Guerrilla units in the truer sense did come sporadically into being in the winter of 1936-1937 in various parts of Spain, particularly in the center and the north.87 These were usually small bands which did not last long and whose activities left no great imprint. The war was decided in the battles for Madrid, at Guadalajara and the Ebro; partisan warfare made no difference to its course. Even those Spanish leaders who were most predisposed toward partisan warfare — anarchists like Durutti — fought at the front in Barcelona and Madrid; there were not enough soldiers to spare for partisan operations. Even a born guerrilla leader such as the Communist El Campesino was appointed a division commander, in which capacity he showed much less aptitude.
Given the long-standing Spanish propensity for guerrilla warfare, the political support of substantial sections of the population for the Republican cause and the inefficiency revealed by the right-wing regular army commanders, would not the Republicans have been better advised to put stronger emphasis on guerrilla warfare? Even with the benefit of hindsight the question cannot be answered in the affirmative. True enough, the Nationalist army (as Stanley Payne has written) never became a first-rate twentieth-century military machine. "It won because it proved less ineffective than the motley contingents of the Popular Front.'88 But however incompetent, the Nationalists would still have been able to seize the major cities within a short time but for the Republican forces concentrated in their defense. Precisely because they were not really a modern army, the Nationalists were not that dependent on supplies, and damage to their lines of supply and communication would not have been fatally harmful. Partisan units could have been concentrated in the mountainous regions of central and northern Spain, but the military decisions fell in the plains. The presence of active, strong and highly mobile guerrilla units in Franco's rear might have made a difference in the battle for the Basque country; it is most unlikely that they would have influenced the outcome of the fighting in the south.
The Nationalists, too, had many irregulars in their ranks; during the first year of the war regular army units were in a minority. There were many banderas — Carlists, Falangists, and other right-wing volunteers, some of them counting a few hundred members, others, such as the Tercio de Navarra, ten thousand or more. But they were gradually integrated into Franco's army and there was never any systematic attempt on the part of the Nationalists to wage guerrilla wars in the Republican rear.
Guerrilla War and the Regular Armies
On the eve of World War II, the attitude toward guerrilla warfare that its advocates had noted four decades earlier still held true: the various army general staffs had no interest in it, and the military academies saw no reason to include courses on it in their curricula. Individual officers had gained guerrilla knowledge in the interwar period. Major Wingate's experiences in the Palestine rebellion helped him in the jungle of Burma, doubtful though it is whether General Patton, the tank commander, drew on the inspiration acquired by Lieutenant George Patton in the raid against Pancho Villa. By and large the feeling prevailed that guerrilla warfare, half-brigandage, half-political in genesis, was a messy business best left outside the confines of regular armies and their commanders. One German writer's view was that it could endanger the country's war effort by very reason of its methods being so diametrically opposed to the German way of waging battle.89 But Arthur Ehrhardt was almost the only German author in the interwar period to concern himself with the prospects of guerrilla warfare in modern conditions. He pointed out that aircraft and motorized columns would make for armies being able to advance far more rapidly than ever before. But this meant that their supply lines would be much more extended and that the advancing units would be infinitely more dependent on supplies, above all of fuel, ammunition and spare parts. Long and vulnerable supply lines would be an obvious target for enemy partisans.90 Ehrhardt also calculated that the average modern airplane was much too fast to be of help in combating guerrillas and that special aircraft would be needed for this purpose. He envisaged the possibility of enemy partisans landing in the German rear, and of motorized guerrilla units. He even weighed the potential use of chemical warfare by guerrillas, or in the fight against them, but dismissed this as impractical. These, however, were only the views of an outsider, the German military command remained uninterested; among the hundreds of books and the thousands of articles on military topics published in the 1920s or 1930s one looks in vain for any serious discussion of guerrilla warfare. There was some logic in Germany's neglect since she was prepared (and preparing) for a Blitzkrieg, and in a war of this kind, if successful, guerrillas could not possibly play a part of any significance. There was less logic in French, British and American ignoring of the subject, none of them having that faith in a Blitzkrieg. Yet they nevertheless equally shared the German conviction that guerrilla warfare was unimportant. True, all the British army was asked to prepare itself for in the 1920s was small wars only, for which it was generally assumed that no special provision was required since these would surely be, grosso modo, on the pattern of previous colonial wars.91
Warnings about impending changes in the character of guerrilla war were so infrequent that they deserve to be singled out. Thus Major B. C. Dening in an essay on "Modern Problems of Guerrilla Warfare," published in 1927, pointed with astonishing foresight to three important contemporary processes favoring the guerrillas. The first, and the most important, was that in view of the increasing influence of public opinion at home, the Great Powers could no longer act with the same "ferocity" as on past occasions. "Otherwise such an outcry would arise as would be certain to bring about either the fall of the government responsible or the intervention of an interested outside power."92 Secondly, the development of modern weapons favored the guerrilla more than those operating against them. These weapons could be readily concealed and lent themselves to the first principle of guerrilla warfare — rapid concentration and equally rapid dispersion. Last, there was the difficult problem of combating guerrillas in thickly populated areas. "Here the guerrillas have opportunities to make propaganda, to destroy property and to deliver attacks with great ease. The task of the army becomes essentially a police task.93 Major Dening also suggested that it was quite likely that guerrillas would in future try draining the financial rather than the military resources of a great power, as the Cuban rebels had done with considerable success in 1898. But such predictions, to repeat once again, were the exception, not the rule in the interwar period.
