Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present

by Max Boot

  Wu knew that a prerequisite for any offensive was to assemble enough horses to track down the elusive raiders. Horse-breeding stations were established along the frontier, and costly military expeditions were dispatched all the way to the vicinity of modern Uzbekistan to capture more mounts.82 Horses in hand, the Han expanded their cavalry ranks, even going so far as to dress some of their soldiers in the “barbarian” manner, meaning in trousers and short jackets as opposed to the traditional Chinese long coats. Wu also expanded his links with the Xiongnu’s nomadic neighbors, enlisting many of their horsemen in his own ranks as part of the time-honored policy, also beloved of the Romans, of “using barbarians to control the barbarians.”83

  This was part of a broader transformation of the Chinese army, which came to number 700,000 men.84 The need to send troops to distant frontiers for extended periods necessitated an end of reliance on peasant conscripts serving one- or two-year tours—not enough time to master horsemanship or the crossbow. Instead the army came to be composed, in the words of the historian Mark Edward Lewis, of “professionals, nomads, and criminals.”85 Much the same transformation was occurring in the Roman army at the same time and for the same reason—the demands of imperial pacification made it impractical to rely on citizen-soldiers called away temporarily from their farms.86 Thus professional armies may be said to have arisen in both Europe and Asia in response to the threat posed by guerrillas.

  When Wu, soon to be known as the “martial emperor,” finally sent his armies marching into the lands of the Xiongnu in 129 BC, they scored some successes and killed large numbers of nomads. But, like most armies through the ages undertaking large-scale maneuvers against guerrillas, they had trouble finishing off the resilient and elusive Xiongnu. In his attempts to annihilate them, Wu wound up exhausting his own resources, causing “extreme hardship to the empire.” One campaign alone consumed more than half of his annual revenues. Within a few years, wrote Sima Qian, “there was not enough money left to support the troops,” and “the common people were exhausted and began to look for some clever way to evade the [tax] laws.” Coinage became so debased that the emperor had to kill his own white deer and use their hides, cut into one-foot squares, as “hide currency.”87

  Following two defeats at the hands of the Xiongnu and with Wu’s strength fading (he would die three years later), the Han court finally gave up the offensive in 90 BC and reverted to defensive measures such as erecting walls to keep out the barbarians. Over the preceding forty years, more than two million soldiers and ten million support personnel had been mobilized to mount twenty-one separate offensives against the Xiongnu and their allies.88 They had greatly expanded the emperor’s domains, but they had not delivered real security. The improvements were mostly cosmetic. The Xiongnu had agreed to become “tributaries” of the Celestial Empire. But in return for token tribute, the emperor annually gave the Chanyu “gifts” that were worth far more. This was a continuation of the previous policy of appeasement dressed up in rhetoric more pleasing to Chinese ears.89

  The Xiongnu confederation eventually collapsed, but this was due more to civil wars that broke out in 57 BC and AD 48 than to external pressure. Many of the nomads moved south to be absorbed into the Chinese Empire. Others fled west where, according to one theory, they later materialized as the Huns who helped bring down the Roman Empire.90

  The Xiongnu had not brought down the Chinese Empire, but that was never their purpose; they were interested in raiding, not in occupying land or overthrowing the ruling dynasty. Perhaps because their ambitions were modest, they were able to survive longer than any other nomadic empire, including those of the Mongols and Huns, which are far better known in the West. For 250 years the Xiongnu dominated the steppe, and for 500 years they were a major irritant to their southern neighbors. The failure of the mighty Chinese Empire to decisively defeat the relatively small number of “Mountain Barbarians” demonstrates once again the difficulties that guerrilla-style tactics caused for armies in both East and West.

  THE MIDDLE KINGDOM’S problems with nomads did not end with the extinction of the Xiongnu threat. New waves of horse-borne invaders materialized to harass China’s northern frontier. The nomadic threat did not disappear until AD 1750, when the Manchu dynasty exterminated the Zunghars, or Western Mongols, the last of the great nomadic confederations, in a genocidal campaign made possible by the development of firearms and vastly improved logistics.91 Dealing with external attacks was all the harder for many emperors because of the frequency of peasant uprisings orchestrated by secret societies such as the Red Eyebrows, the Yellow Turbans, and later the Taipings and Boxers. These rebels, too, often employed guerrilla tactics and, even if unsuccessful, sapped the energy of the imperial government.

