Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present
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The inhabitants of this rough land were poor but extraordinarily tough and hardy. They fought with spears, long-handled Lochaber axes, and two-handed broadswords more than five feet in length.102 The men of the Highlands wore a kilt, which today has become a decorative item of clothing but in those days was quite practical. Since, as one historian notes, “men were frequently wading deep in water and travelling long distances through days of rain,” it made sense to wear the “loose kilted plaid,” which “allowed quick drying, and could easily be stripped off and wrung,” rather than breeches which “stuck to and galled the skin or induced rheumatism and other ills by keeping the legs constantly wet and cold.”103 Wearing a kilt and carrying a sword, Bruce’s few followers could travel long distances with nothing more to sustain them than a little water and a bag of oatmeal.
Often Bruce himself did not have even that much. A contemporary chronicler, John of Fordun, described Bruce as “passing a whole fortnight without food of any kind to live upon, but raw herbs and water.” Sometimes he had to walk barefoot because his shoes “became old and worn out,” and he had to sleep in caves to avoid detection. He was “an outcast among the nobles,” most of whom had accepted English rule—as Bruce himself had done for four years before making his own bid for power. “And thus,” wrote John, “he became a byword and a laughing-stock for all, both near and far to hiss at.”
In desperation Bruce was forced to undertake a mode of warfare that could not have come easily to a great feudal lord. He had been brought up to view the cavalry charge as the epitome of combat—to dream of leading a great host with heraldic banners flying. He was inclined to agree with a nephew who counseled him, “Ye should endeavor to make good your right in open battle, and not by stratagem and craft.” But Bruce was wise enough to see that “he could in nowise harry his foes with equal forces,” so he turned to stratagem after all. “Speed, surprise, mobility, small-scale engagements, scorched earth and dismantling of fortresses—these were to be the hallmarks of his campaigns,” writes Bruce’s foremost modern biographer, Geoffrey Barrow. He adds that for the would-be king to act “based on his belief in the supreme virtue of guerrilla warfare . . . was not only a revolutionary decision, it was proof of his genius and imagination.” But could it possibly work?
William Wallace, the leader of an earlier Scottish insurrection in which Bruce had played a minor and ambiguous part, had tried similar stratagems, and, notwithstanding some initial successes, he had failed miserably. In 1305 he was captured and sent to London, where he was given the standard punishment for treason: he was briefly hanged, then cut down “half-living” to have his genitals sliced off and internal organs ripped out of his chest before he was decapitated and his body hacked into pieces. His head was placed on London Bridge, and his quartered remains were sent to four different cities.104 Bruce knew he risked a similar fate. Already his family members had paid a steep price for his effrontery: his sister and daughter were imprisoned in cages, and three brothers had been executed. But to hang this “Scottish traitor,” the English would first have to catch him. And that was no easy matter.
In 1307, when the bloodhound got on his trail, the guerrilla king was hiding near Cumnock, south of Glasgow. He had but three hundred men and thus had no intention of risking battle against John of Lorne’s forces. He decided to break up his men into three different groups to facilitate their escape. But the hound was not fooled. He ignored the other two groups and kept on Bruce’s track. Bruce then divided his followers again into parties of three—and again the dog held a “straight course” after his former master. Bruce now decided it was every man for himself and set off accompanied only by his foster brother. The hound still followed him “without wavering.” Seeing which way the dog went, John of Lorne ordered five of his speediest men to race ahead and cut off the fugitives. Knowing there was no escape, Bruce turned and stood his ground, great sword in hand. John Barbour described what happened next in his epic poem, The Brus (The Bruce), completed in 1376:
Soon the five came in the greatest haste, with mighty clamour and menace. Three of them went at the king, and the other two, sword in hand, made stoutly at his man [the foster brother]. The king met the three . . . and dealt such a blow at the first that he shore through ear and cheek and neck to the shoulder. The man sank down dizzily, and the two, seeing their fellow’s sudden fall, were affrighted, and started back a little. With that the king glanced aside and saw the other two making full sturdy battle against his man. He left his own two, and leapt lightly at them that fought with his man, and smote off the head of one of them. Then he went to meet his own assailants, who were coming at him right boldly. He met the first so eagerly that with the edge of his sword he hewed the arm from the body.
