Guerrilla Warfare

by Walter Laqueur

  The Greek Civil War

  On 16 October 1949 the Greek Communist radio transmitter situated somewhere in Eastern Europe announced that the Communist army had put a stop to operations in order to "avoid the total destruction of the homeland." The announcement, magnanimous in spirit, came a month after the army had ceased to exist. During the preceding three years it had successfully challenged the Greek government, defeated its armed forces, and a stalemate, if not a Communist victory, had seemed virtually inescapable. The third round in the fight for power in Greece had started with small-scale Communist attacks launched in February-March 1946. Zakhariades, the secretaiy general of the party, wrote in retrospect that "we all agreed that the situation was ripe, that we should take up arms and fight. . . . The People's Democracies were behind us.' But a few British forces were still in Greece and it was not in the Communists' interest to bring about their intervention. The attack, in other words, had to be directed not against the foreign enemy but the domestic foe.4 It is not entirely clear to this day to what extent the Greek Communists had been encouraged by their mentors abroad; it has been asserted that they were prodded by Tito to start the insurrection, that Stalin was first in favor and then skeptical about the outcome of the venture. Perhaps he had no strong views one way or the other. The ultimate decision had to be taken by the Greek Communists themselves, but it is patent that they would not have gone to war if Stalin had been opposed.

  The conditions seemed propitious. The postwar economic crisis had not been overcome, the police force was inefficient and the army in the process of being rebuilt. There was no stable government, let alone strong leadership. Much of Greece consists of mountainous territory which favors guerrilla warfare; the border between Greece and her Communist neighbors, seven hundred miles in length, is almost impossible to secure. Thousands of Communist activists had gained military experience in World War II. The Communists had bases, training grounds and steady sources of supply in Albania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. The Greek Communist party, to be sure, was relatively small; it had never polled more than ten percent in general elections, but it was far more tightly knit than the other Greek parties and could rely on a high degree of militancy and discipline. It had supporters both among the urban intelligentsia and the industrial workers; it was especially influential among the Greeks from Asia Minor who as the result of the population transfer after World War I had been repatriated to Greece. Both Markos Vafiades, the commander in chief of the Communist army, and Nikos Zakhariades who later replaced him, had been born in Turkey. The Communist partisans did indeed appear to have the advantage. They were more deeply motivated, their morale was sturdier, they fought better than the government troops. They were also more ably led, at least until the very last stage of the fighting.

  Two reasons have been advanced to account for their defeat nonetheless in 1949. The first is the decision taken in November 1948, apparently against Markos advice, to convert their guerrilla army into one of larger formations (divisions), and to engage in positional warfare in defense of the liberated areas; this, when they had been at their potent best in 1947-1948 operating with units of company strength (fifty to a hundred men) and, at most, in battalions (two to four hundred). The second frequently cited reason is Yugoslavia's rift with the Communist camp which eventually resulted in the closing of the border with Greece. These circumstances had, needless to say, their adverse effect but they were by no means the only causes of the Communist rout. The very decision to embark on an armed offensive had been a mistake, as the Communist leaders themselves later admitted. The country's mood was not as revolutionary as they believed. Greece was, after all, not a dictatorship at the time; the Communists' deliberate boycotting of the first postwar democratic elections was generally interpreted as a confession of weakness.

  When they made their fateful choice, the Communists had banked above all on the demoralized state apparatus and an undermined army, lacking both training and modern equipment. A protracted war, it was figured, would of necessity bring about the collapse of the regime. They overlooked—or perhaps preferred to ignore—the possibility that a long war might precipitate the reorganization of the army. Between 1946 and 1949 the United States supplied Greece with approximately three hundred and fifty million dollars' worth of arms; this undoubtedly contributed to the Communist defeat, but even more telling was the revitalization of the Greek army under Papagos, who became commander in chief in early 1949. As an American observer wrote later: "The army was galvanized into action. Its manpower was not increased, its training was not greatly improved, and there was no significant increase in its equipment. The army was simply made to do what it was capable of doing, and no more than this was then needed to gain the victory."5 But even if the Greek Communists had not made the mistake of transforming their forces into a semiregular army, ii they had continued to operate in small units, they would still have had no chance. The shift to conventional warfare was a fatal error, easy though it is to see why the step was taken. Some Communist leaders felt that time was running out, with Yugoslavia's "defection" the international situation had from their point of view deteriorated, it would be wisest to move against the Greek army while it was still depleted.6

  Guerrilla tactics would have made it more difficult for General Papagos to defeat the Communists, but without bases inside Greece, which they did not have, the guerrillas could anyway not have existed much longer; their cause in fact lost more of whatever appeal it initially had with each month the war dragged on. The Communists had no popular aim, no obvious, all-embracing slogans such as the overthrow of the tyranny or the reapportionment of the land. They tried to use anti-imperialist slogans, but to little purpose; there were, after all, no more than three thousand British soldiers in Greece at the time, who did not participate in the fighting, and a few hundred American military advisers. On the other hand, the Communists had to defend themselves against charges of treason, since they supported the establishment of an independent Macedonian state. The proposal to surrender Greek territory to the Bulgarians was anything but attractive. Even the Greek Communists were not enthusiastic about this item in their political paraphernalia; perhaps it was part of the price they had to pay for the help they received from their comrades abroad. Their having to press-gang young peasants into their army during the last year of the fighting merely antagonized villagers the more, and at no benefit to their fighting machine either, for there was not time enough to indoctrinate the new recruits.

