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

by Max Boot

  Armed with high-level authorization, Wingate returned to India, only to run into unremitting hostility from the British headquarters in New Delhi. Part of this was due to the natural skepticism of conventional officers who resisted “a new approach to war.” But Wingate did not help his own cause. One staff officer recalled that when challenged he “replied with a long-winded diatribe accusing almost everyone of stupidity, ignorance, obstruction, and much else besides.” This officer concluded that Wingate was “a thoroughly nasty bit of work.” Wingate was typically unrepentant. “It is because I am what I am, objectionable though it appears to my critics, that I win battles,” he shot back.91

  Wingate was too weak to fight back effectively at first because on the way to India he had contracted typhus after foolishly drinking the water from a flower vase during a refueling stop. (He was thirsty and the canteen was closed.) But as he recovered his strength he got the upper hand against the “marsupial minds” at headquarters. He was promoted to major general and given command of a Special Force of some twenty thousand men, or two divisions’ worth. The first expedition had been mounted with one brigade. Now he had six.

  A new feature of the second Chindit expedition would be the establishment of fortified strongholds in enemy territory. Wingate defined the stronghold as “an orbit round which columns of the Brigade circulate,” “a defended airstrip,” “a magazine for stores,” and, more colorfully, as “a machan overlooking a kid tied up to entice the Japanese tiger.” In other words the strongholds were designed to goad the Japanese into costly and futile attacks. In the process, however, the Chindits would sacrifice the guerrilla’s advantages of speed and mobility.

  Operation Thursday, the second Chindit expedition, began with one brigade marching overland at the end of February 1944. The bulk of the force was to begin its fly-in on Sunday, March 5. At 4:30 p.m. that day, just half an hour before the first C-47 cargo aircraft was to lift off from an airstrip in India, an American reconnaissance flight revealed teak logs blocking one of the landing sites in the jungle, code-named Piccadilly. Had the landing been blown? Or had the trees been placed there in the course of normal logging operations? It was later revealed to be the latter, but there were more than a few anxious moments for the cluster of senior commanders huddled on the airstrip. Finally the decision was made to proceed, diverting the flights that would have gone to Piccadilly to another landing zone, Broadway, located 150 miles inside Burma.

  The first C-47 roared off at 6:12 p.m. on March 5, followed by more aircraft at thirty-second intervals. Each airplane towed two gliders full of men jammed in with their supplies. Not all of the gliders made it over the seven-thousand-foot mountains. Ten of them crashed in India; six others got lost and came down in the wrong part of occupied Burma. For the thirty-seven gliders that reached Broadway, the trouble was only beginning.

  Near the landing zone, the tow ropes were released and there was a “sudden tremendous silence” as the gliders headed for the dark ground. The men had no seat belts as they braced for impact. Reconnaissance flights had not revealed the presence of two deep ditches that were used by elephants to drag timber to the river. Some of the first gliders had their undercarriages ripped off and lay blocking the makeshift airstrip. The gliders just behind them had to maneuver sharply to avoid the wreckage. Many did not make it and created more obstructions. Attempts to clear the wreckage and help the wounded were complicated by the arrival of more gliders, which emerged from the darkness with the force of bombs. “At times the rending, tearing, crunching sound of wings and fuselages being torn apart was quite deafening,” recalled “Mad Mike” Calvert, commander of the first brigade to be inserted, “then all would be quiet for a moment until the cries of the wounded men arose up from the wrecks. Their pitiful calls for help pierced into my shocked mind as I worked with the others to clear up the mess.”

  Calvert had been given a choice of signals to send: “Pork Sausage” if the landings were successful; “Soya Link” (a widely hated pork substitute) if not. At 2:30 a.m. on Monday, March 6, he sent out “Soya Link,” thereby stopping all further flights. In India the faraway commanders figured the “Japs” had ambushed the leading parties. But in fact the Japanese were nowhere to be seen; they were befuddled by the errant gliders landing for hundreds of miles around. At Broadway, 30 Chindits had been killed and 20 wounded but more than 350 had landed unharmed. With the aid of a bulldozer that somehow emerged unscathed from the wreckage of a glider, they worked to clear and improve the airstrip. At 6:30 a.m. Calvert was able to send out “Pork Sausage.” That night C-47s began landing at Broadway bringing in reinforcements. Another stronghold, Chowringhee, named after Calcutta’s main street, was established not far away.

