Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present

by Max Boot

  If Kitchener was aware of this dire precedent, he gave no sign of caring. His soldiers rounded up over 150,000 Boer women and children, along with their black servants and farm hands. No adequate provision was made to house that many people. Food, milk, clean water, bedding, medicines, bathroom facilities, soap—all were lacking. Flies and filth were everywhere. “When the 8, 10, or 12 persons who occupied a bell tent were all packed into it . . . there was no room to move, and the atmosphere was indescribable, even with duly lifted flaps,” noted Emily Hobhouse, a strong-willed English pacifist who toured the camps in early 1901 on behalf of the South African Women and Children’s Distress Fund. When she complained to camp officers, they told her, “Soap is a luxury.” Before long epidemics—measles, dysentery, diphtheria, typhoid—raced through the camps, killing at least 25,000 people.

  This was the product not of deliberate policy but rather of neglect. The Germans, in their African campaigns against the Herero and Maji-Maji revolts, practiced genocide;143 the British did not. Kitchener—who was said by a subordinate to lack “any personal feel for his troops,”144 much less for the enemy’s women or children—simply never bothered to visit a single camp.

  The process of correcting his oversight was set in motion after Miss Hobhouse, “that bloody woman” to Kitchener, began publicizing her findings in June 1901. Liberal Party leaders such as David Lloyd George and Henry Campbell-Bannerman rushed forward to denounce these “methods of barbarism.” By early 1902, conditions in the camps had improved and their death rate had fallen below that of many British cities, but by then Britain had suffered a black eye in world opinion.145

  While embarrassing, the negative publicity was not enough to imperil the war effort. The opposition Liberals were outspoken in denouncing concentration camps, but they were split on the fundamental question of the war, while the ruling Tories were positively jingoistic. In 1900 Lord Salisbury’s Conservative government called a “khaki election” to take advantage of British victories and won a substantial majority by labeling the opposition as “pro-Boer.” (“To vote for a Liberal is a vote to the Boer,” proclaimed one poster.)146 The Boers hoped that a majority of the British public would turn against the war, but that did not happen. Nor were the Boers rescued by outside intervention. Many countries, especially Germany and the Netherlands, were sympathetic to their plight, but none was willing to fight on their behalf. Only two thousand foreign volunteers joined the Boers.147 That left the British free to muster overwhelming resources to hammer the bittereinders (bitter-enders) into submission.

  THE BOERS, LIKE many other skilled guerrillas, were masters of mobility. Often their pursuers were left to grasp at thin air. The obvious answer was to limit their ability to travel freely. This is an objective that all security forces engaged in counterinsurgency must pursue. The methods employed vary widely, from the issuing of internal passports (the favored method of Russia’s tsars and commissars alike) to the slaughtering of pony herds (as American soldiers often did in the Indian Wars). More recently American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan relied on biometric databases.

  The British approach in South Africa was characterized, in the first place, by the erection of blockhouses, which spread like tumbleweed across the veld. Eight thousand were built in all, initially out of masonry and concrete and then, because they were faster to construct, from corrugated iron. Each was manned by ten or fewer very bored soldiers (“there was absolutely nothing to do,” a subaltern griped) and located less than a mile from its neighbors. Some were even built on ox wagons so as to be portable. The gaps between blockhouses were filled by a relatively recent invention—barbed wire.148 Meanwhile fearsome armored trains, bristling with Maxim guns, artillery, and searchlights, steamed across the veld like battleships on the ocean.149 Thousands of troops were then dispatched on giant “beating” expeditions, as if on a grouse hunt, to “bag” Boers pinioned between the blockhouses and rail lines.

  De Wet, the Boers’ foremost guerrilla leader, was not impressed. He called the blockhouses “the policy of the blockhead.” Whenever “it became necessary for us to fight our way through,” he wrote, “we generally succeeded in doing so.” All it took was a pair of wire cutters and the cover of darkness to slip past bored and inattentive sentinels. He was equally unimpressed by the farm burnings and concentration camps, which, he claimed, only hardened Boer determination.

