Guerrilla Warfare

by Walter Laqueur

  From August 1927 to the "Autumn Harvest Uprising" and the establishment of a first Red Army to the beginning of the Long March in October 1934, Mao and his supporters, with Chu-Teh and Peng Teh-huai as the chief military commanders, engaged in armed operations in the Hunan-Kiangsi-Fukien area and built their first revolutionary bases. But the great hurricane Mao had predicted did not yet break: there were many military defeats, and he came under strong attack in his own party. In fact, in November 1927 he was ousted from the Politburo. He made a temporary comeback, but from 1932 to 1934 his influence was again on the wane. It was only in January 1935 that he was elected chairman of the Military Affairs Committee and became the de facto leader of the party. The story of these seven years was basically one of an almost uninterrupted struggle for survival. By trial and error the Communists gradually developed in the Kiangsi Special Border Area a system of guerrilla warfare that in some respects followed traditional Chinese patterns. In later years Mao summarized the experience that had been gathered in the fighting:

  Divide our forces to arouse the masses, concentrate our forces to deal with the enemy. The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue. To extend stable base areas, employ the policy of advancing in waves; when pursued by a powerful enemy, employ the policy of circling around. Arouse the largest number of the masses in the shortest possible time and the best possible methods. These tactics are just like casting a net; at any moment we should be able to cast it or draw it in. We cast it wide to win over the masses and draw it in to deal with the enemy. ...8

  Mao claimed that these tactics "are indeed different from any other tactics, ancient or modern, Chinese or foreign." But neither for Sertorius nor for Viriatus two thousand years earlier would these ideas have been startling revelations — nor for guerrilla leaders all over the globe throughout history. Although neither the strategy nor the tactics were novel, their use in the framework of a political doctrine was. The idea to combine them had occurred to others before but they had never been applied on such a scale, or ultimately with such effect.

  Mao and his comrades-in-arms faced overwhelming odds in the early years of the fighting. The enemy was weak, but they were even weaker. They had no supplies, no arms, no money except what they could seize from the enemy. The human material they were dealing with was unpromising: bandits, vagrants, various elements declasses, deserters from the enemy camp who had not been paid their wages — a veritable riffraff. They had, as a historian of the Chinese army put it, "few bricks and little straw, but they had a clearly defined goal and the determination and perseverance needed to attain it."9 The Communists were not just another party or clique of warlords; they had an ideology that at one and the same time provided an explanation of the world and a guide to action for changing it. It generated among the younger generation enthusiasm and the willingness to sacrifice. They were far more highly motivated than their rivals and they realized that it was necessary to establish a much closer relationship between the soldiers and their commanders and between the army and the people; they had a method to mobilize the masses that was more effective, more in line with Chinese realities than that of the Kuomintang or the warlords. It has been rioted that there was no great difference between the social background of the military leaders of the Communists and their enemies;10 some Communist commanders (such as Nieh Jung-chen, Ho Lung and Chu Teh) hailed from poor peasant familes, and there were also officers of similar background in Chiang's armies. Communist and Nationalist commanders had studied in the famous Whampoa military academy; their careers were parallel in some respects, and they were heirs in many ways to the same tradition. The main difference was that those who had embraced Communism were willing to share the life of the common people and its misfortunes and deprivations. The Communist party curbed its officers' individualistic traits, whereas the Nationalist officers were not subject to such discipline; they lacked the feeling of serving a common cause and were incapable of cooperating.

  During the early years of its mountain warfare the Red Army was engaged in guerrilla operations; these, however, were on the whole subordinate to regular army activities. Mao was not in charge of operations during much of the time and it is in retrospect almost impossible to say with any degree of accuracy when and in what circumstances guerrilla doctrine developed. In 1928 Mao called for strict discipline because "guerrillaism" ("the tendency to destroy cities and kill, burn and rob purposelessly") had to be extirpated. This (he argued) was merely a manifestation of the Lumpenproletariat and peasant mentality that might hamper development of the party among the peasant masses.11 In 1929-1930 Mao bitterly denounced the idea of "pure guerrilla warfare," the "aimless and ineffectual raids of vagabond elements." The Red troops should not be dispersed but instead should establish and consolidate revolutionary bases.12 Communist experience with guerrilla warfare frequently had been negative; several guerrilla leaders had even deserted. Some of the leading military experts such as Chu Teh talked about the "guerrilla quagmire" into which the party should not sink; guerrilla tactics were useless against the blockhouse system that Chiang's troops applied in accord widi the advice given by foreign military specialists.13 It was only after the massive defeat of the Red Army at Kuangch'ang (April 1934) that guerrilla tactics were widely employed, and that the Tsunyi Conference passed a resolution that constituted a decisive switch from positional to mobile warfare. Preference to real guerrilla warfare was given only after the Japanese invasion in September 1937.

