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

by Max Boot

  The observations of the psychiatrist Jerrold Post also ring true. Although he writes that “terrorists do not show any striking psychopathology,” he does posit that many “individuals are drawn to the path of terrorism in order to commit acts of violence.” He believes that for many “the cause” is only an excuse to pursue a lifestyle that allows a frustrated, unsuccessful youth to become a glamorous celebrity—a terrorist who is “engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the establishment, his picture on the ‘most wanted’ posters,” who in certain circles “is lionized as a hero,” and thereby acquires “a role and position not easily relinquished.”125 Those generalizations, made about late twentieth-century terrorists, apply equally well to their nineteenth-century forebears—and even to the Assassins of the Middle Ages.

  But, and this must be kept in mind, there are always exceptions, often prominent ones. Michael Collins was no fanatic or outcast. He was a shrewd, popular, supremely sane leader who was admired even by his foes, notwithstanding his ruthless streak. (Lloyd George said he was “full of fascination and charm—but also of dangerous fire.”)126 In many ways he bore a greater resemblance to the most skilled and respected generals of history than to those “wild beasts,” the disreputable anarchist or socialist terrorists of his day whose actions often bespoke a psychological compulsion rather than a well-developed strategy. If there has ever been a heroic and likable terrorist, the Big Fellow was it.

  BOOK V

  THE SIDESHOWS

  Guerrillas and Commandos in the World Wars

  37.

  THE THIRTY YEARS’ WAR

  Blood Brothers and Brownshirts, 1914–1945

  IT WAS THE most consequential wrong turn in history. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was on a brief visit to observe army maneuvers in the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The heir to the Habsburg throne was supposed to spend only a few hours in Sarajevo on Sunday, June 28, 1914—just long enough to view some troops, meet some notables, open a museum, inspect a carpet factory. But from the start the day had not gone according to plan. The archduke and his wife, Sophie, had been sitting in the back of an open-top touring car on the drive into town from the train station when, just after 10 a.m., a Bosnian printer named Nedeljko Cabrinovic tossed a bomb at them. The nineteen-year-old “Nedjo” had been so excited he had forgotten to count to ten after priming his crude hand grenade. The bomb bounced harmlessly off the royal automobile and injured two officers in a trailing car along with some spectators.

  Nedjo tried and failed to end his life with a cyanide capsule. He was taken to a police station, where he was interrogated, but he refused to reveal that five other would-be assassins were still stalking Franz Ferdinand. Out of an excess of courage or a deficit of common sense, the archduke proceeded with his next stop at the town hall, where he was greeted by local dignitaries and gave a short speech. Afterward he decided to stop by the hospital to visit one of the officers who had been injured in the earlier bombing. His staff thought it would be safer to take the broad Appel Quay rather than the original route, publicized in advance, through the narrow, winding streets of the city center. But because of a miscommunication the lead vehicle in the six-car motorcade turned down Franz Josef Street as originally planned, followed by the luxurious Graef und Stift convertible flying an imperial emblem and carrying Franz Ferdinand and Sophie. When he realized what had happened, the royal chauffeur stopped the car in order to turn around.

  By a colossal stroke of ill fortune, the archduke’s car paused in the brilliant summer sunshine in front of Moritz Schiller’s Jewish delicatessen and general store. Standing in front was none other than Nedjo’s good friend Gavrilo Princip, another Bosnian radical armed with a bomb and a Browning pistol. The teenage terrorist, who was just shy of his twentieth birthday, must have been dumbfounded at the good fortune that had put his quarry only a few feet from him. He could hardly miss the archduke in his resplendent blue general’s uniform and green peacock-feather hat or his wife next to him in her white silk dress and wide-brimmed hat piled high with ostrich feathers. “Gavro” drew his revolver and fired twice. Both the archduke and the duchess were dead by lunchtime.

