Guerrilla Warfare

by Walter Laqueur

  The first Maquis had come into being in late 1942; by early 1943 there were so many that it was already impossible to list them in full.54 Most of these, however, were very small groups, only rarely existing for more than a matter of weeks or a few months. Many of their members were réfractaires, young Frenchmen escaping forced labor and deportation to Germany, and more anxious to hide in the woods and mountains than to indulge in military operations. The idea of establishing a major concentration of Maquis in the Vercors originated with Pierre Dalloz, the secretary of the French Alpinist Association, and Yves Forge, a resistance leader in Lyons. Another plan aimed at concentrating some ten to fifteen thousand partisans in the Mont Mouchet region near Clermont-Ferrand. Both projects were undertaken in the belief that the local Maquis would be joined by French paratroops and that heavy equipment would be provided. (War materiel was dropped by British planes on many occasions in 1943 but consisted mostly of light weapons and explosives.) The Maquis congregated but neither the paratroops nor the heavy arms arrived. Furthermore, the basic concept of a "mountain fortress" violated the most fundamental guerrilla principles.55 The Germans stormed Mont Mouchet on 11 June 1944; most of the defenders were fortunate enough to escape. The main battle for Vercors began on 13 June 1944, the Maquis having struck prematurely. Following the failure of the first German assault, the local Maquis had some four weeks' respite, but eventually the superior numbers of the Germans and their heavier equipment told and most of the Maquis perished in the battles of July 21-23. There were bitter complaints that the Maquis had not received the promised help, but the hard-pressed Allies could not divert forces to a military sideshow, hundreds of miles from the places where more imperative battles were being fought. Nor could the responsibility be so easily shifted; the original notion of using guerrilla forces for conventional warfare was itself of course at fault.

  These two major partisan efforts apart, there were countless minor operations, the story of which has been described in exhaustive detail.56 When General Marshall wrote in 1946 that the resistance in Normandy had assured the success of Allied landings by delaying the arrival of German reinforcements and in preventing the regrouping of enemy divisions in the interior, he referred not to one major, spectacular engagement, but to hundreds of small acts of sabotage, especially on the part of transport workers. Generally speaking, there is reason to believe that the railway workers of Europe contributed more to the Allied victory than the partisans.

  Between 1942 and 1944 the trench resistance suffered more losses as the result of betrayal within its own ranks than through German action. By early 1944 it had to some degree recovered and it played a certain role in the liberation of French towns and villages. But in the last stage of the liberation of France, military operations were dictated by the overt scramble for power. The Communist (FTP) decision to launch an insurrection in Paris while the Allied columns headed for the capital were yet on their way is the best-known example. Elsewhere the Gaullists tried to pre-empt the Communists. One circumstance, however, that perhaps distinguishes the French resistance from others of its kind at the time is that although it was internally no less divided than any politically, the conflicts between Communist and non-Communist groups brought no ostensible armed clashes as long as the Germans were the common foe. It was only in the interregnum between their retreat and before full civilian control was established that a free-for-all took place. Most of the participants in these postwar struggles had never even seen action against the Germans.

  Italy

  The Italian military resistance differed in some immediate respects from partisan warfare elsewhere in Europe. In the first place it began only after Mussolini's downfall, when the final outcome of the war was scarcely any longer in doubt. Secondly, relations between Communists and other anti-Fascist forces, despite occasional strains, were more harmonious than was the usual rule. And further, if it produced no giant world figure, its partisan movement was headed by men such as Longo, Parri, Pajetta, who were to play an important part in Italian politics for years to come. Activist almost by definition, it ranged itself deliberately against the policy advocated by the less militant anti-Fascist leaders. As the movement saw it, Italy had to redeem itself before the world and to regain its self-respect after submitting for two decades to Fascist domination. The Italian resistance, to put it somewhat crudely, was the return ticket to democratic, anti-Fascist respectability. The Rome government, along with the Allied command, was less enthusiastic about partisan operations. Italy, like France, was save for a few exceptions not ideal guerrilla country: it could well be that the partisans might hinder more than help the Allied campaign. The Italian government tried to bring the partisan movement under its direct control, but as in France, the exercise was not wholly satisfactory. The Rome government appointed General Cadorna as the partisan chief of staff, whereupon the resistance (CLNAI) named two of its leaders, Longo and Parri, to keep a watchful eye on him.

