Guerrilla Warfare

by Walter Laqueur

  The army has come to feel that its very strength is its weakness. Without any maneuverability, in a state of continual exhaustion, it must make its way through these desert regions under the constant dread of ambuscades and be slowly sacrificed to a dreaded enemy who does not stand and fight but flees. The conflict is an unequal one, and a military force is compelled to descend to a lower plane of combat; it has to contend not merely with man but with the earth itself; and, when the backlands are boiling in the dry summer heat, it is not difficult to foresee which side will have the victory.19

  The greatest disaster was the defeat of the third expeditionary force under Colonel Moreira César, a tough soldier subject to epileptic fits. His force included a squadron of cavalry and a battery of artillery. For the first time there was a clear military plan but it was a crude one — "to hurl a thousand-and-some bayonets against Canudos in double-quick time" (da Cunha). The enterprise was carried out in great haste, and all the past mistakes were repeated. Meanwhile, the people of Canudos had dug an elaborate system of trenches in and around their small capital; they were not badly armed for guerrilla warfare with their scythes, "scraping knives," muskets, shotguns and blunderbusses. Gunpowder they had bought in the neighborhood or manufactured themselves. They received reinforcements from all over the province — the "badmen from the backlands congregated in and around Canudos. The expeditionary force managed to reach the town, but in the ensuing assault it got literally lost in the labyrinth of lanes and alleyways. Cesar was mortally wounded in the attack and soon his soldiers were in full flight, rifles abandoned. The insurgents seized a great quantity of arms, including four Krupp field guns. The jaguncos took no prisoners — wounded soldiers were beheaded; later on the army retaliated with similar acts of cruelty.

  This defeat caused a major crisis in Brazilian politics. "Patriotic passion was verging on insanity," is the way da Cunha put it. The fourth expedition was headed by General Artur Oscar who had been previously engaged in guerrilla warfare along the Rio Grande. But neither his own past experience nor the lessons of the previous campaigns against Canudos were heeded and on his first major encounter with the rebels he was surrounded and lost almost all his reserve supplies. Another army column saved him from complete destruction; but this force, too, had to retreat, decimated by hunger, thirst and disease. To vindicate his defeat, General Oscar claimed that the insurgents were armed with the "most modern weapons' which had allegedly been smuggled from Europe. Eventually, Canudos was destroyed but only after all the country's military resources had been mobilized and after it had been besieged from every side. Conselheiro died on 22 September 1896; on 5 October the fighting was over. "Canudos did not surrender. ... It held out to the last man. Conquered inch by inch, in the literal meaning of the words, it fell on 5 October, towards dusk — when its last defenders fell, dying every man of them. There were only four of them left; an old man, two other full-grown men and a child, facing a furiously raging army of five thousand soldiers."20

  Europe

  Guerrilla warfare in post-Napoleonic Europe was limited mainly to the south and east of the continent; more often than not it occurred in the wider context of wars of national liberation or civil wars. This applies, for instance, to the first and second Carlist wars in Spain (1833-1840 and 1872). These dynastic wars were at one and the same time conflicts between a backward countryside resentful of change and the modern town, and between the clergy and the freethinkers. The Basques' desire to maintain their traditional privileges against central state power was also a factor of some importance. The Carlists, broadly speaking, were fighting for tradition and the old Spain, and the Cristinos (with the help of a British legion and other foreign volunteers) for change and modernism of a very moderate variety. The larger cities usually supported the Liberals, while much of the countryside sympathized with the Carl ists. It may be recalled that the guerrilla leaders of the war against Napoleon found themselves here in opposite camps, Merino, the priest, fighting with the Carlists, Mina throwing in his lot with the government forces. But these were no longer the prime leaders; the military command was by now in the hands of men of another generation. Two of them in particular distinguished themselves — Colonel Tomas Zumalacarreguy, who had begun his military career under a minor guerrilla leader in 1810 and led the Carlists until his death in 1835, and Ramon Cabrera (the "tiger of Maeztrazgo"), who then took over; having married an English woman, Cabrera was to spend his declining years as a liberal country gentleman near Virginia Water.21