  In many respects the death of Franz Ferdinand resembled that of Tsar Alexander II, another assassination carried out by a group of young Slavic fanatics. But the consequences were much more serious and long-lasting. For the Austrian government chose to blame the Serbian government for the attack.

  In reality the links to Belgrade were tenuous at best. Nedjo and Gavro were members of Young Bosnia, a small group of radicals whose goal was to create Yugoslavia, a state that would unite the South Slavs: the Bosnians, Croats, Serbs, and other nationalities. They had been provided with arms (four revolvers, six bombs) and smuggled into Bosnia by Serbian officers who were close to Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, a.k.a. Apis. He was not only chief of intelligence for the Serbian General Staff but also head of a secret society called Union or Death, popularly known as the Black Hand, which was intent on driving Austria out of Bosnia-Herzegovina to create a Greater Serbia. Apis later testified that he had never thought the conspirators would succeed and had even tried to recall them at the last moment. Certainly there was no evidence that anyone in a senior position in Serbia’s government had authorized the plot. But that did not stop Vienna from making intolerable demands on Belgrade. Germany backed its ally Austria, while Russia came to the aid of Serbia.

  Thus one daring act of terrorism lit the fuse that ignited the deadliest war the world had yet seen. That the war probably would have broken out anyway over some other pretext does not diminish the enormity of this act or lessen its consequences.1

  THE FIRST WORLD WAR raged from 1914 to 1918. It was followed by an unstable armistice and then the eruption of open conflict in China in 1931 and in Poland in 1939. Those two conflicts merged to produce the Second World War. That war, too, had its roots in terrorism: specifically the terrorist campaigns waged by German and Japanese militarists in the 1920s and 1930s to seize power from more moderate regimes.

  The fragile Weimar Republic, born in 1919 out of Germany’s defeat, faced and survived an initial burst of left-wing and right-wing violence whose victims included Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau, assassinated by a rightist fanatic in 1922. The initial turmoil faded after Adolf Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch was foiled in 1923. Thereafter the Nazis sought power through political organizing backed by the thuggish SA (Sturmabteilung, or “Storm Battalion”). Popularly known as the Brownshirts—a name that, like the Blackshirts (Mussolini’s paramilitaries), would have caused the liberal Giuseppe Garibaldi and his Redshirts to spin in their graves—the SA intimidated, beat, and killed political opponents and Jews. The Communists also engaged in street violence, employing a strong-arm squad called the Red Front Fighters’ League, but they were no match for the Brownshirts, who numbered half a million men by the time Hitler became chancellor on January 30, 1933.

  Much of Hitler’s appeal was that he was the man who could restore “order”—which, of course, his own party had done as much as anyone to undermine. The arsonist was offering to turn fireman. The analogy is particularly apt given that Hitler was able to consolidate his rule thanks to the burning of the Reichstag on February 27, 1933, by Marinus van der Lubbe, a lone Dutch anarchist who had once been a Communist. Hitler used this isolated act of terrorism as an excuse to crack heads among the opposition and destroy the last vestiges of constitutionalism. From then on terrorism in Nazi Germany was to be a state monopoly.2

  Japan’s experiment with parliamentary democracy, which began in earnest in the 1920s, was expiring at the same time. Its death was even more directly tied to a campaign of terrorism, this one waged by fanatical military officers and ultra-nationalist agitators organized in groups such as the Blood Brotherhood, whose slogan was “One Member, One Death.” Their victims included Prime Minister Kei Hara, killed in 1921, Prime Minister Hamagushi Osachi (1930), and, in 1932, a particularly busy year, Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai, former fin
ance minister Junnosuke Inoue, and the Mitsui corporation’s director-general, Baron Dan Takuma. The conspirators behind the 1932 attacks had also contemplated assassinating the comedian Charlie Chaplin during his visit to Japan because they thought this “would cause a war with America.”

