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

by Max Boot

  Not until much later did one of the more sordid details of his last years emerge. Between 1923 and 1935 he had found some perverse satisfaction in occasionally hiring a younger soldier to whip him—apparently as penance for his ordeal at Daraa. This is what psychiatrists call a “flagellation disorder.” Lawrence’s friends and family had no idea about this private behavior; the beatings became public only when the soldier who administered them sold his story to a newspaper in 1968. Contrary to the widespread assumption, however, there is no evidence that Lawrence was a practicing homosexual; he consistently professed his own “sexlessness” and in all likelihood never entered into a sexual relationship with anyone, man or woman.53

  OPINION ABOUT THIS “strange character,” who admitted that “madness was very near” for him, has been sharply divided over the years.54 Some have derided him, with scant evidence, as an “unfortunate charlatan” who “lied compulsively,”55 while boosters have compared him, rather preposterously, to Napoleon, Marlborough, and other “great captains” of history.56 Lawrence never claimed such importance for his own work in a “side show of a side show.” “My role was a minor one,” he wrote with excessive modesty.57

  A more balanced judgment was rendered by Franz von Papen, a future German chancellor and ambassador to Istanbul who as a junior officer served as an adviser to the Ottoman army. “The British can indeed count themselves fortunate to have had the services of a man with such understanding and affection for the Islamic world,” Papen wrote. “From the military point of view his activities were probably not of great importance, but politically and economically they were of priceless value.”58 (By “economically” Papen was presumably referring to the access to oil that Britain secured.)

  Lawrence’s most lasting influence was as a glamorous practitioner of guerrilla warfare who was to inspire numerous imitators. A writer of the first chop, as well as a “witty and enlightening” conversationalist with an “impish sense of humor,”59 he left copious guidance for latter-day Lawrences. What he called “my beastly book,”60 Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which was not widely published until after his death, was rightly acclaimed as a great work of literature. The condensed version, Revolt in the Desert, became a best seller in his lifetime. Just as influential, for soldiers if not for the general public, were two of his articles.

  “The Evolution of a Revolt,” published by the Army Quarterly in 1920, was Lawrence’s attempt to use his own experiences to expatiate on the subject of irregular warfare. It would form the basis of an entry called “Science of Guerrilla Warfare” compiled by a friend, the military strategist Basil Liddell-Hart, and published under the initials T.E.LA. in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1929. In it Lawrence coined numerous aphorisms that are still widely quoted: “The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander”; “Irregular war is far more intellectual than a bayonet charge”; “Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent active in a striking force, and 98 per cent passively sympathetic.” His conclusion was a direct challenge to the conventional military mindset: “In fifty words: 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 perfection of means and spirit struggle quite in vain.”61

  Those words have formed a rallying cry for guerrillas and their acolytes ever since, but Lawrence’s claim is less far-reaching than it appears on a quick read. Note all of the caveats: success is certain only if guerrillas have “mobility,” “security,” “time,” and “doctrine.” Few insurgencies have ever been vouchsafed all of those advantages. How many insurgents are able, after all, to call on the aid of the Royal Air Force, Army, and Navy? As one of Lawrence’s fellow advisers to the Arabs noted, “Seldom has a force had greater liberty of action or greater security.”62 Lacking these advantages, most guerrillas fail to achieve their goals. Even the Arab Revolt was hardly an unalloyed success, insofar as the insurgents were not strong enough to prevent their European allies from grabbing most of the Ottoman possessions for themselves.

  Reservations must also be kept in mind when reading Lawrence’s other enduring essay, “Twenty-Seven Articles,” written on August 20, 1917, a month after the capture of Aqaba. In it Lawrence offered some of his secrets for being an effective adviser. His shrewd advice included the following:

  Never give orders to anyone at all, and reserve your directions or advice for the C.O. [commanding officer], however great the temptation (for efficiency’s sake) of dealing with his underlings. . . . Formal visits to give advice are not so good as the constant dropping of ideas in casual talk. . . . The less apparent your interference the more your influence. . . . Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.63

