In Carinthia, operations were on a more restricted scale. German-speaking peasants organized themselves into small units but the conflict was no less bitter, because it was waged between neighbors, dividing little villages and even hamlets into two armed camps. The struggle against the French occupation of the Ruhr had the support of all German political parties. It took for the most part the form of passive resistance, which still did not inhibit the occasional terrorist act, such as the mining of the railway line between Duisburg and Düsseldorf, This sabotage was organized by Albert Leo Schlageter, an early member of the Nazi party who had fought with the Freikorps in Upper Silesia. Apprehended by the French, he was executed in May 1923, thus becoming the earliest martyr of Hitler's Third Reich, a "fighter for national liberation who had paid the supreme penalty for his patriotic idealism."
The free corps consisted chiefly of former officers and soldiers of the Imperial army (some Freikorps consisted entirely of young officers), but students who had been too young to fight in the Great War also volunteered. The veterans were quite familiar with the tactics of fighting in the open country, but they were not accustomed to street battles and they learned only by trial and error the technique of crowd control.36 The great majority of the soldiers of the Freikorps were right-wing activists, many of them becoming even more radical in their opposition to the Weimar Republic as the fighting continued. But traditional labels are of only limited help in explaining the Freikorps phenomenon. Bitterly opposed though they were to Communism, they hated the Poles and the French even more; not a few of them were enthusiastic advocates of a German-Soviet military alliance against Poland and the West. The spirit of Tauroggen, the anti-Napoleonic convention of 1813, was again conjured up. There are many illustrations of the antibourgeois and anticapitalist spirit prevailing in these units. They despised the "fat, cowardly bourgeois' and all he stood for; and they made it known, time and time again, that they had not the slightest wish to fight for the preservation of this social order. They had far more respect for their enemies, the Communists, and the Communists tried hard to attract members of the free corps to their ranks. Karl Radek devoted a friendly essay to the memory of Schlageter. Schlageter and his comrades were, so he wrote, men of goodwill, confused or misguided nationalists, who could be swayed either way. They were uprooted men, radicals who shared with the Communists the militancy, the desire to overthrow the political system. "I cannot go home and start the old life," one of them wrote later, "my Germany is where the Verey lights illuminate the sky, where the time of day is estimated according to the strength of the artillery barrage. It ends where the train for Cologne departs."37
The radicalism of the Freikorps also found expression in their way of life. Former colonels served under the command of lieutenants, and there was equal pay for all, from general to the youngest recruit.38 There was little marauding in these campaigns in comparison with other guerrilla wars. Individual banditry was not in the Prussian tradition, it was detrimental to discipline; the state, the collective, was entitled to maraud on a grand scale, but not the individual. Many members of the free corps joined the Reichswehr in later years. Many became supporters of the Nazi party, but only a few rose to its top leadership. There was a tendency in the Third Reich to play down, not so much the historical role of the Freikorps in general, but that of those who had taken a leading part in them. Some former Freikorps men were killed in the Nazi purge of June 1934, others deviated from the Nazi cause in time and were imprisoned or executed. The volunteers of the Freikorps fared a little better under Hitler than the Old Bolsheviks under Stalin, but not by very much.
The Experience of War and Revolution: Revolt in the Desert
The war years were arid insofar as the development of guerrilla doctrine is concerned. The only original contribution was made by Τ. E. Lawrence in an essay published in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a curious mixture of brilliant insights, of stating the obvious, and of arrant nonsense. It is marred by pretentious neologisms ("bionomics," "diathetic"), and deliberately paradoxical formulations which do not survive critical analysis. ("The Turkish army was an accident, not a target." "In irregular war, if two men are together one is being wasted.") Lawrence believed guerrilla warfare could be proved an exact science, granted certain factors and if pursued along certain lines. These factors are an unassailable base, a regular army of limited strength that has to control a wide territory, and a sympathetic population. The guerrillas, Lawrence argued, must have speed and endurance and be independent of lines of supply. They also need the technical equipment to destroy or paralyze the enemy's supply lines and communications:
In fifty words: granted mobility, security (in the form of denying targets to the enemy), time, and doctrine (the idea to convert every subject to friendliness), victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain.39
Lawrence maintained that the Turks would have needed six hundred thousand men to control the Arabian peninsula, but as they had only a hundred thousand they were bound to fail. (They had, in fact, far fewer.) They were low, besides, on war materiel, consequently "the death of a Turkish bridge or rail, machine or gun, or high explosive was more profitable than the death of a Turk * The enemy soldier should never be given a target; many Turks on the Arab front "had no chance all the war to fire a shot." To achieve this, the guerrilla needed infallible intelligence.
