Guerrilla Warfare

by Walter Laqueur

  Thus the two main causes of the Communist victory were the general disruption caused by the Japanese invasion and occupation and the superiority of Sino-Communism as a force rallying the masses. The Japanese victory destroyed the hold of the KMT; the Nationalists had been weak even before: the military defeats accelerated and deepened the process of decomposition. The government lost control over most of China and a power vacuum resulted. The extent of Nationalist incompetence came as a surprise even to the Communists; Mao had written in 1940 that

  Whoever can lead the people in driving out Japanese imperialism and introducing democratic government will be the saviour of the people. If the Chinese bourgeoisie is capable of carrying out this responsibility, no one will be able to refuse it his admiration; but if it is not capable of doing so, the major part of the responsibility will inevitably fall upon the shoulders of the proletariat.38

  The Chinese "bourgeoisie" (meaning Chiang and his supporters) lacked the faith, the stamina, the resolution and the political know-how to pursue the anti-Japanese war successfully. The Communists had these qualities; furthermore, they were in the enviable position of not having to share responsibility for the grave domestic and military setbacks during the war years.

  Marxism-Leninism as it developed in China provided a new world view that inspired its followers with something akin to religious faith and with the readiness to fight and sacrifice. It increasingly appealed, as the Kuomintang never did, to the activist and idealist elements among the younger generation, in whose eyes the government had dismally failed. Traditional Chinese political ideas and practices were outdated, and Western liberalism was quite unsuitable for China; Maoism seemed to provide the answer for most of the problems besetting the country. Old-fashioned authoritarian government divorced from the masses was no longer effective; Marxism-Leninism, suitably modified to Chinese conditions, provided an excellent method by which to reach the masses and to organize them. The idealism of the elite and its ability to mobilize mass support at a time when the central government had all but broken down were the decisive factors in the Communist victory. Thus, the key to Communist success was the Sinification of Marxism by Mao, who did not stick too closely to foreign models but adapted Communist ideology and practice to the needs of China:

  If a Chinese Communist, who is part of the great Chinese people, bound to his people by his very flesh and blood, talks of Marxism apart from Chinese peculiarities, this Marxism is merely an empty abstraction. The Sinification of Marxism — that is to say, making certain that in all of its manifestations it is imbued with Chinese peculiarities, using it according to these peculiarities — becomes a problem that must be understood and solved by the whole party without delay... .40

  This is the reason for Mao's voluntarism (the downgrading of "objective conditions") and his orientation towards the peasantry and other "peculiarities," large and small. It is quite irrelevant in this context that the ideology to which Mao referred as "Marxism" was in fact Leninism, a doctrine that in many essential respects had already deviated a great deal from historical Marxism. Nor does it matter that the new ideology and the new political techniques that emerged as the result of the Sinification of Leninism had about as much to do with Marxism as Boulez with Beethoven (or Kandinsky with Fra Angelico). All that mattered in the final analysis was that the new system worked.

  The victory of Communism in China, an event of world historical importance, has induced many students of guerrilla and revolutionary warfare to regard Mao's military writings as the greatest revolution in military thought in modern times. But there have been few, if any, such revolutions in recent centuries; the basic principles of warfare have been known since time immemorial: Clausewitz, Jomini and other military philosophers were not radical innovators but systematizers. In the same way Mao's military writings do not really contain novel ideas. This refers not only to his "basic principles" and the elements of surprise and deceit, but also to his ideas about flexibility, the coordination of guerrilla with regular warfare, and even the concept of protracted war. It applies to his advice about concentration and dispersal, the strategic defensive and offensive, interior and exterior line operations and the war of attrition and annihilation. There was nothing new with regard to his advice about how to treat the civilian population; the concept of political power growing out of the barrel of a gun has been known to warlords in China (and not only there) ever since the invention of guns and, in a modified form, well before. The one new element was perhaps the concept of base areas. The idea had been known and practiced before, but Mao put far greater emphasis on it. Yet precisely this is the most contradictory element in his doctrine, for it led the guerrillas into dangerous situations.