  Since 1924 Japan’s government had been run by whichever political party had won a majority in the parliament. After the 1932 “incidents,” as they were decorously known, military influence became predominant. But the radicals still were not satisfied: they intimidated and assassinated officers who were deemed too moderate, such as the elderly retired Admiral Makoto Saito, a former prime minister and lord privy seal. He was murdered along with the finance minister and the head of military education in 1936 during an aborted coup by junior army officers. The prime minster, Admiral Keisuke Okada, narrowly survived the 1936 revolt; he hid in a closet when his house was invaded by rebellious troops who murdered his brother-in-law by mistake. Getting the message, he resigned immediately afterward. None of his successors was any more successful in resisting the desires of the imperialist extremists.

  Terrorism worked in Japan because the terrorists represented a significant and influential constituency, including a large portion of the armed forces. Even then terrorism was only partly responsible for bringing the militarists to power. Failed terrorist groups such as the anarchists, by contrast, had few supporters and those came from the fringes of society.3

  THE POLITICAL TURMOIL in Germany and Japan was part of a broader struggle that rent the world apart in the first half of the twentieth century. In essence it was a battle between totalitarianism and liberalism, although totalitarians of left and right were often at each other’s throats. This clash of ideologies produced not only the two world wars but also lesser conflicts, including the civil wars in China, Mexico, Russia, and Spain. The whole 1914–45 period could be called “a second Thirty Years’ War”—a term coined by the German expatriate scholar Sigmund Neumann in 1946.4 (From our present-day perspective we might see a Seventy-Five Years’ War lasting until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.)

  Most of the fighting during those years, even in civil wars, pitted conventional armed forces against one another and hence is of little concern from our perspective. But smaller-scale guerrilla warfare and terrorism did not disappear amid the clash of gargantuan fleets, armies, and air forces. Indeed this period produced some of the twentieth century’s most notable practitioners of low-intensity conflict and some of the most influential doctrines for its prosecution. We will focus in particular on the influence of T. E. Lawrence, Orde Wingate, and Josip Broz Tito. Their efforts were very much “sideshows” that affected the ultimate outcome of the big wars only at the margins. But these sideshows left a lasting legacy. They made “special operations forces” (i.e., guerrillas in the service of the state) a prominent part of all modern militaries. They showed the limitations of even the most draconian counterinsurgency policies in quelling uprisings that enjoyed outside support. And, even more significant, they made inevitable the independence of Europe’s Asian and African colonies by mobilizing and arming significant numbers of the “natives.” The conclusion of this modern Thirty Years’ War, which left the great powers of Europe wheezing and gasping, set the scene for decades’ more fighting in wars of decolonization that would send the popular reputation of guerrillas soaring to new heights.

  Our examination of this turbulent epoch begins with a slight, sensitive archaeologist from Oxford who improbably enough became one of the most storied irregular warriors in history.

  38.

  THE EVOLUTION OF AN ARCHAEOLOGIST

  “Lawrence of Arabia,” 1916–1935

  THE RIDE FROM Palestine took eight days over a “rough track . . . through a harsh no-man’s land where water was scarce and brackish when found, and nothing grew except the thorny scrub growths of the desert.” Finally on April 9, 1918, the Egyptian Camel Corps, a hundred soldiers strong, reached Aqaba, a town on the Red Sea that had recently been liberated from the Turks by an Arab offensive.

  The corps’ commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Frederick W. Peake, found a “sleepy little port,” described by another soldier as “a few mud huts and a broken down castle,” whose normal population of four hundred had been swelled by a vast influx of military personnel. In the port were ships unloading stores. West of town several aircraft were parked on a newly cleared airfield. All along the shore were tents, a mixture of the white canvas favored by the British army, the “ornate oriental tents” of the Arab officers under Emir Feisal, and the “black goat-hair beyts of the assembled Bedouin.”