  Dynasties were more likely to launch punitive expeditions early in their tenure when they were more vigorous. As they became more decrepit, they usually resorted to buying off the nomads and erecting fortifications to block their advance. This strategy culminated in the construction of the Great Wall of China, one of the great engineering feats in world history, under the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries AD.92

  None of these measures worked all that well. China saw a succession of “conquest” dynasties rule its northern territory, while domestic dynasties continued to survive in the south. The Mongols in the thirteenth century and the Manchus in the seventeenth managed to conquer the entire empire. It may be doubted, however, whether they were truly guerrillas. Far from being a loose-flowing horde of tribesmen, the Mongol army was a disciplined military force that was trained to operate in units of 10, 100, 1,000, and 10,000. At their peak the Mongols may have had a million men under arms.93 The size and discipline of their armies put them on a different plane from other nomads and elevated them out of the realm of purely guerrilla warfare.

  However one classifies the invaders, their impact was clear: In the last 1,003 years of Chinese imperial history, ending in 1911, alien regimes established by steppe nomads or seminomads ruled over all or part of Chinese territory for 730 years.94 The Chinese over the long run showed a remarkable ability to absorb their conquerors rather than be absorbed by them, thereby preserving their ancient heritage. Much the same thing happened in Europe, where local populations gradually assimilated waves of invaders from the east, north, and south; the Normans, for instance, first appeared in France in the eighth century AD as feared Viking raiders and ended up adopting the French language and Christian religion. But the eventual triumph of their native culture was scant comfort to countless generations of Chinese peasants terrorized by the horse archers from the steppe, just as it would have been scant comfort to French peasants of the Dark Ages terrorized by seaborne marauders from Scandinavia.

  10.

  THE GUERRILLA PARADOX

  Why the Weak Beat the Strong

  THE SUCCESS OF various raiders in attacking states from ancient Rome to medieval China gives rise to what one historian has called the “nomad paradox.” “In the history of warfare it has generally been the case that military superiority lies with the wealthiest states and those with the most developed administrations,” Hugh Kennedy notes. Yet nomads going back to the days of Akkad managed to bring down far richer and more advanced empires, even though “they did not have states and administrative apparatus, they were often dirt poor and entirely unversed in the arts of civilized living.”

  Kennedy explains this paradox by citing all the military advantages enjoyed by nomads, many of which we have already noted. First, they were more mobile than their enemies and better able to thrive in harsh terrain without need of supply trains. Second, in nomadic societies every adult male was a warrior, thus allowing the nomads to mobilize a higher portion of the population than in sedentary societies. Third, many of the nomads, such as the Huns, Xiongnu, and Mongols, excelled in a distinctive technique of fighting—mounted archery—that was alien to their enemies. Fourth, in nomadic societies “leadership was based on skill and wisdom in warfare a
nd hunting.” By contrast, many settled societies appointed army commanders based more on political considerations than on military merit. We might add a fifth and final advantage: having no cities, crops, or other fixed targets to defend, nomads had little cause to worry about enemy attacks, making them hard to deter. Thus it should be no surprise that on numerous occasions nomads bested their agrarian adversaries.95

  But impressive as the nomads’ military success was, it was hardly unique. The nomads’ victories become less mysterious and more explicable if they are seen as part of the long continuum of guerrilla warfare. After all, even in the last two centuries, when states were far more powerful than in the ancient or medieval periods, guerrillas were able to humble superpowers. Think of the Vietnamese defeating France and the United States or the Afghans defeating Great Britain and the Soviet Union. The factors that made these modern guerrillas so formidable were not exactly the same as those of the ancient nomads, but there was considerable overlap. Both groups relied on superior mobility, cunning leadership, the ability to mobilize a large portion of society, and mastery of a style of a war different from that of their enemies. Thus the “nomad paradox” is really the guerrilla paradox: how the weak can defeat the strong. The answer lies largely in the use of hit-and-run tactics emphasizing mobility and surprise, which makes it difficult for the stronger state to bring its full weight to bear.