There was an upsurge of nationalist and revolutionary movements in Asia and Africa in the 1920s and 1930s, but their activities were largely political. British and French, Belgian and Dutch colonial administrators were not unmindful of these activities, and from the time of the famous Baku Congress on, there was a tendency in the European capitals to attribute most colonial rebellions to Soviet propaganda and intrigues. Quite frequently it was argued that these operations were carefully prepared and coordinated in Moscow. This was almost certainly untrue at the time or in any event exaggerated; the Comintern supported existing colonial insurgencies, but such support was usually quite limited and often as not refused. The Germans, who had lost their colonies after the war, followed the anti-imperialist struggle with great interest; the geopoliticians, with General Professor Karl Haushofer at their head, were quicker than most others to realize the potential importance of coming national liberation wars. It was another former German general, Max Hoffmann, who predicted that the explosive mixture of Communism and nationalism would result in protracted colonial wars, different in character from those in the past, which the British and the French could not win.94 Even if the colonial forces were to defeat the enemy, there would be a subacute revolutionary situation which would make it impossible for the British to withdraw their units. This constant combat readiness would wear out the colonial troops, there would be no clear and distinct enemy to combat and, furthermore, it would be impossible to employ native troops. Even if Britain were able to crush an insurgency in Egypt, its pos
ition would become untenable should there be simultaneous risings in Bengal, in Iraq and elsewhere — the power and the resources of Britain and France would sooner or later be exhausted in these unending colonial wars.
Such predictions were rejected as too pessimistic at the time. In the 1930s the Communists favored popular or national front policies that excluded the armed struggle. The radical nationalists had no such inhibitions, but the time was not yet ripe for mass campaigns against foreign rulers or domestic enemies, nor was it certain that the guerrilla approach would be the most effective weapon in any such struggles. The development of modern military techniques had seemingly made regular armies well-nigh irresistible. Guerrilla movements could hope to challenge regular armies only in certain exceptional conditions which in the 1930s did not exist. World War II was the turning point in this respect; Europe's (and Japan's) decline was, to paraphrase Wolfe Tone, the guerrillas opportunity. World War II caused the collapse of the colonial powers, it undermined the confidence of the European ruling classes, led to deep economic and political unrest and created revolutionary situations the world over. In these conditions, following a major shift in the global balance of power, it was again possible for a few determined people to find support for an all-out assault against the established powers by other than political means. Once it had been demonstrated that guerrilla war worked, the example was bound to be emulated.
5
The Twentieth Century (II): Partisans against Hitler
Resistance in the German-occupied countries ranged from a refusal to read Nazi newspapers to organized armed struggle. Resistance fighters gathered and transmitted military intelligence to the Allied commands, printed and disseminated anti-Nazi newspapers and leaflets, sabotaged the German economic war effort. Partisan warfare aimed above all at disrupting lines of supply and communications, at creating a general climate of insecurity, compelling the Axis powers to divert some of their forces from the main theaters of war. The story of the resistance movement in the various countries, its achievements and many setbacks has been amply documented; resistance organization, political views, activities and way of life have been studied in the greatest detail. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of partisan warfare is still in dispute. The claims made by the partisans as to the damage and the losses inflicted on the enemy are often ridiculously high.
There is a tendency in every war to magnify one's successes in the heat of battle; even in so notable a one as the Battle of Britain the official British announcements on enemy aircraft shot down were proved after the war to have been greatly exaggerated. But when it comes to guerrilla warfare, there seems to be, as remarked long ago by Denis Davydov and other outstanding guerrilla leaders of the past, an almost built-in temptation to overstate, and here the possibility for verification is usually all but nonexistent. Rumors or wild estimates are repeated and passed on so often that they eventually enter the history books as the established truth. According to General Bor Komorowski, for instance, the Armia Krajowa had four hundred thousand sworn-in members in 1944. There is no reason to doubt this statement; for all one knows, the number of its sympathizers may have been even greater. But judging by all available evidence, only a very small proportion of them were in physical partisan actions at any one given time during the war (one percent in 1943, perhaps five to ten percent in 1944). Soviet partisans in the Orel region claimed after the war to have killed 147,835 Germans.1 But Western sources give the total number of Axis soldiers killed by partisans in Russia during the war as only about thirty-five thousand; and of these not more than half were Germans. According to the British official history of the war, the Greek Communist guerrillas wounded and captured five thousand Germans in October 1944. Brigadier C. M. Woodhouse, deputy head of the British militarymission to Greece at the time, called these figures absurdly inflated. "I myself never saw more than two or three [Germans]. The fact is that the guerrillas' claims were simply copied out from hand to hand, without any attempt to evaluate them, until ten years afterwards they had become part of the official history of the war."2 The published figures of French Maquis membership are substantial, but to this must be added that the great majority joined only during the last few weeks (or days) before the liberation.
