Guerrilla Warfare

by Walter Laqueur

  The structure of the partisan movements and the leeway for their operations varied from country to country. After an initial period of confusion and disorder, the Soviet partisan units were in close contact with the partisan general staff in Moscow, and all major units were in radio communication with the "center." They had airports of their own, received arms and supplies at frequent intervals; wounded partisans were evacuated by air, there was a steady stream of new commanders, political commissars, demolition experts and important visitors. Some Soviet partisan units grew within a year from a few dozen members to a few thousand (those, for instance, headed by Kovpak, Melnik, Saburov and Naumov) and from time to time several units would combine for a large-scale operation, but on the whole their assignment was to act as individual units, not to become an army in the enemy's rear. Some units were dispatched on long-distance raids, but only very rarely would they try to occupy cities. The few attempts that were made (by Kovpak) failed. The dispersal of forces was in keeping with the overall strategy of the Soviet High Command; the establishment in the German rear of large infantry units lacking armor would have exposed the partisans to dangerous counterattack.

  German forces in the Balkans, on the other hand, were not strong and the Yugoslav partisans concentrated their units into an "Army of National Liberation" subdivided into divisions as early as November 1942.6 (A partisan division, however, numbered no more than three thousand men at the time, frequently fewer.) This partisan army fought large-scale battles against Axis forces in 1943 at the Neretva and the Sutjeska rivers. It occupied, and held, cities for long periods. In 1943 the German High Command admitted outright that it no longer faced "bandit" (i.e., partisan) warfare, but that a new front had been opened in Southeast Europe. Thus, Yugoslav strategy followed the Chinese pattern, even though there is no evidence that Tito and his comrades were familiar with developments in China. According to Yugoslav sources, Tito's army numbered eight hundred thousand men at the end of the war, whereas Soviet partisans never exceeded two hundred and fifty thousand; the quality of the forces the Yugoslav partisans were up against was, however, distinctly inferior to the antiguerrilla ones on the Russian front.7 Still, it must be borne in mind that the Yugoslav partisans received no supplies at all from outside during the first years of the war; a massive Allied airlift was organized only in 1944. The partisan movements in other parts of Europe were considerably smaller and the operations against them, until the last year of the war, were, with rare exceptions, carried out by special police units.

  The Soviet Partisans

  Guerrilla warfare in the Soviet Union was officially initiated with Stalin's appeal on 3 July 1941, calling Soviet patriots to establish infantry and cavalry partisan units everywhere in the enemy's rear, to mine bridges, to cut his communications and supply routes; in short, "to make life intolerable for the invader." Mention has been made of the fact that before the war the NKVD, the secret police, had been responsible for diversionary action. With the outbreak of the war the Communist party apparatus and the Soviet army also became prominently involved in the enterprise; a central partisan staff was formed under the command of P. K. Ponomarenko, former party secretary in White Russia, and Marshal Voroshilov. The major partisan commanders (Naumov, Saburov, Medvedev) were usually either NKVD men or leading party officials (Begma and Fyodorov, former first secretary of the Chernigov party district).8 Later on, regular army officers were attached to the units as chiefs of staff or as their commanders. The chief of the Ukrainian general staff was T. Strokach, formerly head of the Ukrainian NKVD; he was later replaced by V. Andreyev, a partisan commander. There were some notable exceptions; Sidor Kovpak, a veteran of the civil war, was fifty-four years of age when the war broke out. He had been mayor of the city of Putivl; his deputy, P. Vershigora, who later became commander of another major unit, had been a movie producer. The party officials who became partisan leaders showed enterprise and courage well above what could be expected of the average bureaucrat. Few of them would have collaborated with the Germans in any case, even if it had not been Nazi policy to execute all leading Communists.

  No exact data exist about the social composition of the partisan units; according to one Soviet source, of twenty-five thousand partisans in the Orel districts, thirty-eight percent were workers, thirty-one percent peasants, and thirty percent belonged to the "intelligentsia." Of sixty-two thousand Ukrainian partisans, thirtysix percent were workers, forty-seven percent peasants, and seventeen percent "employees."9 Such statistics are, however, of dubious value, for during the early period of the war the partisan units consisted for the most part of Red Army stragglers who in the general retreat had been cut off from their units. Later on, the composition of the units changed rapidly as young villagers were recruited in the Nazi-occupied areas.