  There is a further paradox to contemplate: even the most successful raiders were prone to switch to conventional tactics once they had gained the ability to do so. We have already noted the example of the Mongols, who turned into a semiregular army under Genghis Khan. The Arabs underwent a similar transformation. They fought in traditional Bedouin style while spreading Islam across the Middle East in the century after Muhammad’s death, in AD 632. The result of their conquests was the creation of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, two of the greatest states of the medieval world, which were defended by conventional forces composed of expert foreign soldiers such as the Mamluks in Egypt, mainly slaves or former slaves. The Turks, too, arose out of the raiding culture of the steppes but built a formidable conventional army, with their highly disciplined slave-soldiers, the janissaries, replacing the tribal levies known as ghazis. The new Ottoman army conquered Constantinople in a famous siege in 1453 and went on within less than a century to advance to the gates of Vienna.96

  Why would groups so adept at guerrilla tactics resort to positional warfare? In the first place professional armed forces, with infantry, artillery, armorers, sappers, and other experts, gave them the ability to fight on ground not suitable for cavalry and, most important of all, to batter down city walls. Nomadic archers could not have taken Constantinople; this feat required a battery of sixty-nine cannons, including two monstrous guns that were twenty-seven feet long and fired stone balls weighing more than half a ton. Nor were fast-moving tribal levies of much use in defending, administering, and policing newly conquered states. This, too, required a professional standing army.

  A further factor dictated the transformation of nomads into regulars: the style of fighting practiced by the mounted archers was so difficult and demanding that it required constant practice from childhood to maintain proficiency. Just try twisting around in the saddle while riding at full gallop to fire an arrow behind you—the famous “Parthian shot.” Once they were living among more sedentary peoples, notes one historian, “nomads easily lost their superior individual talents and unit cohesion.”97 This was a trade-off most former nomads, or at least their children and grandchildren, were happy to make because a more settled life was so much safer and easier than their previous existence. In the end, no one chooses to fight as a guerrilla, a lifestyle that has always come with great hardships, if there is any alternative.

  11.

  THE TARTAN REBELLIONS

  Scotland vs. England, 1296–1746

  IN THE WEST, following the fall of the Roman Empire, there was, in fact, no other choice. It would take more than a thousand years before strong states emerged across Europe. In the meantime, the continent was broken up into petty statelets and fiefdoms that lacked the resources to field disciplined standing armies as Rome had done. That required the support of an elaborate administrative infrastructure, which no longer existed. Feudal armies were made up of nobles, retainers, and mercenaries who would come together for a few months to fight a single battle or campaign and then disperse afterward. Kings had to rely on the goodwill of powerful magnates to assemble their forces, and if that goodwill was lost the soldiers were liable to walk off the job. If guerrilla warfare is the war of the weak, then during the Middle Ages practically every European polity was weak enough to resort to it.

  It is easy to lose sight of this elemental truth because of the great myth of the Middle Ages—the clash of knights on horseback. This would seem to be the very antithesis of stealthy, low-intensity conflict. But such battles did not happen nearly as often in real life as they did in the epics of the period.98 Siege warfare was more important. So was the raid, or to use the French name popular at the time, the chevauchée (“ride”). That innocuous term connoted something far more ominous: roaming the enemy’s countryside, burning, stealing, raping, kidnapping, and killing at will. The flavor of one of these operations can be gleaned from a letter written home to England by Sir John Wingfield, steward to Edward of Woodstock, better known to posterity as the Black Prince, during his eight-week chevauchée through France in 1355. “And, my lord,” Wingfield wrote to the bishop of Winchester, on December 23, 1355, “you will be glad to know that my Lord has raided the county of Armagnac and taken several walled towns there, burning and destroying them, except for certain towns which he garrisoned. Then he went to the viscounty of Rivière, and took a good town called Plaisance, the chief town of the area, and burnt it and laid waste the surrounding countryside. Then he went into the county of Astarac. . . .” Well, it is not hard to imagine what the Black Prince did there, or in succeeding towns that the English force, five thousand strong, entered. They left a swath of devastation in their wake, stretching from Bordeaux to Toulouse, a distance of 150 miles. Wingfield boasted that “the countryside and towns which have been destroyed in this raid produced more revenue for the King of France in aid of his wars than half his kingdom.”99