  The resistance claimed that the lack of Allied encouragement stemmed from political reasons, a not altogether unfounded charge. The Western governments were aware that at least a third of the partisan movement was under Communist administration. The second largest contingent was that of the Action party — the former Giustizia e Libertà. It is undeniable both that the tactics of the Italian resistance were not very well thought out and also that its strategy was politically motivated. A striking instance of this was the decision (against Allied advice) to establish large rather than small fighting units. Granted all the undoubted heroism, there was also a bombastic element in the heady invoking of il secondo risorgimento.57 True, the difficulties facing the early partisans were formidable; they fought not only the Germans, but the diehards of the Duce's Fascist regime which still had its stalwarts throughout the German-occupied areas. Kesselring, the German commander, estimated that some thirteen thousand soldiers were killed and the same number wounded as the result of Italian partisan action; transport between Italy and the south of France was interrupted for ten days in October 1944 and some major Italian cities were temporarily cut off because of mined bridges, roads and railway lines.58 But the partisans suffered many more losses — some estimates range as high as sixty-five thousand killed and wounded, and up to ten thousand civilians were executed during German and Fascist reprisals.59

  Some partisan leaders had acquired military experience in the Spanish Civil War but this was of no great help in such different circumstances. They committed the same mistake as the French Maquis, attempting to establish liberated areas at a time when German military power was yet unbroken. For a while small partisan republics existed near the Swiss frontier (Ossola, Monferrato, Carnio), but at the end of six weeks, in late October 1944, they were destroyed by the Germans who did not even have to employ strong forces for the purpose. The partisans found themselves in the worst possible situation that could face a guerrilla — having to defend a static line without real fortifications, armor and artillery. It is only fair to add that Longo and other partisan commanders had warned against this strategy.60 Following these disasters, General Alexander, the commander in chief of the Allied forces in Italy, appealed to the partisans on 13 November 1944 to stop large-scale operations; he did not tell them in so many words to go home, but advised them to save arms and ammunition for a better day and more propitious circumstances. From the partisans' point of view such advice was highly demoralizing; they regarded his call as an underhand trick, giving a new boost to bourgeois attentisme. But in truth there was no other strategy the partisans could have adopted once they had been defeated; it was only commonsense to prevent further unnecessary losses.

  The partisan movement recovered its momentum the following spring. During the winter the organized bands numbered no more than a few thousand members, whereas on 1 March there were again eighty thousand men in the partisan army. By mid-April that figure had swollen to a hundred and thirty thousand, and at the time of the general insurrection there were two hundred and fifty to three hun
dred thousand.61 But "general insurrection" usually meant not much more than stepping into the vacuum created by the German retreat, ousting the Fascist bureaucracy, and turning the Fascist casa del popolo into the headquarters of the Communist party.

  The Italian partisans were from the start a political movement above all, their military activities were subordinated throughout to their political aims. In military terms their operations were of no great consequence, but their political impact was indubitable; but for them the country might have remained a monarchy — at least for far longer than it did.62 As in France, the resistance movement in Italy was the cradle of many idealistic schemes for a better postwar world, of far-reaching internal changes, social justice, industrial democracy. Even in defeat these ideas continued to be cherished. And through its unfulfilled dreams the spirit of the resistance was to materialize as a distinctly tangible factor in the country's postwar political history.

  Postwar Reflections

  When the war broke out in 1939 no one thought that guerrilla operations would play any material part at all in the critical years ahead. And it was perhaps by very virtue of this revival of partisan war being so unexpected in the first place that the pendulum later swung to the other extreme and its importance exaggerated. The impression is sometimes even created that it was the guerrillas who in fact won the war with occasional help of this or that regular army. These sources have it that there were two million partisans in the USSR, 50,000 in France, 462,000 in Italy and 250,000 in Bulgaria.63 The partisans claimed to have killed millions of enemy officers and soldiers, not to mention local traitors; they allegedly destroyed fifteen thousand locomotives, fifteen thousand bridges, four thousand tanks and a thousand aircraft.64 They claim to have diverted enemy forces amounting to between two hundred and fifty and three hundred Axis divisions, forty divisions in the USSR, fifty in Poland, fifty-five in Yugoslavia, more than thirty divisions in France, twenty in Greece, ten to fifteen in Czechoslavakia, eight in Albania and so on down the line. These figures certainly do not err on the side of understatement.

  The real number of partisans is virtually impossible to establish. Much, of course, depends on the definition of the term. If one applies it liberally and includes men and women who were ready to hide partisans for a night or who expressed sympathy with them, there may have been millions of them. The dangers involved should not be belittled; it took a brave person to give shelter to a partisan for it could mean execution. If, on the other hand, one counts only those who actually participated in the armed struggle against the enemy, the number is much smaller; the less resistance there was, the taller quite often the claims. Furthermore, there are great discrepancies between the figures given by Soviet, Yugoslav, French and other sources at various times and in various contexts. Recent Soviet sources quote the total number of people involved at one time or another in the partisan movement as seven hundred thousand; Western sources put it at five hundred thousand. But the rate of attrition was high; many lost their lives, others were wounded or captured, some deserted or were sent back to join the regular army. The maximum strength of the Soviet partisan movement at any given time was two hundred to two hundred and fifty thousand men and women.65

