Urban Guerrilla Warfare

Anthony James Joes

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780813137599
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Guerrilla insurgencies continue to rage across the globe, fueled by ethnic and religious conflict and the easy availability of weapons. At the same time, urban population centers in both industrialized and developing nations attract ever-increasing numbers of people, outstripping rural growth rates worldwide. As a consequence of this population shift from the countryside to the cities, guerrilla conflict in urban areas, similar to the violent response to U.S. occupation in Iraq, will become more frequent. Urban Guerrilla Warfare traces the diverse origins of urban conflicts and identifies similarities and differences in the methods of counterinsurgent forces. In this wide-ranging and richly detailed comparative analysis, Anthony James Joes examines eight key examples of urban guerrilla conflict spanning half a century and four continents: Warsaw in 1944, Budapest in 1956, Algiers in 1957, Montevideo and São Paulo in the 1960s, Saigon in 1968, Northern Ireland from 1970 to 1998, and Grozny from 1994 to 1996. Joes demonstrates that urban insurgents violate certain fundamental principles of guerrilla warfare as set forth by renowned military strategists such as Carl von Clausewitz and Mao Tse-tung. Urban guerrillas operate in finite areas, leaving themselves vulnerable to encirclement and ultimate defeat. They also tend to abandon the goal of establishing a secure base or a cross-border sanctuary, making precarious combat even riskier. Typically, urban guerrillas do not solely target soldiers and police; they often attack civilians in an effort to frighten and disorient the local population and discredit the regime. Thus urban guerrilla warfare becomes difficult to distinguish from simple terrorism. Joes argues persuasively against committing U.S. troops in urban counterinsurgencies, but also offers cogent recommendations for the successful conduct of such operations where they must be undertaken.

1

Warsaw 1944

Poland was the scene of Europe’s largest resistance movement during World War II. The principal act of that movement was the Warsaw Rising of 1944, called by its most recent historian “the archetypal model of urban guerrilla warfare.” Although eventually defeated, the Warsaw uprising had the gravest consequences for the emerging postwar world: “The Rising did not cause the Cold War by itself. But it was a major step in that direction.”¹ Nevertheless, these Warsaw events, with their complexity, nobility, and tragedy, have faded almost completely from Western consciousness.

Poland Halts the Red Tide

Josef Stalin played a malevolent and determining role in the outcome of the Warsaw Rising. A key to Stalin’s attitude toward that struggle can be found in the Russo-Polish conflict following World War I. The 1920 Bolshevik invasion of Poland—the first Soviet invasion of Europe—is one of the least known of modern wars, but its outcome may have been nearly as decisive for the destiny of Europe as Charles Martel’s victory at Tours.²

The Kingdom of Poland, once one of the largest in Europe, had disappeared at the end of the eighteenth century, partitioned by Prussia, Austria, and Russia. In 1918, with the defeat or collapse of those partitioning empires, a Polish state reemerged. The army of the new state was composed largely of Polish units of the former Tsarist and Habsburg armies. Its principal figure was General Jozef Pilsudski (1867–1931). He had joined the Socialist Party as a youth was imprisoned or exiled for agitation several times, and organized the Polish Legion under the Habsburgs during World War I. Taking command of Polish forces in Warsaw in 1918, he declared Poland independent.

Pilsudski developed a truly grandiose geopolitical strategy. He wanted Poland’s new frontiers to stretch as far east as possible. This extensive Poland would be the fulcrum of an alliance of new states in eastern and central Europe—Ukraine, Finland, and the Baltic and Caucasian republics—that would push Russia away from the shores of the Baltic and Black Seas, undoing the work of Peter and Catherine and setting Russia on the road to second-rank status.

The Russo-Polish boundary was not settled at Versailles. After negotiations with the Lenin regime had clearly failed, on April 25, 1920, Pilsudski launched an offensive. The Polish occupation of Kiev on May 6 aroused Russian nationalist fervor, and in reaction many former Tsarist officers joined the Red Army when its need for officers was most acute. The capture of Kiev dangerously overextended Polish lines. Woefully short of ammunition, and factories to produce it, the new Polish army evacuated the city on June 12. Meanwhile, the British Labour Party forbade workers to load munitions on ships headed for Poland. The French Socialists took the same stance.

The Red Army commander for the assault on Poland was Mikhail Tukhachevsky, twenty-seven years old, like Napoleon in his Italian campaign. Lenin informed the world, “We shall break the crust of Polish bourgeois resistance with the bayonets of the Red Army.”³ Following behind the Russian troops were thousands of horse-drawn carts intended for looting every inch of conquered Poland.

