Guerrilla Warfare
Page 18
Admittedly these studies dealt with the operations of regular armies. But there was also Callwell's Small Wars, which presented what was certainly the fullest account of all unorthodox campaigns in nineteenth-century experience. Captain Callwell saw these campaigns as an inevitable consequence of keeping order throughout the confines of the British Empire. Far from romanticizing them, with the Light Brigade charging howling dervishes in the desert sunset, or the Bengali lancers fighting a treacherous enemy at the Khyber Pass, he noted time and time again the general rule that the "quelling of a rebellion in distant colonies means a protracted, thankless, invertebrate war." He warned that "guerrilla warfare, regular armies always have to dread, and when this is directed by a leader with a genius for war, an effective campaign becomes well nigh impossible."65
Callwell's study and Maguire's later work are eminently pragmatic books devoid of any ambition to develop a general theory of guerrilla warfare. But from time to time the authors pause for reflection, providing not just practical advice for counterinsurgency but speculating on future developments. That guerrilla warfare ought in fact to be met with an "abnormal system of strategy and tactics" goes without saying — the rules of the game as played in Europe would not work: "the inner line principle is not so effective against invaders as it has been in France, Bohemia and the United States, as the savage has no idea of strategy. . . ."66 The savage, in other words, did not know when he was beaten. Callwell and Maguire were fully aware of the fact that the more irregular and dispersed an enemy force, the more difficult it was to pursue once it had been defeated. The American rangers often could not find the camps of the Indians, just as the French in Algeria had been unable to locate the Kabyles and the British had lost tract of the Zulus for a time. On the other hand, the enemy always seemed to know the movements of the regular army. Hence the conclusion that it was always better to fight the irregulars than to maneuver against them — provided, of course, contact could be established at all. Callwell noted that generalizations about effective counteraction to guerrilla warfare were always dangerous: in the Maori wars, the British faced an enemy who was poorly armed and, on the whole, not very spirited (not all observers agreed with this view), whereas the Austrians in Bosnia and the Turks in Montenegro fought opponents who were well armed and eager. But, Maguire asked, was this not the shape of things to come? The native ("the natural man") had better eyesight and woodcraft, could manage with less food than the city dweller, was hardly affected by heat or cold, and was seldom ill — in short, he was tougher than his civilized brother, an ideal recruit, superior to him in everything except discipline and armament.67 Acquisition of the latest weapons was merely a question of money. In future the European powers would face in Africa and Asia opponents "individually superior to the vast majority of our men in all the qualities that go to make a good soldier" and who no longer wielded swords and spears, but rifles:
If fuzzy-wuzzy be, as he often is, as good a man as Tommy Atkins, or Fritz, or Jacques, and is even approximately as well armed, numerical superiority, knowledge of the country, and better health will go a long way to redress the balance in our favour, which experience and discipline in these days of loosened fighting may produce. Both sides — nature and civilization — being once more on an equality, the scale must be turned by better generalship in the future, as it has been in the past.68
In the writings of these British authors no clear distinction was drawn between guerrilla and small warfare; perhaps experience had taught them that there was no clear dividing line. Callwell and Maguire agreed that a guerrilla war was something to be avoided; it was desultory, claimed more victims from disease and exhaustion than from gunshot, it was demoralizing because of the futile marches involved. The way to deal with guerrilla warfare was to adapt one's own methods to that of the enemy, to use flying columns, like Hoche in the Vendee and Bugeaud in Algeria had used.69 It was of paramount importance always to maintain the initiative. Callwell argued that the strength of the flying columns ought to depend on circumstances — in Burma three hundred men with one or two guns proved sufficient. In the fight against Abd el-Kader, Marshal Bugeaud had employed as many as three to four battalions with cavalry. Infantry alone could be used in the bush; on the prairie and steppes, however, only mounted men would stand a chance, their mobility compensating for lack of cover. Again it depended entirely on the circumstances how severely mutineers should be handled. Hoche succeeded where his predecessors had failed precisely because he did not advocate a policy of devastation. In Burma the rural population supported the British against the dacoits and villages which were merely victims of dacoitry had to be recognized and spared. Elsewhere the maxim les represailles sont toujours inutiles would not apply, because "fanatics and savages would misinterpret leniency for weakness."70
Callwell and Maguire thought that it was dangerous to surround the enemy completely; it almost always involved heavy losses for the attacker, since a "savage" would fight to the end. It was as effective, and less costly, to leave the enemy a line of retreat and then engage in vigorous pursuit. Both authors had misgivings about night attacks, quoting the Duke of Wellington to the effect that night attacks against good troops were seldom successful, and citing Napoleon, who regarded success or failure in a night attack as dependent on entirely unpredictable circumstances such as the barking of a dog.
