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

by Max Boot

  As China’s “chairman,” he would live apart from her, enjoying sex with a rotating bevy of young women, sometimes several at a time, supplied for him by the party apparatus. The girls, apparently not dissuaded by his questionable hygiene, were proud to serve the Great Helmsman; even to contract venereal disease from him was regarded as an honor. As in other communist countries such as the Soviet Union, where Stalin and his cronies enjoyed the high life, so in China: the puritanism preached by the Communists did not apply at the top.56 The Communists were also hypocritical in their condemnation of the drug trade. In Yan’an they supported themselves in part through opium production, much as the Taliban would later do.57 But it was really in the sexual arena that Mao came into his own: his exploits made other womanizing guerrilla chieftains, such as Garibaldi and Tito, seem chaste by comparison.

  HIS DECADELONG SOJOURN in Yan’an (1937–47) gave Mao the leisure not only to womanize but also to philosophize. During this period he expounded his major theories of warfare and class struggle. The most famous product of this period was the essay On Protracted War, which he wrote in 1938 over nine days, working in a cave by candlelight with little sleep or food, so absorbed that he did not notice a fire burning a hole in his shoe “until his toes felt the pain.”58 A similar but not identical document, whose Chinese-language original has never been found, was translated as On Guerrilla Warfare by the U.S. Marine officer Samuel B. Griffith II, who in 1942 was to set up a Marine Raider Battalion inspired by Mao’s teachings.59

  Mao’s name is closely associated with “people’s war,” but he disavowed the “right tendency” of “guerrilla-ism”—the assumption that hit-and-run raids by lightly armed fighters could by themselves defeat a determined foe. In On Protracted War, he wrote that “the outcome of the war depends mainly on regular warfare” and “that guerrilla warfare cannot shoulder the main responsibility.” “It does not follow, however,” he added, “that the role of guerrilla warfare is unimportant.”

  He posited a three-stage model of insurgency. First, “the enemy’s strategic offensive and our strategic defensive.” Second, “the enemy’s strategic consolidation and our preparation for the counter-offensive.” Third, “our strategic counter-offensive and the enemy’s strategic retreat.” He explained that in the first stage “the form of fighting we should adopt is primarily mobile warfare, supplemented by guerrilla and positional warfare.” In the second stage “our form of fighting will be primarily guerrilla warfare, supplemented by mobile warfare.” In the third and culminating stage, “mobile warfare” will be the primary form of fighting while “positional warfare” rises in importance. Throughout the first two stages, Mao saw political considerations as paramount—“that is, the policy of establishing base areas; of systematically setting up political power; of deepening the agrarian revolution; of expanding the people’s armed forces.” He cautioned that without secure bases that had been cleansed of “class enemies” the guerrillas could not win: “History knows many peasant wars of the ‘roving rebel’ type, but none of them ever succeeded.”

  In this revolutionary struggle, Mao posited the need for forces of differing level of ability, starting with a militia known as the “township Red Guards, then the district Red Guards, then the county Red Guards, then the local Red Army troops, all the way up to regular Red Army troops.” Only the highest-level forces could undertake maneuver warfare; lower-level Red Guards would have to limit themselves to guerrilla attacks or to providing intelligence and logistical help. “The principle for the Red Army is concentration, and that for the Red Guards dispersion.” He added that in the third, decisive stage much of the fighting “will be undertaken by forces which were originally guerrillas but which will have progressed from guerrilla to mobile warfare.”

  While the most commonly cited influence on Mao’s work was the ancient sage Sun Tzu, considerable elements were also anticipated by Giuseppe Mazzini, the nineteenth-century champion of Italian nationalism who inspired Garibaldi and many other revolutionaries. In his Rules for the Conduct of Guerrilla Bands (1832), Mazzini, like Mao, posited a multistage struggle beginning with hit-and-run raids and culminating in “the formation of a national army.” Like Mao, Mazzini called for a far-flung struggle run from the center—not by a politburo, a term that did not yet exist, but by a “Centre of Action” that sounds suspiciously similar. And, like Mao, he demanded that guerrillas be scrupulous in their dealings with the people whose support they sought: “Every band should be a living program of the morality of the party. The most rigorous discipline is at once a duty and a necessity among them. . . . Respect for women, for property, for the rights of individuals, and for crops should be their motto.” Even Mazzini’s tactical instructions were proto-Maoist. “The band must be ready to assault when the enemy believe them to be retiring,” he wrote, “and to retire when the enemy are prepared to resist their attack.”60