At the end of July 1920, the Red Army established a “government of Communist Poland” in the town of Bialystok, just as Stalin would do years later in Lublin. But as the Red Army advanced into Poland, few Polish peasants joined or assisted it. And as they neared the gates of Warsaw, the Bolsheviks were deeply dismayed to learn that the city’s factory workers were volunteering for the Polish army.

General Wladyslaw Sikorski, who would head the Polish government in exile in World War II, commanded the Polish forces in front of Warsaw. Within the city, almost the entire diplomatic corps had fled westward, except for the Vatican envoy, Archbishop Achille Ratti (later to become Pius XI). In August, when things looked very bleak, the White Russian offensive in the Crimea under Baron Wrangel relieved some of the pressure on Warsaw. More importantly, Tukhachevsky’s advance had badly overstretched his supply lines. His long flanks were now exposed to counterattack. Indeed, a copy of Pilsudski’s plans for just such a stroke fell into Tukhachevsky’s hands, but he dismissed it as a deception.⁴ Pilsudski launched his counterattack on August 16; it was the turning point of the war.

A persistent myth holds that French general Maxime Weygand, chief of staff of the famous General Foch, saved Warsaw. This Weygand myth suited the purposes of the Bolsheviks, Pilsudski’s Polish critics, and French premier Millerand. But the honors of victory belong above all to Pilsudski, who appeared everywhere on the front line, heartening his troops, some of whom were barefooted and almost without ammunition. Weygand himself gallantly admitted that “the victory, the plan and the army were Polish.”⁵ (Another French officer in Warsaw, a young captain named Charles de Gaulle, politely declined the offer of a permanent commission in the Polish army.) Late in September Pilsudski attacked Tukhachevsky again, in the Battle of the Nieman River, and completed the Bolshevik defeat. An armistice took effect on October 18, 1920; the Treaty of Riga, signed in March 1921, fixed Poland’s eastern frontier until 1939. Polish casualties in the war totaled over 250,000, including 48,000 dead. Red Army losses in casualties and prisoners also exceeded a quarter million, plus scores of heavy guns.⁶

Concerning this battle of Warsaw, the distinguished British military historian J. F. C. Fuller wrote: “The influence of this decisive battle on history . . . was little grasped by Western Europe and has remained little noticed.”⁷ Yet Tukhachevsky himself declared, “There is not the slightest doubt that, had we been victorious on the [River] Vistula [which runs through Warsaw roughly south to north], the revolution would have set light to the entire continent of Europe.”⁸ The British ambassador to Berlin, Lord D’Abernon, believed that if Warsaw had fallen, “Bolshevism would have spread throughout Central Europe and might well have penetrated the whole continent.”⁹ Therefore, D’Abernon continued, “it should be the task of political writers to explain to European opinion that Poland saved Europe in 1920, and that it is necessary to keep Poland powerful.”¹⁰ British historian E. H. Carr concurs: “It was not the Red Army, but the cause of World Revolution, which suffered defeat in front of Warsaw in August 1920.”¹¹

Thus Poland had broken free of the Russian Empire, rejected Bolshevism, and humiliated the Red Army. But the Poles would eventually pay a very heavy price for this victory. Their defeat of Russia, unaided, convinced Polish leaders that they needed to fear neither Germany nor the USSR. And the young Josef Stalin, involved peripherally but not unimportantly in these Warsaw events, conceived a personal hatred for that city and the whole Polish leadership class, including General Sikorski, that he would brutally manifest less than twenty years later.

World War II

Pilsudski had restored a great deal of Poland’s historic territory. His success illustrates the illusion that empire means strength and security. The new Poland contained too many ethno-religious minorities: Ukrainians, White Russians, Germans, unassimilated Jews, and others. These minorities were of two types: the territorially concentrated, such as Ukrainians and White Russians, and the dispersed, such as Germans and Jews. Reinforcing these cleavages, most ethnic groups in Poland were religiously compact: the Poles were Catholic, the White Russians Orthodox, the Germans Protestants, and so on. In the 1921 census, only 69 percent of the state’s inhabitants gave their nationality as Polish, and that figure is almost certainly too high.

Germans in Poland numbered at least one million. “The central feature of the history of the German minority [in Poland] between 1935 and 1939 was its almost complete conversion to National Socialism [Nazism].”¹² The invasion in 1939 revealed many of them as spies and saboteurs, and almost all of them would collaborate with the Nazi occupation.

The Ukrainians in Poland comprised seven million, almost all peasants, who lived between towns with Polish and Jewish majorities. One million White Russians made up the majority of the population in two eastern provinces; they too were almost all peasants living around towns populated by Poles and Jews.