  But De Wet had to concede that other British stratagems were more effective: “night attacks were the most difficult of the enemy’s tactics with which we had had to deal.” He also paid grudging tribute to the British recruitment of blacks and “hands-uppers,” including De Wet’s own brother, Piet, who enlisted in the national scouts. “These deserters were our undoing . . . ,” De Wet wrote. “[I]f there had been no national scouts and no Kaffirs, in all human probability matters would have taken another turn.”150

  The blacks and the Boer defectors were important because they provided the British with what any counterinsurgent most needs: timely intelligence about the enemy’s location. When the war began, British military intelligence capabilities were anemic. During the conflict the Field Intelligence Department expanded from 280 men to more than 2,400,151 and it came to include officers of outstanding ability such as Colonel Aubrey Woolls-Sampson.

  A hot-tempered Cape Colony native of English ancestry who was a former gold miner, Woolls-Sampson had developed, according to his brother, “fanatical” hatred for the Boers. This is hardly surprising, for during the first Boer War (1880–81), which the Boers won, he had suffered three bullet wounds in one battle—including a shot through the jugular, which he barely survived. Later, in 1896, he was imprisoned by the Boers for his membership in a conspiracy of Uitlanders (foreigners) who were working with Cecil Rhodes to annex the Transvaal. He emerged from prison unbowed the following year. Even before the second Boer War broke out, he began to raise a new regiment, the Imperial Light Horse, to fight the Boers, who were masters of light cavalry tactics, on their own terms. While leading the Light Horse, he was wounded again, nearly losing his leg this time, and in his weakened condition he had to endure the four-month siege of Ladysmith. Throughout it all he remained, a former commander wrote, “mad to get at the enemy.”

  Not well suited to be a regimental commander (he was “too much inflamed with patriotism” to worry about mundane matters such as logistics or billeting), he now found his métier as an intelligence officer. Like T. E. Lawrence, his younger and more famous contemporary, whom he resembled in some ways, Woolls-Sampson was considered a bit of an oddball by his peers. He refused to socialize with fellow officers. Instead he spent his time talking with his “boys”—a group of Africans he recruited and paid out of his own purse to track Boer commandos after dark. The blacks, who shared his hatred of Boers (and, unlike the British, risked death if caught), provided invaluable intelligence that repeatedly allowed British columns to fall on Boer encampments at dawn.152

  The pursuit of Geronimo two decades earlier through the Sierra Madre had shown the utility of small groups of soldiers, unencumbered by supply trains, who could match the mobility of fleet guerrillas. Many decades later that lesson would be validated by the experience of the Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrols in South Vietnam. So, too, in the Boer War the most successful British leaders—not only Woolls-Sampson but also Colonel Lord Rawlinson, Colonel Harry Scobell, and Lieutenant Colonel George Elliot Benson—fought much as “Brother Boer” did, leading small groups of mounted men on long treks across the veld without the hindrance of cumbersome supply trains. They “bagged” far more prisoners than did larger, more ponderous units.

  BY MAY 1902 the Boers had had enough. Much as they protested Kitchener’s “relentless policy of attrition,” they had to admit its effectiveness. Deneys Reitz wrote that “universal ruin . . . had overtaken the country. Every homestead was burned, all crops and live-stock destroyed, and there was nothing left but to bow to the inevitable.” More than twenty thousand Boer fighters remained in the
field, but they all told “the same disastrous tale . . . of starvation, lack of ammunition, horses, and clothing, of how the great block-house systems was strangling their efforts to carry on the war.”153

  Even so, the Boers did not agree to unconditional surrender. In return for giving up their independence, they won a pledge that there would be no retribution for their resistance except for Cape and Natal Afrikaners who were viewed as traitors by the British. Far from punishing the Boers, the British promised to help them rebuild and to introduce “as soon as circumstances permit, representative institutions leading up to self-government.”154 This anticipated the practices of future British counterinsurgents in Malaya, Northern Ireland, and other conflicts who found, as the Romans had done, that it is essential to offer political and social benefits to solidify battlefield gains and prevent future revolts.

