War Before Civilization

by Lawrence H Keeley

  Although it did not hinge on anything that could properly be called a campaign, the fate of the Norse colonists in Vinland and Greenland provides no support for the notion that civilized people possessed inherent military superiority. Viking accounts (discussed earlier) record that they were driven from Vinland by the hostile natives. But three centuries later something even worse befell them, when southward-migrating Thule Inuit (Eskimo) reached a long-established but declining Norse colony in southwestern Greenland. The last written Norse records recount attacks by the Skraelings, and an expedition mounted from the Eastern Settlement to reconquer the Western Settlement from the Inuit found it completely deserted. The unequivocal traditions of the Inuit, not recorded until 1850, claim that their ancestors administered the coup de grace to the fading Norse colonies in the course of mutual raids and massacres. Archaeology also suggests that the Inuit may have played a role in the final disappearance of the Eastern Settlement.18 In these first military conflicts between the warriors of the New and Old Worlds, all the spoils belonged to the Americans.

  Also in the fourteenth century, the Neolithic Gaunche tribesmen of the Canary Islands, armed only with wooden spears and stones for throwing, repulsed several French, Portuguese, and Spanish campaigns of conquest.19 The Gran Canada Guanches held out against these various conquistadors for almost a century and a half (1342–1483). Tenerife resisted until 1496 after pushing two invading Spanish armies into the sea. The prolonged resistance of these Stone Age tribes compares very favorably with the swift defeats suffered by the highly civilized Aztecs and Incas at the hands of Spanish invaders a few decades later. Similarly, the “wild tribes” of tropical South America defeated many Inca, Spanish, and Portuguese campaigns of conquest, as often as not, by completely annihilating the armies sent against them.20

  The story was no different in North America. In one case, an early Spanish expedition sent from New Mexico to overawe the ever-troublesome Plains tribes (and detach them from any connection with French traders) was wiped out by the Pawnees in eastern Nebraska.21 The Seminoles of Florida were never completely conquered by the U.S. Army, and it is hardly hyperbole to claim that tourists, armed only with tasteless clothing, have done a better job. One of the biggest American successes was obtained in 1839 when a corrupt Indian agent “bought out” a tough Seminole chief named Billy Bowlegs; when he left for exile in Oklahoma, he was reconciled to his defeat by fifty slaves and $100,000 in gold. A century after the Seminole War petered out in the early 1840s, Florida Seminoles plausibly (but unsuccessfully) claimed exemption from conscription during World War II because they belonged to a sovereign and never subjugated enemy “nation.” After several years of dogged raiding by Chief Red Cloud’s Sioux and Cheyenne warriors, the United States conceded the Bozeman Trail and the Powder River country it transited in the Treaties of 1868, admittedly because there was an alternative (but longer) route to the Montana mines. If not every civilized campaign in the New World was a success, it must be conceded that the great majority were. But the reasons for these victories had little to do with tactics, and even logistics and economics may have been irrelevant to the results.

  As the ecological historian Alfred Crosby points out, European conquerors of the “brave new worlds” of the Americas, Australia, the Pacific islands, and the isolated extremities of the Old World were aided by invisible but overpowering allies.22 These silent partners included viruses, bacteria, seed plants, and mammals that disseminated death and triggered ecological transformations that decimated native manpower and disrupted traditional economies. These insidious conquistadors spread far more rapidly and were many times more deadly than the human conquerors who followed in their wake. The deaths meted out by measles, influenza, and (especially) smallpox far exceeded in magnitude the deaths inflicted by the weapons of the Europeans. For example, the highest estimates for the number of Aztecs killed in combat during the Spanish Conquest (mostly by the Spaniards’ Indian allies) are about 100,000, whereas in the decade following, introduced diseases killed at least 4 million and perhaps more than 8 million central Mexicans.23 Many groups in these new worlds commonly lost a third to half of their populations just in the initial epidemic. Certainly, far less effort was needed to defeat adversaries who had just watched half of their comrades and families the of an alien and untreatable disease or had seen the mainstays of their economy choked out by the weeds and feral animals of the invaders. Crosby concludes that the celebrated victories of the small armies of Cortez and Pizarro over the populous Aztec and Inca civilizations were “in large part the triumphs of the virus of smallpox.” The Yukaghir hunter-gatherers of Siberia had no doubt about why the Russians had been able to overpower them. They claimed that the Russians had brought with them a box containing smallpox, which, when opened, filled the land with smoke, and “the people began to die.”

