Guerrilla Warfare

by Walter Laqueur

  The assassination campaign against government officials in 1957-1958 was the prelude to the second Indochinese war. Even before that date, however, the Diem regime had engaged in anti-Communist repression and the North Vietnamese government had applied similar measures to stamp out domestic opposition, real or imaginary. But, while the South would have been quite incapable of stirring up trouble in the North, even if it had tried, the Communists had a foothold in the South — about 6,000 armed Vietminh, who had stayed behind after the ceasefire. These "stay-behind cadres" were the hard core of the insurrection. Up to 1960 the Vietcong had enlarged its forces mostly on a local basis. Infiltration on a massive scale from the North via the Ho Chi Minh trail began only in 1960 (3,500 men came south in 1960, 10,000 in 1961 and altogether some 50,000 between 1960 and 1965). By early 1966 this force had grown to some 55,000 full-time, main-force soldiers engaged in mobile warfare. In addition there were about 125,000 guerrillas operating on a regional basis, and also some 45,000 political instructors and administrators. The number of North Vietnamese army regulars who had been dispatched to the South by 1967 was estimated at 70,000. These forces faced more than half a million Americans, 700,000 Republic of Vietnam soldiers and some 60,000 troops from Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Most of the foreign soldiers arrived, however, only after June 1965; up to that date, the Americans had been active almost exclusively as advisers. In 1962 helicopters were first used against the Vietcong on a large scale, and for a little while it seemed as if the tide was turning against the insurgents. But the battle (January 1963) of Ap Bac, a village in the Mekong Delta some forty miles from Saigon, showed that the South Vietnamese army was incapable of coping with guerrilla forces in open battle, however great its technical superiority. On this occasion it had 2,500 men in armored amphibious personnel carriers supported by bombers and helicopters, yet it failed to defeat a group of 200 Vietcong.71 Militarily, the battle was of little significance, but the outcome was ominous because it showed all too clearly that the Vietnamese army was badly led and had little fighting spirit. Following the mission of General Maxwell Taylor it was decided to establish "special forces" that would collaborate in antiguerrilla warfare with irregular Vietnamese units (Operation Sunrise 1962, Operation Hop Tac 1964-1965, Strategic New-Life Hamlets 1966). But the attempts to pacify the countryside by applying certain Vietcong techniques within a totally different political framework were of no avail and, as a result of this failure, there was an ever-increasing demand for regular American forces.

  The basic concept of the Vietcong until roughly 1964 was that it would come to power following a general uprising (Khoi Nghia). It was expected that following the intensification of the political struggle, as well as of acts of terror and guerrilla fighting, the whole country would explode, the army disintegrate, the soldiers join the people; no one would be left but a few imperialist lackeys in Saigon.72 There was, of course, a great deal of guerrilla fighting prior to 1964, but with the arrival of the northern cadres it was very much stepped up. The Northerners advised their comrades in the South that the build-up of military forces was the commandment of the hour. With the Tet offensive of spring 1968 that led to the occupation of Hue and parts of Saigon, the transition from guerrilla to regular warfare was made, although later on the emphasis was again put on guerrilla operations. In the third Vietnamese war (1975) guerrilla operations no longer played any significant role; the conquest of South Vietnam was carried out by regular units of the North Vietnamese army.