  The years immediately after the South African war saw an ambitious program of reconstruction overseen by the British high commissioner, Sir Alfred Milner, a warmonger turned peacemaker who set up schools, built railway and telephone lines, and imported seeds and livestock to reconcile the Boers to their involuntary membership in the British Empire.155 In 1906 the Liberals won a large majority in Parliament and immediately began devolving power to South African whites. Because English emigration never took off, the Boers remained a majority. Before long they ruled not only the old Orange Free State and Transvaal but also Cape Colony and Natal, which together formed the Union of South Africa in 1910. The British, who had once complained about Boer mistreatment of blacks and coloreds, looked the other way as nonwhites were consigned to second-class status. So successful was the process of reconciliation that, notwithstanding a revolt by De Wet and a few other hard-liners in 1914, South Africa fought alongside Britain in World War I and World War II. Jan Smuts would go on to lead British troops as a field marshal and become a member of the Imperial War Cabinet.

  Notwithstanding abuses on both sides, many participants later remembered the Boer War as “the last of the gentlemen’s wars”156—and not without reason, especially when seen from the vantage point of the next great war, which would be fought with machine guns and mustard gas. In South Africa each side could count on the other to provide medical treatment to the wounded, neither side engaged in torture to elicit information, and captured soldiers were generally well treated. Thirty thousand Boer detainees were sent to well-run camps in places like Bermuda, Ceylon, and India, while the Boers, at least during the guerrilla phase, tended to release British prisoners unharmed. Kitchener even had two Australian officers, Harry “Breaker” Morant and Peter Handcock, shot after they were found guilty of killing prisoners. Although 7,000 Boer soldiers and 22,000 of their British counterparts died—in addition to at least 25,000 noncombatants who perished in the concentration camps—the butcher’s bill was still lower than in what the military strategist J. F. C. Fuller, who as a young subaltern fought in South Africa, was to call the “massed proletarian conflicts” of the future.157 Certainly it would be hard to imagine in future conflicts the kind of polite, even at times “very friendly conversation,” which occurred at numerous meetings and in even more regular exchange of correspondence between British and Boer commanders to discuss the treatment of noncombatants, the provision of medical services, and other issues relating to the “rules and customs of war.”158

  28.

  HIGH NOON FOR EMPIRE

  Why Imperialism Carried the Seeds of Its Own Destruction

  THE BOER WAR affirmed that the advantage in guerrilla conflicts still lay with European imperialists—but their enemies were closing the gap fast. The same message was sent by an eerily similar war fought at virtually the same time by the United States.

  As a result of the Spanish-American War in 1898, the United States annexed the Philippines. Many Filipinos had no desire to be ruled from Washington. In 1899 they began a violent resistance that came to be known as the Philippine Insurrection. Like the Boers, the Filipinos fought initially in conventional formations and suffered heavy losses before reverting to guerrilla warfare. U.S. troops, like their British counterparts, engaged in human-rights abuses, including the use not only of concentration camps known as “protected zones” but also of the “water cure,” a form of torture later known as waterboarding, which they had learned from the Spanish. Those abuses caused an outcry at home, as they were doing simultaneously in Britain during the Boer War, from the likes of Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie. But the election of 1900 in the United States, as in the UK, delivered a resounding victory for the “prowar” candidate—Theodore Roosevelt. He brought the conflict to a successful conclusion in 1902 following the capture of the insurrecto leader Emilio Aguinaldo in a daring raid led by Brigadier General Frederick Funston. The successful campaign to hunt down the guerrillas and their leaders, overseen by General Arthur MacArthur (father of Douglas MacArthur), was accompanied, as in Morocco, by a benevolent campaign of reconstruction, including the opening of schools, hospitals, courts, and other institutions, all overseen by the civilian governor and future president, William Howard Taft. The proclamation of peace was followed, as in South Africa, by the expeditious devolution of self-government so as to reconcile the Filipinos to American sovereignty.