  All of these aphorisms have been cited ever since by Western soldiers engaged in advisory work. The suggestion to “not . . . do too much” was especially popular with American and British soldiers in Iraq from 2003 to 2007 when it encouraged a destructive hands-off policy that allowed the fighting to spiral out of control. Only when General David Petraeus decided to do more to secure the populace did the tide start to turn. Those who might be tempted to quote Lawrence dogmatically—something that would have horrified him—should keep in mind his admonition that the “Twenty-Seven Articles” “are meant to apply only to Bedu: townspeople or Syrians require totally different treatment.” He might have added, but did not, because it was self-evident, that his advice was meant for insurgents, not (as in Iraq) counterinsurgents.

  Lawrence’s most important achievement was not in crafting a template of guerrilla warfare or even military advising that could be transposed to any situation. Rather, by his own example he showed how hard any soldier fighting an irregular war must work to understand and adapt himself to local conditions. He made empathy into a powerful weapon of war, striving to understand the actions of both enemies and allies. “I risked myself among them a hundred times, to learn,” he wrote of the Turks. He later attributed his success to “hard study and brain-work and concentration.” His example, he declared, was at odds with the “fundamental, crippling, incuriousness” of so many of his fellow officers who were “too much body and too little head.”64

  Lawrence was a rare combination of body and head, “active and reflective.” In some respects he resembled Marshal Lyautey, another misfit who approached the subject from the other side as a fighter against guerrillas but reached, as we have seen, similar conclusions about the need for “adaptation” and “elasticity.”

  39.

  THE REGULAR IRREGULARS

  The Birth of the Special Forces in World War II

  GIVEN THE WELL-PUBLICIZED success enjoyed during World War I by Lawrence and, to a lesser extent, by Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, a German officer who used hit-and-run tactics against the British in East Africa, it should be no surprise that the next world war would see an exponential increase in irregular operations. The advance of German armies across Europe was preceded by the Brandenburg commandos who spoke multiple languages and often operated in enemy uniforms. They had been set up on the initiative of Captain Theodore von Hippel, who had served under Lettow-Vorbeck and had also studied Lawrence’s campaigns.65 In May 1940 Brandenburgers disguised as Dutch troops seized a key bridge across the Meuse into the Netherlands and swooped down in gliders on Belgium’s Eben Emael fortress. Later, in 1943, the SS major Otto Skorzeny employed gliders in a famous raid to spring Mussolini from his mountaintop prison in Italy. (Gliders in the 1940s served the role now played by helicopters.) The Italians, for their part, developed a highly capable maritime commando unit, the Decima MAS—forerunner of today’s SEALs.

  But it was the Allies who fielded the preponderance of the irregular forces used in World War II. They knew that it would take years to mass the giant armies neede
d to defeat the Axis. In the meantime, it was better to mount pinprick raids than do nothing at all. Or so figured Winston Churchill, who had seen firsthand as a junior officer in South Africa the impact of Boer commandos. When he took over as prime minister in May 1940 just as France was falling, he immediately established both the Army Commandos to “develop a reign of terror down the enemy coasts” and a civilian organization, the Special Operations Executive (SOE), to undertake “subversion and sabotage” in occupied lands—or, in his evocative phrase, to “set Europe ablaze.” As an indication of how urgent the situation was, the formation of the commandos was approved three days after being proposed, and their first raid on the French coast took place fifteen days later.66 Before long, numerous other British units were set up for operations behind enemy lines. The war in North Africa spawned the Long-Range Desert Group, the Special Air Service (SAS), and Popski’s Private Army, all of which used trucks and jeeps to transverse trackless seas of sand, hitting the Germans and Italians where they least expected it. Not to be outdone, the Royal Marines, Royal Air Force, and Royal Navy formed commando-style detachments of their own.