If Allied partisan claims cannot be trusted, German internal reports, if for different reasons, also bloated the strength of these partisans and the importance of their activities. A local German commander would deliberately exaggerate the number of partisans operating in his vicinity, either because of deficient intelligence reports or in the hope of getting reinforcements for the next counterguerrilla operation. Following such operations, the Germans would magnify the extent of their successes. Of the total number of "bandits" killed, wounded or taken prisoner, the bulk would more likely than not be peasants who had no connection whatsoever with the partisans.3 There are, in short, few reliable facts and figures. Internal accounts of the German Army Railway Command 4 record two thousand cases of railway lines being mined or trains attacked in one sector of the Eastern front during 1943. This is an impressive figure, except that on breaking it down further, one finds that only ninety-four servicemen and railway personnel were killed in these many incidents and only in fifty-two cases were the lines closed for longer than twenty-four hours.4 An overall assessment of the cost effectiveness of these attacks would also have to take into account the resources invested in producing the mines, in transporting them from the Russian rear to the partisans, the man-hours spent and the losses incurred during the attacks themselves. But such calculations are virtually impossible.
Mining railway lines was the most important activity or Soviet partisans; after the war they declared there had been five hundred thousand such operations whereas the Germans were aware of only a hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand. Partisan avowals were of fifteen thousand locomotives destroyed throughout Europe; again, the real figure seems to have been considerably lower, for Germany had more locomotives at the end of the war than at its beginning. A locomotive which had been derailed might be reported to headquarters by five or six different partisan units;* besides, the partisans had no way of establishing whether a locomotive had been only slightly damaged or permanently disabled. Whether successful or not, these actions undoubtedly involved a great deal of courage and many partisans paid for it with their lives. They merit our admiration, but the historians' assignment is not that of the hagiographer and he cannot uncritically accept their claims.
According to Yugoslav sources, Tito's partisans fought in early 1942 against 616,000 Fascist soldiers; later that year their number is said to have risen to 830,000. Altogether, 450,000 Fascist officers and men were reputed to have lost their lives fighting the partisans. But the total number of troops under the German commander in chief "Southeast" (Balkans) never exceeded 467,000. Many of the men under his command did not fight in Yugoslavia at all, and most of them were not killed.5 Mikhailovich's Chetniks reported military operations against Gennans whereas in reality they had concluded a de facto armistice with them.
The probable truth is that the political impact of partisan activity was far greater than its military contribution. It helped restore the self-respect of a defeated nation and gave new impetus to the spirit of defiance: sanguis martyrorum, semen ecclesiae. It was in any event restricted in its scope, actual guerrilla war being confined almost exclusively to parts of East and Southeast Europe. In Denmark, Holland and Belgium there could be strikes, acts of sabotage and of individual terror, but partisan warfare was ruled out. Toward the end of the war Maquis congregated in certain areas of France (such as the Massif Central) and in upper Italy, but their military operations were of no great consequence. The Slovak uprising in the latter days was not guerrilla in character, which, incidentally, may have been one of the reasons for its failure. Partisan units existed in Greece but they spent more time fighting each other than the German invaders.
The two major theaters of guerrilla war were Russia and Yugoslavia, but again, if c
hiefly for geographical reasons, it was contained within certain areas; in Russia the partisan movement was strongest in the central sector, in Yugoslavia it was at its most active in Bosnia, Montenegro and parts of Serbia. Within these regions, the partisans' hold on the countryside was virtually unchallenged, German rule being limited to the towns arid the main lines of communication.
In Yugoslavia, as in Russia, the partisan units were still weak in 1941, they gathered strength during 1942, and by late 1943 reached the height of their power— following Italy's collapse and the German defeats on the Eastern front. This gradual development of partisan ascendancy was perhaps only natural, but it also points up the tenuous effect the partisan movement had on the course of the war; the partisans were at their weakest when they were needed most and might have rendered the greatest service — before Stalingrad. They could cause serious harassment to the Germans only after the tide of the war had already turned.
In many European countries the Communists were the leading force in the armed resistance. They were the only political party organizationally prepared to operate in conditions of illegality. To be a Communist involved an unqualified measure of discipline and commitment, it meant not merely paying one's dues, it meant fighting for the cause and, if necessary, giving one's life for it. Opposition to Nazism was widespread in all social classes and most political parties, but it was almost solely the Communists who had the machinery to channel resistance into armed struggle.
Relations between Communist and non-Communist partisan units were always strained. Non-Communists were usually suspicious of Communist intentions and reluctant to cooperate with them; the Communists tried wherever they could to isolate and destroy their rivals. From time to time, under the pressure of the Allied powers, Communists and non-Communists would collaborate on some specific operations, but sooner or later hostilities would again break out between the two sides. This applies above all to Greece, Albania and Yugoslavia. In Poland the Communists were in lame shape; their party had been dissolved following the execution of most of its leaders in the Moscow purges. It was reestablished in 1942 but remained much weaker than the Armia Krajowa. There was tension between Gaullists and Communists in occupied France, but no armed clashes.
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