by Max Boot
Initially the British people had supported the effort to suppress the American Revolution. A contemporary memoirist wrote that there “does not perhaps occur in the annals of Britain a single instance of a war more popular at its commencement.”42 But from the start there had been a substantial undercurrent of opposition. The Whig party, whose ranks included such eloquent spokesmen as Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, had argued for a policy of conciliation rather than confrontation. Many of these Whigs saw the Americans’ struggle as a continuation of their own efforts to limit overweening royal power. Speaking on the floor of the House of Commons in 1775, one member of Parliament called the war “a butchery of his fellow subjects, to which his conscience forbad him to give his consent.”43 The antiwar ranks included prominent military men such as Vice Admiral Augustus Keppel and Lieutenant General Sir Jeffrey Amherst, who made clear that they would not fight their “American brethren.”44 They had the support of most major newspapers, such as the Evening Post, which called the war “unnatural, unconstitutional, unnecessary, unjust, dangerous, hazardous, and unprofitable.”45
The rebels skillfully and shamelessly played on this sentiment. As early as 1772 the Boston radicals Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren had started a Committee of Correspondence to plead their case, an example that was emulated throughout the colonies.46 After every major event, the revolutionaries raced to get out their version of events. An American account of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, addressed to the “Inhabitants of Great Britain,” reached London two full weeks before the official dispatches.47 The Declaration of Independence, written out of “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind,” was a supremely successful weapon in this propaganda struggle. It was reprinted verbatim in every major British newspaper.48 Just as effective was Thomas Paine’s best-selling pamphlet Common Sense (1776), which was widely read not only in America but also in Britain and France. Benjamin Franklin was another successful propagandist. His work in Paris starting in December 1776, which included numerous letters and essays in Affaires de l’Angleterre et de l’Amérique, a newspaper covertly financed by the French government, helped to win the rebels their most important foreign ally.49
The Tory prime minister, Lord North, tried to get out his side of the story through the official government mouthpiece, the London Gazette. He even gave secret subsidies to a popular scandal sheet, the Morning Post, thereby converting it from a critic to a supporter of the war effort.50 Initially the government line—that the revolutionaries had “been compelled to take up arms against their sovereign & country under false pretenses”51 and would soon be defeated—was accepted by many, perhaps most, in Britain and North America. But as the war dragged on, with few victories and many casualties, support sagged. The British defeat at Saratoga in 1777 caused a spike in opposition, with the London Gazetteer describing America as the “Grave of Englishmen” and writing that it would now be “national suicide” to continue the war. After Yorktown the cries of “enough of war,” “enough of slaughter” became deafening. “Everybody seems really sick of carrying on ye American war,” wrote one parliamentarian in late 1781.52
On February 28, 1782, Parliament voted by a narrow margin, 234 to 215, to discontinue offensive operations. After this stinging rebuke, Lord North had no choice but to resign. He was replaced by a Whig government led by Lord Rockingham, which was committed to peace even at the price of independence. The war finally ended with the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
BESIDES HIGHLIGHTING THE newfound importance of the struggle for “hearts and minds,” the American success in winning independence from the world’s most powerful empire offers a number of other lessons about the nature of guerrilla warfare.
It demonstrates, first of all, the heavy toll of taking on a superpower. Revolutionary forces lost an estimated 25,674 dead, with disease being the biggest killer. (The British lost even more men—43,000 in all, including naval losses fighting the French, but many of the dead were German mercenaries.) Considering that the population of the thirteen colonies in 1776 was only 2.5 million people, this represents a loss of 1 percent of the entire population, making the Revolutionary War the second-costliest war in American history on a per capita basis, behind only the Civil War, in which 1.6 percent of the population perished.53 The American patriots, like most other successful insurgents, needed extraordinary willpower to prevail despite such heavy losses.
Even with all the willpower in the world, however, victory would not have been possible, at least not in the early 1780s, without French backing. The war’s second major lesson is the importance of such outside support. The turning point was the American victory at Saratoga, because it persuaded King Louis XVI to enter the conflict. His support made all the difference: first because French supplies did so much to bolster the Continental army (they accounted for 90 percent of all American gunpowder),54 then because the danger of French attacks on the British Isles and other parts of the empire prevented Britain from concentrating all of its forces in North America, and finally because a French fleet defeated the Royal Navy off the Virginia coast, thereby isolating the British field army at Yorktown.
