The attitude of the civilian population was, of course, of crucial importance. The partisans could knock on many a door and expect help, or at the very least be certain that they would not be betrayed. The strength of the partisan movement's appeal lay in its patriotic character; revolutionary slogans would have been wholly ineffective and the Communists were the first to acknowledge this.
Conversely, it was this very strength of patriotic feeling that prevented the emergence of a resistance movement directed against the government inside Nazi Germany and inside the Soviet Union. The German and the Soviet political police had no difficulty in putting down any manifestation of political dissent and obstructing any organized resistance. The majority of the population in these countries either supported the regime or was cowed into submission. It is revealing that of the German Communists parachuted into German territory by the Soviets to organize cells of resistance and to collect information, only one was not caught within a week or two, and this lone survivor, significantly, infiltrated toward the end of the war, was an agent of Polish extraction who hid among Polish friends in Upper Silesia. (One or two German socialist parachutists also survived, but this was in the last phase of the war when the activities of the Gestapo were already disrupted as a result of saturation air raids.) The Germans tried on various occasions to send agents to the Soviet rear, but there is reason to believe that most of them were arrested before very long. The only trenchant resistance could have come from inside the German army, but the oppositionist generals and colonels were not at all sure whether their troops would follow them.
From what has been said so far it would appear that the partisans in Europe were not strikingly successful in their paramount task, namely, to inflict decisive damage on the Axis forces. One of the foremost historians of the resistance, who can scarcely be suspected of lack of sympathy, later wrote that "the vast majority of German units never came into direct contact with the guerrillas."69 The only expression of real anger and concern about partisan warfare on Hitler's part was his directive No. 46, dated 18 August 1942. ("In recent months banditry in the East has assumed intolerable proportions.") But in 1943-1944, when "banditry" had assumed far greater proportions, there was no such outburst. As the German position deteriorated, the German military leaders were totally preoccupied with the regular forces facing them.
Conditions differed from one country to another and political perspectives were subject to change. The Soviet partisans certainly had no doubt that their chief assignment was to wreak the worst possible havoc on the Germans. Elsewhere in Europe the situation was far more complex; by the time the Balkan partisans reached the peak of their strength — in the autumn of 1943 — the German summer offensive in Russia had failed and Italy had surrendered. It was obvious by now that the Germans were going to lose the war and this affected the political perspective of Communists and non-Communists alike. Seen from the Communist point of view, it was far more important to destroy their domestic rivals than engage in costly battles against the Germans who were doomed anyway. The anti-Communist partisans also stopped operations against the Germans, unless they were attacked, because survival had become their top priority. True, some of the heaviest fighting took place in the Balkans in late 1943, but this was invariably the result of German antiguerrilla campaigns, not of partisan offensives. As in China, priorities had changed; if at the start everything (or almost everything) had been subordinated to the anti-Fascist war effort, from 1943 on at the latest, the anti-Fascist fight was subjugated to winning the struggle for power inside each country.
Whether one considers the record or the European partisan movements a story of success or failure or something in between depends entirely on the yardstick employed. Insofar as winning the war is concerned, Alan Milward correctly observes that, on the evidence, the history of the resistance should have a far lesser place in the history of World War II. "As an individual act resistance was liberating, satisfying and necessary; on a coordinated level it seems to have been seldom effective, sometimes stultifying, frequently dangerous and almost always too costly."70 But then, the task of the Communist resistance movements was, of course, not only to help win the war.
Seen in this light, their operations were not, of course, a failure but an outstanding success; the guerrilla movement was an excellent school for the mobilization of masses and the training of cadres, it was the most effective tool for the seizure of power. There was widespread feeling in the west of Europe as well as in the south that the old elites had failed — hence the defeats in the early days of the war. It was widely held that the old system had been corrupt, that out of the ashes of destruction a new order would emerge — just, more humane and effective, under the leadership of the progressive forces headed by the Communist parties.