  The Greek Communists were better armed than most postwar guerrilla movements. After the battles in the Vitsi and Grammos mountains, the government forces captured about a hundred pieces of artillery, including anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, some 650 machine guns, 216 heavy mortars and 142 rocket launchers. Considering that the guerrilla forces had never numbered more than twenty-five thousand soldiers (up to twenty percent of them women), they seem to have had about as much equipment as they could possibly absorb. They had no air force, but the government air force was minute and until the last phase of the fighting played no significant role in the campaign. The war was fought with great bitterness, clemency was rare and atrocities common to both sides. The Greek government forces suffered about sixty thousand casualties, among them sixteen thousand dead and almost five thousand missing. More than four thousand civilians were executed by the Communists. No accurate figures are available about the extent of Communist losses. They were, in all probability, as large as those of the government. Greece, a small and poor country with about seven million inhabitants at the time, needed years to recover from the trauma of the civil war, the material destruction wrought and the loss of life. With the Russian and the Spanish civil wars heading the list in that due order, the Communist insurrection in Greece ranks as third among the major European internal wars of this century.

  Southeast Asia

  As World War II came to its shuddering end, the calls for national independence began to reverberate across Southeast Asia. The easy victories o
f the Japanese against the European colonial powers had given an enormous boost to the native national movements. In India, Pakistan and Burma, Britain abdicated without a struggle; the course of events in Indochina has been described elsewhere in this study. But in Malaya and the Philippines, guerrilla movements mushroomed, while in Indonesia the Dutch attempts to reimpose their rule also provoked armed resistance.7 The Indonesian bid for independence was won with relatively little fighting, and this despite the movement there being internally split, with the Communists taking, grosso modo, a more militant line than the rest. To compound the confusion, the Communists were themselves divided and all in all there was a real danger that the country might quite literally fall apart. Indonesia's very weakness, however, was its strength, for the Dutch were wary of the chaos whereas the Nationalists and the Communists had no such inhibitions.

  There had been no resistance movement in Indonesia during the war; on the contrary, there had been widespread collaboration with the Japanese. Mention has already been made of the fact that under their occupation a small Indonesian army, the Peta, had come into being. Furthermore, all the main political parties had their private armies, such as the Masjumi (Hizbullah) and the Darul Islam. The Peta consisted of fewer than a hundred thousand officers and men, the private annies of somewhere in the neighborhood of double that number. The two Dutch "police actions," in 1946 and 1948, were carried out by much smaller forces, but these were highly trained and well-organized units which had no trouble whatsoever coping with the untrained, ill-disciplined and badly equipped Indonesian troops. But the real problems, as so often in this kind of war, emerged only after the Dutch had seized the key cities and lines of communication. A hundred thousand Dutch soldiers were not sufficient to control the heartland of Java and Sumatra, let alone the other islands. The Dutch army was, in the words of one observer, incapable of occupying an overcrowded area of fifty million people, short perhaps of an outright campaign of terror, for which the Dutch were "temperamentally unsuited,"8 Facing an economy in ruin, the prospect of general turmoil, the condemnation of the United Nations (still a moral force to be reckoned with in those days), facing the strong disapproval of the United States and their other allies, the Dutch opted for withdrawal and Indonesia became a sovereign republic. Weak as the national government was, the Communists were in no position to challenge it for their force had been much reduced in the fighting, notably in the Madiun rebellion. Moreover, by the time they recovered from their internal splits (1952-1953), world Communist policy was no longer that enthusiastic about armed struggle outside the colonial context. So the Indonesian Communists reshaped their strategy to one of political action, demonstrations, strikes, and eventually even of collaboration as the Sukarno government veered towards "anti-imperialism."

