The British adapted far less well than the Germans to local conditions; it is difficult to visualize a British general cutting his own shoes out of deerskin, as Lettow did. They should have used native soldiers rather than Europeans and Indians from the beginning. In 1916 their numbers began to tell, but the very size of the British army hampered its mobility, the organizing of supplies proving a mounting problem the farther they went. Lettow figured rightly that he would still have local superiority in Mozambique, and that while the Germans would be independent of supply dumps, the British would be increasingly reliant on them to keep their immense quantity of men and materiel sustained and maintained over the ever-growing distances. All this made it possible for Lettow to retain the tactical offensive throughout the war, despite the fact that he was strategically on the defensive.
Four decades later, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania had become independent states. Von Lettow-Vorbeck survived not only Wilhelm II, but even Hitler, and almost outlived Adenauer. He had never been a member of the Nazi party, perhaps because they were not monarchists, perhaps because he disliked their socialist slogans. In the early 1960s he still pursued his favorite sport of hunting. He died in Hamburg in 1964. He was ninety-four years old.
The Postwar Crisis
Following the breakdown of the old order in Central and Eastern Europe and the disintegration of the Russian, German and Austrian armies, irregular units began to emerge, to become for several years a factor of some military importance. There was no lack of recruits; the young officers and soldiers had been fighting for four years without interruption, it was the only kind of job at which they were proficient. The survivors of the greatest concentrated mass slaughter in modern military history had few scruples about shedding more blood; human lives counted for far less after 1918 than before World War I. There was plenty of arms and ammunition; all the ingredients existed for bloody and prolonged civil wars.
Russia was in many respects ideally suited for partisan warfare; guerrillas were more numerous on the right than on the left, but most frequent were the nonpolitical, "a-plague-on-both-your-houses" bands. The Bolsheviks would use partisan tactics from time to time, but neither Lenin nor Trotsky was a great admirer of this particular form of warfare; they rejected the idea of a militia, even though this concept had figured prominently in their political program before the revolution. Having seized power, they realized that their need was for a well-trained, well-organized regular army, not enthusiastic amateurs. Partisan bands had been of some use in the pre-revolutionary period, but once the Bolsheviks ruled large parts of Bussia, the main task was to maintain their hold, and this was not the work for partisans. Besides, Bolshevik influence was strongest in the towns, weakest in the countryside — the party thus lacking steadfast bases most fit for the launching of guerrilla warfare.
The main areas of partisan warfare were Siberia and the south of Russia. According to Soviet sources, some hundred to a hundred and forty thousand guerrillas operated in Admiral Kolchak's rear.19 The number is almost unquestionably too high; figures in guerrilla wars are always inflated. Tens of thousands of partisans did fight the White armies — but many of them fought the Red Army as well. Local conditions favored partisan warfare: the vast stretches of forest provided excellent cover. There was no communications network save for the Trans-Siberian railway, which constituted an easy target for partisans. Kolchak and his Czech allies were holding the railway, but the rest of Siberia was in a state of anarchy. The Siberian partisans, mostly smallholders, whose individualism was proverbial throughout Russia, held no brief for the Bolsheviks, but the outrages and the systematic looting perpetrated by some of the White partisan units, led by bandits such as Ungern-Sternberg, Kal-mykov (ataman of the Ussuri Cossacks) and Semyonov, a Cossack of part Mongol extraction and a Japanese agent, eventually drove them into the Soviet camp.
The war between the Red and White armies, like all religious and political wars, was callous, sanguinary and claimed a host of civilian victims. It is difficult to establish which side was answerable for more bestialities, particularly since the situation varied from front to front. Insofar as the irregulars were concerned, the White partisans undoubtedly had the edge. The American General Graves, an observer in Siberia and a professional soldier not given to squeamish overstatement, wrote of Kalmykov that he was the "worst scoundrel I ever saw or heard of and I seriously doubt, if one should go entirely through the Standard Dictionary, looking for words descriptive of crime, if a crime could be found that Kalmykov had not committed."20 Semyonov was a bird of similar feather, while Ungern-Sternberg had received a blow on his head during the war which seems to have unhinged the mind of an officer who had not been too stable in the first place. All three were cavalry officers who had fought in the Carpathian campaign.21 If Kolchak was defeated, it was partly owing to the activities of these savage bands only nominally under his command.