  The acrimonious disputes about what was the correct strategy lasted throughout the early 1930s. Mao and his supporters saw the main task to be the establishing of "Red Areas" (the "highest form of the peasant struggle"), the foundation and development of a Red Army and the building up of a political and military power that would eventually lead to the encirclement of the cities by the countryside. Li Li-san, Mao's chief antagonist during that period, maintained that the center of gravity was still in the cities and that protracted warfare was "boxing tactics"; he for one was not willing to wait for victory until his hair had turned gray.14

  The Maoist line in Chinese Communist strategy prevailed only after the struggle for power in the party had been settled. Only after it appeared that Communism had no future in the cities was Li Lisan's approach discredited and did the various emissaries from Moscow lose their influence. The Communists, to be sure, had not done that well in the countryside either, but at least they had preserved their strength. Chiang's first two encirclement campaigns against the "Communist bandits" ended in failure: the government troops were not familiar with the terrain, their units were dispersed and they had no intelligence about Communist movements. Above all, they thought the campaigns would be a walkover and did not take the enemy seriously. The Communists captured thousands of prisoners and seized considerable booty. In the third encirclement campaign Chiang himself took command and employed some of his best troops. The Communists were on the brink of defeat when the Mukden incident (the occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese in October 1931) compelled Chiang to call off his campaign. This campaign had shown that in the long run the position of the Communists was untenable.

  In the fifth encirclement campaign (October 1933) the Communists' area was ringed with blockhouses, their supply lines were cut and their sources of intelligence dried up. With the Nationalists evacuation of part of the population and the organization of local militias against them the Communists' survival was no longer certain. The Communists had used the wrong tactics — "halting the enemy in front of the gate," that is, fighting for every inch of territory. This was, of course, exactly what Chiang had hoped for because the elusive enemy had at last become easily identifiable. In later years the blame would be put on one Li Te (Otto Braun), a German Communist who had been delegated as military adviser. But the Communists would have lost even if they had reverted to guerrilla tactics. In this desperate situation the decision was taken to transfer the Communist forces to some
other part of China, and on 16 October 1934 some hundred thousand men and women set out on the famous Long March. No one knew at the time where it would lead to.

  The Long March has entered the annals of Chinese and world history as an achievement without precedent. Fourteen months later, after the Red Army had arrived in Shansi, Mao claimed that the Long March was a "manifesto, an agitation corps and a seeding machine." For twelve months (he related) the Communists had been under daily surveillance and bombing from the air; they had been encircled, pursued, obstructed and intercepted by hundreds of thousands of enemy soldiers; they had crossed eighteen mountain ranges, twenty-four rivers, had taken sixty-two cities. They had engaged in two hundred and thirty-five day marches and eighteen night marches and fought almost one skirmish a day against government troops and provincial warlords. They had covered a distance of over six thousand miles.15

  As so often, it is not easy to differentiate between fact and fiction. That the Long March was not a picnic goes without saying; for to move units such distances involved great stamina even if there had not been an enemy to harass and obstruct them. On the other hand enemy attacks were not as frequent and fierce as the Communists claimed in later years: according to the official Communist version the First Front army averaged twenty-four miles a day over a 368 day period — including 44 days of rest in Szechuan. From a practical point of view no army involved in constant combat, even to a limited degree, could have maintained this pace.16 There was no unified effort to attack the Red Armies: Chiang Kai-chek's units were only rarely in contact with them and the local warlords were only too eager to leave the Communists unmolested, provided that they did not bother them. Some of the hardest fighting went on not against the Nationalist armies but against the (non-Chinese) Lolo tribesmen in southwest China. The main obstacles on the march were in fact natural ones such as the eternal glaciers of the Great Snow Mountains, the marshy grasslands of Ching hai and the savage Tatu River.

  These obstacles caused the most casualties. Of the hundred thousand who had set out on the march, only about a third arrived at Shensi in October 1935. This threadbare band represented at best only a marginal element in Chinese political life, but "sustained principally by discipline, hope and political formulae it had . . . several hidden assets which were later to prove of major significance" (Howard L. Boorman). In retrospect it has been maintained that the operation was a stroke of genius meticulously planned from the beginning. In fact, there is every reason to believe that the Communists were simply improvising; for a long time they had no clear idea about their eventual destination. On at least one occasion, Mao noted that the whole march had been unnecessary and that the original base could have been kept.

  The Long March was not a major victory but a great retreat. But the Communists turned military defeat into a propagandistic victory, for Chiang had after all failed to destroy them; their forces seemed invincible. Above all, the march had given them outstanding training, far better than any military academy could provide. Those who had been steeled in battle during this annus mira- bilis would stick together in the stormy years ahead until they became the masters of a new China. (After the victory, to be sure, human nature and the vicissitudes of politics would reassert themselves, and the veterans of the Tatu River would find themselves in opposite camps in the struggle for power.) The choice of northern Shensi as the main base was an astute one and for the next ten years Yenan was the capital of Chinese Communism — partly perhaps by accident. This remote, exceedingly poor and backward part of China offered little temptation to warlords and was more or less ignored by the Chinese central government and the Japanese. On the other hand, there was already a Communist guerrilla tradition in this area adjacent to the north China plain. Within less than three years of their arrival the Communist forces counted a hundred and fifty thousand soldiers; by 1940, with the expansion of their bases, their number had risen to some four hundred thousand. Almost unnoticed the Communists had re-emerged as a major factor in Chinese politics.

