Guerrilla Warfare

by Walter Laqueur

  The fighting in the peninsula, which involved many Roman legions, reached its climax in the war between Viriathus and Rome (147-139 B.C.). Born in the mountains of the Sierra de la Estella, between the Tajo and the Duero, probably of poor parents, Viriathus had been a shepherd and hunter in his youth, and later a small-time bandolero. Roman historians portray him as a man of very strong physique, quick, impervious to heat and cold, to hunger and thirst and without apparently needing sleep. He escaped Galba's massacre in the year 150 B.C. and, three years later, became the supreme military leader of the tribes — in Mommsen's words, the "chief of the guerrillas." Soon after Viriathus had been elected commander in chief, his soldiers were surrounded by the Romans but he achieved a getaway by use of a strategem that he was to apply many times in later years.8 This is how Appian described his tactics:

  He [Viriathus] drew them all up in line of battle as though he intended to fight but gave them orders that when he should mount his horse they should scatter in every direction and make their way as best they could by different routes to the city of Tribola and there wait for him. He chose 1,000 men only, whom he commanded to stay with him. These arrangements having been made, they all fled as soon as Viriathus mounted his horse. Vitelius [the Roman praetor] was afraid that those who had scattered in so many different directions, but turning towards Viriathus who was standing there and apparently waiting for a chance to attack, would join battle with him. Viriathus, having very swift horses harassed the Romans by attacking and thus consumed the whole of that day and the next, dashing around on the same field. As soon as he conjectured that the others had made good their escape, he hastened away in the night by devious paths and arrived at Tribola with his nimble steeds, the Romans not being able to follow him at an equal pace by reason of the weight of their armour, their ignorance of the roads, and the inferiority of their horses.9

  A few days later he attacked Vitelius from an ambush, killing four thousand of his ten thousand men; the rest were no longer capable of giving battle. Vitelius's successor, the praetor Plautius, fared no better; he was defeated twice by Viriathus, who again pretended that he was about to abscond when he was in fact preparing for an attack. Plautius was so weakened that, in the words of the Roman historian, he "retired to his winter quarters" — and this in the middle of summer. Viriathus also defeated another Roman praetor, Claudius Unimanus, but, after the year 145, his position became precarious inasmuch as the Romans had realized the seriousness of their situation on the peninsula and, after the victory over Carthage, dispatched larger forces to Spain. A consul was sent — Fabius Maximus Aemilianus, Scipio's brother — with an army of seventeen thousand preponderately new recruits. They were at first more successful than their predecessors; Viriathus continued to attack small detachments as the Roman general preferred to train his troops before launching a major campaign. In 144, Viriathus lost two cities in southern Spain, but his luck changed when Fabius was called back to Rome and when several tribes, hitherto in league with Rome, joined him in his struggle. A new Roman offensive was undertaken after the arrival of Fabius Maximus Servilianus in the year 141; but the forces at his disposal (twenty thousand men, ten elephants, and some African cavalry) were not sufficient to defeat the enemy.

  Despite several setbacks and the loss of some more cities, Viriathus attacked the Romans almost without interruption. The following year he cut off and encircled the main body of the Roman forces and disaster seemed inevitable when, instead of pressing home his advantage, he engaged in negotiations that led to a peace treaty, with the Romans for the first time recognizing Viriathus, who became amicus populi Romani. The reasons for his seemingly inexplicable behavior have been the subject of a long and inconclusive debate on the part of latter-day historians. According to the Romans, he was guided by generosity; others argued that his army was simply tired — and he was under pressure to bring the war to a speedy end. Yet others saw it as a psychological enigma; Viriathus could have put the whole enemy army to the sword and thereby ended the war, for the Romans would never have retrieved such a loss.10 Against this, it could be argued that Viriathus must have known that, in the long run, he could not maintain himself against Rome, that the Romans would not accept defeat, that new and stronger legions would be sent against him, and that formal recognition and semi-independence was the most for which he could hope. In any event, the treaty remained in force for less than a year; the war party in Rome had been opposed to it from the beginning and tried to provoke Viriathus into breaking it. When this did not succeed, Caepio, the new Roman leader in Spain, renewed the conflict. There was, however, no victory for him in the military sense, the war ending only after the assassination of Viriathus in his tent by three Roman emissaries who had been sent to renegotiate with him. The Romans were glad that their dangerous foe was dead; they were less than happy at the manner of his dying. Caepio was not awarded a triumphal return and Viriathus's murderers did not receive the promised reward. Tantalus, Viriathus's successor, capitulated soon afterward.

