The Austrian army, as Hron and others had predicted, did have to fight enemy guerrilla units during the First World War, especially in Serbia. Their activities became fairly intensive in 1917. The chief organizer of the bands was Kosta Vojnovic, a Serbian army captain, later reinforced by Captain Pecanac who had been parachuted by air from Allied Headquarters in Saloniki. The Austrians coped with the problem by establishing small flying columns of about forty men and by organizing Turkish and Albanian counterguerrilla units. The detachments used by both sides were smaller than had been anticipated by the theorists, and horses — against expectations — were widely used. Allied Headquarters prepared a general rising behind the Austrian and Bulgarian lines in March 1917 which was to coincide with an Allied offensive. But the enterprise failed, partly because the secret was not well kept and partly because the insurgents were not sufficiently well armed.86
Socialism And Insurrection
The idea of insurrection played a central role in European nineteenth-century revolutionary doctrine while the technique of insurrection was very much neglected. Insurgency was in the air from Babeuf's conspiracy to the Carbonari and the revolutionaries of the 1830s and 1840s. Philipe Buonarroti provides the link between the old generation of extreme Jacobins and the young French, Belgian and Italian revolutionaries of the 1820s and 1830s. But Buonarroti's legacy did not include any clear, systematic doctrine of how to make a revolution, except that conspiracy was needed and that after the victory of the revolution there would have to be a dictatorship for a transitional period.87 The technique of insurrection became a litde more tangible and was discussed in detail in the works of three nineteenth-century revolutionaries — Blanqui, Mazzini and Carlo Bianco, Conte di Saint Jorioz; all of whom had known Buonarroti and were, to a varying extent, influenced by him.
Carlo Bianco (1795-1843) is the least known of the three but it is precisely in his writing that the link between guerrilla warfare and radical politics was first established. It was probably no accident that modern political guerrilla doctrine appeared first among Italian radicals. The resistance against Napoleon in Spain had been a people's war but the Spanish partisan leaders were guerrillas by instinct; they lacked the intellectual equipment to draw generalizations from their experience and to develop a system or a doctrine. The French revolutionaries based themselves on the support of the urban middle class and the workers; this ruled out a guerrilla campaign. In Italy, on the other hand, the radicals confronted both foreign rulers and domestic tyrants. Furthermore, Italy was much less urbanized than France.
Carlo Bianco was the son of a recently ennobled Turin lawyer; he studied law but later joined the army and served in Spain. A radical democrat, he became a member of the Italian nationalist underground; his last years were spent in great poverty in French, Swiss and Belgian exile. His main work on partisan warfare was written in Malta in 1828/29.88 It was based on a comprehensive study of the existing military literature, and on the experience of partisan warfare in many parts of the world, in particular the guerrilla war against Napoleon and his own experiences in Spain. Bianco began with the assumption that modern (i.e., Napoleonic) warfare was quite unsuitable for the liberation of Italy — the insurgents would be unable to collect the money, obtain the weapons and mobilize the mass armies they needed. On the other hand, two million Italians could easily be mobilized for a people's war, which a group of conspirators could organize. Such a war would be most cruel, even terrorist in character; in this context Bianco referred to the forty-year struggle waged by Pasquale Paoli in Corsica. It would be a war in which the sacred end would justify all means, including a scorched-earth policy, and the evacuation of large parts of the population to the mountains. While putting great faith in the ardent patriotism of his fellow Italians, Bianco was realist enough to understand that, given "the present state of the world," one could not ignore such "ignoble pretensions as the love of money" — hence the necessity to distribute booty, or at least some of it, among the freedom fighters.
Α neo-Jacobin, Bianco believed not just in national independence but equally in a free, republican Italy. Hence the necessity of a transitional period of revolutionary terror; once a certain area was liberated, the internal enemy, too, would have to be purged and even exterminated. It would be a war to the death. Only in exceptional circumstances should prisoners not be killed, for in a war of constant movement there would be no facilities to detain them. Every month bayonets would have to be checked and volunteers whose weapons were not covered with enemy blood would be publicly disgraced.
Bianco proposed a system of "democratic centralism." For purposes of organizing the conspiracy and conducting the war, Italy would be divided into four major provinces, every province into five cantons, and each canton into ten sub-districts. There would be elections on a regional basis but the leadership would be appointed. The central junta (Consulta Suprema) would be responsible to the supreme commander (Condottiero Supremo) and not to the nation. At the same time, while the war continued, the leaders of the guerrilla units would have maximum freedom of action. Guerrilla units should comprise only ten to fifty fighters in the early phase of the struggle, for units larger than these would be exposed to unnecessary danger and could easily be infiltrated by enemy agents.89 Mobility was the essence of partisan warfare; sudden surprise attacks followed by quick retreat. In time a true people's war would evolve; women, children and the elderly, too, would play an active part, preparing ammunition, food and medical supplies. The peasants would assist in the transport of arms and supplies. and also help to spread panic through acts of individual terror: one suggestion was to overpower enemy soldiers after having made them drunk.