The record shows that In Yugoslavia and Albania the Communists destroyed the rival forces before the end of the war, in Greece they almost succeeded, in France and Italy they were in a very strong position but failed. Wherever Communist partisans did not succeed it was principally because the presence of Allied troops made an armed takeover impossible. Once parliamentary democracy was restored, the majority was bound to reassert itself, and the "vanguard" had missed its opportunity. Irrespective of the existence of partisan movements, Communist regimes would of course have been imposed in Eastern Europe, but this does not detract from the overall achievement of the partisans. The political repercussions of the resistance were for long to echo — still echo resoundingly — through the west, south and east of Europe.
*This point is made by a recent Soviet source in a footnote to the statistics issued by the partisan general staff, i.e., 1.5 m. enemies killed, wounded or taken prisoner, 4,000 tanks and 16,000 locomotives destroyed, etc. Bolshaya Sovietskaya Entsiklopedia (1975), vol. 19,234.
*Liddell Hart's enthusiasm for guerrilla war waned because he found it both ineffective and politically counterproductive. He wrote in 1954 that the partisans in the Second World War had rarely had more than nuisance value except when their operations coincided with the imminent threat of a powerful offensive absorbing the enemy's main attention: "At other times they were less effective than widespread passive resistance — and brought far more harm to the people in their own country. They provoked reprisals much more severe than the injury inflicted on the enemy. They afforded his troops the opportunity for violent action that is always a relief to the nerves of a garrison in an unfriendly country." Liddell Hart recalls a meeting with Wingate, then serving as a captain in Palestine, in the late 1930s. He was beginning to have doubts about the long term consequences of guerrilla war— the political and moral ill effects which would inevitably continue after the invaders had gone. (Β. H. Liddell Hart, Strategy [New York, 1967], 368-370.)
6
The Twentieth Century (III): China and Vietnam
Of all guerrilla wars in modern history those in China and Vietnam have been the most important, and all others have been in comparison of regional significance only. The war in China resulted in the victory of a new social and political order in the most populous nation in the world; the Vietnamese war caused a deep crisis in the United States, and it is too early to assess its impact on the global balance of power. The wars in China and Vietnam were won by political parties inspired by a mixture of Communism and nationalism whose elites came to correctly understand and apply the ideas of peasant support, political organization and propaganda. By trial and error they chose the military strategy most likely to succeed in local conditions. The Communists won because the Japanese occupation of China and Vietnam had discredited these states former rulers and had created, with Japan's defeat, a power vacuum. The Japanese were not defeated by the Chinese Communists, and in Vietnam there was hardly any anti-Japanese resistance; but in both countries, the Japanese acted as the catalyst for the victory of Communism. The Communists prevailed in the struggle for power that followed the Japanese defeat because they were the only modern political party that appeared both as the "party
of the poor" and at the same time as the leading patriotic resistance movement.
For many years the Chinese Communists received virtually no help from outside. Their tactics were traditionally Chinese; foreign examples, such as the Russian revolution, were of little relevance to them. New elements for the Communists were the political techniques, and the subordination of the military struggle to political aims. The Vietnamese Communists were in a more fortunate position inasmuch as they received foreign assistance on a massive scale from a very early stage of their war. On the other hand they had to do more fighting than the Chinese Communists, and their room for maneuvering was more limited; they also had to cope with an enemy using superior equipment. For both the Chinese and the Vietnamese Communists guerrilla warfare was a transitional stage in the struggle: they were fully aware that guerrilla tactics could not possibly win the war and that sooner or later these would have to be supplemented by and ultimately subordinated to regular war. The Chinese Communists had used guerrilla tactics on and off from the very beginning but they were employed, on the whole, in the framework of regular warfare; it is quite likely that the Communists would have been defeated by Chiang's fifth encirclement campaign anyway, but the defeat was certainly precipitated by their engaging in positional rather than guerrilla warfare. In view of the numbers involved in it, the Long March was not, and could not possibly have been, a guerrilla operation, though in the skirmishes guerrilla tactics were of course frequently used. Guerrilla warfare was an essential stage in the war against Japan, but the Communist commanders sounded sometimes almost apologetic: thus Peng Te-huai said in 1938, "The growing partisan units in North China will very rapidly be transformed into a regular army, and this new army will be better than the present one..."1
In fact, the transformation took much longer than expected, and it was only after the surrender of the Japanese that the "new armies' entered the fighting. As usual reality was far more complex than doctrine: up to 1945 there were guerrilla bands that had the strength of a division, and on the other hand there were regular army units that used guerrilla tactics; the dividing line was far more fluid in practice than in theory.
