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Civilian Loyalties and Guerrilla Conflict

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Chalmers A. Johnson
Chalmers A. Johnson
Affiliation:
University of California
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Extract

It is not surprising that Western statesmen and students of politics everywhere have recently begun to give major attention to what are variously termed guerrilla warfare, irregular warfare, paramilitary operations, la guerre révolutionnaire, insurrectional warfare, resistance movements, and other, allegedly military, doctrines. Of course, irregular armed struggles are not a unique feature of mid-twentieth-century politics; however, they have occurred with great frequency in our time and, more important, they have resulted in baffling victories over vastly better armed, better trained, and more numerous forces. President Kennedy, in response to the apparent superiority in military doctrine possessed by Communist forces in Asia, has ordered the rapid expansion of United States “guerrilla and counter-guerrilla forces.” On a more prosaic level, the publication in a national Sunday-morning newspaper of excerpts from a celebrated pamphlet on guerrilla warfare by Mao Tse-tung suggests that “guerrilla warfare,” along with “massive retaliation,” has entered the popular Cold War vocabulary.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 14 , Issue 4 , July 1962 , pp. 646 - 661
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1962

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References

1 Stanford, Neal, “U.S. Prepares for Guerrilla Wars,” Foreign Policy Bulletin, XL (June 1, 1961), p. 139.Google Scholar

2 “Mao's Primer on Guerrilla War,” New York Times Magazine, June 4, 1961.

3 Garnett, David, ed., The Essential T. E. Lawrence, London, Jonathan Cape, 1951, p. 99.Google Scholar

4 Ibid.

5 Allen, W. E. D., Guerrilla War in Abyssinia, London, Penguin Books, 1943, p. 19.Google Scholar

6 Letter to Col. A. P. Wavell (later Field Marshal Lord Wavell), May 21, 1923, in Garnett, , ed., op.cit., p. 260.Google Scholar

7 Fall, Bernard B., Street Without Joy: Indochina at War, 1946–54, Harrisburg, Pa., 1961, p. 60.Google Scholar

8 Vladimir. Dedijer, , With Tito Through the War: Partisan Diary, 1941–1944, London, Hamilton, 1951, pp. 341–42.Google Scholar

9 Garnett, , ed., op.cit., p. 100.Google Scholar

10 Allen, , op.cit., p. 33.Google Scholar

11 In Sykes, Christopher, Orde Wingate, Cleveland and New York, 1959, p. 324Google Scholar; italics added.

12 “The French Army and La Guerre Révolutionnaire,” Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, CIV (February 1959), p. 59. For a thorough presentation of all aspects of the doctrine, see Déon, Michel, L'Armée d'Algérie et la Pacification, Paris, Libraire Plon, 1959.Google Scholar One important French military source on this subject is Ximenès, (pseud.), “La guerre révolutionnaire et ses données fondamentales,” Revue Militaire d'Informatian, No. 281 (February–March 1957), pp. 7–20.Google Scholar

13 Déon, , op.cit., p. 18.Google Scholar

14 “Guerrilla War and Modern Strategy,” Orbis, 11 (Spring 1958), pp. 75–76.

15 See Howell, Edgar M., The Soviet Partisan Movement, 1941–1944, Washington, D.C., 1956.Google Scholar

16 Quoted in Wolff, Leon, Little Brown Brother: How the United States Purchased and Pacified the Philippine Islands at the Century's Turn, New York, 1961, p. 311.Google Scholar

17 For a full discussion of this history, see my Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937–1945, Stanford, Calif., 1962 (forthcoming).

18 Russell W. Volckmann implies the possibility of forced loyalty from the population when he writes: “No resistance movement can flourish for long without mass civilian support. This support may be voluntary, induced, or imposed, but it is absolutely essential to the maintenance of large guerrilla forces for a prolonged period of time in a country overrun by the enemy.” (We Remained: Three Years Behind the Enemy Lines in the Philippines, New York, 1954, p. 125.) Colonel Volckmann commanded the United States Armed Forces in the Philippines, Norm Luzon—a guerrilla corps operating during the period of the Japanese occupation. His own experience indicates that broad-based civilian support was voluntary; only Filipino agents for the Japanese and collaborators were objects of guerrilla attack.

19 Fall, , op.cit., p. 294.Google Scholar

20 Ibid., p. 15.

21 See Is It a People's Liberation? A Short Survey of Communist Insurrection in Burma (Rangoon, Ministry of Information, Government of the Union of Burma, 1952), which shows how the rebels alienated themselves from the population (pp. 22–23); and Vukmanović, Svetozar (“Tempo”), How and Why the People's Liberation Struggle of Greece Met with Defeat (London, Yugoslav Information Service, 1950)Google Scholar, which criticizes the Greek guerrillas on the same score but from the opposite political point of view. For an objective study of the Greek war and a discussion of the question of privileged sanctuary, see Chandler, Geoffrey, The Divided Land: An Anglo-Greek Tragedy, London, Macmillan, 1959, pp. 180–81Google Scholar and passim.