  These unlikely allies—Christians from northern Europe and Muslims from the deserts of Arabia—had been brought together by a shared interest in fighting the Ottoman Empire, an ally of Germany that was the imperial overlord of the Middle East. For the Arab Revolt to succeed it would need to overcome not only that enemy but also the mutual suspicions among these disparate fighters. “We hate the Arabs,” admitted one British soldier, and the feeling was richly reciprocated.

  Peake got a first taste of the “maddest campaign ever run” when a noncommissioned officer announced a party of Arabs to see him. At the head of the delegation was a blue-eyed man, only five feet five inches tall but muscular and lean, “dressed in extremely good and expensive Bedouin clothes.” His feet were bare, the Arab custom being to take off one’s sandals when entering a tent. Strapped to his belt was a beautiful gold dagger. In his hand was “the usual almond-wood cane that every Bedouin camel rider uses.” His face was partly covered by his kaffiyeh. Peake imagined that this “regal-looking person . . . must be the Emir Feisal himself.” He rushed over to greet him with “the usual flowery Arabic words of welcome and greetings.” He was in for another shock when this “Arab,” evidently bemused by the spectacle, cut him short in “perfect” English: “Well, Peake, so you have arrived at last. We have been waiting some time for you and your braves, and there is plenty of work for you up country.”

  Only then did Peake realize that he was speaking to Lieutenant Colonel T. E. Lawrence, a liaison officer and adviser to Feisal. But even that realization would not have meant much to him, for Lawrence was not yet famous. The mystique of “Lawrence of Arabia”—an appellation coined by a Chicago newspaperman—was to be a postwar phenomenon. In 1918 Lawrence was just another officer operating in great secrecy behind enemy lines to disrupt Turkish operations in the Holy Land. But the raw materials of his legend were already in place.5

  LAWRENCE WAS A misfit from the start because of what his Victorian and Edwardian contemporaries would have called his “illegitimate” birth. His father, Thomas Chapman, was a wealthy Anglo-Irish aristocrat who had abandoned his dour wife and their four daughters to run away with their much younger governess, Sarah Lawrence, who herself had been born to an unwed mother. Chapman never formally divorced his wife, so he and Sarah, “Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence,” lived a cloistered existence as they raised four boys, including Thomas Edward, who was born in 1888. Ned, as he was known to his family (later simply “T.E.” to his friends), became aware of this family secret as a child and feared ostracism and social ruin if it were revealed. Thus he grew up feeling an outsider to English society even as he earned a first in history from Oxford.

  His alienation was heightened by his complete lack of interest in sports such as cricket or football. Nor did he partake in the rarefied British university social life so luxuriously depicted, in its 1920s incarnation, in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. He preferred solitary pursuits such as photography, bicycling, and collecting archaeological relics. Often he would stay up all night reading obscure books in Latin, Greek, or French. He trained himself to endure great privation, on one occasion going forty-five hours without food or sleep “to test his powers of endurance.” That he was able to pass such tests was a testament not only to his extraordinary willpower but also to his physical fitness. As a teenager he would bicycle a hundred miles a day while touring France.

/>   In 1909, in the summer before his senior year, Lawrence visited the Middle East for the first time to research his thesis on Crusader castles. He returned after graduation in 1910 and stayed nearly continuously until 1914 working at an archaeological site in Syria. Here he improved his Arabic and learned how to manage Arab workers.6

  When war broke out in August 1914, he joined the Geographical Section of the General Staff in London, first as a civilian, then as a freshly commissioned second lieutenant. By the end of the year he was in Cairo working in military intelligence. He remained a staff officer—what he wryly called a “bottle-washer and office boy pencil-sharpener and pen wiper”7—until 1916, when the Arab Revolt broke out. Lawrence was a supporter of Arab aspirations to have their own nation stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, and he was feeling bored and restless with office work. A feeling of guilt crept in after two of his brothers were killed on the Western Front in 1915 and he was still safe in Cairo. So in October 1916 he applied for ten days’ leave to accompany a British diplomat on a mission to assess the situation in the Hejaz, the western coastal region of Arabia where the revolt originated.