  Viriathus's conduct of war was, in all essential respects, identical to the campaign waged in the peninsula nineteen hundred years later.11 He made optimal use of the terrain and established foci in inaccessible places. He provoked the Romans to pursue him until he had maneuvered them into an ambush; he cut off their supply lines, harassed them ceaselessly with minor attacks. His principle was to attack quickly and to retreat with equal speed so as not to give the enemy an opportunity to discover the strength of the attacking party. While he preferred arms to be used from a distance, the weapons used by his troops in close battle were no less effective — the paraxiphis in particular, a lance with a strong barbed hook which caused terrible wounds.

  The Roman historians praised his personal integrity and his military leadership; he was a just and unselfish man who had nothing but contempt for pomp and ostentation. Thus the dux latronum turns into the vir duxque magnus (Livy) and the national hero of Portugal, glorified in Camoes's patriotic epos.12

  Fifty years after Viriathus's death there was a revival of guerrilla warfare in the peninsula. The insurgents were led by Sertorius, a Roman nobleman of Sabine extraction, who received his military training in Marius's army, was wounded and lost one eye. Sulla barred his election to the tribunal and later, when appointed governor of Hispania Citerior, had him proscribed. Sertorius escaped to Mauretania, where Lusitanian emissaries reached him and asked him to become their leader in the struggle for independence. At the time there were two thousand Romans and seven hundred Mauretanians with Sertorius; after his return to the peninsula his little army had grown to eight thousand and although Sertorius had to face the greatly superior armies of Pompeius and Metellus, he was never defeated. However, his deputies were not of the same caliber; on one occasion, in the midst of the war, he dissolved his army because he was dissatisfied with its performance and enlisted and trained new units to continue his campaign. He attacked the supply lines of the Roman legions and devastated the villages in their rear, compelling the legions to retreat to Gaul in the winter. He had an alliance with the pirates who attacked the Roman forces from the sea. Plutarch, who notes his quickness and dexterity, commented upon Sertorius's strategy:

  . .. Sertorius vanished, having broken up and dispersed his army. For this was the way in which he used to raise and disband his armies, so that sometimes he would be wandering up and down all alone, and at other times again he would come rushing into the field at the head of no less than one hundred and fifty thousand fighting men, like a winter torrent.13

  Sertorius was a master both of regular and guerrilla warfare; with inferior forces he kept many legions constantly on the alert. Like Viriathus, he was assassinated: he was killed during a meal in the home of Perperna, one of his aides. This, to all intents and purposes, was the end of the revolt against Rome, for Perperna's qualifications as a military leader, in contrast to those of a conspirator, were nonexistent.

  Sertorius no doubt more than once regretted his decision to b
ecome head of the Iberian tribes. He could rely on his soldiers only while the going was good; in adversity they were easily discouraged and they lacked staying power. There was a romantic streak in his character; at one stage he planned to sail to the mythical Isles of the Blest. He had far-fetched political ambitions and, for all one knows, planned, like Caesar, to conquer Rome and establish the rule of his party, the moderate democrats. He tried, without much success, to conclude an alliance with Mithridates and other enemies of the Roman Empire such as the pirates. Yet deep down he remained a Roman patriot — one of the most gifted and most attractive personalities of his time, a tragic figure who, owing to the intrigues of his enemies, had to die far from his native Rome for which he longed forever. Mommsen says of him that he was one of the greatest, if not the greatest man produced by Rome up to that time, one who, in happier circumstances, might have been the leader of a moral and political revival.14

  The Roman legions were superior to the enemies facing them in the west and the east owing to their discipline, their military prowess, their sound tactics based on the maniples and above all their engineering feats (road networks, fortress building and siegecraft). On the other hand, these forces were dispersed over a wide area and their lines of supply and communications remained often unprotected. It is therefore surprising that guerrilla tactics were not used against the Romans with greater success. There was not that much to choose between the arms used by the Romans and those used by the "barbarians"; no major war industry was needed to keep either army supplied. But while Roman rule provoked resentment and, on occasion, active resistance, there was no unity and no common purpose among Rome's enemies. The Romans were fighting tribes, not nations, and in the heyday of the Roman Empire a policy of "divide et impera" helped to maintain the Pax Romana and military power had to be used but rarely.