. . . [S]o fairly it fell out that the king, though he had a struggle and difficulty, slew four of his foemen. Soon afterwards his foster-brother ended the days of the fifth.105
Bruce was “drenched in sweat,” but he had no time to exult in this small victory. He saw John of Lorne’s men coming up fast with their bloodhound. He and his foster brother had to run off into the woods. From 1306 to 1314 that is mostly what he did—run and run some more. During what were literally his wilderness years, he persevered through what John of Fordun summed up as “mishaps, flights and dangers; hardships and weariness; hunger and thirst; watchings, and fastings; nakedness, and cold; snares, and banishment; the seizing, imprisoning, slaughter and downfall of his near ones”106—and gradually, despite all that, he gained the upper hand. He started to push the English out of their captured territory, even raiding into northern England on occasion.
The key obstacles were the English castles that dotted the Scottish countryside. Since the Scottish rebels lacked proper siege engines, they had to resort to daring commando raids. On one occasion, Bruce’s men even donned black capes and walked on their hands and knees in the dark pretending to be cows in order to get close enough to clamber up rope ladders and seize a redoubt.107
BY 1314 THE Scots felt strong enough to challenge the English, now led by Edward I’s ineffectual son, Edward II, in open battle at Bannockburn. Bannockburn was a glorious Scottish victory and, in the words of a medieval chronicle, “an evil, miserable, and calamitous day for the English.”108 Yet it no more determined the outcome of the war than had previous clashes at Stirling Bridge and Falkirk. The war ground on, ceaselessly, remorselessly, unendingly, interrupted only by brief “peaces” and “truces” that were inevitably violated.
Bruce and his successors would launch repeated chevauchées into northern England, where, according to a medieval chronicle, they “ravaged and burnt.”109 They also stole everything they could carry away, and extorted protection money from the locals. The English army moved too slowly to stop them, but attacks on a sparsely settled frontier region could not bring England to heel. In desperation, Bruce tried other tactics, such as invading Ireland to harass its English occupiers and even attempting to kidnap the queen of England from her home in York.110 However bold and imaginative, these ploys failed.
King Robert I died in 1329 with his country still facing the constant threat of English invasion. Scotland was simply too small and too poor to defeat its southern neighbor. Its population in the early fourteenth century was less than a million; England’s was 5.5 million.111 But it was too tough and prickly to be subdued.
For their part, English monarchs lacked sufficient resources or willpower to pacify the sprawling Scottish countryside. Most of their invasions followed a pattern: after an initial victory or two, the English army would be forced to slink home because the Scots’ scorched-earth tactics made it impossible to stay in the field. During one such expedition in 1322, the ravenous English foragers were said to have found only one lame cow in the entire Lothian region.112 Those today who imagine that long-running conflicts—say, over Kashmir or Palestine—can be resolved neatly and expeditiously through negotiations ignore the lesson of the Anglo-Scottish wars: conflicts of blood and soil, fought
as a series of skirmishes between guerrillas and regulars, can drag on for centuries even among peoples far closer in religion and outlook than the Indians and Pakistanis or the Israelis and Palestinians.
Organized warfare between Scotland and England finally petered out in the sixteenth century, although the final clash between Scottish insurgents and English armies did not occur until the Jacobite rising of 1745–46 aimed at restoring the Catholic Stuarts to the throne of Great Britain. For centuries before that the frontier was unsettled by the attacks of border reivers (from the Old English word meaning robbers), who chose to cloak their thievery in a nationalistic guise.