There were not many Communist partisans outside cities such as Tomsk, Omsk, Irkutsk and the towns of the Far East.22 The anti-White partisan units behind Denikin's lines in southern Russia consisted mainly of deserters (the so called red-green units), and as in Siberia, the Bolsheviks were not too effective outside the cities. Politically the south was, on the whole, hostile territory from the Communist point of view: the Ukrainian peasants were strongly nationalistic; most of the Cossacks in the southeast and the Caucasus, who constituted almost half of the rural population, were supporters of the old regime. Among the anti-Bolshevik Cossack irregular units, Shkuro's from the Kuban (the "wolves") and Grigoriev's band were two to acquire great notoriety. Shkuro had little to learn from the Kalmykovs and Ungern-Sternbergs who devastated Siberia; Grigoriev had originally cooperated with the Bolsheviks but turned against them, heading a mutiny in May 1918 which almost overthrew Soviet power in the Ukraine.23 Grigoriev was shot while negotiating with another major partisan leader, Nestor Makhno, a Ukrainian anarchist, the most colorful of them all. Makhno came from a poor peasant family and had spent years in a Tsarist prison; he first made his name as a resistance leader against the German occupiers of the Ukraine and then, for about eighteen months, collaborated closely with the Bolsheviks. At its zenith, in the late autumn of 1919, Makhno's movement numbered between twenty-five and fifty-five thousand adherents.24 His chief base was his native village of Giulai Pole in the Ekaterinoslav district. A man of small stature, he made his motley force of deserters — bona fide anarchists, landless peasants, adventurers and bandits — into a formidable fighting force. He was perhaps the greatest guerrilla fighter of the lot, developing techniques of fighting dependent on swift dispersal and assembly, together with rapid movement by carts and captured gun carriages which were, when necessary, lifted onto flatcars and moved by rail.23 He was a leader of great cunning and many ruses; on one occasion he dressed his units up as Ukrainian police units, on another as Bed Army battalions. His command was the only truly radical one in the civil war; the Red Army employed former Tsarist officers, but no one of middle-class or aristocratic origin could serve as an officer in Makhno s armies. His soldiers killed the habitual numbers of Jews in their pogroms, but there were also Jews among his closest collaborators; Grigoriev, when visiting him, complained at the presence of Jews in Makhno's camp. Like many partisan commanders, he was a heavy drinker; at one point his partisans passed a resolution that orders of the commanders had to be obeyed only if they were sober when issuing them.26
Makhno was a genuine anarchist, who believed in the abolition of the state; wherever he went, prisons were destroyed, and the banknotes printed on his behalf advised that no one would be prosecuted for forging them. His movement was bound to fail because it was merely regional in character and could not link up with similar groups in other parts of Russia. In August 1921 Makhno gave up what had become an unequal struggle and with his two hundred and fifty remaining followers crossed into Roumania. If Grigoriev was a mere brigand who could switch sides in the civil war without compunction, Makhno was a political leader, albeit a
very confused one. For some anarchists he was to become a patron saint, whereas the Communists dismissed him as nothing but a bandit. The truth, as so often, lies somewhere down the middle, simply demonstrating yet once again that in guerrilla warfare the distinction between patriotic and revolutionary leader and marauder is easier to draw in theory than in practice.