The enemy, again in terms of Lawrence's thesis, should be encouraged to stay in harmless places in the largest numbers. Propaganda is important: "the printing press in the greatest weapon in the armory of the modern commander." Range is more to strategy than force, "the invention of bully beef has modified land war more profoundly than the invention of gunpowder." Guerrilla tactics should be what they had been in the Arab peninsula, "tip and run, not pushes but strokes." The smallest force is used to reach the farthest place in the quickest time. Lawrence's concept of guerrilla warfare was based entirely on his own experience in Arabia; he seems not to have been aware of the lessons of guerrilla warfare elsewhere, let alone of the existing literature on the subject. His generalizations are of limited worth only, valid in certain circumstances, inapplicable in others. Nor should one look for consistency in his writings. Thus, in a letter to Wavell he noted that if the Turks had mounted machine guns on their touring cars and patrolled the desert, they would have put a stop to the Arab camel parties and so to the whole rebellion. "It wouldn't have cost them twenty men or £20,000. . . . They didn't think hard enough." This observation is certainly at variance with his statement that the Turks would have needed six hundred thousand men to control the peninsula. The Turks, to put it somewhat crudely, lost out not because of any "algebraical factors," but because they did not have armored cars. Another time he argued that bombing tribes was ineffective, that guerrilla tactics were a complete muffing of air force, a statement of doubtful validity with regard to desert warfare. He wrote that guerrilla war was essentially a moral contest and that counterpropaganda was never effective when conducted on the conservative side. But in the same breath he declared that Turkish intelligence was miserable, that one well-informed traitor could spoil a national rising, and that the Turks had failed because they did not go to the effort of buying a few venal men.
Lawrence succeeded on a modest scale because, like LettowVorbeck, he understood that he had to go for the main weaknesses of the enemy, and that warfare had to be adapted to local conditions, human as well as geographical. Compared with Lettow's precarious position in East Africa, his situation was much more advantageous; he had money, almost unlimited supplies, and there was a separatist movement that could be mobilized against the enemy The Turkish army in Arabia was overextended and for that reason Lawrence's "rapier play" could have pointed thrust. But to argue, as he later did, that this approach was generally applicable and preferable to Allenby's "wood-chopping tactics" was simply not true; rapier play and evading battle would
not have worked in Palestine, let alone in the European theaters of war against heavy army concentrations. Lawrence's ideas were rejected at the time for the wrong reasons by orthodox military thinkers. Liddell Hart, on the other hand, popularized his views because they fitted in so well with his own concept of the strategy of the indirect approach. He lived to regret his enthusiasm. In essence, however, Lawrence's theories gained their generally wide currency and appeal because he was a romantic figure and had little, if any, competition. The few other contemporary practitioners of the art of guerrilla warfare were not literary men or, as already remarked, simply did not bother to put down their experiences in writing. If they did, they refrained from engaging in generalizations.
The Experience of War and Revolution: Lenin, Trotsky and the Partisans
While Lawrence in later years came to be regarded as the great guerrilla theoretician in the West, Lenin was largely, and by most as ignorantly, held as its chief proponent in the East. More than any other major revolutionaries of his generation, Lenin studied military strategy and organization and, of course, the art of revolution. But although he had much of account to say about revolutionary situations and the proper tactics to be employed in each, he certainly offered no new and startling advice on guerrilla warfare. He was more favorably inclined toward it than other radical socialists, but that is saying very little indeed. In the many volumes of his published works there is just one short article on the subject and some occasional references in 1905-1906 and in 1918-1919. Whatever interest he had in it at all was first aroused by the Moscow insurrection in December 1905, and the armed rebellions in Latvia, Poland and in other parts of the Russian Empire during the revolution of the same year. He noted that the Moscow experience had shown that, pace Engels, urban insurgency was not altogether obsolete; Moscow had inaugurated new barricade tactics, a fact which had been observed, incidentally, by Kautsky even before Lenin.40 Unfortunately there had not been enough volunteer fighters, and their arms had been inadequate. Lenin thought that the experience had nevertheless been positive and that its lessons should be spread among the masses. One month later, in September 1906, Lenin directly addressed himself to a consideration of what guerrilla warfare was, in what conditions it could be effective, and what the correct attitude of a revolutionary should be toward a question which "greatly interests our party and the mass of the workers."41 Lenin defended the guerrillas against their Social Democratic critics who invoked — vainly in his view — the authority of Marx and Engels. Blanquism and old-style Russian terrorism, which had been denounced by Marx and Engels, had been futile because it was an affair of a few intellectual conspirators. Since then the situation had changed. "Today, as a general rule, guerrilla warfare is waged by the worker combatant, or simply by the unemployed worker." (This statement was not altogether accurate; in Latvia the peasants, not the workers, had been in the forefront of guerrilla warfare, and Moscow apart, Latvia had been the main focus of the insurrection.) Thus, reasoned Lenin, guerrilla warfare had to receive the Bolsheviks' blessing; it was an "inevitable