Third, the outcome of the American war demonstrated the importance of partisans operating in close conjunction with a regular army. If the Americans had lacked an army, they might have been no more successful than the Irish rebels who rose up in 1798 and were put down by Cornwallis. As Nathanael Greene noted, “You may strike a hundred [partizan] strokes, and reap little benefit from them, unless you have a good army to take advantage of your success.”55 But without a guerrilla force to harry them, the British could have concentrated all their resources on crushing the Continental army, and the Americans might have been no more successful than the Scottish rebels who rose up in 1745. As it was, the Americans were able to land a one-two punch, with the irregulars weakening the army of occupation until a conventional force could administer the coup de grâce. This method of fighting—dubbed “hybrid warfare” by twenty-first-century strategists—has usually been the surest road to success for an insurgency.56
A fourth lesson is the need for counterinsurgents to have a suitable strategy and unity of command to execute it. The British suffered from terminal confusion as to ends and means, with cabinet officers in London and general officers in North America pushing competing, often incompatible, visions. Was the British goal to terrorize the Americans into restoring the status quo ante? Or was it to reach a liberal accommodation that would maintain only the most tenuous links between the metropolis and the colonies? Conciliatory officers such as Cornwallis issued lenient orders based on the latter assumption, but those orders were often ignored by hard-line subordinates such as Tarleton who operated under the former assumption. The result was a counterproductive muddle. British forces were harsh enough to alienate the Americans but not terrifying enough to bring them to heel.57
This failure was closely related to another: the inability or unwillingness to send enough troops to pacify 2.5 million Americans spread over more than twelve hundred miles of the Eastern Seaboard. The need for adequate resources to fight an insurgency constitutes the war’s fifth major lesson. Britain began the war with only 8,500 soldiers in North America, a figure that briefly swelled to 50,000 in 1778 before falling again to 30,000–35,000 for the remainder of the conflict.58 British commanders had only enough men to garrison a few enclaves along the coast (Savannah, Charleston, New York, Newport), where they could be resupplied by the Royal Navy. The vast interior was always beyond their grasp. They hoped that native allies would hem in the Americans, but the Indians got the worst of this savage struggle. Nor did enough Tories sign up for the struggle against their American compatriots. The British compounded their difficulties with questionable troop deployments—for instance, leaving 15,000 men in New York during the southern campaign. A U.S. Marine Corps officer who has studied the campaign suggests that New York could have been defended with a force a third the size, while the rest should have been sent to r
einforce the 8,500 redcoats in the South.59
But none of these failings need have proven fatal if the British public had retained the desire to continue fighting, no matter the cost. The average American today probably thinks that the Vietnam War was the first time that a counterinsurgency was fatally undermined on the home front. A citizen of France would probably cite the Algerian War. But the American War of Independence long predated either conflict, and it was effectively decided not at Yorktown, as most historians would have it, but in Westminster. The battlefield success of George Washington’s soldiers was not irrelevant, but neither was it decisive. Public opinion in Britain was. This was a lesson that future generations of guerrillas could study and apply.
15.
WAR TO THE KNIFE
The Peninsular War, 1808–1814
THE AGE OF ideological struggles ushered in by the American Revolution would cast aside the limitations on warfare created in the century after the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Few counterinsurgents would display the kind of restraint shown by the British in North America. Even the British themselves would show less restraint in repressing uprisings in Ireland in 1798 and India in 1857. But then the Irish and Indians were not “Englishmen.”
A more savage approach to counterinsurgency was displayed by the French revolutionary regime that took power in a popular revolt and that by 1793–94 was under the control of the radical Jacobins of the Committee of Public Safety, led by the pitiless Maximilien de Robespierre. Their growing tyranny sparked uprisings in Bordeaux, Brittany, Lyon, Marseilles, Toulon, and other areas. The republican regime responded with the kind of scorched-earth tactics practiced in ancient times by Akkad and Assyria and in the modern day by Nazi Germany, Baathist Iraq, and the Soviet Union. Such policies can succeed but only if the insurgents are devoid of outside support and if the counterinsurgents have some degree of popular legitimacy, if they can muster overwhelming force, and if they are willing to engage in mass murder on a scale that would be intolerable to a more liberal regime. The Jacobins succeeded in establishing their control because revolutionary France met all these conditions.
More than 16,000 “enemies of the revolution” were formally executed during the Reign of Terror in 1793–94; many more perished without any judicial proceeding at all. The repression of the Vendée in western France, where the makeshift Catholic and Royal Army arose to challenge the revolution, was particularly brutal. A republican general reported in 1793, “I crushed the children beneath the horses’ hooves, massacred the women who . . . will bear no more brigands. I have not a single prisoner to reproach myself with. I exterminated them all.” Almost 250,000 people, more than a third of the Vendéans, were killed before the revolution’s “infernal columns” were finally disbanded in May 1794. The Catholic and Royal Army might have had more success in fighting back if it had received arms and other supplies from Britain or other powers, but no such support was forthcoming.60
There were also uprisings in parts of Europe conquered by the French, including Calabria, the southernmost portion of Italy,61 and the Tyrol, an Alpine region that had been under Austrian control.62 The rebels in all these cases were not radicals like the American or French revolutionaries. They were conservative peasants like the Vendéans who wanted nothing to do with Napoleon’s social engineering. In putting down these revolts, the French army was helped by the fact that they were much more confined, geographically and demographically, and much closer to home than the uprising the British had faced in North America. Moreover, like the Vendéans but unlike the Americans, none of these rebel groups received any meaningful external aid.