By 1920, with the execution of Kolchak and the flight of Wrangel, the Red Army had at long last defeated the White armies. Partisan warfare was to continue, however, though on a smaller scale, in various parts of the Soviet Union. In the eyes of the Soviet leaders these partisans were of course no more than another brand of plain brigands, to be handled as such — just as the White generals had treated the Bolsheviks as criminals, just as all governments through the ages have denied their irregular opponents political motivation and status. That the anti-Soviet partisans were marauders no one would deny, but it must equally be allowed that their inspiration was largely political and social — there could scarcely otherwise have been any accounting for their mass support. Antonov for one, the leader of the Tambov guerrillas, had been jailed for years by the Tsarists for acts of violence during the 1905 revolution. He called himself a social revolutionary and with the backing of angry peasants first set up a partisan band in 19x9. By early 1921 he had as many as twenty thousand volunteers, almost exclusively peasants; the land of some had been taken away to establish state farms, others had been hard hit by the requisitions carried out by order of Communist officials.27 The political demands of the insurgent peasants were radical ("The land to the toiling peasants!"). In suppressing this counterrevolutionary insurrection the Bolsheviks behaved as the White armies had done; houses and farms were burned, hostages were taken and sometimes executed. Antonov achieved great popularity because his force, as a matter of principle, plundered only state farms while the Red Army lived off requisitions from the peasants, but his movement was defeated in late 1921; it was a purely regional uprising that could not hold out against vastly superior regular forces. The Soviet authorities did not, however, rely entirely on military repression and for a time discontinued the nationalization of land, reduced requisitioning to a minimum and introduced the more liberal New Economic Policy (NEP), Thus peasant riots gradually abated; fighting of one sort or another had continued for seven years, and the peasants were only too happy to work the land again.
The one exception was Central Asia, where guerrilla warfare continued up to the early 1930s. The Basmatchi, the Soviets' main opponents, were made up of partisan detachments, almost always on horseback. They were elusive and, in the words of a Soviet eyewitness, often dissolved in the neighboring villages "literally before the eyes of our troops, who would immediately undertake a general search of the villages but without any result. 28 According to Soviet sources, the Basmatchi, who first appeared in the Fergana valley, the rich center of cotton plantations, and subsequently spread to other parts of Central Asia, were professional bandits who had made common cause with the local reactionaries, the Beys and the Mullahs. (The origin of the term Basmatchi is not clear; it has been variously translated as "raider," "robber," and "down-trodden.")29 Again, there is no denying that there were robbers among the Basmatchi, if perhaps more at the start than in the later years. But, again, banditry would hardly explain the widespread support they enjoyed among the local population, making it that much more difficult for the Soviet authorities to destroy them. The marauders' popularity and strength lay in their constituting simultaneously a movement of national resistance against the Russians who had, to put it mildly, shown little tact in their dealings with the natives. By the same token, Basmatchestvo was also a social movement, reflecting peasant protest against requisitioning and collectivization. The Basmatchi were weakened by internal divisions; the Uzbeks did not cooperate with the Kirghiz, and the Turkmens would not collaborate with either. For a short while in 1921-1922 it appeared that all the bands might unite under the leadership of the Turkish leader, Enver Pasha, who had cooperated with the Soviet government but then switched his political allegiances to the Panturks of Central Asia. He failed, however, in his attempt to consolidate all these peoples and tribes and was killed in a skirmish with Soviet forces in August 1922. Enver was no outstanding partisan leader; he had been accustomed to giving orders to armies and found it hard to adjust himself to commanding bodies of only three thousand men.
The influence of the Basmatchi dwindled as the Soviet authorities rescinded some of the harshest abuses of power and as they made religious and economic concessions to the local populations. Nevertheless raids continued in the Samarkand region up to 1924 and aircraft and tanks had to be used against the insurgents. There was resistance in the Fergana valley as late as 1926, and small raids from across the Iranian and Afghan borders over which the Basmatchi had escaped were reported even in the 1930s. The Soviet border was long, complicated to control, and whenever the Basmatchi crossed into Soviet territory they apparently had no problem hiding among sympathizers. They had ceased to be a real military and political menace much earlier, but it is interesting that even a totalitarian state with its unlimited means of repression needed almost a decade to stamp out the last remnants of armed resistance.