  The attitude of the population during the first months of the German occupation was one of attentisme, especially in the Ukraine and the Baltic countries. However, this mood did not last. It was official Nazi policy to treat the Slavs as Untermenschen; the Germans engaged in wholesale requisitions, they employed forced labor and carried out mass executions. The partisan leaders would have found it much more difficult to attract recruits had the Germans treated the populace decently, but this would have been quite incompatible both with the character of the Nazi leaders, their doctrine, and their aims.

  The initial defeats of the Red Army had come as a shock to the inhabitants of the occupied territories, but with the failure of the Germans to take Moscow and at the very last with the battle of Stalingrad, the belief in a German victory waned. As a result, the partisan movement continued to grow; if there had been something like thirty thousand partisans by the end of 1941, their number had risen to a hundred and fifty thousand during the second half of 1942, and reached its peak, about two hundred to two hundred and fifty thousand, in the summer of 1943.10 At first partisan units had been organized on a territorial basis; platoons and companies were mobilized by the local party secretaries, the Komsomol officials and the NKVD. Later, as the units congregated in wooded or marshy areas far away from their original base, the territorial system was given up. There were relatively few guerrilla units in the northern sector of the front and south of Kharkov; the Ukrainian steppe and the lowlands of the north offered little cover and the partisan units operating there endured heavy losses. The main concentrations were around Smolensk and Minsk, the forests of Bryansk, the Pripet marshes, and White Russia generally.11

  The area occupied by the Germans during the first fifteen months of the war was several times that of Germany proper, the population also exceeded that of Germany itself, and supply lines had become a logistic nightmare. Troops could not be spared for operations in the rear and the German presence, as in Yugoslavia, was necessarily confined to the towns and the main traffic lines. There were large areas which throughout the occupation remained altogether outside German control. Thus, a region of several thousand square miles southeast of Minsk was in partisan hands without interruption from the summer of 1942 onward and there were a number of other such little partisan republics dotted about elsewhere. The Germans were fully aware of their existence but could not divert sufficient forces to destroy them. Even the front line was not continuous; certain gaps existed, such as the Vitebsk corridor, through which the partisans maintained contact with the bolshaya zemlya, that is, Soviet territory.

  The vast spaces and the lack of manpower thwarted the German attempts to suppress the guerrillas. The German army group "Center," the one most exposed to partisan attacks, had at its disposal in late 1941 no more than four regiments and one SS brigade to police an area the size of England. Throughout the spring and summer of 1942 the German armies largely ignored the partisans, with something of fitful actions against them launched only in the autumn of that year, and during the following spring. Meanwhile, however, control of antipartisan operations, hitherto left mainly to the local commanders, was coordinated and non-German units, including Russian collaborators, Latvians and
Lithuanians, were set up to fight the "bandits." In the end, the number of Russians serving in assorted German auxiliary units far outstripped that of the partisans. Hitler objected to the use of Russian volunteers; shortly after the outbreak of the war he had even welcomed the existence of Soviet partisan units, for this, so he said with his own unfathomable brand of illogic, would make it easier to recognize the enemy and to destroy him. His few instructions about antibandit warfare left little to anyone's imagination; there was to be no misplaced chivalry in this struggle — the enemy had to be exterminated.12 Villages were destroyed and their inhabitants killed, or at the very least rendered homeless. In the countryside there had been no overwhelming enthusiasm for Soviet power; the circumstances of collectivization were still fresh in the memory. But indiscriminate arson and murder soon made the Germans as much hated in the villages as in the cities. In the later phases of the war, the German command switched its tactics and made all kinds of promises to partisans who surrendered. But of three major antipartisan operations, only one (Zigeunerbaron), produced a sizable number of deserters — 869 — whereas Nachbarhilfe netted a mere twenty-four, and Freischütz only five, a poor response to half a million leaflets that had this time been distributed.13

  During the first months of the war the partisan units were building up their organizations, training for action, gathering weapons and establishing contact with the "center." Alongside this, and on a more political level, they circulated propaganda broadsheets, assassinated individual collaborators and tried, by persuasion if possible, to enlist support among the civilian population, appealing to the villagers' patriotism (Communist slogans were dropped during the war), but also not hesitant to use intimidation.