Callwell defined the essential element of success in guerrilla warfare as surprise, followed by immediate retreat, before the opponent could recover. Operations were necessarily on a small scale ("petty annoyance — not operations of a dramatic kind") because surprise would be difficult to achieve with large bodies of men.71 Maguire, and in far greater detail Callwell, dealt with many aspects of the technique of guerrilla and partisan warfare, such as attack tactics, weapons, the blockhouse system for counterguerrilla operations, blowing up of railways, bridges and viaducts, mountain and jungle warfare. It is difficult to think of any major omission with one important exception: political aspects were hardly ever mentioned. Callwell apparently believed that guerrilla warfare was a transient phenomenon that was encountered by imperial powers in distant countries. Maguire, who wrote his book a few years later (and who had the experience of the Boer War to guide him), did not exclude the possibility that with the change in the character of war since the eighteenth century, irregular or guerrilla warfare might increasingly be applied to Europe and America.
Lieutenant Frankland of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, one of the very few other British commentators on guerrilla warfare, dissented: guerrillas were doomed in a civilized country, the loss of the capital and other main towns would paralyze all further action. But in other parts of the world given effective leadership the guerrillas were virtually insurmountable: "only by actually capturing or killing each individual can the prospective conqueror, so long as the patriotism of the inhabitants remains firm, hope to terminate the struggle." Frankland was fully aware of the cardinal principle of protracted war:
Guerrilla warfare has as its object the exhaustion of the invader, for the primary aim of driving him away can only be brought about in this way; unable to bar his progress to any part of their country, or to prevent his occupation of what territory he chooses, the guerrilla can at least dog his steps, delay his progress and sap his strength until exhaustion or intervention causes the invader to withdraw.72
The guerrillas could recede like the tide, they had no organization, untrammeled by detailed orders they could move hither and thither until their presence was reported in several places at one and the same time — to the despair of even the most competent intelligence officer. But despite all these advantages, Frankland thought that the guerrillas were bound to lose sooner or later, provided the conqueror applied the correct methods and, unlike Napoleon in Spain, had the patience and the resources to carry them out.
Partisan Warfare And East European Military Thought
The Russian tradition in partisan warfare dates back to the eighteenth century: a biograp
her of Barclay de Tolly noted that his hero was "initiated into the practice of partisan warfare by that well known Caucasian, Count Tsitsianov."73 But the real hero was the poet-warrior Denis Davydov whose notable contribution to the theory of partisan warfare is discussed in some detail elsewhere in the present study. Russian military doctrine did not entirely neglect partisan warfare, though much of its effort was directed towards a precise theoretical definition of the subject — an enterprise of doubtful promise. According to the Russian Military Encyclopedia, there was a substantial difference between "small war" and "partisan warfare" — the latter being conducted by a detachment cut off from the main army. Partisan warfare, according to this definition, only took place when the rear of the enemy was vulnerable, and the more vulnerable it was, the more promising the outlook.74 But there was also a difference between partisan and popular (i.e., guerrilla) warfare; the latter was carried on at their own risk by groups of men tied to their native soil.
The same trend towards systematization can be found in much of the Russian literature on the subject; furthermore the stress was always on big units operating in close cooperation with the regular army. The very title of an article by Count Golitsyn first published in 1857 — the most noteworthy contribution since Davydov — reflects this tendency perfectly: "on partisan operations on a large scale brought into a regular system." General Golitsyn (1809-1892), incidentally, was the only infantry officer among Russian writers on the subject; he is mainly remembered as the author of a fifteen volume military history and the editor of a well-known journal, Russki Invalid.
Russian advocates of partisan warfare faced a real dilemma, in that unorthodox practices had to be accommodated within the policies of a Tsarist autocracy. Partisan warfare put a premium on personal initiative and independent action unlikely to be adopted by a political system which regarded such qualities with disfavor and suspicion. While the Russian army had considerable experience in combating partisans and guerrillas of sorts (sometimes by adopting their tactics) in Poland, the Caucasus and Central Asia, Russian military authors ignored the lessons of these campaigns on the whole, referring almost exclusively to examples from wars elsewhere in Europe, or America, or of course to the campaign of 1812. Perhaps they thought in retrospect that their colonial campaigns had little to teach them and that, anyway, such wars were a thing of the past. This applies equally to the works of Novitski and Vuich who wrote about small warfare in general, as to the more specific studies of partisan warfare by Gershelman and Klembovski. Colonel Vuich, in a textbook written for the students at the Imperial War Academy, dismissed partisan warfare in one short chapter and popular risings in one paragraph.75 In his definition small wars were all operations carried out by small detachments; they were obviously actions of secondary importance which, unaided, could not possibly achieve the main aim, namely the defeat of the enemy in open battle. But they could contribute to the attainment of this goal, and since in every war there would be some elements of small warfare, it was a legitimate subject of study.