  The Filipinos should have had more success than the Boers—there were far more of them (seven million), and they lived amid mountains and jungles, terrain that was far harder for troops to penetrate than the prairies of South Africa. And yet they managed to inflict far fewer casualties on the American forces: 4,234 American soldiers died, mostly from disease. In turn, Filipinos suffered far more heavily: 16,000 fighters killed in battle, another 200,000 civilians dead mostly of disease. The Boers were somewhat more successful in part because of their superior weaponry and greater skill in utilizing it: every Boer had a rifle, whereas many insurrectos had nothing more than a knife. But the Boers’ main advantage was their superior nationalist sentiment. The Afrikaners thought of themselves as a single people and greatly cherished their independence, whereas Filipinos, like Native Americans, were split among numerous ethnic groups. Moreover, unlike Boers or American Indians, Filipinos had no experience of freedom. As a result they had trouble coming together to oppose American occupation.159

  Although the insurgents were defeated in both the Boer War and the Philippine War, the two conflicts markedly decreased enthusiasm for imperialism. Casualties were higher than in previous “small wars,” and they fell not just among a handful of professional soldiers but among wartime volunteers whose loss was more keenly felt on Main Street and High Street. As Leo Amery wrote in The Times History of the War in South Africa, the losses inflicted by the Boers were “a shock to a generation accustomed to the cheap glories of savage warfare.”160

  Military men who might have been contemptuous of “native” resistance in the past were acquiring newfound respect for the fighting prowess of guerrillas. That was evident in Small Wars: Their Principles & Practice, a popular British handbook that went through three editions between 1896 and 1906, and that would later inspire the U.S. Marine Corps’ Small Wars Manual, published in 1940. Its author—widely recognized as the foremost authority on the subject until T. E. Lawrence—was Colonel (later Major General) Charles Edward Callwell, an intelligence officer who had commanded mobile columns against the Boers. He wrote that “guerilla warfare is a form of operations above all things to be avoided. The whole spirit of the art of conducting small wars is to strive for the attainment of decisive methods, the very essence of partisan warfare from the point of the enemy being to avoid definite engagements.”

  Callwell offered mainly tactical advice, stressing the importance of “constantly harassing the enemy and . . . giving the hostile detachments no rest,” subdividing “the whole area of operations . . . into sections, each of which has its own military force,” “clearing the country of the supplies which may be useful to the enemy,” and “utilizing the troops available as far as possible for mobile columns” that “should be as small as
possible consistent with safety.” He also stressed that no other kind of warfare placed as much emphasis on “self-reliant subordinate officers” or on “a well organized and well served intelligence department.” While he wrote that regular troops had “to resort to punitive measures directed against the possessions of their antagonists,” he also warned, “The enemy must be chastised up to a certain point but not driven to desperation,” and that “wholesale destruction of the property of the enemy may sometimes do more harm than good.”161

  This was about as far as Callwell got in acknowledging the political aspect of counterinsurgency, which his British successors would view as paramount. Nor did he make any reference to press coverage, which would loom so large in later insurgencies. Politics and what would now be called information operations were not entirely absent even in the nineteenth century; witness the efforts of Bariatinsky in the Caucuses and of Lyautey in Morocco to court local notables. But such factors were not nearly as important as they would become. At the high noon of European empire, small numbers of Western soldiers armed with Maxim guns and repeating rifles generally could rely on “bold initiative” and “resolute action”162 to crush enemies ranging from Pashtuns to American Indians without having to worry overmuch about placating native grievances—or courting a skeptical press corps.

  It helped, too, that most of these conflicts occurred on the periphery of empire against enemies that were considered “uncivilized” and therefore, under the European code of conduct, could be fought with unrestrained ferocity. The very success of the imperial armies meant, however, that future battles would take place within imperial boundaries and that, as one historian notes, they would be “considered civil unrest rather than war.”163 Accordingly troops in the future would find their actions circumscribed by civil law and public opinion in ways they had not been in the nineteenth century.