Bianco's "infamous" Trattato was followed three years later by another book in which he partly repeated what he had put forward in his previous manual.90 There were a few new ideas: volunteers from foreign countries would join in the war of liberation; during the later stages of the war, flying columns would be formed and eventually a regular army would come into being.
Italian–Polish Interlude
Throughout the first part of the nineteenth century, guerrilla doctrine was more widely discussed in Italy and Poland than in any other country, and the reasons are manifestly plain. The writings of Le Mière and Decker were read all over Europe at the time, and other writers were to borrow heavily from them for decades to come. But in the last resort these were technical manuals, devoid of direct political implications. In Poland and Italy, on the other hand, the questions of national independence and unification were the burning issues of the day: a search was on for an answer as to which was the most effective military-political approach to liberate a country from foreign occupation. In contrast to Decker, the Polish and Italian guerrilla strategists were deeply preoccupied with the political aims and context of a war of national liberation. It is for this reason that, however unsuccessful in practice, they anticipated many of the twentieth-century discussions on partisan warfare.
Carlo Bianco has been singled out for attention as a pioneer in the field. There had been individual publications even before, such as one by an anonymous Neapolitan author, who stressed the advantages of operations carried out by very small guerrilla bands of no more than ten to twenty men acting independently of each other. He also elaborated on the political and psychological differences between professional soldiers and partisans: the military man is guided by his honor, the volunteer-guerrilla has no other guide than the good of the fatherland. The professional army officer is to brave danger, the duty of the partisan to inflict maximum damage to the enemy with the least risk to himself.91 But if Carlo Bianco was not the first to deal with the topic, no one in Italy had previously provided a systematic and detailed analysis of the problems of guerrilla warfare in Italy, and his writings certainly influenced his contemporaries, from Mazzini onwards, whereas the notes of the anonymous Neapolitan writer remained unnoticed.
Not long after the appearance of the Trattato, an article was published in the fir
st issue of L'amico del popolo italiano in which the author drew the attention of his compatriots to the "gratidiosi ri-sultamenti" a mere twenty Corsican partisans (voltigeurs) had achieved: how much more could be attained by a brave band of men following similar tactics in Italy?92 Even more optimistic in vein were the writings of General Guglielmo Pepe: everything in Italy pointed to the success of an insurrection once it had been started. All social classes would join it, for the local rulers were universally detested, and the clergy no longer exercised the influence that had been theirs a few decades previously under the French occupation. In Pepe's view it was essential for the success of the popular rising that a "liberated zone" be established in Calabria early on (and, if possible, a second, in the center of Sicily near Castrogiovanni). The enemy would no doubt counter by dispatching a major army against these southern foci, but three-quarters of his forces would have to remain stationed in northern Italy; and the rest, far away from their bases, would suffer defeat at the hands of the insurgents fighting according to the rules oiguerra alia spicciolata, i.e., guerrilla warfare.93 Pepe frequently drew attention to the lessons of the Spanish experience from which the Italians had much to learn. Cesare Balbo devoted a whole book to the subject, written in 1817 but only published thirty years later.94 He had visited Madrid in 1815 accompanying his father, the ambassador. Balbo also envisaged an invasion by the Austrian army in the event of a popular rising but, like Pepe, he emphasized that Austria would have to keep back many units to forestall similar risings in Hungary and Bohemia. The Italian irregulars would fight in the cities, the fields and the mountains and, supported by regular forces, would wear out the Austrian expeditionary corps. Yet another manual on the techniques of guerrilla warfare was written by Enrico Gentilini, an early Utopian socialist thinker; it was published in 1848, the year of the revolution. The author was a self made man, and his book is mostly derived from the writings of other military men. For the student of political theory there is more interest in Gentilini's essays in which he envisaged far-reaching social changes, implicitly regarding guerrilla warfare as a prelude to a people's war.95 He thought that such a war would be a protracted one, and in his scheme the guerrillas would operate without support from regular forces.