  The discrepancies are even greater when it comes to the results of the partisans' operations. The Yugoslav partisans alone, it was noted, claim to have killed and wounded almost a million "enemies." If this figure is correct, most of the victims must have been Yugoslavs. The same applies to other European countries; a great many people perished in Europe during and after the war in civil wars, purges and the settlement of all manner of accounts, but this did not necessarily weaken the German war effort. If two to three hundred divisions had been diverted by the partisans, the war would have been over by 1943 at the lastest. Again, much depends on the interpretation of the term "diverting enemy forces." A French author rightly observed that in the German operations against partisans in the Soviet Union far more forces were diverted than in the entire North African campaign which involved a mere twelve divisions.66 But with equal justice it could be claimed that the number of German troops stationed in Norway in 1944 (372,000 men) exceeded that of German antiguerrilla forces in Russia and Yugoslavia, and this despite the fact that there was no guerrilla warfare in Norway. Such uncritical comparisons are, of course, absurd; occupying armies have to station some divisions in their rear quite irrespective of the incidence of guerrilla warfare. The larger the territory occupied, the greater the number of forces that have to be deployed as garrisons, to police it and to safeguard supplies and communications. Considering that the Germans occupied vast territories with a total population of more than two hundred million, the forces stationed in the rear of the German armies were few, and the aggregate of tanks, aircraft and heavy artillery diverted for antiguerrilla warfare was insignificant.

  Some of the reasons making for the partisans exaggerations have already been gone into. There were other motives, conscious and unconscious, such as the compulsion in some of the occupied countries to wash away with braggart tales of gallant resistance exploits the shame of the defeat and of collaboration; the majority of the population, so it was avowed, had been actively anti-Fascist all along. There were numerous such brave men and women who fought the occupiers from the very beginning, but for every one of them there were a hundred (or perhaps a thousand) last-minute resistance fighters who would put on a red armband or don some fancy uniform to join the partisans in the victory parade. The genuine partisans were contemptuous of these late arrivals but they still needed manpower, so welcomed them in their ranks nonetheless. Not that these tardy recruits were necessarily all cowards or opportunists; many of them had perhaps for long sympathized with the resistance. But not everyone is born to be a hero, and besides, in some countries it may indeed have been physically impossible to join a partisan group earlier.

  The very fact that the military experts had prematurely announced the demise of guerrilla warfare, or ignored the subject altogether before 1939, acted as a spur in itself to further the tendency after the war to overrate it. Now it became the fashion to proclaim Marx and Engels, Lenin and Stalin as the great strategists of guerrilla warfare.67 German writers who had taken part in antiguerrilla operations discovered belatedly that partisans were not just bandits, and that the problem could not be solved by military repression alone.68 To which one must hasten to add in due fairness that in the documents and memoirs of the supreme warlords, of Hitler and Stalin, of Churchill and de Gaulle, there are but few references to guerrilla warfare. Liddell Hart, who had been so enthusiastic about Lawrence's accomplishments in the First World War, had strong reservations about the efficacy of partisan warfare in the second.*

  The real causes of the proliferation of guerrilla warfare are not shrouded in mystery; they were the same, broadly speaking, as those that provoked resistance against Napoleon in Spain, Russia, the Tyrol and elsewhere. Both Napoleon and Hitler had occupied many lands and dispatched their armies to faraway countries. They had both overextended their supply lines and spread their forces very thin. But whereas Napoleon scarcely intervened in the internal affairs of occupied countries, except perhaps by appointing a relative to rule it, the Germans interfered brutally and on a massive scale, and this was bound to intensify the struggle against them. Terror produced counterterror, and given the heavy demands on their manpower, the Germans lacked the soldiery to destroy the partisans if these operated in favorable conditions.

  The partisan experience during World War II again demonstrated the paramount importance of geography. But it also pointed up the significance of psychological factors; but for the dedication of capable cadres, and rallied political sympathies among the local populations, there could have been no guerrilla warfare. A partisan movement needed space to maneuver, and areas in which it could hide. This ruled out most of Western Europe; with German concentrations in all the major cities, urban guerrilla operations were also impossible there. If the local garrisons had not sufficed to subdue
the partisans, the German air force would have bombed them out of existence. Allied intelligence agents and individual resistance fighters could hide in a city, major partisan units could not. In the German scale of priorities, Western Europe mattered far more than the Balkans. The presence of small guerrilla bands in the mountains of Albania was a mere pinprick, it did not threaten any vital military or political German interests. If, on the other hand, the Maquis had been able to gain a firm foothold anywhere in France, the German military leadership would have had to destroy it at any price because this would have constituted a direct military threat. But even if geographical conditions had been more propitious, it is doubtful whether a major partisan movement would have emerged in Western Europe. Partisan war, guerre à l'outrance, was not in the tradition of civilized nations; as Engels had noted many years before, Western Europe was no longer conditioned for a war of this kind. There was opposition to foreign rule, but not necessarily the willingness to sacrifice life and property, to risk the destruction of cities and perhaps the entire nation. Furthermore, Nazi terror was much less in evidence in Western than in Eastern Europe. The West, as far as the Nazis were concerned, was merely decadent, whereas Eastern Europe was racially inferior; the fewer Slavs, the better.