  Zumalacarreguy, who had at the start no more than a mere few hundred ill-armed adherents, forged them gradually into an effective fighting force. He subdivided his little army into battalions, which would occasionally meet for some major action, but most of the time acted independently. By 1835 he was strong enough to engage in regular warfare and force a decision, but Carlos, envious of his general's popularity, ordered him to seize Bilbao rather than march on Madrid, Zumalacarreguy was wounded in die fighting for Bilbao and died soon after from his wounds. With the demise of its most gifted soldier, the Carlist cause, already undermined by internal intrigues, suffered a lasting blow. Cabrera, his successor, had been trained as a priest, but even his closest friends would not claim that Christian charity was his outstanding virtue. Under his leadership, acts of atrocity became ever more recurrent in a war which had been cruel from its inception. Prisoners were frequently shot, and after the Cristinos had killed Cabrera's mother, he no longer showed any restraint whatsoever. His skill as a guerrilla leader was undoubtedly considerable. If he suffered a reverse, he would send his troops to rest for a fortnight "to change their shirts. Soon afterwards they would reassemble and fight again."22 His aides, Batanero (yet another priest) and Miguel Gomez, would engage in long penetration raids from Biscay to Old Castile or even to Gibraltar and back. But apart from showing the flag and engaging in brigandage, these ventures were militarily without value and they clearly pointed to the limitations of guerrilla warfare. Defeated by the Cristinos, Cabrera crossed in 1840 into France with the remnants of his forces. In 1848 fighting in the mountains of Catalonia, he made a short-lived and ineffectual comeback. Once more he had to leave his native country and toward the end of his life, much to the disgust of the diehard Carlists, he made his peace with the Spanish government.

  The Carlist wars were demonstrable proof that the guerrilla tradition had become deeply rooted in Spain; it was no mere coincidence that its principal bases of operations were yet again in the northern regions such as Navarre, Catalonia and the Basque mountains, But despite superior leadership, guerrilla tactics were in the last resort less than effective in this prolonged conflict. In the Greek War of Independence they proved on occasion more successful, and this for all the absence of good commanders. Applying guerrilla methods, the Greeks contrived to liberate part of their country in the early phase of the war (1821-1822). Later on they tried to transform their bands into a regular army with the help of some European well-wishers. The results were disastrous; they suffered an almost unending series of defeats. The discipline, the drill, the organizational effort were not to the liking of the Greeks who were saved in the end from almost certain defeat only by the intervention of the European powers.23 But nor is it certain that they would have fared any better had they stuck to their initial tactics. They succeeded in the first stage of the war because their attacks took the Turks by almost complete surprise. Once the element of surprise was gone and the Turks had dispatched new forces to the field, the Greeks simply had no answer. Happily for them, their war differed in one essential respect from other such campaigns and this helped to some extent to restore the balance. The distinctive element lay in sea power; whatever their weaknesses on land, the Greeks proved more than a match for the Turks at sea.

  If the Carlist wars were scarcely marked by compassion, the Greek War of Independence was almost genocidal in character, the Greeks' premise being that if they exterminated the Turkish communities in their midst, they would eventually b
e masters in their own home. As in the Iberian peninsula, the clergy took a prominent part both in the fighting and the atrocities. The Greeks had the enthusiastic support of most of Christian Europe, and there was a steady flow of volunteers and money. Later, many of their erstwhile supporters turned against them, some even to become their worst enemies. The Greek intellectuals living in exile who had first lifted the banner of independence were not military men, and the leadership in the war passed to Klepht chieftains like Kolokotronis who were no budding Napoleons either. That brigands were potentially excellent guerrilla leaders is a well-known fact, but an analysis of the battles of the Greek War of Independence (such as Kaki Skala, Elaphos and Trete) makes plain that the Klephts never really had any coherent policy on what kind of war they intended to fight. They had no plan or general strategic concept, nor were they very good at improvising. Their experience was limited to the command of smaller bands; they were simply not accustomed to cooperating within a larger framework. Much of their time was spent quarreling, both with the government and with each other. Many of them had been reluctant to join the rising in the first place, preferring the certainty of an arrangement with the Turkish authorities to the doubtful proposition of a civil war.