  The military lessons of the Vietnamese war have been discussed in the most minute detail. Some Western observers had misgivings about the war from the very beginning. Experience elsewhere had shown that to suppress insurgency effectively, great superiority in manpower was needed; far more men are necessary for guard duty on a bridge than for blowing it up. General Maxwell Taylor thought in 1965 that a superiority of twenty-five to one was essential; at the time other experts were more optimistic and believed that a ratio of ten to one would be enough. Yet, in actual fact, the forces fighting Communist insurgency had not even a five to one superiority. To make good its lack of manpower, the American command tried to exploit its technological superiority. But the air attacks against selected targets in North Vietnam did not have much effect on guerrilla operations in the South and the systematic bombing of the North was ruled out for political reasons. Air strikes against the Vietcong were not decisive either, because the enemy was usually not visible. Helicopters, on the other hand, while a real danger to the partisans, also offered an easy target to Vietcong machine guns; a disproportionately high number of them were lost in combat. As Colonel John Van η put it: "In a political war the worst weapon to kill is an airplane, the next worst — artillery."73 There was not much scope for the use of tanks in the marshes of the delta or in the mountains. This was ideal country for staging ambushes, as General Dayan noted during a visit. The main problem facing American forces was to discover enemy positions in a country with many natural places for concealment. Dayan predicted that technological devices would not seal the Ho Chih Minh trail forever: if the Vietcong opted for guerrilla warfare, it could not be subdued.74 This is not to say that the Vietcong could not have been defeated by a determined adversary who, unhampered by political considerations, would have been willing to employ its military .power. The United States, for obvious reasons, was not in a position to do so. The main danger facing the Vietcong all along was the loss of its cadres. The fact that some six thousand of them dropped out or were killed or taken prisoner between 1960 and 1965 was far more serious than the killing of ten or twenty times that number of Vietminh rank and file. The cadres were irreplaceable, except, of course, in the long run. The Communist high command was all along aware that military victory against the Americans was ruled out; the strategic aim was therefore to make the war so costly for the United States that it would tire and withdraw. Once the Americans were out of the country, victory over the Saigon government was just a question of time, and probably not much time and effort at that.

  The Vietnamese war was unpopular in America from the very beginning, and it became more so the longer it lasted. Furthermore, American intervention in Indochina had been based on three assumptions, two of which had been proved manifestly wrong by 1971. The domino theory included a larger element of truth than its critics wanted to admit. But by 1971 no one could argue any more with much conviction that the United States had to fight Communism in Vietnam in order to stop Chinese expansionism. For, meanwhile, relations between America and China had been normalized and the continuation of the war in Southeast Asia became a serious obstacle on the road to a further improvement in relations with China and the Soviet Union and thus an embarrassment to the architects of détente. The Vietnamese Communists gravitated more to Moscow than to Peking but they did not want to be a satellite of either. Lastly, it had become perfectly obvious by 1971 that the United States was neither willing nor able "to pay any price, to bear any burden, to meet any hardship" in order to assure the survival and success of liberty in Southeast Asia; the burden and the commitments had become too heavy, the country had become disillusioned and retrenchment was the order of the hour.

  The deeper reasons for the Communist victory in Indochina are not shrouded in mystery. The Vietcong fought exceedingly well, but there was nothing novel about its military strategy and tactics. Nor was there any secret political weapon; the Algerian nationalists and the Cypriot EOKA won their wars with much smaller forces against even heavier enemy superiority than the Vietcong faced; they achieved victory in geographical conditions less propitious than those in Vietnam and without the benefit of Communist ideology. The reason for their success was simply that a foreign power could have destroyed the insurgents only by applying a strategy that would have been unacceptable to a democratic society. Above all, no native elite existed which equaled the Communists in enthusiasm, determination and dedication; the Americans could offer guidance, money and arms, but they could not provide the qualities mo
st needed to win the war.

  7

  National Liberation and Revolutionary War

  With the profound global shifts in the post-World War II balance of power, guerrilla warfare received a galvanic fresh impetus. Very much weakened, the European colonial powers could no longer resist the rising tides of nationalism in both Asia and Africa. By 1960 most former colonies had attained independence, the majority without recourse to armed struggle. The breaking of the "colonial yoke" did not, however, inaugurate a new era of peace and stability, for there were many contenders for dominance in the newly established countries. Radicals fought conservatives, national minorities pursued separatist policies, and the conflicts frequently took the form of guerrilla, or quasi-guerrilla war. Of these many wars no two were alike. Some, as in Palestine, predated World War II in origin, some were given a fillip by it, with continuing resistance merely switching its focus — as in Greece, Malaya and the Philippines, for instance — once the territories concerned were no longer occupied by the wartime invader. Some of these wars were short, others protracted, some ended with the victory of the insurgents, others with their total defeat. The Greek and the Malayan insurrections were Communist-inspired and led, the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya was in the time-honored tradition of anticolonial uprisings. In Malaya, Palestine and Cyprus the wars were further complicated because they took place within a multinational society. In the military sphere, too, the patterns were infinitely variable. In Indonesia the rudiments of a regular army had come into being during the war; in Palestine and Cyprus the accent was for the most part on urban terrorism, in Greece and in Indochina the Communists transformed their guerrilla groups into militias and even regular army units of brigade and division strength. The Greek and the Indochinese Communists received key support from neighboring Communist countries whereas the Huks in the Philippines were given no such assistance. In Greece most of the fighting took place in the mountains, in Southeast Asia, on the contrary, in jungles and forests.