  The Long March was a great test of endurance but otherwise it offers little that is new to the student of military history, for it proceeded, roughly speaking, like all long marches in history from the anabasis onwards. The Communists occasionally used guerrilla tactics, but the retreat of so big a force had to proceed largely on orthodox lines. At times the Red units presented a "snake ' fifty miles long. Chiang Kai-chek himself would fly reconnaissance missions: there was never a secret about the location of the Red Armies. It was just another maneuver, albeit one of historical importance, in the general course of the Chinese civil war. If the politics of the Communists were revolutionary, their military strategy was fairly orthodox, and it changed only to a certain extent during the Yenan period.17

  The wilderness of northern Shensi was, as a Communist leader told Edgar Snow, culturally one of the darkest places on earth: "We have to start everything from the beginning."18 But some politicomilitary spade work had already been done in the area; for almost a decade previously banditry had gradually changed to viable guerrilla operations. In the course of eight years of setbacks, local partisans had independently developed a set of military and political postulates appropriate to survival and revolutionary growth in the northern Shensi area.19 The Shensi disputes about whether and in what way guerrilla tactics should be used were almost identical to the discussions among the Communist leadership in the Kiangsi Soviet. The issue was decided in favor of the "guerrillaists" (such as Kao Kang) only upon the arrival of Mao and his companions in 1935.

  Having made its way to northern China the Red Army began to reorganize and expand its units and to consolidate its political base. There was hardly any outside interference. In 1936 Chiang had instructed the Manchurian army to attack the Communists, but its attacks showed little determination: to Chinese patriots the Japanese, not the Communists, were already the main enemy. A second united front between the Communists and the Kuomintang came into being after the Sian incident (December 1936), and hostilities ceased for a number of years. The understanding between the two sides was rather vague, however. It certainly did not prevent the Communists from expanding the areas under their control nor Chiang's troops (in December 1939) from taking some of these areas back and imposing a blockade on the Soviet regions. In January 1941 Kuomintang forces moved against the New Fourth (Communist) Army which was based south of the Yangtse and which had made inroads in what the KMT considered its own territory. But the blockade apart, there was little fighting in northern China. Having lost their major cities and lines of communication and having to bear the brunt of the Japanese offensive, the KMT could no longer launch a major campaign against the Communists. It was reduced to adopting a "negative policy" of restricting as much as possible the areas of Communist control and suppressing Communist activities in areas under its control.20 Thus, for the first time in their existence, the Red Armies were no longer fighting for mere survival; they could invest their energies in the expansion of their military units and bases. Russia's and America's entry into the Second World War offered further protection, for the Japanese could no longer concentrate their military efforts in China.

  Communist political activities in Yenan, such as land reform, political organization and indoctrination, were, of course, closely connected with military strategy; they have been described and analyzed in great detail and need not be retold here. We should instead turn to the military doctrine as formulated in the late 1930s by Mao, Lin Piao and others and to the specific place of guerrilla fighting within the general concept of revolutionary warfare. It has been noted that Mao's three major essays on guerrilla warfare were all written during the first half of 1938;21 Lin Piao's one major essay 011 the topic was also apparently written in 1938.22 Mao's ideas on revolution in China rest on three basic assumptions: that military forces will play a decisive role and that the fight will be carried on by the villages, which will eventually "encircle" the cities — hence the importance of rural base areas. Lastly there is the concept
of "protracted struggle." These ideas took about a decade to evolve, the concept of protracted war being the last of the three to be pronounced and in some ways the most difficult to accept, for it is the natural inclination of soldiers, as of politicians, to prefer a short war to a long one. On guerrilla warfare Mao usually took a "centrist" position between those who advocated "pure guerrillaism" and dismissed regular warfare altogether and the military (or party) experts who took the opposite view. Mao always claimed that, in the last resort, the correct choice of an approach depended on the circumstances. He argued that positional warfare was ruled out as long as the Red Armies were not strong, lacked reserves, supplies and ammunition. Mobile warfare was the answer since in China as in the Soviet Union in 1918-1919 or in other revolutionary wars there could be no fixed battle lines. "Fluidity of battle lines" meant that the base areas, too, had to be fluid, constantly expanding and contracting, "as often as one base area falls another rises."23 In a rare flash of irony Mao notes that the very comrades who had been the strongest advocates of regular warfare in 1933-1934 "managing affairs as if they were rulers of a big state," had in fact caused extraordinary and immense fluidity — the "Long March."