  Communist guerrilla warfare in Malaya began in 1948, reached its climax in 1950-1952, and petered out in 1956-1958. In the Philippines fighting developed in 1947, continued on and oil for about seven years and then gradually died down after the surrender of Luis Taruc, the Communist leader. Both in Malaya and the Philippines the leading cadres of the postwar insurgency were composed of the same men who had organized the wartime resistance. The Chinese Malayans had established a guerrilla force in February 1942, and the following year British officers ("Force 136") landed and cooperated with them; Chin Peng, the commander of the MPAJA (the Malayan resistance forces), which numbered some six thousand fighters, was to be awarded the OBE. The Philippine Hukbalahap was founded in March 1942; its relations with the small U.S. guerrilla forces in the islands were, however, anything but cordial, and although the Huks contributed in no small measure to the war effort against the Japanese, they were equally if not more eager to settle scores with their own domestic political enemies. Although the leadership of the Huks was Communist, this fact was not made public at the time. Whereas to all intents and purposes the MPAJA was identical with the Malayan Communist party, the relationship between the Huks and the Philippine Communist party was more complicated. The political situation in Malaya was anyway altogether dissimilar to that in the Philippines. Malaya was still a colony while the Philippines had almost attained independence, even if the Communists would argue that this independence was a mere legal fiction. Which does not alter the fact that the Malayan guerrillas still had to contend with the British army and police, whereas the Huks were by now free to take on their own people. Again, recruits to Communism in Malaya came almost entirely from one community, the Chinese; the membership of the Huks, on the other hand, was not limited to a national minority.

  The timing of the insurrections in Southeast Asia was probably not altogether uncoordinated. They all broke out within the space of a few months in 1948 and this has tempted observers to look for a definitive guiding hand behind the eruptions. Attention has been drawn to the Calcutta Conference of the World Federation of Youth and Students in February 1948.9 The resolutions of the conference attacked the "false independence" of India and Pakistan and called for an intensification of the struggle for true independence, which in the circumstances did not of course mean the concentration of one's efforts 011 electoral contests. It is most unlikely, however, that the Cominform would have chosen a minor meeting to coordinate its policy in Southeast Asia. Whatever coordination there was had most probably taken place at the highest level. The "general line" of Communist policy, the "two camps" concept, had been defined by Zhdanov and others well before then and the new militancy just happened to coincide neatly with the desires of the Southeast Asian Communists. But this is not to say that the policy was clear-cut, or planned in detail. During World War II the Soviet Union would have taken a dim view of any fraternal party which did not contribute its share toward the defense of the Soviet Union. The world situation after the war, however, was infinitely more complex and there could be no imposing of one rigid universal law. Between 1947 and 1952 the stress was certainly on the armed struggle, at that point peaceful coexistence became the watchword. But just as not everyone everywhere took to arms in those five years, so neither did all armed insurrections cease after 1952. It all depended on local factors, "objective" and "subjective" alike.

  Malaya is a small country, four-fifths of its area uncultivated jungle. It was (and is) a major producer of tin and rubber, of its 5.3 million inhabitants (1945), forty-nine percent were Malay and thirty-eight percent Chinese.10 The Chinese were better educated and had, on the whole, a considerably higher living standard. After the war the Communist party had become legal; its new head was the now twenty-six-year-old Chin Peng, the guerrilla hero who had cooperated with the British. His predecessor, Loi Tak, had been successively a French, Japanese and British agent, a particular learned only later and that anyhow did not affect the party line.11 At its fourth plenary meeting (May 1948), the MCP decided that "an armed struggle will be inevitable and will constitute the most important form of struggle."12 This decision coincided with the final victory of Mao's forces in China and was probably not unconnected with it. There is reason to believe that the secretary general of the Australian Communist party, on a visit to Malaya at the time, acted as an emissary and that he advised the local Communists against continuing the constitutional struggle.

  Communist strategy, insofar as can be ascertained, was to liberate certain areas near the jungle, to seize plantations and mines, and then to envelop the cities. From the guerrillas' point of view the squatters' villages on the fringe of the jungle were of paramount importance; they relied on them for intelligence, food and supplies. After some hesitation the British authorities decided to resettle the squatters in new villages. This proved an easier task than had been envisaged and it aggravated the guerrillas' supply situation. But it did not solve the authorities' military problem, for with great tenacity the guerrillas continued to fight on in adverse conditions. General Clutterbuck, who was actively involved in counterinsurgency, writes admiringly not only about the organization of the Communist guerrillas but of the "fortitude of tiny bands of guerrillas holding out
against the concentrated efforts of twenty or even sixty times their strength of soldiers when the war was already lost — ranking high in the annals of human endurance."13 It has been pointed out that the main aim of the insurgents at the start of the guerrilla war was to cause maximum disruption to the country's economy and the administration. But in contrast to Vietnam, the Communists never quite succeeded in achieving their objective; the administration continued to function throughout the country, the government collected taxes, the schools were kept open and justice was administered. Unlike their Vietnamese comrades, the Chinese guerrillas in Malaya had no active sanctuary, no secure line of supply from beyond the border. Their staunchest ally was the well-nigh impenetrable jungle in which their camps could be tracked down only with the greatest difficulty. Individual terrorists would be seized only by accident.