  By March 13, 1944, eight days after the first landing, more than 9,000 men and 1,350 animals, mostly mules whose vocal cords had been cut to prevent them from braying, had arrived in Burma along with 250 tons of stores and batteries of field guns and antiaircraft guns. Wingate announced, “All our Columns are inside the enemy’s guts. . . . This is a moment to live in history.”

  He would not live to see the rest of the history unfold. On March 24, while shuttling between bases in India, his B-25 bomber plunged into a hillside for reasons that remain mysterious. The man who had pioneered the concept of “long-range penetration operations” was just forty-one years old—even younger than T. E. Lawrence when he died.

  One of his brigade commanders, Joe Lentaigne, took over the Chindits, but he was no “wayward genius,” as one of his men described Wingate; no one was. The Chindits were soon subordinated to the acerbic American general “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, who made no secret of his disdain for all “Limeys.” He proceeded to decimate the Chindits in a lengthy campaign during the monsoon season, which turned roads into knee-deep mud and made it difficult to provide air support, by throwing them repeatedly against well-entrenched Japanese troops.

  By the end of June 1944, while on the other side of the planet fresh Allied troops were beginning the liberation of France, the 77th Brigade, 3,000 strong initially, had only 300 fit men left, and they were, one of them noted, “yellow, bedraggled, bearded scarecrows.” In the 111th Brigade even fewer were still able to fight—only 119 men. The brigade commanders demanded to be pulled out, noting that Wingate had not envisioned leaving them behind enemy lines for more than three months. Stilwell, stubborn to the end, resisted. Not until August 27, 1944, were the last Chindits flown out—almost six months after the initial landings.

  The Chindits had lost 3,628 killed, wounded, and missing, or 18 percent of the force, and 90 percent of those casualties had occurred while under Stilwell’s command.92 They would fight no more. In 1945 they were disbanded. A similar fate was suffered by Merrill’s Marauders, an American long-range penetration brigade trained by Wingate that was also “destroyed” in Burma under Stilwell’s brutal directives.93 Survivors of both units would curse Vinegar Joe for decades to come.

  Controversy still shrouds the Chindits’ operations. Did they substantially weaken the Japanese hold on Burma, as some historians argue, or only shave a “few months,” as the official history has it, from the time when northern Burma would have been liberated anyway by regular Indian Army troops?94 Contemporaries could not agree, and neither can historians. The only certainty is the courage and resilience the Chindits displayed while being pushed to the edge of human endurance and beyond.

  WINGATE’S ABILITY TO inspire strong feelings, for and against, did not end with his death. Churchill paid tribute to him as “a man of genius who might well have become also a man of destiny.” This was an opinion shared by most of his men. One Chindit wrote, “When you first met him you thought he was a maniac—after a week you would have died for him.”95 Yet not all of his subordinates were in “awe of him.” A Gurkha officer said, “We did not like him. . . . We were terrified of him.”96 Another officer recalled debating with his colleagues, “Is he mad?”97 The strain of antipathy was much stronger among the staff officers
over whom Wingate rode roughshod. One of them penned an acidulous assessment of him in the official British war history; it suggested that “the moment of his death” may have been “propitious for him.”98 This was the first and probably last time that any official history celebrated the death of a senior officer.

  Jack Masters, a Chindit officer who became a well-known novelist, rendered perhaps the most evenhanded verdict when he wrote sixteen years after his commander’s death:

  Wingate was sometimes right and sometimes wrong. It really does not matter. What does matter is that he possessed one of the most unusual personalities of recent history. He had a driving will of tremendous power. His character was a blend of mysticism, anger, love, passion, and dark hatred, of overpowering confidence and deepest depression. He could make all kinds of men believe in him, and he could make all kinds of men distrust him.99

  The same might be said about most other successful guerrilla leaders; it is not a business that rewards those who are too amiable and agreeable.