In Vietnam the Communists engaged in regular army operations early on in their war against the French, and suffered some major defeats. By trial and error they came to combine guerrilla and conventional warfare and, as in China between 1928 and 1935, they constantly discussed to which form of military operations preference should be given. Eventually their emphasis also shifted to regular warfare.
The facts about guerrilla warfare in China and Vietnam are not easy to unravel since they have become the object of hagiography rather than of critical study. Those who fought the Communists, having originally underrated their tenacity, fighting spirit and inventiveness, frequently ended by regarding the victors as a race of supermen, thus exaggerating the originality and general applicability of the guerrilla strategy of Mao and Lin Piao, of Ho and Giap. They came to accept "revolutionary warfare" as an irresistible force, as the greatest revolution in modern politics as well as in modern warfare.2 Thus a recent historian has written: "For the first time in a century the armed might of an industrial power was fought to a standstill, its dreams of empire crushed, by a people in arms,"3 It is certainly true that Japan in 1937 was an "industrial power" to the extent that it had an industry. But the military importance of the textile industry — its chief industry at the time — was strictly limited, and its heavy industry was still in its infancy. Its share in world industrial production was only about three percent. Japan had started to produce motor vehicles only in the early 1930s, and by the end of the decade the number of Japanese trucks and cars was less than ten per cent of Britain's. Furthermore, Japan's dreams of empire were shattered not in China but on other fronts; the number of Japanese casualties in the Philippines alone far exceeded those suffered at the hands of the Chinese Communists. If, towards the end of the war, the Japanese evacuated much of China this was not the result of fighting in mainland China but of the defeats suffered in the Pacific, mainly a consequence of the American victory at Okinawa. The Russians, needless to say, have not joined the general chorus of admiration for obvious political reasons: poor Mao had always been mistaken, had engaged in either right- or left-wing deviations; the general line had somehow always eluded him.4
In the search for historical truth one has to proceed beyond mythology and political polemics: despite all the tenacity and courage displayed by the Chinese Communists, they were on more than one occasion exceedingly lucky. They operated in near ideal conditions: there was no strong central authority in China even before the Japanese invasion. Once the war had started in 1937 the Communists enjoyed virtual immunity in their bases in northern China, For the Japanese, the Communist guerrillas were not a serious danger, and this despite that the Japanese occupation army was small by any standards. Indeed, the Chinese Communists did little fighting against the Japanese after 1940, though Chiang Kai-chek's troops did even less. Mao's policy was to devote seventy percent of the Communists' effort to expansion, twenty percent to coping with the Kuomintang government and ten percent to fighting the Japanese. The Vietnamese Communists' war of liberation against the Japanese belongs almost entirely to the realm of mythology, for their military organization came into being only towards the end of the Second World War. After the Japanese surrender and before the French returned in strength, there was an interval during which the Communists obtained a great many arms and consolidated their political and military power base. After that they faced the troops of the French Fourth Republic, a regime quite incapable of waging and sustaining a "dirty colonial war." By the time American troops became involved in Vietnam a major Communist army had already come into existence that was better trained and more experienced, if much less well equipped, than its enemy. During their struggle the Chinese and Vietnamese Communists displayed a great many sterling qualities and, of course, greater political foresight. But given the vast size of China's territory, the weak base of Japanese militarism and the chaotic state of Chinese domestic politics, it cannot fairly be argued that the victory of the Chinese Communists was an unprecedented, superhuman achievement. Seen in historical perspective the military odds were heavier against the Vietnamese Communists, but the political factors involved in the struggle for Southeast Asia favored them to a great extent, and these, in the end, proved to be of decisive importance. The stories of the guerrilla wars in China and Vietnam have been told countless times; the following account concentrates on a discussion of some of their essential features.