  Fearing for their life and property, many mayors and policemen appointed by the Germans opted for collaboration with the partisans. True, the German military command had published countless warnings that all those who gave cover or supplies to partisans would be executed. But the next German police post was usually far away, whereas the partisan was the man with the gun in the doorway. In the circumstances, the decision was not difficult to make.

  Another major partisan task was to spoil and destroy the agricultural crops, preventing their shipment to Germany. Since the main wheat-growing areas were a long way from the main partisan concentrations, they succeeded only partially in this in 1942; in 1943 the results in this respect were more impressive. They almost never managed to interfere with the extraction of minerals and oil in the occupied areas; the mining centers were located in the south, beyond the partisans' reach. They did better in the battle for the railway lines; to hamper German transport had been one of their primary missions from the start, but in 1943 it was given absolute priority. The Smolensk-Bryansk-Orel and Minsk-Gomel-Bryansk railways which were of vital importance to the German central army group were temporarily paralyzed during a decisive phase of the war. In late July 1943 new plastic mines, against which metal detectors were ineffective, were used for the first time and in their greatest single operation of the war, on 2 August 1943, more than 100,000 partisans planted 8,422 of these mines on the railway tracks. This sabotage coincided with the Soviet offensive following the battle of Kursk.14

  Occasionally an especially large partisan body would be given instruction to carry out penetration raids deep in the German rear; the intention was usually to relieve pressure on the Soviet army.15 During the winter of 1942/43 several major partisan units transferred their activities to the Western Ukraine far beyond the German lines; the Saburov and Bogatyr units marched some four hundred miles through the German rear, crossing five rivers in the process. From his hideout in the Bryansk forests, Kovpak moved to the same target area, west of the Dnieper, where by May 1943 a partisan concentration of twenty-two thousand men had assembled. One White Russian unit went on a six-hundred-mile raid, but the most spectacular operation was Kovpak's in 1943 which took him to the Carpathian Mountains and the Slovak border.16 Sections of his unit remained there and participated in the Slovak rising of 1944. Later, Kovpak ran into trouble and his unit was almost wiped out. The partisans were unfamiliar with the area and the population was frequently hostile. The partisans had to cope not only with the Germans but also with Ukrainian nationalist irregulars who were both anti-German and anti-Soviet.

  Alter May 1943 operational cooperation between the partisans and the Soviet army was near total, the partisans coming under direct army command. During this period partisans became more active in the northern sector of the front where they had previously been weak. Having already been of assistance in preparation for the Soviet offensive in 1943, they also helped to pursue the fleeing Germans, while the great Soviet summer offensive of June 1944 was again preceded by massive partisan attacks on railway lines, with more than ten thousand minings taking place two nights before its start.17

  As the Soviet army crossed into Poland and Germany, the partisan units were gradually disbanded. Their general staff had already been dissolved earlier, in January 1944, for reasons which are not entirely clear; that of the Ukrainians, in contrast, continued to function up to the end of the war. Perhaps some influential party leaders such as Khrushchev and Korotchenko took a personal interest in the Ukrainian partisans.

  As more and more territory was liberated by the Soviet army, the local partisans would be absorbed into regular units; their former commanders, awarded some military decoration and promotion, returned to their old positions in government, political parties and the secret police. Their subsequent personal fates fluctuated with the postwar purges and shifts in the Soviet party leadership. Among those who were to rise to high rank was Mazurov, the partisan Komsomol secretary in White Russia, who eventually became a member of the Politburo.