  41.

  RESISTANCE AND COLLABORATION

  Yugoslavia, 1941–1945, and the Limits of

  Scorched-Earth Counterinsurgency

  THE END OF the Chindits and Marauders did not mean the end of irregular warfare in Burma. In 1943 the OSS infiltrated a unit code-named Detachment 101 to train Kachin tribesmen to fight the Japanese. By 1945 the OSS had over ten thousand guerrillas under arms, while the SOE had succeeded in winning over to the Allied cause the Burma National Army, commanded by Aung San, father of the future Nobel Peace Prize recipient Aung San Suu Kyi, who had initially been in the Japanese camp. By now both the SOE and the OSS, which had been plagued in the war’s early years by all the mistakes that characterize a hastily improvised start-up, had gained from experience a much more professional approach to training and tradecraft. They showed what they had learned in Burma, making it, in the judgment of one historian, among “the most successful irregular military operations of the war.”100

  The experience of Burma was a microcosm of the rise and fall of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. While more-liberal European empires lasted centuries before they expired, the sun rose and set much more quickly on the more-brutish Japanese empire acquired in imitation of the European example. This was due, of course, mainly to the strength of the opposition arrayed against it by the Allies. But the heavy-handed methods employed by the soldiers of the Rising Sun did not help. Unlike the Nazis in Europe or the Middle East, the Japanese initially had some success harnessing nationalist sentiment with their slogan “Asia for the Asians.” They attracted collaborators such as Aung San, Sukarno in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), and Subhas Chandra Bose in India. But the “stupid and swinish conduct” of Japanese soldiers, who in China pursued a “three alls” strategy (“kill all, burn all, destroy all”), had alienated most of their subjects by war’s end. A 1947 CIA report about Indochina noted, “Japanese terrorism . . . roused the whole people to a general anti-imperialistic feeling.”101 That held true across Asia. There were significant resistance movements in Burma, China, Malaya, and the Philippines. In the Philippines alone there were around 225,000 guerrillas. By the time of MacArthur’s landing in 1944, the guerrillas claimed to control 800 of the country’s 1,000 municipalities. The guerrillas would not have prevailed without the help of Allied armies, but they did help to make life more difficult for the occupiers.102

  The record of guerrilla resistance in Western Europe was less impressive. The continent smoldered but never saw an anti-Nazi blaze. The SOE pulled off occasional coups such as sending two Czech agents to assassinate the SS lieutenant general Reinhard Heydrich, the “blond beast,” outside Prague in 1942. But the price was fearful. In retaliation for Heydrich’s death, the Nazis eradicated two entire villages, Lidice and Lezaky, killing over five thousand people. Such overreaction sowed the seeds of hatred that would come back to haunt the Nazis in the future, but, as a historian of the SOE notes, “In the short run, terror worked, as it usually does.”103

  At least it did in Western and Central Europe where the topography was hardly favorable for guerrilla operations. To avoid bringing an awful fate upon their innocent neighbors, most European resistance movements adopted the refrain of the clandestine Norwegian Milorg (Military Organization): “Lie low, go slow.”104 Accommodation with the Nazis was made easier in the west by the fact that the Nazis did not have the same kind of pathological antipathy for the Belgians or French that they had for Jews and Slavs, whom they labeled Untermenschen (“sub-humans”). The Danes, Dutch, and Norwegians were even considered to be fellow Aryans, although that did not save them from invasion. In the Nazi orders for retaliation against partisan attacks, a German soldier’s life was worth the lives of “only” five Danes compared with a hundred Poles.105 Because German occupation in the west was so much milder than in the east, it aroused less opposition.

  It was a different story in Eastern Europe. There is always a temptation for any counterinsurgent force, especially one sent by an illiberal state, to resort to the most sanguinary methods imaginable to eradicate resistance from armed civilians. Whatever their short-term impact, such blunderbuss tactics usually fail in the end by arousing more opposition than they eliminate. That was a lesson learned by the Akkadians in ancient Mesopotamia and the French in 1790s Haiti. Such methods are even more counterproductive, as the Japanese, Italians, and Germans were to discover, if the victimized populace can find outside allies to help it fight back.