China
Guerrilla warfare in China developed against the background of peasant unrest, the breakdown of the central authority and the presence of a Communist elite which, by trial and error, evolved a more effective strategy than did its rivals for coping with China's problems. The decisive turning point was the Japanese invasion, which aggravated the general discontent, discredited and paralyzed the central government and thus created the pre-conditions for the Communists to spearhead the armed struggle in northern China.
Agrarian unrest had been endemic in China for many centuries; furthermore the peasant wars had been on a much greater scale than those in Europe. In the T'ai Ping rebellion some three million insurgents had fought, and millions of civilians had been killed. The peasantry suffered from natural calamities and rising rents, as well as the requisitions and pillaging of warlords and their soldiers. Local industry and handicraft were undermined by cheap foreign imports.5 Most of this had happened before in Chinese history; the young peasants would "take to the mountains," a euphemism for banditry, and, generally speaking, éléments déclassés proliferated. Those remaining in the villages would establish self-defense societies to struggle against bandits, warlords, tax collectors and other plagues. The secret societies such as "Red Spear" and "Great Knife" had supporters in many parts of the country due to widespread unemployment in the villages and increasing militancy among a peasantry wanting land.
Since
the fall of the Manchu Dynasty in 1911, there had been no effective central authority in China. Chiang Kai-chek's attempts to reunite China in the late 1920s were only partly successful; the warlords were integrated into the system as subcontractors who collaborated, or refused to do so, as they saw fit. Their loyalty could never be fully trusted.
The Communist Party of China was founded in 1921. The main stages of its growth during its first decade are well known and need not be reiterated. Its influence spread among sections of the intelligentsia, particularly the students and the urban younger generation. It also had some support among the working class. The party established a united front with the Kuomintang but it was defeated in the struggle for power by Chiang, its erstwhile ally, and its urban insurrections failed totally. The Communists had never entirely neglected the revolutionary potential of the countryside, but they had given it low priority; according to Marxist-Leninist doctrine only a mass movement led by the industrial proletariat could be truly revolutionary and so prevail in the end. From time to time resolutions would be passed by the Comintern (as in 1922 and again in 1926) that the revolutionary movement in the backward countries could not be successful unless it relied on the broad peasant masses. But the magic wand to mobilize the peasants and to combine their struggle with that of the industrial proletariat had not yet been discovered. The Chinese Communists began to reveal greater interest in the countryside only in 1927, the year of their great defeats in the cities. The two processes of revolution were not, of course, unconnected. When Mao, head of the peasant department of the party, returned from an inspection tour in Hunan he wrote that the upsurge of the peasant movement was a colossal event, that several hundred million peasants would rise and that this would be a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power could hold it back.6 Mao was, of course, not the first to discover the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. The tactics he suggested at the time were, in fact, less far-reaching than the Comintern line which advocated confiscation of the land. But Mao was among the first to make use of the peasants' potential and to move beyond extreme but noncommittal slogans. There had been among the precursors of Communism in China a strong pro-agrarian, populist bias mingled with antiurban sentiments and nationalist overtones: the young intellectuals (it was argued) should go back to the villages to free themselves from the corruption and the vices of town life. There was also a great belief in the spontaneous energies of the people and in revolutionary voluntarism.7 The idea that people, not things, are of paramount importance was not entirely new; the theory and practice of Maoism did not develop in a vacuum. Mao's great merit was to open a new vista to the party at the very time when its fortunes were at a low ebb.
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