  A periodization of guerrilla warfare is possible only in very general terms. By and large, the first phase was over by the mid-1950s with the end of the Malayan insurgency, the lull in Indochina, the defeat of the Huks and the Mau Mau. But it was just at this moment that the Algerian rebellion began, with Castro's landing in Cuba coming close on its heels. In the 1960s, following the victory of the Algerians and the Cuban rebels, the principal scene of guerrilla operations shifted to Vietnam and Latin America, although there was also some fighting in Africa south of the Sahara. By the late sixties the rural guerrillas in Latin America had been subdued, to be replaced by urban terrorists. Simultaneously there was an escalation in the Middle East, and the war in Indochina reached its climax. But the Indochinese war had meanwhile become increasingly conventional, with guerrilla operations as only a supplementary weapon, while the Palestinians used techniques which were no longer "guerrilla" in the familiar sense.

  In some guerrilla wars there was direct superpower involvement, in others help was extended obliquely, and in yet others there was no interference at all. Nor may it be ignored that in addition to the major wars that have been mentioned, guerrilla war was endemic in certain parts of the globe — in Kurdistan and Burma, to name but two. The political character of these more minor wars was in turn so complex as to defy generalization. Some were Communist in inspiration, but with the gradual erosion of the Communist bloc the general trend was towards a nationalist socialism or a socialist nationalism. Some gravitated to Moscow, others to Peking, and they all tried to get support from both. This, however, did not necessarily mean that they were willing to toe either the Soviet or Chinese line; the one common denominator was that each country insisted on its independence. Most Latin American guerrilla movements and the Palestinians were split along political lines, whereas in Africa the divisions derived usually from the tribal or confessional (ELF) background. Sometimes the factions would join forces against the mutual enemy, but more often than not they would be at odds with each other. The differences, in short, were altogether more pronounced than the similarities and any attempt to classify these guerrilla movements according to their ideology, their geographical location or their eventual achievement (victory or defeat) is at best an arbitrary exercise. And yet, for all that, it is only by comparing and juxtaposing the individual wars that something of a clearer picture ultimately emerges.

  Palestine

  The British decision in 1947 to evacuate Palestine and to hand over the thorny problem to the United Nations came after three years of military and political feuding. Jewish resistance was splintered. There was the Hagana, a militialike self-defense organization that had been tolerated although never officially recognized by the British Mandatory authorities. During World War II its members had been voluntarily mobilized for the war effort against Nazi Germany. The IZL (Irgun Zvai Leumi) had been founded in the 1930s by the right-wing Revisionist party in protest against the purely "defensist" line taken by the Hagana against Arab insurgents. With the outbreak of war the IZL, like the Hagana, declared a truce. But its attitude changed as the danger of a Nazi victory passed, as the full extent of the holocaust in Europe became known and as the British government persisted nevertheless in its opposition to Jewish immigration to Palestine. Thus the IZL renewed its activities in February 1944 with attacks directed against police stations and other government buildings. It was IZL policy at this early stage to avoid, if possible, causing loss of life. The avowed objective of the movement was to expel the British from Palestine and to create a Jewish state.1 The third resistance group was LEHI (Lohame Herut Israel — the "Stern Gang"), an offshoot of the IZL. Abraham Stern, its leader, had been shot early in the war while allegedly resisting arrest, and most of its members had been detained. In November 1943 some twenty of them broke jail and almost immediately reactivated their organization. Their program was a curious mixture of extreme right-wing and revolutionary elements; the enemy was British imperialism, the ally every anti-imperialist force including the Soviet Union and "progressive" Arabs. The great historical model for both the IZL and LEHI was the Irish struggle for independence and, to a lesser extent, the Risorgimento. LEHI had no qualms about political murder and fashioned itself after the classical terrorist organizations reaching back through the ages. An attempt in August 1944 to assassinate the High Commissioner of Palestine was unsuccessful, but in November of that year two of their members killed Lord Moyne, British minister for Middle Eastern affairs, in Cairo.