  To their own detriment, the Nazis disregarded the lessons of the more liberal British Empire, which Hitler claimed to admire. The Führer did not seem to notice that the British, in spite of their own dogma of racial superiority, made many accommodations with local rulers and local customs and always held out the hope, however faint, that at some point in the future the empire’s subjects would be allowed to rule themselves. There could be no such hope for those enslaved within the Nazi ambit. “What made the Nazis’ approach not only unusual but completely counter-productive as a philosophy of rule,” notes the historian Mark Mazower, “was their insistence on defining nationalism in such completely narrow terms that it precluded most of the peoples they conquered from ever becoming citizens.”106 In so doing, Hitler disregarded the lessons not only of the British but also of the Romans, who extended citizenship across their domains.

  Hard as it may be to believe in retrospect, there was nothing inevitable about the violent loathing that Nazi rule aroused. When the German armies rolled into the Soviet Union, many people, and not only minority nationalities, were ready to welcome them as liberators from Stalinist oppression. At least 650,000 Soviet citizens wound up wearing Wehrmacht uniforms, including many prisoners of war who volunteered to fight under Andrei Vlasov and other captured Red Army generals.107 There were also numerous volunteers for Waffen SS units from the Baltic states, Ukraine, Hungary, and other parts of Eastern Europe—nearly half a million men in all.108 But Hitler’s draconian decrees and indiscriminate violence alienated most Eastern Europeans and helped give rise to a large and effective partisan movement in the Soviet Union that numbered more than 180,000 fighters and received substantial assistance from the Soviet military and intelligence apparatus.109

  Like the British army in the American Revolution, the Napoleonic army in the Peninsular War, the federal army in the post–Civil War South, or, for that matter, the Japanese army in China, the Nazis compounded their woes in the East by not deploying enough troops to police rear areas effectively, thereby violating the imperative to achieve a sufficient ratio of counterinsurgents to civilians. The proper ratio is a matter of debate, with estimates ranging from one counterinsurgent per 357 civilians in a relatively peaceful situation to one counterinsurgent per 40 civilians in a more contested environment, but there is little doubt that in the central part of the Soviet Union the counterinsurgent forces were badly understrength: there were an average of just 2 German soldiers per three square miles.110 After a partisan attack, German units might
roll through a village and slaughter everyone in sight, but then they would move on, allowing the partisans to come back. Thus the Germans aroused much hatred but exercised little control: the worst of all worlds. As the power of the occupiers waned, guerrilla attacks increased in keeping with the plan outlined by one Polish resistance fighter in 1939, who had counseled that the underground should reveal itself only when Germany was on the verge of defeat “or at least when one leg buckles. Then we should be able to cut through veins and tendons in the other leg and bring down the German colossus.”111

  In France the German hold began to buckle following the Allied invasion on June 6, 1944. The French Resistance, the maquis, which had been relatively quiescent until then, chose that moment to step up its activities. Cooperation between the Allied armies and the Resistance was facilitated by Jedburgh teams parachuted into France ahead of D-day, each one composed of an SOE or OSS officer, a Free French officer, and a radio operator. General Dwight Eisenhower later claimed, “probably overgenerously” in the estimation of the historian Julian Jackson, that the work of the Resistance had been worth fifteen divisions to him.112 After Mussolini’s overthrow in 1943, Italian guerrillas also proved a valuable adjunct to Allied armies advancing up the peninsula; the guerrillas themselves strung up Il Duce and his mistress.

  Irregulars who were not able to work with conventional forces did not fare as well. Following the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the Nazis razed the entire ghetto. Following the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, they razed the rest of the city. Members of the Polish Home Army, which was behind the 1944 revolt, had mistakenly believed that the Red Army, which was within sight of Warsaw, would come to their aid. Stalin, however, cynically chose to hold back his troops while the Polish patriots, who might have resisted the imposition of Communist rule, were slaughtered. A similar fate was suffered by Naples in 1943 following a four-day uprising against the Nazis, proving once again what the Paris Commune and the Jewish Revolt had already demonstrated: that cities are death traps for large-scale rebellions.