THE HISTORIAN Eric Hobsbawm coined the term “social bandits” to describe “peasant outlaws” who “are considered by their people as heroes, as champions, avengers, fighters for justice, perhaps even leaders of liberation, and in any case as men to be admired, helped and supported.” The mythical archetype was Robin Hood. Rob Roy MacGregor in Scotland (1671–1734), Jesse James in America (1847–1882), Ned Kelly in Australia (1855–1880), and Pancho Villa in Mexico (1878–1923) were real-life examples. Less famous but more significant were the klephts and haiduks, the Christian bandits who battled Ottoman overlords in the Balkans for five hundred years. Hobsbawm notes that the prevalence of such men “is one of the most universal social phenomena known to history”; they flourish wherever social order has broken down, including today in such areas as the triborder region of South America. In years past rough badlands such as Scotland, Corsica, Sicily, Spain, and the Balkans were particularly fertile pastures for social bandits until the state became too strong to resist.113
In most of the wars fought in Europe between the fall of Rome and the rise of nation-states in the seventeenth century, it was not easy to tell “social bandits” from soldiers, regulars from irregulars. All victimized hapless peasants in equally savage fashion for their own benefit. Friedrich Schiller, the eighteenth-century poet, playwright, and historian, wrote with great feeling of how during the Thirty Years’ War in the preceding century his native Germany “was laid waste by the desolating bands” of various captains and “lay exhausted, bleeding, wasted, and sighing for repose.”114 This was the guerrilla version of total war, a struggle of all against all, and it was the natural result of the decline of nation-states and conventional armies in the millennium after the fall of Rome.
All that was about to change, at least in the West. The years after 1648, when the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War, would see the rise of increasingly powerful and sophisticated states—and also the rise of increasingly powerful and sophisticated insurgent groups to challenge their power. That is one of the most enduring dynamics in the history of warfare: as a state becomes more capable in its defense, so guerrillas become more capable in their offense.
12.
WAR BY THE BOOK
The Counterinsurgents’ Advantage
A LOOK AT the ancient and medieval worlds suggests yet another paradoxical conclusion: the most primitive guerrillas were the most successful. There were a few notable insurgents such as Judas Maccabeus and Robert the Bruce who operated with a fair degree of sophistication and managed to achieve a fair degree of success. They were sensitive to the need to build political support and to establish political institutions to replace those of their enemies. But such successes were rare, in no small part because ancient rebels lacked the ability to appeal to a hostile population over the head of its leader—and, in those days when autocracy was the dominant form of government, few populations could do much anyway to sway the decisions of their emperor, king, or chief. Most insurgents suffered the fate of Viriathus, Quintus Sertorius, Spartacus, Vercingetorix, Boudicca, and others who died battling Roman power. Lacking the ability to call in outside aid or state their case to the mass media (which did not yet exist), ancient insurgents were generally on their own to face the pitiless power of a pagan polity.
The most successful guerrillas of the ancient world were the nomads who brought down the Roman Empire and seized large chunks of the Chinese Empire and other Eurasian states. They did not try to organize a revolution within a state, a notoriously difficult undertaking. Rather they chipped away at the state’s outer defenses until, in some cases, the entire edifice collapsed. The nomads’ achievement, while great, was almost wholly negative: with the exception of the Arabs, Turks, Moguls, and Manchus, who blended with more-settled societies, nomads could not build lasting institutions. Nomadic empires generally crumbled after a generation or two. But, as long as they were around, nomads had few equals in their ability to inflict catastrophic costs on established states through the use of hit-and-run tactics. All of the great commanders of antiquity—Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, Scipio—grappled with the problem. Many of them discovered, as did Alexander the Great during his Central Asian campaign in 329–327 BC, that fleet nomads were harder to defeat than massive conventional armies.
While the nomadic menace had once been of overriding, indeed existential, importance to the world’s greatest states, by the seventeenth century it was becoming a historical curiosity. The rise of the gunpowder empires (British, French, Russian, Prussian, Turkish, Indian, Chinese), with powerful bureaucracies able to marshal vast resources, was creating a new world order. Potent in the age of bows and arrows, nomads could not compete with large armies equipped with guns and supported by extensive logistical establishments. Among other problems, nomadic societies were severely limited in size because of their limited food resources. (There are only so many livestock that you can herd before you run out of grasslands.) In the long run they would be overwhelmed by the greater wealth and resources of industrial societies.