Soviet military thinkers were very much preoccupied during the 1920s and 1930s with topics such as the future of tanks, artillery, aircraft, and the character of a future war in general. They were not concerned with the prospects of partisan warfare. At best, insofar as they thought in terms of it at all, their attitude was ambivalent. Nevertheless, a strong claim could be made for regarding Marshal Tukhachevski as one of the originators of the theory of modern counterinsurgency. In a series of articles published in 1926,30 he reveals with great candor the difficulties Soviet power was facing in its struggle with counterrevolutionary bands in European as well as in Asian Russia; a rebellion, he points out, was not necessarily crushed when the band had been destroyed, military measures had to be closely linked with political and economic steps, and even then success would not necessarily be immediate. Tukhachevski argued that surrounding guerrillas was time- and manpower-consuming and very often ineffective. His definition of "national banditry" is of interest — a "peasant rebellion . . . organized by the kulaks which attracts the poor elements in the villages."31
The Freikorps
Following the dissolution of the German army after the armistice in November 1918, some hundred and twenty Freikorps (free coips) came into being, numbering altogether about two hundred and fifty thousand men. They varied in their status, size, function and political orientation. Some were more or less legal, that is, recognized both by the Allies and the German government of the day, others were semilegal, being recognized only by the German government, while yet others were altogether illegal. Some went on fighting, with short interruptions, for several years, others existed for a few days only. Some had the strength of several divisions, whereas the Freikorps Gross Thüringen consisted of one lieutenant and thirty-two soldiers.32 The strength of the average free corps was that of a battalion or a brigade, and they were frequently called after their commander (Ehrhardt, Rossbach, von Loewenfeld). A very few were republican in orientation, but the great majority were right wing, or even semi-Fascist; the Baltikum Freikorps was the first to display the swastika on its helmets. The Social Democratic government tolerated some of the Freikorps because it needed military units both against external enemies who had penetrated German territory — the Poles in the east — and against the Spartacists who tried to overthrow the Social Democratic government. The government would have preferred a fighting force of reliable republicans, but there had been few, if any, republican officers in the imperial army, and if the Bolsheviks had a few months to forge a new one, the German Social Democrats had only a few days.
Some Freikorps joined forces with the White armies against the Bolsheviks, others provided cover for the retreating German armies from the east, others again served as border police, or fought against Communist paramilitary units inside Ge
rmany. Many free corps had official recruitment offices in the major towns, this leading to frequent abuses, such as new recruits enlisting in several units at one and the same time. The general atmosphere reminded observers of Wallenstein and the age of the Thirty Years' War.33 The activities described so far would have been those normal to regular army units, the police or border guards. But in addition, there were operations of traditional guerrilla character — in Upper Silesia against Polish units, in Carinthia against the Yugoslavs, in the Ruhr in 1923 against the French occupiers, and in the Rhineland against the local separatists.
The fighting in Upper Silesia was the heaviest and in many ways the most confused because it was carried out by partisan units on both sides; on the German side the Bavarian "Oberland" Freikorps was prominently involved, while the Poles were led by Adalbert Wojciech Korfanty, a former member of the German Beichstag, a gifted and very ambitious politician and propagandist, who later became deputy prime minister in Poland.34 The Allied statesmen had left the fate of Upper Silesia wide open and Korfanty, with the discreet help of the Polish government, tried to maneuver as many faits accomplis as possible before a plebiscite took place. He had earlier successfully engineered an insurrection in Poznan, but he found the going in Silesia much rougher. The Poles were a minority except in some mining and rural districts; besides, not all Polish-speaking Silesians supported the Polish cause. The German irregulars, while badly equipped, were more numerous, and to make matters still worse for him, coordination between Korfanty and his officers was deficient. Both sides committed acts of senseless terror. The Germans assassinated a senior French officer, the Poles killed some forty Italian soldiers who were to supervise the plebiscite. But whereas the French supported the Poles anyway, the Italians and the British, who had been neutral in the dispute, were incensed by the Polish attacks. Since the Polish government very much depended on Allied goodwill, it had to dissociate itself eventually from Korfanty. Meanwhile, in May 1921, a major battle took place at Annaberg in which the Poles were routed. Some Polish officers wanted to fight on, but Korfanty accepted an armistice and later a political decision which gave Poland the more important part of the Upper Silesian coal mines. Altogether, some sixty thousand Poles and thirty thousand Germans were involved in the fighting in Upper Silesia.35 It was to a large extent war by proxy; Germany still had a regular army but it could not be used for fear of French intervention, For different reasons, Poland could not employ its new armed forces. Thus, military operations in Upper Silesia on both sides turned into partisan warfare, with the local population the principal victim.
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