22 Fall, , op.cit., p. 297.Google Scholar The Morice Line was, of course, penetrated on occasion. See photographs of FLN operations against the Line in New Statesman, June 6, 1959, pp. 782–83. Nevertheless, the most effective French maneuver was “to cut off the nationalist fighters from their roots by preventing them from getting food and shelter from the peasant population” (New York Times, December 13, 1959, p. 2).

23 There are obviously types of mass risings against governments other than guerrilla movements. Gwynn distinguishes at least three main classes of “disorders” in the experiences of British colonial troops: “1. Revolutionary movements organized and designed to upset established government. 2. Rioting or other forms of lawlessness arising from local or widespread grievances. 3. Communal disturbances of a racial, religious or political character not directed against Government, but which Government must suppress.” It is only the first that may imply “guerrilla warfare, carried on by armed bands acting possibly under the instructions of a centralised organisation, but with little cohesion.” (Maj. Gen. SirGwynn, Charles W., Imperial Policing, London, Macmillan, 1934, pp. 10–11.)Google Scholar The Boxer Rebellion in China and the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, for example, should be considered as “communal disturbances” and not as guerrilla movements.

24 It is common in large-scale guerrilla movements to distinguish mobile forces, full-time partisans restricted to a given area, and militia (organized civilians who leave their regular occupations for military activity only in emergencies). Chinese Communist usage designates these forces as cheng-shih-tui (regulars), yu-chi-tui (guerrillas), and min-ping (militia). Wingate's doctrine does not envisage armed forces other than regulars, but still stresses the need to have the loyalty of the population on the side of the raiders. See Sykes, , op.cit., pp. 324ff.Google Scholar

25 Garnett, , ed., op.cit., p. 101.Google Scholar

26 Fall, , op.cit., p. 73n.Google Scholar

27 Allen, , op.cit., p. 24.Google Scholar

28 December 1936. See Tse-tung, Mao, Selected Works, New York, 1954, 1, pp. 175–253.Google Scholar For a competent military history covering the same period as this work, see Gen. Chassin, Lionel Max, L'Ascension de Mao Tse-tung, Paris, Payot, 1953.Google Scholar

29 May 1938. Tse-tung, Mao, op.cit., 11, pp. 119–56.Google Scholar

30 May–June 1938. Ibid., 11, pp. 157–243.

31 November 1938. Ibid., 11, pp. 267–81.

32 “Mao's Primer on Guerrilla War,” loc.cit., p. 13.

33 “The 18th Group Army: Training, Medical Care and Supply,” U.S. Office of War Information, General Intelligence Division, OPINTEL Report No. 324 (December 15, 1944), p. 1.Google Scholar

34 Katzenbach, Edward L. Jr, and Hanrahan, Gene Z., “The Revolutionary Strategy of Mao Tse-tung,” Political Science Quarterly, LXX (September 1955), pp. 322, 324.Google Scholar

35 Fuller, Francis F., “Mao Tse-tung: Military Thinker,” Military Affairs, XXII (Fall 1958), p. 139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 The maximum population of the various districts under the direct control of the Soviet central government in 1934 was estimated by Mao Tse-tung for Edgar Snow in 1936 as follows:

Kiangsi Soviet 3,000,000

Hupeh-Anhui-Honan 2,000,000

Hunan-Kiangsi-Hupeh 1,000,000

Kiangsi-Hunan 1,000,000

Chekiang-Fukien 1,000,000

Hunan-Hupeh 1,000,000

Total 9,000,000

Snow recalled that “Mao laughed when I quoted him the figure of ‘80,000,000’ people living under the Chinese Soviets, and said that when they had that big an area the revolution would be practically won.” (Red Star over China, Modern Library edn., 1938, p. 73.) By April 24, 1945, at the Seventh Chinese Communist Party Congress, Mao Tse-tung could announce that “China's liberated areas under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party have now a population of 95,500,000.” (“On Coalition Government,” Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1956, IV, p. 259.)

37 See, e.g., Benda, Harry J., “Revolution and Nationalism in the Non-Western World,” in Hunsberger, Warren S., ed., New Era in the Non-Western World, Ithaca, N.Y., 1957, p. 20.Google Scholar

38 See Scaff, Alvin H., The Philippine Answer to Communism, Stanford, Calif., 1955Google Scholar; and Starner, Frances L., Magsaysay and the Philippine Peasantry, Berkeley, Calif., 1961.Google Scholar

39 Elsbree, Willard H., Japan's Role in Southeast Asian Nationalist Movements, Cambridge, Mass., 1953, p. 148.Google Scholar

40 To call Os Sertões (translated as Rebellion in the Backlands by Samuel Putnam) a classic history of guerrilla warfare slights the moral, humanitarian, and scientific significance of this work, considered to be Brazil's greatest literary classic. It is at the same time, however, a major study of military history and of guerrilla conflict. See Cunha, Euclides da, Rebellion in the Backlands, University of Chicago, Phoenix edn., 1944 and 1957.Google Scholar

41 Antonio Conselheiro's rebellion bears a striking similarity, on a lesser scale, to the Taiping Rebellion of mid-nineteenth-century China.