Some three decades later Fyodor Gershelman, a colonel on the general staff and commander of the Orenburg Cossack officers' academy, criticized Vuich for not having made it sufficiently clear that there was a basic difference between a partisan unit and a light detachment. The assignment of partisans was not to act as scouts and patrols, nor was it correct to argue, as some French authors (such as Thibault) had done, that a unit should consist as a norm of two hundred to three hundred riders; in fact it could consist of several thousand men and deploy field artillery.76 A partisan unit, according to Gershelman, was one that had no lines of supply and communications, its task (and here he followed Decker) was to harass the enemy, without risking too much, particularly in places where large units could not operate freely. Success depended largely on surprise: this meant that their movements had to be unobserved and quick and, to this end, the partisan units ought to be constituted mainly of cavalry detachments. While a small war has a tactical connection with big operations, partisan actions have purely strategic significance. What the author somewhat clumsily and schematically wanted to stress was that since the partisans operated completely independently, their contribution to the warfare was, generally speaking, to weaken the enemy without making a specific contribution to any major battle. While a people's war (guerrilla warfare) in the rear of an enemy uses the same means as partisan warfare, the two are quite dissimilar in their scope and character.77 Gershelman, like almost all Russian authors, did not deal with a war of this kind, only with partisan units comprised of regular army officers and soldiers. A small partisan unit consisted of a thousand horsemen, big ones of twelve thousand or more. Refuting the arguments of the opponents of partisan warfare, Gershelman claimed that despite the different topographical character of Central and Western Europe and the relative density of population, partisan warfare could be conducted there too; it could even be conducted in enemy territory, against a hostile population.78 He stressed that since partisans could be made combat-ready immediately they could play an important role at the very beginning of a war; regular armies were still taking some six to twelve days to mobilize. German military observers were aware of this danger and one of them suggested planting big blackthorn hedges on the border of East Prussia, putting up barbed wire entanglements and arming the local population against an eventuality of this kind. (It was also proposed that partisan Cossacks should be denied the status of prisoner of war.)79 Gershelman, who also discussed antipartisan measures, much regretted that the theory and practice of partisan warfare were not taught in Russia; similar laments by British, French and German authors have already been noted.
Victor Napoleonovich (sic) Klembovski's work on partisan operations was published in 1894; he subsequently became a general and was wounded in the war against Japan.80 Like Gershelman, he was mainly interested in the activities of big, flying columns and most of his illustrations were drawn from the American Civil War and the operations of the French franc tireurs in 1870-1871. One of his main heroes was the Russian general Geismar, whose exploits in France in 1814 tended to fortify the thesis that partisan warfare was indeed possible in enemy country. He discounted the argument that partisans could succeed only if they faced young, inexperienced soldiers. When they attacked an army's rear, the men who covered these long lines of communication were as likely to be as experienced as anyone in the front line. He believed, like Gershelman, that partisan warfare was perfectly possible, and indeed likely, in a coming European war.
Russian comments on partisan warfare were closely followed in Vienna. The Russian cavalry is trained to conduct partisan activities par excellence, an Austrian military observer noted in 1885; was it not a matter of elementary caution to watch these preparations?81 The Austrians had pioneered old-fashioned partisan warfare in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; J. B. Schels, of whom mention has already been made, was one of their chief theorists. Another notable contribution was made by Wlodimir Stan islaus Ritter von Wilczynski, a Pole serving in the Austrian army, who based himself to a considerable extent on the experience gained in the Polish insurrections. The partisan units, as envisaged by him, would consist of several units of "scythe men" (kossiniere), and some light cannon. The various partisan units in a given province would be under the overall authority of a district commander. Each unit should not be too large but constitute a "family," obeying its head "like a father."82 The unit commander could appoint (or depose) his officers, and was entitled to a pension and all the other privileges of a regular army officer. Unlike the Russian theorists, Wilczynski put as much emphasis on infantry as on cavalry units within the general framework of partisan warfare, and he even made provision for the presence of a surgeon and a padre.
As the nineteenth century drew to its close, Austrian strategists, like those of other European countries, reached the conclusion that the small war had lost much of its importance — new inventions such as the railways, the telegraph ("and in future also the balloons") would 1
10 doubt shorten a future war; a mass army of half a million or more soldiers concentrated in a small space could sleep peacefully, pistol shots no longer would disquieten them.83 Some of the Austrian writers nevertheless thought that partisan warfare still had a limited future in view of the mountainous terrain of Austria's border regions, in the Tyrol, the Carpathian Mountains, and above all in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the Austrian forces had encountered guerrilla warfare on a small scale in 1878/79. Hence the conclusion that it was premature to regard the small war as a mere game.
Partisan units could be of particular use when the main body of the army suffered a setback and needed time to recover. Hron's emphasis on ambushes and surprise attacks offered little that was new, except perhaps in his comments on the lessons of the war in Bosnia. In this mountainous territory, which sixty years later became once again the scene of a major guerrilla war, horses were of little or no use. The partisans had to follow the smallest and most tortuous mountain paths and employ artillery only in exceptional circumstances. Hron thought that the ideal size of a partisan detachment ought to be between eight hundred and a thousand men — if it were larger it would lose mobility, if smaller, the unit would be aware of its insufficient strength which could adversely affect its fighting spirit.84 The lot of the partisan officer was an enviable one, provided he had "a streak of genius." That his men would have to be tough and fearless went without saying; it was unrealistic to expect that such men would have the character of a saint. The "Southern Slav character," as Hron saw it, had always proved itself in partisan warfare, provided that the command was in the right hands.85