  The Hagana had collaborated with the British police in hunting down members of both the IZL and LEHI because they regarded their activities as detrimental both to the anti-Nazi war effort and the Zionist cause. Nor were they willing to put up with acts of defiance against their own official underground army, representing the majority, the elected institutions of Palestine Jewry. But a few weeks after VE Day collaboration between the Hagana and the British (saison) came to an end. In late October 1945 the IZL and LEHI joined with the Hagana in sinking three British naval craft and wrecking the railway lines at a number of points. Throughout 1946 and 1947 the IZL and LEHI continued their operations, directed for the most part against British troops in the major cities. The Hagana's actions were far fewer but on a larger scale, concerned chiefly with the sabotaging of lines of communication. The most spectacular terrorist operation (carried out by the IZL) was the mining of a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which several government departments were at the time located, with the loss of more than ninety British, Jewish and Arab lives. Terrorist acts were suspended, however, with the outbreak of the Arab-Jewish war in December 1947.2

  The dissident organizations nonetheless continued their separate existence until shortly after the end of the war of independence (summer 1948), although while it was yet in progress Ben Gurion, himself an activist second to none, was firmly resolved that the Hagana — or the Israeli army, rather, of which it had become both nucleus and backbone — should impose its authority on the "dissidents," even at the ris
k of a civil war within the shadow of the wider one being fought; the Altalena, a ship chartered by the IZL with badly needed ammunition and provisions, was shelled and sunk off Tel Aviv midway through the war since the dissidents were not willing to hand it over to the government. Eventually the IZL and LEHI were dissolved and their members incorporated in the body of the Israeli army but still not before the Deir Yassin massacre had been perpetrated. And it was members of LEHI who after the war assassinated Count Bernadotte, the Swedish mediator appointed by the U.N. Both dissident groups later went into politics. Members of the IZL established the right-wing Herut party, while members of LEHI were involved in the foundation of a short-lived national Communist party.

  LEHI in its heyday consisted of no more than a few hundred activists; the IZL had a few thousand members and active adherents. The Hagana was a much bigger, but also much looser organization with perhaps between sixty and eighty thousand members of whom, however, only a small number saw action in the anti-British operations of 1945-1947. The command structure of the IZL envisaged three divisions: the "Army of Revolution' (which somehow never came into existence); "Shock Units"; and a "Revolutionary Propaganda Force." Like the Hagana and LEHI, it had a small, mobile broadcasting station. The IZL and LEHI had only light arms and explosives; for a long time they could not get automatic weapons. But Hagana had no artillery either prior to 1948.

  The political effect of the terrorist operations has been hotly debated and has remained a matter of bitter controversy to this day. Some Zionist leaders have argued that without the Irgun the state of Israel would not have come into being; Menahem Begin, commander of the Irgun, has claimed that "we succeeded in bringing about the collapse of the occupation regime."3 Other authorities maintain that the "dissidents" did more harm than good to the cause. The international auspices were at the time more than favorable from the Zionist standpoint. With delayed realization of the great disaster that had overtaken the Jewish people in Europe during the Hitler era, there was much sympathy for its aspirations to establish a Jewish state. Notably weakened by the war, Britain found the administration of the Mandate a thankless task. From a strategic and economic point of view Palestine was of no great importance. British antiguerrilla operations, though far from ruthless, had a bad press the world over and were not popular at home. In the circumstances a minimum of force was needed to precipitate the British exodus; the dissidents played a certain part in the process but not a determining one.