  The Chinese Communists were not revolutionaries in the military field for the simple reason that the possibilities and variations of guerrilla warfare (and of warfare in general) are limited. New, as far as China was concerned, was the use of time-honored military strategies in the framework of a political movement. The idea had occurred to others elsewhere and it had even been practiced, but never in a backward country and on such a scale. The Communist victory in China proves that a few determined and highly motivated people, equipped with an ideology of radical change, are by far the strongest contender for power once established authority is breaking down. It could be argued that the existence of an activist elite and internal chaos are essential factors and that the character of the ideology is largely irrelevant. A militant movement propagating different policies might have prevailed in China in the 1940s —but it did not. That Communists were also doing well in other backward countries shows that the choice of the ideology was perhaps not fortuitous and that Asian Marxism had distinct advantages over rival doctrines as a tool for the modernization of underdeveloped societies. The character of the struggle and the doctrine was of importance not just for gaining victory; it also shaped to a large extent the quality of the political regime that subsequently emerged. The military tradition and the regimentation of the war years reinforced the tendency towards dictatorship by a small elite; the strong nationalist trends contained the seeds for the break-up of what should have been a happy family of Communist states. In later years Soviet spokesmen were to argue in their polemics against the Maoists that, while guerrillas began as Communists, they tended to end up as nationalists. They should have added, in fairness, that the Soviet Union had undergone, mutatis mutandis, the same process, and this despite the fact that the Communists in Russia had not come to power through guerrilla warfare.

  The Vietnam War

  The Vietnamese war was the longest, bloodiest and most spectacular of all those modern wars in which guerrilla operations played an important role. In contrast to the Chinese, the Vietnamese Communists were in a position early on in their war to set up a regular army that was comparatively well equipped even though it did not have an air force. This army saw action from 1949 onwards. Dien Bien Phu, the turning point in the war against the French, was not a guerrilla operation but a classical case of positional warfare, an eighteenth-century-style siege, in which the Vietminh defeated the French because of their superiority in men and artillery, and because, as General Giap put it, "we overcame the French artillery by digging trenches."41 The guerrilla tactics used by the Communists were fashioned, broadly speaking, on the Chinese pattern; an American observer writing in 1954 thought that the tactics used were not just similar but identical for all practical purposes.42 Ten years later, by contrast, another American observer noted that revolutionary guerrilla warfare as developed in the early 1960s in South Vietnam was something new, not just in degree but in kind. He referred, however, not so much to military tactics as to the political use of guerrilla warfare.43 From a military point of view the main interest of the Vietnamese war is in the use that was made of guerrilla operations in combination with regular and serniregular warfare. For all their technological superiority, the French and American expeditionary corps were less effective in counteracting guerrilla tactics
than were the Japanese in China.

  There were certain important differences in the strategic political context between the guerrilla war in China and that in Vietnam. A country smaller than France, Vietnam's geography nevertheless offered in some respects ideal conditions: many of the guerrilla operations were conducted in marshy rice lands and in the jungle; there were countless bridges to be mined. Furthermore, individual urban terrorism, almost entirely absent in China, played a significant role in Vietnam. The Communists systematically liquidated their political rivals from the left as well as from the right. One of their main targets during the early period were the Trotskyites, who had been fairly strong in the South.44 While the Chinese were self-reliant and without an outside source of supply, the Vietnamese Communists received arms and supplies from the very beginning from various well-wishers — first, on a small scale, from America and Nationalist China, then, after 1949, from the Chinese Communists and the Soviet Union. Air power was used against the guerrillas to a much greater degree than in China, but the country's geographical conditions reduced its effectivity; most guerrilla operations were anyway carried out by night. In the war against the French, the Vietnamese Communists enjoyed numerical superiority almost from the beginning. True, on paper the French Expeditionary Corps had a superiority of two to one over the Communists, but more than half of these units were tied down in "static duties," defending cities, villages and isolated strong points.45 In later years, the percentage of noncombatants among the American troops was even higher. (The French troops, in comparison, always outnumbered the Algerian rebels by ten to one and, towards the end, by twenty or more to one.) The Chinese Communists faced a ruthless enemy, who was unfettered by moral scruples or restraints imposed by public opinion at home, and thus was free to apply even the most inhuman measures. Torture and the "three-all" strategy was official policy; those who practiced it were promoted, not court-martialed. French and American public opinion, on the other hand, narrowly circumscribed the scope and choice of measures of antiguerrilla action.