  Crosby makes several historical comparisons that illustrate how essential these biological weapons were to European military success.24 Despite using very primitive military technologies and tactics, possessing resources (such as spices, gold, and ivory) that excited the greed of Europeans, and being far closer to Europe than to temperate South America or Australia, many tribal areas were not conquered by Europeans until the late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth century. What distinguished these resistant regions (the prime example being tropical Africa) from those rapidly subdued by Europeans during the previous four centuries was the natural immunity of their populations to Eurasian diseases and, in some areas, endemic diseases to which Europeans were especially susceptible. Also, European commensal species (such as rats and cattle) either were already native to these regions or could not survive there (such as rabbits and many weeds). Where disease-resistant tribal populations were established in the New World—for instance, the “Bush Negroes” of the Guianas—they were victorious over their seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European foes.25 In other words, where Europeans were deprived of their biological advantages, their supposed military superiority was useless. Only the advent of modern medicine and public hygiene, the steamship, repeating rifles, and machine guns gave Europeans overwhelming advantages in health, logistics, and firepower over all tribal adversaries. In the face of these facts, the claim that the superior tactics and military discipline of Europeans gained them dominion over primitives in the Americas, Oceania, and Siberia is so inflated that it would be comic were not the facts that contradict it so tragic.

  Primitive warriors often more quickly appreciated the military potential of civilized weapons than did soldiers long familar with them. The Indians of New England, in contrast to the first European colonists, preferred the flintlock to the matchlock musket, loading and using the flintlock in such a way as to much improve its accuracy and deadliness in combat.26 In a more recent example, whereas civilized soldiers took a decade or more to translate powered flight into a means of inflicting death and destruction, some New Guinea tribesmen grasped its possibilities in only a matter of minutes.27 The Eipo of highland Irian Jaya were first contacted by an ethnographer (Wulf Schiefenhövel of the Max Planck Institute) and his pilot, who landed their small plane among the tribesmen. Despite never having seen an airplane before, the tribal leader immediately asked for a ride, a request that was granted. When finally seated, he said that he wanted to bring a few heavy stones with him on the the flight. Asked what the rocks were for, he replied that if he were flown over the village of his enemies, he would drop these rocks on them. Although his request for a bombing raid was not granted, this tribal Billy Mitchell had immediately recognized the military value of aerial bombardment—far more quickly than the military leaders of the civilized nations that created and developed the airplane. These leaders assigned the first military aircraft to unarmed observational roles.

  In the present day, the tactics, objectives, and practices typical of primitive war survive in civilized contexts under another name: guerrilla warfare. Like their tribal counterparts, guerrilla units are part-time, weakly di
sciplined bands of lightly armed volunteers. They prefer hit-and-run raids and ambushes to formal battles, and they rely heavily on their mobility, excellent intelligence, and knowledge of terrain to exploit the advantages of stealth and surprise. Guerrillas gain territory by harassing and terrorizing their enemies into abandoning it. Because of the lightness of their weapons and the weakness of their logistics, they are usually thwarted tactically by fortifications that they cannot take by either assault or siege. But they can sometimes maintain a strategic siege by harassing a fort’s supply lines, as Chief Red Cloud did against Fort Abraham Lincoln on the Bozeman Trail. Antiguerrilla warfare requires exactly the same tactical adjustments by conventional armies as were adopted to counter tribal warriors. Defeating guerrillas is virtually impossible by purely military means; almost invariably, political and economic methods must also be employed.