  The place of the partisan movement in Soviet historiography and literature underwent certain ups and downs in the postwar period. In professional military literature there was a tendency to downgrade the importance of the partisan units; they were honorably mentioned and due tribute was paid to their heroism, but there was a reaction against the wartime disposition to exaggerate their part in the victory over Nazi Germany. Some of the firsthand accounts written while the war was still on, or immediately afterward, had to be rewritten, because, as highly placed critics argued, the authors had paid insufficient attention to the "leading role of the Communist party in organizing and guiding the partisan units."

  Conditions of partisan life varied inevitably from place to place, but they improved everywhere as the war continued. During the first winter, partisans underwent great hardships; a typical account relates that members of one of the larger White Russian units were given sugar — a great luxury — in their tea and salt with their bread only on special occasions.18 Most partisans were forced to hibernate in their hideouts during the first winter of the war because they had no suitable clothing or equipment, and furthermore their traces in the snow would have betrayed them.19 Eighteen months later the situation had improved so much that when a temporary food shortage occurred following a German antiguerrilla operation, the problem was solved by flying in supplies from behind the Russian front. Altogether, partisan life on the whole was neither as dangerous nor as strenuous as was generally imagined. It was far more risky to engage in anti-German activities in a town; the illegal party leadership in the cities lasted, as a rule, no longer than six months, whereas most leading partisan commanders survived the war. (One notable exception was Rudnev, Korpak's chief of staff, who fell in action in 1943.) There are no detailed statistics, but it would appear that the chances for survival among the partisans were no worse than among Russian front-line units.

  One of the reasons for the partisans' relative safety has already been mentioned. The Germans never had sufficient manpower during the war to cope with them, nor could they concentrate enough armor and aircraft for such operations. The partisans, on the other hand, had radio contact with their general staff and could ask for air support. Radio communications were of great psychological importance; th
ere was no feeling of isolation, one of the commonest drawbacks of partisan warfare throughout history. Add to this that the partisans received warnings of impending German attacks and their offensive operations were effectively coordinated.

  Arms and supplies were flown in by air.20 This included medical supplies and personnel; in one partisan unit, seven doctors took care of five hundred men. During the antiguerrilla operation Ζigeunerbaron, the Germans found to their consternation that the partisans had not only heavy guns but even a few tanks. (The Germans seldom used tanks against partisans, partly because they could not spare them, partly because the terrain was unsuitable.)21 Some larger partisan units had been supplied with 45 and 76 mm guns. Although the Germans used aircraft against partisans, it was chiefly for reconnaissance, on only rare occasions for tactical support. The Soviet partisans, in brief, were in almost every respect in a more advantageous position than partisans in other European theaters of war.

  Partisans helped the Soviet war effort in many supplementary ways. They collected taxes for the Soviet government, recruited soldiers for the Red Army and, in the Leningrad region, transported food from the Pskov kolkhozes into blockaded Leningrad.22 They acted as the long arm of the Soviet government disseminating propaganda and policing the countryside. In all this, however, their function was almost entirely political and administrative. Militarily, their activities, as has been noted, were by far the most frequent and forceful in central Russia, affecting the operations of the German Army Group Center. Years later, a military historian analyzing the Battle of Kursk, the turning point in the history of the war on the Eastern front, mentioned the many partisan operations against railway lines, and the fact that, as a result of them, agricultural deliveries decreased by two-thirds. But for all that, he concluded that until the spring of 1943 partisan activities did not seriously influence the operative planning of the German army.23 It was only during the German retreat from Russia that the partisans became more than a nuisance. During 1942 and 1943 many German generals grumbled about the intolerable situation in the rear, and there were similar complaints emanating from German headquarters. But Himmler, in a secret speech to his Gauleiters in October 1943, summarized the situation in the rear in saying that it was nonsense to make so much of a mere inconvenience; the soldiers at the front were not dying of hunger, nor were they short of supplies and reserves, which arrived as planned.24 It was only in May 1944, when the German armies were about to evacuate the last parts of the occupied Russian territory, that they realized that they might have saved themselves much inconvenience if they had treated the partisans differently. An official handbook on antipartisan warfare published in May 1944 decreed that partisans should not be shot but treated as prisoners of war unless they were caught in German uniforms.25 Such recognition of past mistakes was by that time of purely academic interest.