  The armies of the nomadic or seminomadic peoples, who brought about the downfall of Rome, applied new tactics, putting greater emphasis on cavalry and the use of missile weapons. Guerrilla warfare played little if any role in the early Middle Ages during the campaigns of the Vandals and the Ostrogoths, of the Huns and Byzanz, of Muhammad and the Mongols. In all these wars the fate of peoples and continents was decided in battles between large armies. Thus the Middle Ages are, on the whole, an unrewarding period for the student of guerrilla warfare. There was as much fighting as in former or later ages, but its character changed. In Europe, Christianity constituted a common religious and cultural framework with the Pope as ultimate arbiter. The Church did not seek to suppress war but to humanize it. According to the Treuga Dei, promulgated by successive church councils, it was forbidden to attack women and children, to rob or kill peasants, to use the arbalest against Christians, because its radius of action was a hundred and fifty meters and it was therefore considered too murderous. Fighting was legally permitted only for some one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty days throughout the year. These decrees were not, of course, always observed and were certainly not adhered to in the wars with non-Christian armies. But in principle, feudal warfare was diametrically opposed to the concept of guerrilla fighting; reading Don Quixote will help one to understand why. The knights jealously saw to it that the art of war remained their and their vassals' (the squires, les écuyers) monopoly; they would not tolerate any other fighting men next to them.15 True, swords for hire appeared in Italy by the eighth century but this remained largely an isolated phenomenon, which became widespread in Germany and France only in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In northern Italy, the condottieri extended their activities — the Visconti in Milan, the Scala in Verona, the Este in Ferrara, the Malatesta in Rimini — but the tactics used in their depredations and raids were very different from those used by guerrillas; they certainly did not have the support of the local population. In France and Germany small private armies were organized by the feudal lords and gradually became a major nuisance. In order to get rid of them, the popes tried, quite unsuccessfully, to dispatch them on a new crusade, but they preferred greener pastures nearer home.

  Elements of guerrilla tactics can be found in the peasant uprisings of the Middle Ages and among the bandits roaming Europe's border areas. The war of the Swiss against the Austrians, however, and the Dutch war of independence against Spain were of a different kind. The Swiss were not, as is often believed, a peaceful tribe of peasants and cowherds; they had a long martial tradition. In their battles (Morgarten, Sempach, Nancy), they used regular army tactics; they were superior in number to the other side, but, in contrast to the Austrian knights, they thought it a waste of time and effort to take prisoners. In the Dutch struggle against the Spaniards, guerrilla warfare was well-nigh impossible for geographical reasons; Dutch resistance was concentrated in the cities, there were no mountains and forests to retreat to, while naval power played an important role.

  In the Hundred Years' War between Britain and France, originally a dynastic conflict, which developed by degrees into a people's war, guerrilla tactics were occasionally used by the French, above all by Bertrand Duguesclin, Constable of France. He refused to attack the English, but, fighting in distinctly unchivalrous fashion, raided them by night, ambushed their convoys and in general engaged in a guerre d'usure, with all its familiar vexations. The English gradually lost what they had without so much as an opportunity of meeting the foe on the field of battle. Duguesclin is first mentioned in the chronicles at the Siege of Rennes (1356-1357) when, at the head of a hundred men, he penetrated the enemy camp and seized a wagon train of two hundred carts loaded with food and war supplies.16 Duguesclin was among those who pioneered the technique of using the cavalry as mounted infantry; quickly transferred from one place to another, the soldiers dismounted once the battle had started. This was the French answer to the longbow used by the English. Subsequently the technique fell into disuse, only to be rediscovered in the eighteenth century. Duguesclin and his raids were mentioned more than once as a shining example of partisan warfare in the manifestos of the French Resistance in World War II.