  Kolokotronis, who was the most prominent of the Klepht leaders, came from a family which had engaged in officially licensed brigandage for several generations. A historian of the Greek Revolution wrote of him that he could never distinguish very clearly right from wrong, and that he had an instinctive aversion to order and law. "His patriotism was selfish and his occasional acts of magnanimity cannot efface the memory of his egotistical ambition and sordid avarice during the period of his greatest power."24 At the head of a band of some three hundred warriors, Kolokotronis enlisted the local peasants at Karitena and eventually had some six thousand men under his command. But this formidable force could still not resist the onslaught of five hundred Turkish horsemen and Kolokotronis even lost his rifle in the affray. These and similar such encounters left him with a great deal of contempt for the military qualities of the peasantry, ascribing all the successes in the war to the prowess and the fighting experience of the brigands and armatoli. But this judgment has not been generally accepted. "A careful study of the history of the Revolution has established the fact that the perseverance and self-devotion of the peasantry really brought the contest to a successful termination. When the Klephts shrank back, and the armatoli were defeated, the peasantry prolonged their resistance, and renewed the struggle after every defeat with indomitable obstinacy."25 The Greek War of Independence was essentially a series of uncoordinated operations carried out by irregular troops. The Peloponnese (Morea), where most military actions took place in the early phase of the war, had been classic brigand territory since time immemorial; hilly northern Greece offered even better protection to large guerrilla units. It was in the north that under Karaiskakis, a former officer of Ali Pasha of Janina, some of the major guerrilla operations took place in the later years of the war. But, whereas in the early days the Klephts had the sympathy of the rural population, the depredations of the bands antagonized so the peasants that when the Turks returned to Central Greece in 1824 they were frequently welcomed as liberators.

  Attention has been drawn more than once to the often decisive importance of intervention by outside powers: what happened if other powers would not, or could not intervene is well illustrated by the Polish example. The three Polish insurrections (1793, 1831 and 1863) were a blend of regular and guerrilla warfare. In some measure they were a people's war, but the support of the peasants waned in the course of time. Many thousands of peasant scythemen in their white cloaks fought under Kosciusko in 1793, but peasant participation in 1831 was lukewarm at best, and in 1863 only the cities, broadly speaking, responded to the revolt. This erosion of peasant support was the result of the reluctance of the "Whites," the Polish aristocratic party, to carry out any agrarian reform. In Galicia, the Austrian authorities effectively thwarted a rebellion by inciting the peasants to kill the landowners and to turn against the middle-class revolutionaries. There was not much guerrilla fighting in the 1793 rising save for some sniping from Warsaw windows and rooftops. Kosciusko, the military leader, based his strategy on the experience of the revolutionary war in France — massed attacks and bayonet charges.26 Politically the Poles were isolated; the French stayed clear of any active help, Austria took a benevolent attitude but left it at that. The international constellation in 1831 and 1863 was, if possible, even worse. Britain and France made perfunctory representations to the Russian capital, but the Prussians, alert to the direct and decidedly undesirable repercussions a Polish victory could have in their eastern districts, closed the borders to the rebels. The Russians always had numerical superiority; there had been some hundred thousand Russians against the Poles' sixty thousand in 1793. Diebitsch, in 1831, had 127,000 men at his disposal, and in 1863 the Poles were much of the time outnumbered by as many as ten to one. But the Russians had to keep their forces dispersed over the entire country for fear of the revolt spreading; there were local uprisings in 1863 in distant Polish Lithuania and Livonia. In 1831 the Russian forces were reduced to half their strength by hunger and disease. Polish leadership was bad in 1831 and indifferent in 1863; furthermore, there were unending internal squabbles among the insurrectionist leaders. Many Polish officers serving with the Russian army refused to join the rebellion in the first place because they saw no possible chance of their country winning independence in an armed struggle against Russia.