  All of these special operators made critical use of modern inventions such as the airplane and radio. But they were also inspired by the timeless lessons of history. SOE’s first leaders, the army officers J. C. F. Holland and Colin Gubbins, had fought against the IRA. In addition, Holland had served with the Arab irregulars in World War I and had studied Boer tactics. Now they were determined to employ the same sorts of “ungentlemanly” tactics that T. E. Lawrence, Michael Collins, and Christiaan de Wet had mastered.67

  The very name “commando,” which became a generic term for all special operations units, was inspired by the Boers. Yet not all commando operations constituted guerrilla warfare per se, or as it is known today, “unconventional warfare.” Many were examples of what in the modern military lexicon would be called “direct action”—short-duration raids launched against the enemy from bases on friendly soil. Guerrilla operations, by contrast, typically involve fighters who either lack fixed bases or base themselves in enemy-controlled territory. In either case they spend longer on the ground than the typical commando or Brandenburg team. The SOE was more of a guerrilla force, infiltrating its operatives into Axis-occupied lands to work with indigenous resistance movements. The differences blurred, however, when both SOE and SAS parachuted operatives into France in 1944 to disrupt German lines of communication.

  WHEN THE UNITED States finally entered the war in December 1941, it followed the British lead by setting up the Office of Special Services (OSS) under General “Wild Bill” Donovan, whose mandate ran from intelligence gathering to propaganda. It particularly took to sabotage operations, carrying out advice contained in illustrated training documents with puckish titles such as “Arson: An Instruction Manual.” The OSS also developed a line of secret weapons such as “Hedy,” “a panic creator which simulates the sound of a falling bomb and subsequent explosion,” and “Aunt Jemima,” a flourlike substance with “greater explosive force than TNT.”68

  The U.S. Army, for its part, created in 1942 an analogue to the commandos—the Rangers. They were named in tribute to Robert Rogers, subject of the hit 1940 film Northwest Passage. Like the commandos, the Rangers often found themselves acting as the spearhead for conventional offensives, the most famous example being their scaling of the 100-foot cliffs at Pointe du Hoc on D-Day. The U.S. Marines set up similar Raider battalions, while Allied nations, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, and France, created their own special-warfare organizations to work with the British and Americans. The Soviet Union, too, embraced irregular operations by organizing large numbers of Partisans and Spetsnaz commandos, who would strike behind German lines.

  THERE HAD BEEN “special operations” before—an appellation that can apply to any particularly risky and unconventional attack mounted by a small military force—going all the way back to the days of the Trojan Horse.69 The first attempts to institutionalize the concept, to specially train and equip soldiers for hit-and-run raids, were undertaken in the eighteenth century with light infantry and rangers. But for the most part soldiers who took part in irregular operations before the 1940s had to improvise after being overrun: think of Francis Marion in the American Revolution or numerous Spanish soldiers in the Peninsular War. Their experiences were mirrored in World War II by soldiers ranging from Russians in their homeland to Americans in the Philippines who chose to fight as guerrillas rather than accept defeat. But the war also saw the most ambitious attempt yet to train and equip specialized forces for such missions.

  That innovation did not sit well with the majority of regular soldiers, who saw no need for “elite” units. Those who volunteered for such assignments, and generally only volunteers were taken, tended to be, in the words of the British army captain W. E. D. Allen, either “the young and the keen” or the “stale and the restless”: “The efficient soldier, good at his job, generally ignored the notices.”70 A disproportionate number of the volunteers were upper-class adventurers. Allen himself was a graduate of Eton and a former member of Parliament. The ranks of British special operators also included the actor David Niven; Lord Lovat, a Scottish peer and future cabinet minister; the novelist Evelyn Waugh; and the prime minister’s son, Randolph Churchill. President Roosevelt’s son James also served in special operations with Carlson’s Raiders of the U.S. Marine Corps. The OSS got so many recruits from Wall Street and the Ivy League that wags joked its initials stood for “Oh So Social,” while the SAS was stocked with Oxford and Cambridge graduates.