The 1931 census counted 3.1 million Jews, of whom 80 percent identified Yiddish as their mother tongue. More than 40 percent of these Jews lived in towns larger than twenty thousand. The majority of all lawyers in Poland and nearly half of all physicians were Jews. Nevertheless, by 1939 a large proportion of Polish Jews were dependent on relief, largely private, financed by U.S. Jewish organizations. Polish governments supported Jewish emigration to Palestine, but the British authorities there severely limited the number of newcomers.¹³

Poland was an agricultural country and relatively poor: in 1938, it had one automobile per thousand inhabitants, compared to seven in Czechoslovakia and ten in Italy. Incredibly, the politicians at Versailles had classified Poland as part of the defeated Central Powers; therefore it was allowed no claims for reparations at war’s end.

In August 1939 Hitler and Stalin signed their infamous pact, the essential prelude to a renewed world conflict. The Germans invaded Poland without a declaration of war on September 1, attacking from three sides across the 1,750-mile frontier. In hindsight it is clear that at the outbreak of war Polish forces should have been grouped around Warsaw and behind the River Vistula, but the most economically valuable Polish areas were close to the German borders, and thus the Polish Army was mainly deployed there, and defeated there. The Poles had expected help from a French attack on Germany, which never materialized, even though most German forces had been sent into Poland, with only screening forces left on the French frontier. “A French attack against the weak German defensive front on the Siegfried Line . . . would, as far as is humanly possible to judge, have led to a very quick military defeat of Germany and therefore an end of the war.”¹⁴ But a French attack never came.

Poland’s predominantly infantry army could not pull back eastward fast enough to avoid encirclement by fast-moving German armored divisions. The Luftwaffe, supreme in the air, blasted bridges, roads, and railways to hinder Polish movements, as well as attacking troops on the march. Fifth columnists, mainly members of Poland’s Germanic minority, aided these activities. The final blow fell on September 17, when the Soviet army invaded from the east. The next day the Polish government and army high command crossed into Romania (with which Poland had a common frontier in 1939). Besieged Warsaw held out under a horrendous pounding until September 28. The last important Polish units surrendered on October 5. In the brief conflict 70,000 Polish soldiers died, with another 130,000 wounded. Six thousand had been killed and 16,000 wounded in the defense of Warsaw. German casualties numbered between 45,000 and 60,000, of whom 10,500 were killed. The destruction of the Polish army was a dress rehearsal for the defeat of the French army, “the finest in the world,” eight months later. Prostrated Poland was divided into three areas: provinces annexed in the east by Stalin, provinces annexed in the west by Hitler, and the remaining areas, in the center, called the General Government, under Nazi occupation.¹⁵

The Origins of the Resistance

How, in the aftermath of total defeat and occupation by two overwhelmingly powerful and savagely repressive neighbors, were the Poles able to organize a widespread and sustained resistance? For one reason, the war had been brief, with little loss of life and property compared to what was to come. For another, Polish society was imbued with a “tradition of active resistance and insurrection and the conviction that national identity and sovereignty can be preserved and restored through sacrifice.”¹⁶ Besides, there were encouraging prospects of outside assistance: from the Polish government in exile (hereafter called PGE) in Paris, and from mighty allies, first the British and later the Americans, in whom many Poles had a truly pathetic trust. The U.S. government actually did provide millions of dollars over several years to the underground, money that supported sabotage, espionage, and international communications.

But perhaps the most crucial factor in the emergence of a successful resistance was the behavior of the Nazi occupiers: “Nowhere in the whole Nazi empire was the ‘Master Race’ given such complete control over a conquered nation so comprehensively enslaved.”¹⁷ Indeed, “the conditions of German occupation were worse for the Poles than for any other nation except the Jews.”¹⁸ German policy was total exploitation; German demands on the Polish people were unlimited and impossible; destruction of the Poles as a people was the aim. All Poles were publicly treated as members of an inferior race, with no gradations of education, wealth, or status. One and a half million Poles were expelled from the provinces annexed to Germany. Thousands of young Polish children were kidnapped, to be raised as Germans. The Nazis imposed compulsory labor, reduced food allowances to below survival levels, and publicly executed hostages. Epidemics of tuberculosis became normal, while the psychological damage, e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1: Warsaw 1944
• 2: Budapest 1956
• 3: Algiers 1957
• 4: Sao Paulo 1965–1971 and Montevideo 1963–1973
• 5: Saigon 1968
• 6: Northern Ireland 1970–1998
• 7: Grozny 1994–1996
• Conclusion: Looking Back and Ahead
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index