Although willing to be just as brutal in Spain, the French would find that they simply lacked the resources to be equally successful when faced with an uprising that was much larger and that received much more external aid. Scale matters in guerrilla warfare: what works in a single isolated region may not work across an entire country.
EMBLEMATIC OF THE relentlessly conventional and bloody-minded French approach to counterinsurgency was the assault on Zaragoza, known to the English-speaking world as Saragossa, in northern Spain. The bombardment began on the night of July 31–August 1, 1808, and grew worse by the day. Sixty French guns belched shot night and day. “The firing was infernal,” wrote an early Spanish historian, “no idea can be formed of it.” Among the structures severely damaged was the hospital that housed the mentally as well as the physically ill. Many were still confined in their cells as masonry and splinters began to fly. Their voices “raving or singing in paroxysms of wilder madness, or crying in vain to be set free, were heard amid the confusion of dreadful sounds.” Some lunatics escaped and capered past burning buildings, singing and laughing, even dancing on corpses. Other patients who tried to get away were literally blown to bits. Their body parts littered the streets along with reddened bandages and crutches. “Hell opened its gates that day,” said a witness.
By the afternoon of August 4, the artillery had blasted a hole nearly three hundred yards wide in the city wall, and thousands of infantrymen in their blue coats, white breeches, and black shako hats prepared to pour through the breach. Surely now, the French commanders must have reasoned, they would finally eliminate this troublesome obstacle and its fanatical defenders.
In truth, Zaragoza should have fallen much sooner. This city of 60,000 people was garrisoned by just 1,500 Spanish troops. Its adobe walls were old and decrepit. Under the rules of “civilized warfare,” it should have surrendered with no more than a perfunctory resistance. But on June 15, 1808, the initial French assault had been bloodily repulsed—not by the Spanish troops but by the Spanish people. “Foaming with rage,” the people grabbed knives, sticks, hatchets, scissors, old blunderbusses, whatever was at hand, and rushed to the barricades. A squadron of Polish lancers, pennants flying, advanced into the city only to be picked off by concealed sniper fire and pelted by stones tossed from rooftops and balconies. They were finished off by the assaults of ordinary residents who pulled the riders off their horses and bludgeoned them to death.
Nominally the defenders were under the command of José de Palafox, an aristocratic army officer. He was “a perfectly well-bred man,” but he had an unfortunate habit of leaving the city on one pretext or another when the fighting was at its heaviest. No matter. The workers, peasants, craftsmen, and priests carried on by themselves under their own elected leaders.
Even the women joined in, rushing supplies to the fighters and succoring the wounded. On July 2 a dark-haired young woman with a “mild and feminine countenance” witnessed French fire kill all of the gunners manning a battery of antiquated cannons at one of the city gates. French troops with fixed bayonets were only moments away from streaming into the city. Before that could happen, Agustina Zaragoza rushed through the smoke and scorching heat, grabbed a still-smoldering linstock from one of the dead gunners (said to be her lover), and fired the cannon at point-blank range. The densely packed assault force crumpled before her grapeshot. “The Maid of Zaragoza” became an army lieutenant and a legend celebrated by Lord Byron, among others. Her example inspired Zaragoza’s residents to fight with what a French officer described as “incredible fury.” So incredible that, as the attackers discovered, resistance would not crumble even after an unrelenting, three-day artillery barrage.
On August 4, after an all-out offensive had begun, the French commander, General Jean-Antoine Verdier, who had already been wounded by a musket ball, sent a message under a flag of truce demanding “peace and capitulation.” A pointed answer came back: “War even to the knife.”
One of Napoleon’s Polish officers who took part in a subsequent assault on Zaragoza left a vivid description of what “war to the knife” looked like in the narrow, winding lanes of the city. He could just as easily have been describing the experiences of Romans in first-century Jerusalem, Germans in twentieth-century Warsaw, or Americans in twenty-first-century Fallujah:
The more we advanced the more dogged resistance became. We kne
w that in order not to be killed . . . we would have to take each and every one of these houses converted into redoubts and where death lurked in the cellars, behind doors and shutters—in fact, everywhere. . . . Often as we were securing one floor we would be shot at from point blank range from the floor above through loopholes in the floorboards. All the nooks and crannies of these old-fashioned houses aided such deadly ambushes. We also had to maintain a good watch on the rooftops. With their light sandals, the Aragonese could move with the ease of and as silently as a cat and were thus able to make surprise incursions well behind the front line. It was indeed aerial combat. We would be sitting peacefully around a fire, in a house occupied for some days, when suddenly shots would come through some window just as though they had come from the sky itself. . . .