  Part of this may have been snobbery on the part of higher-ups wearing the old school tie, but it was also a recognition that normal soldiers, no matter how competent, do not necessarily make good irregulars. Devil-may-care aristocrats might be better suited. At the other end of the social spectrum, the criminal underworld came in handy when recruiting for forgers and safecrackers.71 Brigadier Dudley Clarke, who as a lieutenant colonel founded the British Commandos in 1940, wrote, “We looked for a dash of the Elizabethan pirate, the Chicago gangster, and the Frontier tribesman, allied to a professional efficiency and standard of discipline of the best Regular soldier. The Commando was to need something beyond the mass discipline which held the ranks steady when men stood side by side; his had to be a personal and an independent kind which would carry him through to the objective no matter what might happen to those upon his right and left.” This meant, he concluded, that the “men would have to learn for once to discard the ingrained ‘team-spirit’ ” of regular military formations.72

  40.

  WINGATE’S WARS

  A “Wayward Genius” in Palestine, Abyssinia,

  and Burma, 1936–1944

  FEW TOOK UP this admonition as eagerly or excessively as Clarke’s fellow army officer Orde Charles Wingate, who would win renown for his irregular operations in Palestine, Abyssinia, and Burma, becoming the closest World War II equivalent to his distant relative T. E. Lawrence. His pioneering efforts to add guerrilla tactics to the arsenals of conventional armies often met with disdain and disbelief from more conventionally minded officers. Wingate did not care. “Popularity,” he believed, “is a sign of weakness.” Considered by his peers to be either a “military genius or a mountebank” (opinions differed),73 he had been locked in an unceasing war against his superiors from his earliest days.

  Even as a young cadet at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, he “had the power,” recalled his best friend, “to create violent antagonisms against himself by his attitude towards authority.”74 Later, as a junior officer, Wingate was known to begin meetings with generals by placing his alarm clock on the table. After it went off, he would leave, announcing, “Well gentlemen, you have talked for one hour and achieved absolutely nothing. I can’t spend any more time with you!”75

  Wingate’s first rebellion was against the stifling religious atmosphere in which he was raised. His father was a retired Indian Army colonel with a devotion
to a fundamentalist Protestant sect called the Plymouth Brethren. He and his wife brought up their seven children, including “Ordey” (his family nickname), in what one of his brothers called a “temple of gloom,” with prayer mandatory, frivolity forbidden, and “fears of eternal damnation” ever present.76 By the time he arrived at Woolwich, to train as an artillery officer, he had left the Plymouth Brethren, but he never lost his religious outlook. For the rest of his life he would be deeply influenced by the Bible, on which he had been “suckled” and which a friend said “was his guide in all his ways.”77 Another legacy of his childhood was that he developed a violent aversion to being regimented. At Woolwich he was in constant trouble, and he formed a low opinion of the “military apes” who tried to discipline him.78

  After graduation he learned Arabic, and in 1928 he joined the British-run Sudan Defense Force as an officer overseeing local enlisted men. Here he battled elusive gangs of slave traders and poachers within Sudan, learning the hit-and-run tactics he would employ throughout his career.79 He also developed many of his unconventional habits, such as wearing scruffy clothing (“his socks were very smelly and all in holes,” a subordinate later noticed),80 subjecting himself to great danger and discomfort, and receiving visitors in the nude. (He would become notorious for briefing reporters in his hotel room while “brushing his lower anatomy with his hairbrush.”)81 Other Wingate trademarks: a pith helmet, which he wore in the manner of a nineteenth-century explorer; an alarm clock, which he carried (he claimed “wrist watches are no damned good”);82 raw onions, which he munched like apples because of their supposedly salubrious properties; and a beard, which he grew from time to time in contravention of the King’s Regulations, which permitted only a mustache.

  While returning home on a steamship from the Sudan in 1933, he met an Englishwoman, Ivy Paterson, and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Lorna. Ivy noted Wingate’s “medium height” (he was five feet six inches tall), the “forward thrust” of his head, and his “beautiful hands.” But his most impressive feature was his eyes: “Rather deep set, and of a periwinkle blue, they were the eyes of a prophet and a visionary. . . . [I]n their fire and intensity, one was aware of the unusual force of his personality.” That impression was reinforced when she heard Wingate hold forth in what another listener described as a “sandpaper voice” (“like the grating of stone against stone”) on almost every “subject under the sun”—including his love of Beethoven and his dislike of “the wireless,” as radio was then known. “He spoke brilliantly. But he could also be very quiet and silent for long periods.”83