  American GIs in Vietnam acknowledged the similarity between tribal raiders and guerrillas when they ruefully termed their own fortified encampments “Fort Apaches” and Viet Cong-controlled areas “Indian country.” The connection was even more direct for the Soviets in Afghanistan, who could not do any better against actual tribesmen than the British had a century before. Since guerrilla wars have long been recognized as especially destructive, prolonged, costly, and murderous, it is very curious that primitive warfare, being almost identical in means and methods, could ever be regarded as frivolous.

  Indeed, every successful guerrilla campaign, however rare, is a demonstration that there is nothing contemptible about primitive military techniques. The nineteenth century witnessed some notably successful guerrilla campaigns, including the “Spanish Ulcer,” which Napoleon could not cure, and the defeat of the best units of Maximilian’s army (mostly French) by the Juaristas in Mexico.28 In this century, guerrillas have been victorious over conventional forces more often than they have lost.29 The fact that most guerrillas who lost either lacked or were cut off from logistical support by a larger and more modern economy highlights the only real weakness of primitive warfare and the decisive advantage of the civilized version. As the military truism asserts, “Amateurs discuss tactics while professionals discuss logistics.”

  The elaborate tactics, complex organization, and strict discipline of civilized armies are not just irrelevant rituals or irrational customs. But the techniques of civilized war are focused on winning battles, whereas those of tribesmen and guerrillas are devoted to winning everything else, especially wars. In many cases, primitive warfare requires long periods of time—even generations—to gain its ends, whereas the goal of civilized war is the extremely elusive “knock-out blow.”30 Civilized techniques are much more effective when the fighting is between civilized foes who field large formations of more or less equal size and employ heavy and complex weaponry. This fact is demonstrated by the success of European and European-led armies over those of Asian states during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.31 But in World War II, the superior weaponry and tactics of the Germans and the suicidal courage and superior discipline of the Japanese were eventually ground into powder by the overwhelming weight of the Allies’ manpower and industrial productivity. These twentieth-century cases, as well as those of the American Confederacy and of Napoleonic France in the nineteenth century, demonstrate that faith in “superior” (civilized) military techniques, élan, and discipline as a substitute for a larger population and a stronger economy is criminally insane.

  The superiority of the disciplined mass formations and arcane military techniques of civilization over the looser methods of primitives is elusive, if not illusory. A broad survey of warfare indicates that (in the short term or tactically) superior numbers or fortifications and (in the long term or strategically) a larger population and better logistics are the keys to victory. In fact, primitive tactics are superior, since civilized forces must adopt most of them—despite already possessing an often stupendous superiority in weapons, manpower, and supplies—in order to triumph over primitive or guerrilla adversaries. Remarkably, the armies of civilization inevitably suffer some severe and embarrassing defeats before these truths dawn on their commanders. In two full decades of determined fighting, neither the French nor the Americans could defeat the guerrillas of Southeast Asia. But together in the Persian Gulf War, with but a fraction of the strength they employed in Indochina, they decimated one of the largest and best-equipped conventional armies in the world in just three months.32 In contrast to the Iraqi army’s performance in the Gulf War, the Apaches survived civilized military pressure for almost 300 years and were defeated only by primitive methods—literally by other Apaches wearing U.S. Army uniforms. Where is Tactic’s sting and Discipline’s dominion?

  SIX

  The Harvest of Mars

  The Casualties of War

  Although anthropologists have paid some attention to the actual conduct of primitive warfare, until very recently they seldom documented or examined its direct effects. Like those Soviet planners who believed that one big factory was always better than a host of smaller ones, Westerners have a tendency to equate size with efficiency. But efficiency is a ratio, not an absolute. Effects are most profitably assessed in relation to the effort invested in obtaining them. Viewed in proportionate terms, how effective is pre-civilized warfare in wreaking death and destruction on enemies or in exacting profits from victory? This is the question to which we now turn.

