sanctuary existed where the insurgents in extremis could always escape to and reconstitute their force. Psychological security was just as important in Lawrence’s heresy. The fortress of the mind meant that the irregular was secure in his cause because his commitment was total and without reservation; he was a true believer in final victory. Yet for the individual, victory was sometimes beyond his personal horizon and less significant than the length and duration of the struggle itself. The guerrilla, often dominated by a culture of fatalism, would rejoice in the struggle—for victory or defeat was ultimately in the hands of the gods.

  Third, the guerrilla must have a technologically sophisticated enemy. This technological sophistication meant an exploitable vulnerability. In the case of the Turks, the reliance on railroad technology offered a peculiar weakness that Lawrence was able decisively to exploit. The railroad also meant telegraph technology and a further command, control, and communications susceptibility. For the guerrilla, the often primitive nature of his communications meant further security and strength. The massive decentralized cellular structure of the irregular, united by a single idea and motive, created a redundant, “borglike” coherence that was extremely difficult to disrupt.

  Fourth, the guerrilla’s foe must be sufficiently weak in number to prevent him from occupying or influencing the disputed territory through some direct means of control. Adequate troop strength is always relative to the size of the country, the nature of the terrain, the disaffection of the populace, and especially the determination of the guerrilla. Even if the weak Turkish forces could have found a way to occupy or otherwise control every square mile of desert, there was no known system of logistics that could have sustained them all. Thus there was always enough “white space” on the chessboard where the insurgent could flourish.

  Fifth, the guerrilla must possess at least the passive support of the populace, if not its full involvement. By Lawrence’s calculation, “Rebellions can be made by 2 percent active in striking force and 98 percent passively sympathetic.” As this condition persisted throughout most of the revolt, the rebels had a completely secure rear and worried only about the enemy to their front. A passive populace meant a secure active contingent that had little to fear from overt betrayal. The active force could rely on some element of sympathy that could be converted into direct logistical support, aid, and comfort. A passive populace also meant a potential source of recruitment. With a passive populace, the insurgent could move invisibly through a region. From the Turkish perspective, the passive populace was another opaque impediment to victory, as well as a source of deception and surprise. For the guerrilla, the populace was a continuous and invaluable source of accurate and timely information.

  Sixth, the irregular must have the fundamental qualities of speed, endurance, presence, and logistical independence: he had to present the effect that he was everywhere, every time, all the time. If the Turk stood to fight under the heavy desert sun, the insurgent would be his dark shadow: ubiquitous, oppressive, and deadly. Whether imagined or real, the guerrilla specter sapped the morale and will of the Turk, limiting his combat potential and operational reach to the range of his own barracks. The 24/7 endurance of the outnumbered irregular meant a tactical tempo of operations that could only exhaust his stunned and immobiliz
ed opponent.

  Finally, the irregular must be sufficiently armed with modern weaponry to be able to hit at the enemy’s logistics and communications vulnerabilities. It was less necessary to kill the demoralized Turk than to kill his matériel. Lawrence and his men needed more dynamite than bullets. A dead Turk was a man who could no longer eat and remain a logistical burden; a dead Turk was a man who could no longer fear and spread the virus of terror among his living comrades. Lawrence wanted a living demoralized mob, not an army of dead heroes, for heroism is a powerful inoculation against fear that makes demoralized armies well and willing to fight.

  In summarizing the practicality of his heresy, Lawrence offered the following theoretical bottom line: “Granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain.”

  LAWRENCE’S SEVEN HERETICAL theses had to be put into action if they were to have any military or political value at all. The refinement took time to develop in the laboratory of the Hejaz desert, where the Turkish army would act as his unwilling guinea pig. He pieced together several experimental hypotheses that would have to be tested in practice.

  First, wherever possible when operating with a conventional army, that force would do the dying by fixing in place and distracting the main Turkish army. Lawrence’s rebels would harass and pick the bones of the exhausted enemy: Allenby would hammer the Turks senseless; Lawrence and his raiders would simply knock them over.

  Second, since the media in its many manifestations is a weapon of the insurgent, it is his to manipulate; and if he manipulates it, he owns it. The passive populace was vulnerable to Lawrence’s leaflets—and he knew it. He knew he could blow up a minor skirmish into a huge victorious battle. The news would scream across the taut telegraph lines throughout the Arab world and generate more support, more recruits, and less passivity.