Also socialist in inspiration was the work published in London in 1843 of Giuseppe Budini, a printer. He addressed himself not only to the spiritual motivation of the partisans but to the question of popular support, the "mass basis." He considered that since the uprising would confer material benefits upon the popular classes, it would receive their support. Ideally the revolution should break out simultaneously in the Kingdom of Naples and Piedmont; again the emphasis was on operations carried out by "bande nazionale."96
After the defeat of 1848, the general tendency among revolutionary writers of the 1850s was to de-emphasize the partisan element in the forthcoming military struggle, though some of them depreciated old-style regular army tactics even more. This refers, for instance, to General Allemandi who advocated small-war tactics carried out by militia battalions on the Swiss model.97 La Masa had in mind a national Italian army of 600,000 men only one-quarter of which, however, ought to be a voluntary militia of partisans fighting in mobile units in the hilly regions of the Tyrol and Friuli,98 while the regular army would fight in the plains of Lombardy and Veneto. Pisacane, one of the most interesting figures of the Risorgimento, commented on the "chimerical idea" that all that was needed were a few groups of bold young patriots (giovani arditi) who, fighting in the mountains, would successfully ward off a superior enemy. Pisacane wrote that attack, not defense, was essential in a revolutionary war. On another occasion he drew attention to the fact that in Spain, despite the topographical conditions favoring partisan warfare, it was the presence of a British expeditionary corps which proved decisive. Don Carlos's defeat by Cristina was additional proof that partisan war in isolation could not succeed. Pisacane's central concept was that of a nation in arms (Nazione Armata); within this framework there would be room for partisans but they could not possibly replace the regular army.99 Many basic ideas of twentieth-century guerrilla doctrine can be found in these writings: the assumption that guerrilla warfare is the first stage in a people's war which would culminate in the establishment of a revolutionary army (Bianco and Mazzini); the idea that an armed struggle in Italy would prelude a general European revolution; the concept of foci and liberated zones; the importance of the social struggle and political indoctrination (Mazzini, Gentilini, Budini); the suggestion that the armed struggle would have to start in regions remote from the enemy's main concentrations (Pepe). The idea that moral purification and a re-education of asocial elements could be attained through an armed struggle first appeared in Bianco's and Mazzini's writings; it was taken up by Garibaldi. These thinkers did not, of course, see eye to eye on all the details of the strategy to be pursued. Pisacane thought that it was a fallacy to believe (as did Bianco and Mazzini) that the townspeople were ideally suited to mountain warfare; he advocated guerrilla warfare in combination with an urban insurrection, and the earliest possible formation of a regular force of half a million soldiers. Bianco's emphasis on terrorism ("cold terrorism of the brain not the heart" on behalf of all suffering mankind) was not shared with equal enthusiasm by the others.
From a purely technical point of view, the contribution of the Italian school of guerrilla warfare was small. But they pioneered certain political-strategic concepts and they constituted the link between traditional partisan warfare and modern radical politics, predating Blanqui whose only concern was with urban insurrection.
Karol Stolzman has been singled out in the preceding pages as a representative writer of the Polish school of guerrilla warfare. But unlike Bianco he was not the first military author in his country to address himself to the subject, nor was his position as pre-eminent. In the year 1800 a book had been published in Paris which questioned whether the Poles were prepared to fight for their indepen dence.100 The author was Tadeusz Kosciuszko; his little book was based on the experience of the insurrection of 1794, and it advocated a revolutionary people's war against the occupying forces. But Kosciuszko contemplated a mass army applying guerrilla tactics; up to a million Poles were to be enlisted against 450,000 Russians, Prussians and Austrians. While he invoked the examples of Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United States it was not quite clear how a people of serfs could possibly emulate a society of free men. Thus the unleashing of a "people's war" really depended on the degree of patriotism shown by the landowning gentry, who still dominated the peasantry.
The Polish insurrection of 1830/31 produced a spate of partisan literature by men fascinated l ike Kosciuszko with the idea of a mass army or at least a giant militia. Stolzman thought that Poland could mobilize four million men; more modestly Bern and Kamienski believed that a million could be gathered.101 But opinions differed fairly sharply on the role of partisan warfare within a general framework of national insurrection. A few writers such as Major Ludwik Bystrzonowski thought that guerrillas fighting in small formations would be able to liberate their country single-handed without the help of regular forces.102 He assigned to Polesie (the area of the Pripet marshes) the role of an ideal battleground for an "unending guerrilla war. It is interesting to note that the author of the thesis of "pure" and "eternal" partisan war was a monarchist whereas his opponents, particularly Stolzman, Mieroslawski and Kamienski, belonged to the democratic wing of the Polish national movement. They thought like Jelowicki that partisan warfare was merely the first phase in an insurrectional war, and that it was during this stage that the regular army units should be formed.103 Stolzman envisaged the gradual extension and enlargement of the partisan units, thereby transforming the actual character of the war. Bern too advocated a mixture of partisan and regular warfare: first there should be a general insurrection but most of the fighting would be done by big mobile columns attacking the main concentrations of the enemy (Mao's transition to mobile warfare). Chrzanowski was aware of the lik
elihood that in a people's war a great many civilians would be killed — "ein National Krieg ist ein Vernichtungskrieg." Kami-enski's theory was the most explicit: he differentiated between four phases of the war of liberation. It would begin with a chaotic insurrection, there would be a gradual increase of coordination between the local patriotic forces until regular army units were formed to do most of the fighting according to the principles of modern strategy and tactics (meaning the French revolutionary wars) without renouncing the experience gained during the earlier period of partisan warfare. (Again, the similarity with the Maoist concept is quite striking.) Kamienski was aware of the fact that this kind of war would be impossible unless the peasants were liberated. Lastly, there were the skeptics, Nieszokoc and Mieroslawski in particular.104 Nieszokoc was opposed to partisan adventures in principle ("ad finitum") while Mieroslawski attributed them limited importance at best. Following a brief initial phase of guerrilla war there should be a transition as quickly as possible to "real war," namely mass armies attacking the enemy. Mieroslawski wrote about Stolz-man that his concept was a mixture of Italian conspirational folly and Polish aristocratic flippancy.105 In his view Kami en ski's theories were an absolute negation of military experience, and would render the conduct of real war impossible.
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