form of struggle at a time when the mass movement had actually reached the point of an uprising and when fairly large intervals occur between the big 'engagements' in the civil war."42 It was not true, as Plekhanov and others had argued, that guerrilla warfare demoralized the revolutionary avant-garde, only the senseless methods of unorganized, irregular bands had that effect. The avant-garde party had to direct the masses not alone in the major battles of the revolution but also in the lesser encounters. There was no gainsaying that guerrilla warfare brought the class-conscious proletarians into close contact with "degraded, drunken riff-raff." But this meant only that the Bolsheviks should not regard it as the sole, or even as the chief instrument of struggle, or ever as anything but subordinate to other methods. It did not mean that guerrilla warfare should be left to the riffraff. Lenin refrained, expressis verbis, from prescribing "from our armchair" what precise part guerrilla warfare should play in the general course of the civil war in Russia.43 He did once, but once only (in 1906) claim that partisan warfare in combination with uninterrupted strikes, attacks and street fighting throughout the country would effectively exhaust the enemy. No government could withstand such a struggle in the long run, it was bound to paralyze industry, demoralize the bureaucracy and the army and create discontent among the people.44
This was the sum total of Lenin's prerevolutionary dicta on guerrilla warfare. The insurrection of December 1905, he thought, had demonstrated that armed uprisings could be victorious even when pitted against modern military techniques and organization. But guerrilla warfare was only one of the tools for the revolutionary, and not the most important one. Between 1906 and the revolution of 1917 Lenin did not refer to the subject again, apart from welcoming the Irish rebellion of 1916, and in his polemics against Rosa Luxemburg's thesis that national wars were no longer possible. Lenin felt that such wars were still possible in Europe and inevitable in colonies and semicolonies.45 On a very few occasions he pointed to the revolutionary potential of the peoples of the East without, however, elaborating. But whereas Lenin sedulously studied Clause witz and made copious notes which were published posthumously, even the most diligent guerrilla enthusiasts have been unable to discover any further references to guerrilla warfare up to and including the revolution.46 In 1917 the main task facing the Bolsheviks was to win over as many units of the Tsarist army as possible and to transform, with the help of ex-Tsarist officers, the old army into an instrument of Soviet power. Thus, in the words of a leading historian:
Guerrilla war and military freebooting held little appeal for Lenin, squeezed dry of any drop of romanticism. . . . The republic could not defend itself with untrained mobs or be held together by wild-eyed guerrillas.47
Lenin frequently referred to partisanshchina (guerrillaism) after 1917, but always in a derogatory vein, "One should shun partisanshchina like fire," he wrote, "the arbitrary operations of individual detachments, the disobedience vis-ä-vis the central power. It leads to ruin."48 Or again in July 1919 in an appeal to intensify the struggle against Denikin:
The partisan spirit, its traces and remnants, have caused our army more suffering, defeats and catastrophes, more losses in life and material than all the betrayals by [former Tsarist] military experts.49
What the Red Army needed above all was iron discipline and central control; guerrilla warfare was at best ineffective in this struggle. Perhaps there had been a justification for it in the first difficult weeks and months while the Red Army was being born, but that once achieved, guerrillaism had to be stamped out "with an iron fist." Trotsky, the architect and first commander of the Red Army, entirely agreed with Lenin; those who obstructed the Leninist approach were Voroshilov, and, to a certain degree, Stalin. But this dispute mainly reflected some of the Old Bolsheviks' resentment of military specialists who had been taken over from the Tsarist army. The Old Bolsheviks wanted a party committee to run military operations, whereas Lenin opposed misplaced "collegiality"; decisions had to be taken by one man, the commander.50
The debate about a specific Soviet military doctrine much exercised the Bolshevik experts in the early post-revolutionary period. Some of them contended that the Red Army should launch partisan actions and deep-penetration raids in the enemy rear. Trotsky, in reply, noted that these tactics had in fact been used first by the White armies:
The first big raid was made by Mamontov [a general in Denikin's army]. Petliura [the Ukrainian nationalist] was the leader of partisan formations . . . the operations of Ungern's and Makhno's detachments — these degenerate, bandit outgrowths of the civil war — were distinguished by great maneuverability. What conclusion follows from this? It follows that maneuverability is not peculiar to a revolutionary army but to civil war as such.51
Guerrilla warfare, as Trotsky said on another occasion, was the "truly peasant form of war," but this was not meant as a compliment, for he added, "Similarly in religion the peasantry is unable to go beyond the sect" — a
generalization which will hardly be underwritten by historians.52 Guerrilla war, as he saw it, was a primitive form of warfare, inevitable perhaps in some cases, but devoid of any specific revolutionary character. His fairest assessment of the value of guerrilla warfare was made in a speech in 1923:
The guerrilla movement had been a necessary and adequate weapon in the early phase of the civil war. The revolution could not as yet put compact armed masses into the field, it had to depend on small independent bodies of troops. This kind of warfare demanded self-sacrifice, initiative and independence. But as the war grew in scope it needed proper organization and discipline and the guerrilla movement then began to turn its negative pole to the revolution.53
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