Silently running
John Terraine
Guerrilla: A Historical and Critical Study Walter Laqueur (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £8.95) The enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue.
There we have an almost perfect short description of the guerrilla or pa rtisan style of warfare—and why not, you may ask, seeing from whom it comes? Wasn't Mao Tse-tung the arch-prophet of guerrilla warfare? No, retorts Professor Laqueur, he was not, by any means. If the author had done no more in this book than explode the idea that guerrilla activity is a product of Marxism-Leninism, he would have done well. He does much more: he hammers a whole mythology, chiefly by displaying the infinite variety of t he guerrilla wars.
Some were Communist inspired, others were not ; some were led by young men, some by old; some of the leaders had military experience, others lacked it entirely; in some movements the personality of the leader was of decisive importance, in others there was a collective leadership; some wars lasted a long time, others were short; some bands were small, others big ... Some won and some lost.
So it is quite o bvious that sweeping generalisat ions about guerrilla warfare are pointless, and if that message can be widely imparted Professor Laqueur will have done us a lasting favour. As he says, the all-embracing formulae with which people who should have known better have tried to account for the various guerril la experiences are `no help as an analytical tool.' What he himself tries to do here is to examine and summarise as many of those actual experiences as he can in the space given, with due attention to the theorists who helped to shape them or review them. Unfortunately, four hundred and nine pages of text are not enough for such an exercise—but then, what is? I know another recentlypublished work on the same subject which runs to over fifteen hundred pages without being any the better for it.
Professor Laqueur makes it abundantly clear that what we .need--and it is amazing that it does not exist—is an entire military history of 'guerrilla' (or 'small war') to set beside our 'normal' military history, which is virtually entirely the history of large war and therefore incomplete. For the decisive battles of major "warfare in the Western world alone, Major-General Fuller required three volumes; anyone trying to expound the neglected story of guerrilla warfare should have no less.
However, there can be no doubt that Professor Laqueur has made a good start. His first sentence takes us back to the Hittite king Mursilis in the fifteenth century BC; then, via King David, Arminius and Vercingetorix, we progress towards the grim events we habitually meet in our daily newspapers. The best of his book is its handling of modern times; in the earlier passages there are some references calculated to make the military historian's eyebrows go up and down, but this is a book that gets better as it goes along.
Laqueur interestingly places the beginning of guerrilla warfare in its modern form in the Vendee—a right-wing, clerical revolt against the French Revolution in 1793 which, he says, cost more French lives than the retreat from Moscow. The Spanish rising against Napoleon, the rOle of the partisans in 1812, the revolts of Poles, Italians and Greeks against their various imperial masters during the nineteenth century built up a solid body of experience with a corresponding analytical literature of great interest.
• And then, astonishingly, it was all lost— ignored, forgotten (in the growth of modern i
armies) as though t had never been, so that, as Laqueur says, 'Mao and Ho Chi-minh, Castro, Guevara and Debray were not in the least aware of the fact that their ideas had been expounded before and even tried The twentieth-century guerrilla theorist discovered his strategy quite independently. And he quotes E. J. Hobsbawm as saying 'there is nothing in the purely military pages of . Mao, Giap or Che Guevara which a traditional guerrillero or band leader would regard as other than simple common sense.'
This is very refreshing and very valuable, since the lack of historical perspective, almost invariably linked to false analysis, has conferred on the guerrilla tribe a curious aura of invincibility which cannot too quickly be stamped upon. It is my only substantial criticism of this book that Laqueur leaves the real—and revealing— definition of his subject until page 392, with an excellent quotation from Professor S. P. Huntington:
Guerrilla warfare is a form of warfare by which the strategically weaker side assumes a tactical offensive in selected forms, ti mes and places. Guerrilla warfare is the weapon of the weak . .. Guerrilla warfare is decisive only where the antiguerrilla side puts a low value on defeating the guerrillas and does not commit its full resources to the struggle.
Or, one might add, where the anti-guerrilla side is horribly incompetent, as—to take a glaring example—in Batista's Cuba. But the point, admirably tersely expressed, is that 'guerrilla warfare is the weapon of the weak.' This is a truth that is all too often lost in the sensation of this or that guerrilla coup. But what emerges with utter claritY from Laqueur's book is the steady process of metamorphosis of the guerrilla into a regular soldier in case after case as strength accrues. Nobody—and here is a fine ironYhas understood this better than the Marxist
Leninists whom the foolish extol as the champions of guerrilla war.
To Marx, thinking about the performances of the Spanish guerrillas, there appeared the serious danger that in peace. 'they must. . form a most dangerous mob (Bakunin would have said, `so much the better' !). Engels was a sceptic, particularlY of the urban guerrilla. Lenin blamed the partisan spirit' for more damage to the revolution than 'all the betrayals by [former Tsarist] military experts.' Both he and Trotsky were determined to build a power' ful, regular Red Army as quickly as possible. In World War It the Russian partisans, about whom Soviet propaganda and its purveyors were often so lyrical, were organised by the NKVD. Mao, like Lenin, believed in a Red Army, and adopted guerrilla methods only when it met with massive defeat. Dien Bien Phu was a pitched battle reminiscent of the First World War. Unhistorical as we are increasinglY_ becoming as a nation, we need this kind of record-straightening more than ever. We do need to be reminded that 'guerrilla war' fare is the weapon of the weak'—and can therefore be defeated. It is encouraging learn that 'seen in historical perspective, it is on the decline'—but salutary to read 00 the the end of the same sentence: 'together wit its traditional foes, colonialism on the one hand and liberal democracy on the other. In fact, it could be said that the moderr democracy. ltbera guerrilla's only victory is over
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