  PRISONERS AND CAPTIVES

  It is extremely uncommon to find instances among nonstate groups of recognizing surrender or taking adult male prisoners. Adult males who fell into the hands of their enemies were usually immediately dispatched.1 The Mae Enga tribesmen of highland New Guinea provide a typical example. When a Mae Enga warrior was seriously wounded by an arrow or a javelin, his adversaries would charge forward to chop him literally to pieces with their axes. To save their wounded from such a gruesome and culturally humiliating death, comrades would surround them so that they could be guided or carried to the rear. But the usual eagerness to dispatch enemy wounded was such that slightly wounded warriors would sometimes feign greater debility in order to draw their reckless opponents forward into flanking crossfire.2 Armed or unarmed, adult males were killed without hesitation in battles, raids, or the routs following battles in the great majority of primitive societies. Surrender was not a practical option for adult tribesmen because survival after capture was unthinkable.

  The reasons for this no-prisoners policy were seldom articulated by its practioners. In many cases, it was simply tradition, a practice so common and universal that it needed no explanation. For example, during the 1879 Anglo-Zulu War, a British officer asked some Zulu prisoners why he should not kill them, as Zulus always killed British who fell into their hands. One prisoner answered, “There is a very good reason why you should not kill us. We kill you because it is the custom of Black men but it isn’t the White men’s custom.”3 Impressed by this appeal to the power of custom, the officer spared these Zulu prisoners. Overall, however, British soldiers were quick to abandon civilized constraints with regard to Zulu captives when it became evident that no reciprocity was forthcoming. Beyond the proximate cause of convention, one can only speculate about the ultimate reasons that male prisoners were seldom taken in primitive warfare. The most likely reason is that enemy warriors were unlikely to accept captivity without attempting violent escapes or revenge; thus holding them captive required levels of vigilance and upkeep that most tribal societies were unable or unprepared to provide.

  A few cultures occasionally took men captive only to sacrifice them to their gods or torture them to death later.4 Among the Iroquoian tribes of the Northeast, captured warriors were often subject to preliminary torture during the return journey of a war party. When the party arrived at the home village, the prisoners were beaten by running the gauntlet into the village. At a council, the warrior prisoners who survived these initial torments were distributed to families who had recently lost men in warfare. After these prisoners were ritually
adopted and given the name of the family’s dead member, they were usually tortured to death over several days. The victim was expected to display great fortitude during these torments—taunting his torturers and expressing contempt for their efforts. When the prisoner was dead, some parts of his body were eaten (usually including his heart) by his murderers. Archaeological finds of human bones in prehistoric Iroquoian kitchen middens indicate that it was also a pre-Columbian practice.5 Similar treatment was inflicted on captives by various Tupi groups in South America; in some tribes, the tortured prisoner was dispatched by children using arrows or axes, and the boys’ hands were then dipped in the victim’s blood to symbolize their duty to become warriors. Later destruction of male captives by ritual torture, sacrifice, or cannibalism (Chapter 7) has been recorded for the Maoris and Marquesans of Polynesia, Fijians, a few North American tribes, several South American groups, and various New Guinea groups.6 This fate was usually reserved for only a few enemy warriors—usually chiefs or other men of renown. The majority of captured foes were simply executed without further ceremony. These elaborate customs, however gruesome, merely delayed or prolonged the inevitable destruction of enemy males.

  In some societies, of course, blood kin and in-laws who met one another in combat would try to avoid harming one another. In highland New Guinea, for example, a warrior who spotted a relative on the other side might move to another part of the battle line or might point this relative out to his comrades, asking them to spare him (a protection that was usually only temporary).7 The underlying motive was to avoid having a relative’s or in-law’s blood on one’s hands—not necessarily to save him from harm. In most primitive combat, adversaries neither gave nor expected quarter from anyone.