  Sometimes the chevauchée was a tactic used to draw the enemy’s armed forces into battle. More often, as in the case of the Black Prince, it was designed to avoid battle against a superior foe. The chevauchée was hardly a European invention—it was also endemic under different names in Arabia, North Africa, Central Asia, and many other areas. The Bedouin of the Arabian Peninsula were particular masters of what came to be known as the razzia, which would make them, as T. E. Lawrence was to discover many centuries later, highly skilled guerrillas.

  Unlike the Bedouin or the Xiongnu, the Europeans of the Middle Ages did not have any particular cultural affinity for a raiding style of warfare; indeed they esteemed face-to-face battle above all. They adopted the chevauchée for purely practical reasons. The spread of castles made set-piece battles a rarity and, when they did occur, made them less decisive, for the defeated side could usually retreat to the safety of its castles. But while fortified castles were hard to penetrate until the spread of cannons in the fifteenth century, the tendency to seek refuge inside them left much of the surrounding countryside lightly defended and vulnerable to enemy raiders. The chevauchée had the advantage of being both easy to carry out and lucrative. The spoils gained thereby could provide sustenance for fighters who could not expect a salary from a paymaster or a meal from a commissariat. It also offered a convenient excuse for bandits and deserters to prey on helpless peasants: they could claim to be fighting for some larger cause when their only interest was in enriching themselves.

  When carried out, as it often was, by relatively small groups ranging in size from a few dozen men to a few thousand, the raid was akin to what we would call guerrilla warfare. When undertaken by larger armies of tens of thousan
ds of soldiers, it was closer to a conventional military operation, especially if the invaders intended to occupy territory, instead of simply grabbing loot.

  The chevauchée was above all a tactic of attrition designed to instill fear in the enemy’s population and wear down its will to resist. As with other manifestations of low-intensity warfare, the practitioners of the chevauchée could not expect fast results. It would take many years of suffering before the issue could be settled. Thus the length of Europe’s wars during the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, which strike the modern observer as perverse. Typical conflicts included the Hundred Years’ War (England vs. France), the Eighty Years’ War (Netherlands vs. Spain), and the Thirty Years’ War (Protestants vs. Catholics in Germany).

  The Anglo-Scottish struggle lasted even longer: 450 years from the first invasion of Scotland by King Edward I in 1296 to the failure of the last Scottish uprising in 1746. The Tartan Rebellions, as we may dub them, show why guerrilla tactics were so pervasive in the Middle Ages—and so indecisive.

  EIGHT HUNDRED SOLDIERS were on his trail, all “valiant and active men,” in the words of the great Scottish poet John Barbour, and they had a secret weapon: “a sleuth hound so good that it would turn aside for nothing.” It was said that Robert the Bruce had raised the dog himself, so that it knew his scent and would follow it unerringly. The pursuers were led by a fellow Scottish nobleman, John of Lorne. He was serving the king of England, Edward I, but he had a more personal reason to track down the fugitive and his “rebel accomplices.” He was a relative of Sir John “the Red” Comyn, whom Bruce, the thirty-three-year-old earl of Carrick, had murdered the preceding year in a bid to establish his own claim to the throne of Scotland.

  Bruce had indeed been crowned on March 25, 1306, six weeks after Comyn’s death, but ever since he had been on the run from the English troops and their Scottish allies. His attempts to meet the more numerous English army in open battle had led to a shattering defeat at Methven, followed by another repulse at Dalry.100 Almost bereft of followers, he was forced to seek shelter in the countryside amid what a modern historian describes as the “wide wastes of moor and bog” where wolves and wild boars still roamed and roads and bridges were “few and far between.”101