  The history of warfare in early modern times offers a great many examples of the technique of petite guerre. These were actions intended to damage the enemy while avoiding major battles. The element of surprise often played a central role, as in Prince Eugen's capture of Cremona (1702) which ended in a defeat, or the victory of the Austrians over Frederick the Great at Hochkirch (1758). This battle took place in wooded country with the Prussian king laboring under the delusion that he was facing merely another by now almost routine nightly raid by Austrian irregulars, whereas in fact Marshal Daun, the Austrian commander, had moved thirty thousand men to within two hundred yards of the Prussian forces, which were in consequence completely routed. Even before, in the Thirty Years' War, Wallenstein used raiding parties of Croats to pursue Mansfeld, and Gustav Adolf had special light brigades of about five hundred men for similar purposes. The main practitioners of the art of raiding parties were Johann von Werth in the last phase of the Thirty Years' War and the Austrian commanders Trenk and Nadasdy with their Croats and Pandurs who caused considerable trouble to Frederick the Great. The units consisted of anything from two hundred to two thousand horsemen and in their raids, which sometimes lasted for weeks, they covered hundreds of miles to the enemy's rear. But they almost always acted within the framework of a regular army.

  Between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries, peasant revolts periodically swept throughout Europe (Flanders in 1323-1327, the Jacquerie in 1358, Wat Tyler's rising in 1381, the war of the Taborites in Bohemia and the German Peasant War in 1525). It was not so much the absence of a clear political program, inefficient leadership or inferior armament that led almost invariably to the quick defeat of the peasant armies, but chiefly the fact that peasants were incapable of engaging in a sustained effort; the Jacquerie in the Paris region, for instance, was crushed within a mere two weeks. The peasants would congregate for a big battle or a major campaign, presenting an easy and convenient target for their opponen
ts. They lacked organization and discipline: after a few weeks or months they would disperse and their armies would simply melt away. There was nonetheless the occasional exception: while the French peasants were defeated with such ease, the struggle of the Tuchins in the Auvergne lasted for twenty-one years. It was an early and successful case of social banditry; they robbed travelers and attacked small English and French detachments.17 The rebellion of the Remensas in Catalonia went on for over ten years (1461-1472) and there was another upsurge in the 1480s. The Taborites, more a national than a social movement, effectively used a new military technique (the Wagenburg) which, though known in the early Middle Ages, had been totally forgotten in the centuries between. The Taborites did not, however, evade confrontation with their enemies; they could more than hold their own on the battlefield and their military exploits do not therefore belong to the history of irregular warfare.

  The Balkans were the main scene of banditry from the fifteenth to the late eighteenth century. Although they had been occupied by the Turks in the fifteenth century, local resistance had continued, sometimes in the form of a struggle for national (and religious) independence, but more often as banditry. The most successful of the opponents to Turkish rule was George Castriota-Skanderbeg. A Serbian by birth, he had served with distinction with the Turkish army for many years and was governor of a sanjak. In 1442 he moved to Albania and at the head of some three hundred local warriors raised the banner of national revolt. He proclaimed himself a Christian and, temporarily uniting the Albanian tribes, defeated countless Turkish generals such as Fizur, Mustafa, Hamza, Balaban, Yakub Arnaut, as well as the great sultan himself. Skanderbeg was a military leader of remarkable talent. Never defeated in battle, he mastered both regular warfare and guerrilla tactics. When the sultan attacked him with a strong army (a hundred and thirty thousand men according to the chronicles), he wisely evaded battle and, instead, intercepted the sultan's convoys, cut off his communications, wiped out small Turkish detachments, harassed the Turkish flanks and rear by day and by night, and so fatigued them by constantly changing ruses and stratagems that the sultan decided that the game was not worth the candle and retreated from this inhospitable country. After Skanderbeg's death (1468) his movement collapsed. He has become the national hero of Albania, the subject of countless histories, novels and even a film, which usually gloss over the exceedingly cruel character of these wars. Pardon was never granted, treaties and promises were broken, women and children were indiscriminately slaughtered; it was, in brief, a war of extermination which was far removed from the restrictions imposed by feudal chivalry on medieval Europe.