  The social origins of the Vietnamese Communist elite which conducted the armed struggle were very similar to those of the Chinese Communist leadership. Ho Chi Minh hailed from a peasant family but his father had become a mandarin of sorts as secretary of the ceremonial office of the imperial palace in Hué; later he became a deputy-prefect.46 Giap's father was a poor scholar; the son became a journalist and professor of history. Pham Van Dongh was the son of a high nobleman. There were one or two lower-class, uneducated montagnards among the leaders, such as Cho Van Tan (at one time minister of defense), but most of the leading cadres were of the intelligentsia, with a heavy prevalence of teachers — and, more often than not, these were the children of minor mandarins. There was little advancement for the holders of degrees under French colonial rule, but no undue importance should be attributed to the lack of social mobility. Indeed, it is a well-known fact that the intelligentsia has been the standard-bearer of all movements of national and social revolt in colonial countries, and not only there. That the national movement had been systematically suppressed and indeed decapitated by the French authorities between 1885 and 1932 (to select two important dates in Vietnamese history) made it all the easier for the Communists, with their greater cohesion and more accomplished methods of conspiracy and organization, to take over the leadership of the national movement after the Japanese surrender in 1945. The Vietnamese Communists put an even stronger emphasis on Popular Front tactics in their policy than did their Chinese comrades; they entered various coalitions during the 1940s and 1950s and, at one stage, even temporarily dissolved the party as a protective measure. That Vietnam, with its various nationalities, sects and religions, was less homogeneous than China created certain difficulties for the Communists. If they recruited followers among a certain sect that had grievances against the government, other sects would turn against them. But the Saigon government was even more deeply ensnared by the tensions and rivalries between Buddhists and Catholics, between the Cao-Dai and Hoa Hoa, not to mention various pirates, semicriminal sects, the ethnic Chinese and other groups. The Vietnamese Communists, like their Chinese comrades, had little influence among the urban working class even though in theory the struggle of the party was conducted "under the leadership of the proletariat." Frequently the impression was gained that the Communists were active in the trade unions more from a sense of duty to the demands of theory than from genuine conviction. The Communists invested considerable energy in tackling agrarian problems but this issue was more acute in the Mekong Delta than in the northern provinces where they ruled. Nevertheless, despite their appeal as agrarian reformers, the Communists' influence in the South always remained limited and the drastic agrarian reforms in North Vietnam that involved a great deal of terror did them more harm than good.

  Students of Vietnamese history have been puzzled by the sources of Communist appeal, despite the fact that the war in Vietnam has been documented in absorbing detail. It can be shown that the effects of colonialism on traditional society was a factor in the rise of Communism, but these effects were more political and psychological than economic. Mention has already been made of the limited significance of agrarian problems. Generally speaking, immediate socioeconomic grievances were in the final analysis not of decisive importance. All that mattered was that the Japanese surrender had caused a vacuum even more complete than that in China, and that the Communists, however few, were the only group with the political will, internal cohesion and organizational know-how capable of filling it. There was no Vietnamese Kuomintang which would have threatened their progress. The old ruling stratum had disappeared and when the French (and later the Americans) tried to build up a counterelite, the Communists were already firmly entrenched in wide parts of the country. Without foreign intervention they would probably have seized the whole country within a few weeks; against French and American opposition they were to take thirty years.

  When the Second World War broke out most leaders of the Vietnamese Communist party found themselves in China and, following Russia's entry in the war, they collaborated with the Kuomin tang. They received a small subsidy to start a guerrilla war in the Japanese rear, but their operations were limited to the collection of military intelligence. A small guerrilla unit was established under Vo Nguyen Giap in October 1944 in the remote north of Vietnam among the Ho tribes, near the Chinese border. (This region had been throughout history an area of piracy, banditry, insurrection and partisan warfare.) The unit consisted of thirty-four men who had between them two revolvers, seventeen rifles and one light machine gun. On 22 December 1944 it established itself as the "Army of Propaganda and Liberation." There were hardly any Japanese or French units stationed in the region and the only recorded military operation was an attack against a police post at the mountain resort of Tam Dao on 17 July 1945, in which eight Japanese gendarmes were killed.47 But the political activity of the partisans was far more intensive and spread rapidly: by June 1945 some six mountain provinces were largely under their rule. And three months later the Japanese had surrendered, a general insurgency had been proclaimed, the Vietcong had entered Hanoi and the whole of North Vietnam had fallen into their hands almost without a shot being fired. They seized great quantities of arms (including some Russian rifles that had been used in the war against Japan in 1905). Some modern weapons they had bought from Nationalist Chinese troops and others they had received by way of American airdrops before VJ Day.

  Some ten months were to pass before French forces would return to Indochina in strength; in this time the Communists built up a regular army of considerable strength and organized a countrywide guerrilla network. Their position was weaker in southern Vietnam because the earlier return of the French restricted their activities to certain enclaves in the countryside. Throughout 1946 negotiations continued between the French authorities and the Communists; on 19 December 1946 full-scale war started when Vietminh units attacked French garrisons. In the beginning the war was mainly g
uerrilla in character; the Communists, with some exceptions, were as yet reluctant to risk their regular army in open combat. Since the French forces were not numerous enough to occupy in strength the whole of northern and central Vietnam, they had to limit their occupation to the main towns and certain select regions. The guerrillas could not stop the French but they could block their routes: