Guerrilla

A Historical And Critical Study

Walter Laqueur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429716379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book deals with guerrilla warfare; it does not aim at presenting a universal theory, for such a theory would be either exceedingly vague or exceedingly wrong. The present volume is the first part of a wider study which, the author believes, has not been attempted before - a critical interpretation of guerrilla and terrorist theory and practice

1
Partisans in History

Irregular forces and guerrilla tactics are mentioned, perhaps for the first time in recorded history, in the Anastas Papyrus of the fifteenth century B.C. Mursilis, the Hittite king, complains in a letter that “the irregulars did not dare to attack me in the daylight and preferred to fall on me by night.” While peeved, Mursilis obviously lived to tell the tale.

Guerrilla tactics, of course, predate recorded history, as indeed they predate regular warfare. In Melanesia, the chosen practice was for the warriors to attack when the enemy was at its sleepiest and most unwary; the same approach was used by the Kiwai in New Guinea. The southeastern Indians of North America liked to be pursued by the foe so that they could lure him into the hollow of a crescent formation. The mock retreat and the ambush were also known to many other tribes; a classic description is in Joshua 8.

Generally speaking, primitive people had an aversion to open fighting.¹ But surprise and deception have their use in every military conflict and there are basic differences between primitive and guerrilla wars. Far more often than not, the former consisted of sporadic, unorganized sorties, hit-and-run raids, the object being either to plunder or to seek vengeance for some grievance such as trespass, personal injury, or wife stealing. Primitive warfare evolved in small tribal social groups who had no capacity for any sustained effort such as protracted war; the scope of movement was quite restricted, and ideological issues were certainly not involved.

The Bible mentions guerrilla leaders such as Jiftah and David. Of David, it is said that “everyone that was in distress, and everyone that was in debt, and everyone that was discontented gathered themselves unto him; and he became a captain over them.” (Samuel 1:22) He used the Judaean desert (Ein Gedi) as a temporary base, engaged in forays in the Hebron area, imposed tribute on the rural population and, with a force of between four hundred men (the Caves of Adullam) and six hundred (the Battle of Ziklag), fought the Amalekites and other enemies. Gideon’s night attack at Ein Harod (Judges 6–2) is a good example of exploiting the element of surprise. Of the twenty-two thousand men who were with Gideon, three hundred were chosen and, though there were many more Midianites — “like locusts, and no one could count the number of their camels” — they spread confusion in the enemy camp. The sound of trumpets and the sight of torches (hidden in jugs until the very last moment) created pandemonium and the Midianites turned against each other. To make the attack even more effective, it was launched at the time when the guard was about to change.

The Maccabaean revolt in 166 B.C. made use of guerrilla tactics in its early phase; Mattathias and his sons went into the mountains and, having no arms, Judah had to pick up the sword of the enemy soldier who fell first. They lived in secret places in the wilderness, “as wild animals do.” Judas Maccabaeus launched his attacks mainly by night (Maccabaeans 2:8), while his brother, Jonathan, the second leader of the rebellion, launched raids from his base in the Judaean desert, harassing the enemy and evading frontal encounters; his strength lay in the mobility of his troops and a superior intelligence network.

In the Jewish war against the Romans, guerrilla units did not play a decisive role; the country was densely populated, and there were no inaccessible mountain ranges or wild forests which could have provided shelter for the insurgents. Josephus describes how the retreat of Cestius Gallus, the governor of Syria, from Jerusalem ended in a rout. Cestius’s legions were heavily armed which greatly impeded their march, whereas the Jews who attacked them were traveling light. While the Roman forces moved through open terrain they were relatively safe, but eventually they had to cross a narrow downhill pass where their horses stumbled and the attackers all but annihilated their columns.² John of Gischala, a military leader in Galilee and a rival of Josephus, is described as little better than a robber — crafty, cunning, motivated not so much by patriotism as by the lust for power and spoils. The initiative in these wars was usually with the Romans, and the internal conflicts in the Jewish camp made an effective use of guerrilla tactics almost impossible.

The Bar Kochba rebellion (a.d. 132–2) was the last stage in the Jewish war against Rome; caverns and subterranean passages provided the insurgents with hiding places. They avoided open battle and from their footholds in the mountains undertook devastating raids upon the country. When Julius Severus, one of Hadrian’s most capable generals, was appointed to suppress the revolt, he quickly realized that there would be no open engagement and that the rebels had to be hunted from their hideouts one by one.³

There are not many examples of guerrilla tactics in Greek military history. One of the few exceptions was Demosthenes’s campaign with three hundred Hoplites in mountainous Aetolia. Thucydides, our main source for this disastrous invasion, relates that the Aetolian forces were scattered and lightly armed, having no defensive armor. They attacked the Athenians with their javelins from a safe distance without much risk to themselves, retreated when the Hoplites advanced, advanced when the Hoplites retreated, and, generally speaking, demoralized the enemy by constant withdrawal and pursuit: in the end the Hoplites got lost in pathless woods and stumbled into ravines from which they could not climb out. The Aetolians ringed them with flames and a hundred and twenty of the Hoplites (“the best soldiers of Athens”) fell before their commander decided to retreat.⁴

Instances of guerrilla warfare are more frequent in Roman military history — in North Africa, Gaul, Germany, and, above all, in Spain.^* Tacfarinas, the elusive Numidian chieftain, caused a great deal of aggravation to the Romans. According to Tacitus, he had served in the Roman army, deserted and collected a group of bandits with whom he undertook his expeditions. Was it a case of “social banditry,” a “war of national liberation against the imperialist enemy,” or perhaps a mixture of both? The Numidians could not resist the Romans in open battle but they were excellent practitioners of the art of small war; whenever the Romans attacked, they retreated, only to return and harass the Romans when these had ended their onslaught. In the words of Tacitus (Annales, 3:22), the Romans got very tired as a result of these frustrating experiences and it was only when the Numidians left the desert and tried their luck near the coast that they were beaten. Despite various setbacks, Tacfarinas continued his struggle; at one stage he even sent ambassadors to Rome, much to the mortification of Tiberius. It was not until seven years later, when the Romans changed their tactics to using lightly armored soldiers who knew their way in the desert, that they succeeded in defeating Tacfarinas decisively. They came upon him at daybreak with his troops un-prepared, horses unsaddled and not even any guards on duty — and that was the end of Tacfarinas and his band (Tacitus, 4:25).

Arminius the Cheruscan, like Tacfarinas, had served in the Roman army; he was a Roman citizen, a knight and an ally of the Romans. As Varus set out with three legions and auxiliaries, constituting a total of twenty-seven thousand men, for the forest of Teutoburg, he had every reason to suppose that Arminius was a friend. But Arminius was motivated by anything but friendly feelings when he persuaded Varus to move his headquarters from a Rhenish fortress to the Weser. He assumed, quite rightly, that this move would force the Roman leader to disperse his troops and his lines of communication would become vulnerable.⁵ The first two days of Varus’s march having passed uneventfully, on the third he reached the forest. The undergrowth was thick, there were no roads, the constant rain made the ground slippery, and leadership in the Roman camp was deplorable. Suddenly Arminius attacked, there was a mass slaughter and, while in the subsequent eight years the Romans avenged themselves in a series of battles, large and small, they never again succeeded in firmly establishing their rule east of the Rhine.

The Battle of Teutoburg Forest was an example of a successful large-scale ambush, whereas Julius Caesar, in his conquest of Gaul, encountered something more akin to full-scale guerrilla warfare. Vercingetorix, king of the Arverni and military leader of the tribes that rebelled against the Romans, had no military education and his soldiers were untrained. Having been defeated by Caesar’s cavalry, he changed his tactics; Caesar quotes him addressing his fellow chieftains:

We have to conduct the war quite differently, to cut off the Romans from their food and supply, to destroy isolated detachments. All the open villages and farms from which the Romans can get their provisions will be cut off and the Romans will starve.⁶

Vercingetorix realized that, while his own infantry could not face the Romans in open battle, it had the advantage of speed over Caesars legions which were hampered by their huge baggage trains. His tactic was to tempt Caesar to pursue him through difficult terrain, to tire him out and thereby compel him to disperse his forces. He applied this strategy with considerable success for almost six years against Rome’s greatest military genius. It was unfortunate that he had to cope not only with the Romans but also with the impatience and foolishness of his own countrymen, who time and again forced him to commit errors against his better judgment: insisting on his giving battle, for instance, or retreating after a battle into a prepared fortress. In the year 52 B.C. Vercingetorix was enclosed by the Romans in Alesia; Caesar beat off a relieving army and took the fortress by means of circumvallation. Eventually the Gallic leader had to surrender and was executed.

The elements of guerrilla warfare, such as the evasion of battle, the attempt to wear down the enemy, to attack small detachments in an ambush by day and larger units by night, were not of course a novelty to the Roman generals. They had applied them, more than once, in their own operations. Fabius Cunctator, who had been made dictator after the disaster at Trasimene Lake (217 B.C.) had employed the same expedients against Hannibal. He camped on high ground, nibbling away at the Carthaginians’ rear guard, avoiding battle. While Hannibal ravaged the Campania, Fabius used his strategy of exhausting the invaders to good effect and this despite the mounting criticism of his fellow Romans thirsting for a decisive battle. After yet another and even greater Roman disaster (the Battle of Cannae [216 B.C.]), Fabius’s conduct of war became official strategy until the Romans were strong enough to pass on to the offensive.

The examples mentioned so far refer to regular armies using ‘small war’ tactics because they were not strong enough to apply any others. Guerrilla warfare in the strict sense of the term was endemic in Spain among the Celtic-Iberian and Lusitanian tribes. Inevitably it has raised the question of why. The Roman historians saw the insurgents as mere street robbers and highwaymen (latro-listes); their leader was latronum dux or listarchos.⁷ There was a great deal of unpolitical banditry (bandolerίsmo) in Spain in ancient times, as in later centuries, but this hardly explains the emergence of whole armies of thousands of men who defeated numerous Roman legions. Economic and demographic reasons, such as the distribution of land and the density of the population in certain parts of the peninsula, have been adduced to explain this phenomenon. For a long time Spaniards served as mercenaries in the ancient world; to take up arms served as a safety valve. In Hannibaľs army which traversed the Alps, Spanish soldiers seem to have outnumbered the Carthaginians. The Iberian and Lusitanian tribes had every reason to hate the Romans for the heavy tributes imposed on them by several generations of praetors and the atrocities committed by Roman troops; above all, the treacherous massacres carried out by Servicius Sulpicius Galba (151–2 B.C.) and Lucius Licinius Lucullus. Thousands were killed; thousands of others were sold as slaves to Gaul.

The fighting in the peninsula, which involved many Roman legions, reached its climax in the war between Viriathus and Rome (147–2 B.C.). Born in the mountains of the Sierra de la Estella, between the Tajo and the Duero, probably of poor parents, Viriathus had been a shepherd and hunter in his youth, and later a small-time bandolero. Roman historians portray him as a man of very strong physique, quick, impervious to heat and cold, to hunger and thirst and without apparently needing sleep. He escaped Galba’s massacre in the year 150 B.C. and, three years later, became the supreme military leader of the tribes — in Mommsen’s words, the “chief of the guerrillas.” Soon after Viriathus had been elected commander in chief, his soldiers were surrounded by the Romans but he achieved a getaway by use of a strategem that he was to apply many times in later years.⁸ This is how Appian described his tactics:

He [Viriathus] drew them all up in line of battle as though he intended to fight but gave them orders that when he should mount his horse they should scatter in every direction and make their way as best they could by different routes to the city of Tribola and there wait for him. He chose 1,000 men only, whom he commanded to stay with him. These arrangements having been made, they all fled as soon as Viriathus mounted his horse. Vitelius [the Roman praetor] was afraid that those who had scattered in so many different directions, but turning towards Viriathus who was standing there and apparently waiting for a chance to attack, would join battle with him. Viriathus, having very swift horses harassed the Romans by attacking and thus consumed the whole of that day and the next, dashing around on the same field. As soon as he conjectured that the others had made good their escape, he hastened away in the night by devious paths and arrived at Tribola with his nimble steeds, the Romans not being able to follow him at an equal pace by reason of the weight of their armour, their ignorance of the roads, and the inferiority of their horses.⁹

A few days later he attacked Vitelius from an ambush, killing four thousand of his ten thousand men; the rest were no longer capable of giving battle. Vitelius’s successor, the praetor Plautius, fared no better; he was defeated twice by Viriathus, who again pretended that he was about to abscond when he was in fact preparing for an attack. Plautius was so weakened that, in the words of the Roman historian, he “retired to his winter quarters” — and this in the middle of summer. Viriathus also defeated another Roman praetor, Claudius Unimanus, but, after the year 145, his position became precarious inasmuch as the Romans had realized the seriousness of their situation on the peninsula and, after the victory over Carthage, dispatched larger forces to Spain. A consul was sent — Fabius Maximus Aemilianus, Scipio’s brother — with an army of seventeen thousand preponderately new recruits. They were at first more successful than their predecessors; Viriathus continued to attack small detachments as the Roman general preferred to train his troops before launching a major campaign. In 144, Viriathus lost two cities in southern Spain, but his luck changed when Fabius was called back to Rome and when several tribes, hitherto in league with Rome, joined him in his struggle. A new Roman offensive was undertaken after the arrival of Fabius Maximus Servilianus in the year 141; but the forces at his disposal (twenty thousand men, ten elephants, and some African cavalry) were not sufficient to defeat the enemy.

Despite several setbacks and the loss of some more cities, Viriathus attacked the Romans almost without interruption. The following year he cut off and encircled the main body of the Roman forces and disaster seemed inevitable when, instead of pressing home his advantage, he engaged in negotiations that led to a peace treaty, with the Romans for the first time recognizing Viriathus, who became amicus populί Romani. The reasons for his seemingly inexplicable behavior have been the subject of a long and inconclusive debate on the part of latter-day historians. According to the Romans, he was guided by generosity; others argued that his army was simply tired — and he was under pressure to bring the war to a speedy end. Yet others saw it as a psychological enigma; Viriathus could have put the whole enemy army to the sword and thereby ended the war, for the Romans would never have retrieved such a loss.¹⁰ Against this, it could be argued that Viriathus must have known that, in the long run, he could not maintain himself against Rome, that the Romans would not accept defeat, that new and stronger legions would be sent against him, and that formal recognition and semi-independence was the most for which he could hope. In any event, the treaty remained in force for less than a year; the war party in Rome had been opposed to it from the beginning and tried to provoke Viriathus into breaking it. When this did not succeed, Caepio, the new Roman leader in Spain, renewed the conflict. There was, however, no victory for him in the military sense, the war ending only after the assassination of Viriathus in his tent by three Roman emissaries who had been sent to renegotiate with him. The Romans were glad that their dangerous foe was dead; they were less than happy at the manner of his dying. Caepio was not awarded a triumphal return and Viriathus’s murderers did not receive the promised reward. Tantalus, Viria-thus’s successor, capitulated soon afterward.

Viriathus’s conduct of war was, in all essential respects, identical to the campaign waged in the peninsula nineteen hundred years later.¹¹ He made optimal use of the terrain and established foci in inaccessible places. He provoked the Romans to pursue him until he had maneuvered them into an ambush; he cut off their supply lines, harassed them ceaselessly with minor attacks. His principle w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• 1 Partisans in History
• 2 Small Wars and Big Armies
• 3 The Origins of Guerrilla Doctrine
• 4 The Twentieth Century (I): Between Two World Wars
• 5 The Twentieth Century (II): Partisans against Hitler
• 6 The Twentieth Century (III): China and Vietnam
• 7 National Liberation and Revolutionary War
• 8 Guerrilla Doctrine Today
• 9 A Summing Up
• Notes
• Chronology of Major Guerrilla Wars
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Index