Primitive guerrilla warfare of the kind practiced by groups as disparate as the haiduks, the Pashtuns, and the Sioux would continue to flourish until the twentieth century on the periphery of the Western world. A vestige of this type of warfare still exists today in such ungoverned spaces as Somalia and the Pakistan frontier, albeit in considerably modified form. In Book III we will examine the resulting conflicts as primitive guerrillas were defeated by Western armies from the plains of the American Midwest to the crags of the Caucasus. But the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would also see the rise of increasingly sophisticated guerrillas thoroughly steeped in the political ideologies and military tactics of the West. They were not so easy to defeat, because they made use of many of the same weapons and techniques that made modern armies so potent.
One of the greatest advantages enjoyed by modern, as opposed to ancient or medieval, guerrillas was the ability to learn from their predecessors. Before the twentieth century, literacy levels were low, books rare, long-distance travel difficult. Most people led isolated lives. In this environment, it was hard for rebels to learn from one another, much less to cooperate in the way that twenty-first century jihadist groups seek to do by embracing the Internet. Simon bar Gioras, leader of the Jewish Revolt against Rome, undoubtedly was familiar with the experience of Judas Maccabeus and King David, two earlier Jewish guerrilla leaders. But it is doubtful that he knew much if anything of Viriathus, who resisted Roman authority in Spain, and even less likely that the illiterate Viriathus was familiar with the exploits of Spitamenes, who fought Alexander the Great in Central Asia, much less with Modun, leader of the Xiongnu who fought the Chinese Empire. Once printed books and periodicals began to spread and literacy to rise, insurgents were able to study their predecessors’ experiences and puzzle out more potent techniques to bring powerful empires to their knees.
Counterinsurgents were able to learn from their predecessors much earlier. Counterinsurgency manuals have been common at least since the Byzantine emperor Maurice produced his Strategikon around AD 600. It offered advice on how to battle Slavs, Avars, and other “undisciplined, disorganized peoples” who “prefer to prevail over their enemies not so much by force as by deceit, surprise attacks, and cutting off supplies.” Maurice offered an early warning against the sort of blundering “search and destroy�
�� missions that would prove a failure centuries later for, among others, German forces in Yugoslavia, American forces in Vietnam, and Russian forces in Afghanistan. “[I]n warring against them one must avoid engaging in pitched battles, especially in the early stages,” he wrote. “Instead, make use of well-planned ambushes, sneak attacks, and stratagems.”115 Even earlier Greek and Roman manuals of military science, such as Aeneas Tacticus’s fourth-century BC work, How to Survive under Siege, offered guidance on how to combat revolutionaries and subversives (the enemy within the city walls), while battles against “barbarian” tribes (the enemy without) formed a substantial part of Herodotus’s Histories, Caesar’s Gallic War, and other famous narratives of ancient military history.
But accounts written from the insurgents’ perspective were practically nonexistent until the modern era because most ancient and medieval insurgents were unlettered. Insurgent manuals did not become common until the nineteenth century. By then the spread of the printed word had made it easier for guerrillas to appeal for popular support, thereby elevating the role of propaganda and psychological warfare, the distinguishing features of contemporary guerrilla warfare. In the modern age, the printing press would become as important a weapon in the insurgents’ arsenal as the rifle and the bomb. In a related development, the growing ease of communications would expand the range of motivations for insurgencies. Whereas in the past most of those who adopted guerrilla tactics did so for elemental tribal or religious reasons, in the years ahead secular ideologies such as nationalism, liberalism, and socialism were to be added to the volatile mix, thereby attracting more recruits to insurgent ranks. The Enlightenment ushered in a new epoch not only in the history of the West but also in the history of guerrilla warfare. That is the subject of Book II.