  Large parts of Poland are quite flat and provide little effective cover for guerrilla operations. Only in the east and the north were conditions more favorable and it was there that small Polish units caused considerable damage to the Russians in 1831 (Worcell near Lutsk, Puschet and Selon in the forests of Augustowo, the partisan bands in the Bialowicza forest on the road to Brest). In 1863 Augustowo again became an important theater of guerrilla warfare, but there were also sizable operations in the Radom district (under the command of Langiewicz who had fought with Garibaldi in Italy) and near Wengrow.27 The insurgents were on the whole meagerly armed, "raw and undisciplined levies, no more conversant with war than are English yeomen and shopkeepers."28 Only few had muskets, most of them having to make do with pikes, scythes and sticks. The Poles would launch a surprise attack against the Russian units from the forests, then disperse and return to their hideouts. These small skirmishes were often successful, whereas the major battles were always costly and usually ended in a Polish defeat. A hostile observer noted that it was one of the primary mistakes of the Poles that they did not stick to small-war tactics but tried to act like a regular army. In the process, he went on, good partisans became bad soldiers who fled whenever they suffered a setback. Following the Polish concentration of their forces, the Russians were able to withdraw their units from various parts of the country and to crush the insurrection by delivering a massive blow to the Polish force.29 The Polish leaders were ambivalent in their attitude to guerrilla tactics. Mieroslawski, one of the leaders of the "Red" party, who for a short while in 1863 served as "dictator" of Poland, wrote that it was dangerous to stick too rigidly to partisan warfare, that it should always be closely coordinated and should never clash with the general, overall strategy.30 He "hated" partisan warfare, he wrote, but nonetheless did not deny that it could be very useful, given political control and good leadership. After the failure of their insurrections the Polish veterans saw action in revolutionary wars all over Europe — Mieroslawski in Baden and Sicily, Dembinski and Bern against Austria in 1848, the poet Mickiewicz in the short-lived Roman republic. Usually they were on the losing side and were employed as general military experts rather than as specialists in guerrilla warfare which they regarded as of marginal importance only. Their inclination was to apply Napoleonic tactics in wars of national liberation, and for this reason, if for no others, they stood no hope of winning.

  The Italians, in contrast to the Poles, had a base for the
ir military operations — Piedmont. Victor Emanuel II and Cavour had grave reservations about Garibaldi's exploits; they never gave him all he demanded to launch his spectacular, if not always well-conceived campaigns. When Garibaldi returned to Italy in 1848 from a long stay in South America, he already had the reputation of a great guerrilla leader as well as a daring naval commander. He certainly was a brave man and a born leader; whether his guerrilla reputation is entirely merited is a moot point. For the kind of cavalry charges he had specialized in, with the lance as the favorite weapon, was not really in true guerrilla tradition. During the next two decades he emerged as Europe's most dashing and admired revolutionary hero, but it was only on rare occasions that he engaged in battle against forces greatly superior to his own, applying guerrilla tactics. The exceptions were the retreat from Rome in 1848 and the battle for Palermo when his forces were greatly outnumbered. Commenting on Garibaldi's exploits in 1848 in Upper Italy (from a base in Switzerland), a critic wrote that he was not really a good guerrilla leader, because he exhausted his men by long, pointless marches, made inadequate provisions for feeding them, and when he found a good, defensive position, waited there for the enemy to attack, instead of attacking the enemy.31 It is only fair to add that, like the Polish insurgent leaders in their combats, Garibaldi found little patriotic enthusiasm among the rural population. The peasants were reluctant to cooperate or even to provide food. Nor was the quality of his soldiers outstanding; more than once he was to complain that his Italians were not as good as the Latin American gauchos. The first Italian legion of 1849 was composed chiefly of artisans, shop assistants and a great many students. There were also a few convicts for—shades of Fanon! — "to fight for Italy would cure all moral diseases."32 The composition of the "thousand" with whom he conquered Sicily and Naples was similar. There were a hundred and fifty lawyers, a hundred doctors, a hundred merchants, half were workingmen, but there was not a single peasant.33 The Garibaldini about to enter Palermo looked like scarecrows, "resembling in appearance a Boer commando towards the close of war" (Trevelyan), limping, and their clothes in tatters. They had bad weapons (smooth-bore muskests which were just about accurate at fifty yards) and antique artillery. But they were enthusiastic young men, they had a leader who had learned from previous mistakes, and the morale of the Neapolitan soldiers facing them was very low indeed. Twenty thousand Neapolitans evacuated Palermo, unable to resist the onslaught of a far smaller attacking force. Garibaldi had the support of some local squadri, but they were only of scant use because they lacked the sang froid to participate in a bayonet charge and in any case preferred to return home after a few days.