  These similarities, which have seldom if ever been noted before, underline the fact that Mao’s essential theories were not original, although he developed them much more elaborately than Mazzini or any other predecessor. Mao’s theories derived credibility from the fact that, like T. E. Lawrence but unlike Mazzini, he actually led a storied guerrilla force—he was not just a theorist but a practitioner. In subsequent years Mao was to have another advantage in disseminating his work: his unquestioned control of the government of the world’s most populous state. This was a book-promotion tool denied to most other authors, who, however much they would have liked to, could not threaten potential readers with torture and imprisonment for not buying their books. Mao unapologetically and egotistically employed his absolute power to help make his “laws of revolutionary warfare,” bound in Little Red Books, by far the most widely distributed and influential manuals for insurgency ever published. Even Al Qaeda, while rejecting Mao’s atheism, would later cite his military maxims approvingly.

  It has been said that “nearly all contemporary insurgency theory” stems from On Protracted War. Mao’s writing was particularly important in putting the stress on politics rather than on simple hit-and-run tactics of the kind that primitive rebels had employed since the dawn of time. But few other revolutions would pass through all three stages prescribed by Mao; like most insurgent manuals, On Protracted War was more a description of what happened in one place than a formula replicable elsewhere. Even in China, the Reds would never have triumphed had it not been for the intentional assistance provided by their Russian “comrades” and the inadvertent assistance of the “dwarf bandits,” as the Chinese rudely referred to the Japanese.

  Indeed the ultimate Communist triumph in China would serve less to vindicate Mao’s theories than to show the importance of outside assistance for an insurgency to succeed. No other factor has been as important in the outcome of low-intensity conflicts. Some insurgents, such as Toussaint Louverture in Haiti and Michael Collins in Ireland and later Fidel Castro in Cuba, prevailed without substantial external support, but they were the exception, not the norm. More common was the case of the American patriots, Spanish guerrilleros, Greek klephts, Cuban and Philippine insurrectos, Arab irregulars in World War I, Yugoslav Partisans, French maquis, and other rebels who received copious outside aid—as did the Chinese Communists.61

  IRONICALLY JAPAN DID as much as any power to aid the Communist takeover even though its leaders had no sympathy for communism. (Japan’s own Communist Party, founded in 1922, was outlawed and had to operate underground until 1945.) Yet Japan’s invasion of China, which began in 1931 with the occupation of Manchuria and accelerated in 1937 with the occupation of most of the major cities and the coastline, dealt a near-fatal blow to Mao’s enemies in the Nationalist regime. To meet this threat Mao and Chiang, the chairman and the generalissimo, were forced to reach an uneasy truce. In Mao’s case the pressure was applied by Stalin, who wanted a united front to confront the fascists; in Chiang’s case by a patriotic warlord who kidnapped him and only released him after he agreed to a deal. In 1937, the ye
ar of the terrible “Rape of Nanking,” most of the Red Army was renamed the Eighth Route Army and ostensibly subordinated to Kuomintang control.

  The truce gave the Communists breathing space while Chiang diverted most of his forces to fight the Japanese. At least three million Chinese soldiers were killed battling the invaders between 1931 and 1945 along with eighteen million civilians. More than 90 percent of the military dead were Nationalists.62 It was not that the Communists refused to fight altogether, but, with one costly exception that was said to have been undertaken without Mao’s approval (the 1940 Hundred Regiments Offensive), they generally eschewed large-scale attacks on the better-equipped, -trained, and -disciplined Imperial Japanese Army. They preferred to build up Red areas in the countryside where the occupiers were thin on the ground while staging occasional raids on Japanese lines. Communist strength soared even as Nationalist armies were being decimated.

  All the while Mao was cynically accusing Chiang of neglecting the “War of Resistance” and husbanding his troops for a resumption of the civil war. This was widely believed, especially in the West, and cost Chiang considerable support. Ironically Mao’s charges were more nearly a description of his own strategy, which, as one historian notes, “put self-preservation and expansion above fighting the Japanese.”63

  The Communist Party emerged from the war stronger than ever. The People’s Liberation Army, as the Red Army was renamed in 1947, had numbered just 40,000 men in 1937. Now it was nearly a million strong. It was still outnumbered by the Kuomintang, however, whose army had 3.5 million men and American-supplied tanks and airplanes.64 Chiang’s forces were moved with U.S. help to take charge of areas that had been under Japanese occupation. By 1946, when the civil war resumed, they controlled 80 percent of China’s territory and almost all its major cities.65 Even Yan’an, the Communist capital, fell in 1947. Mao and other senior leaders had to flee the Nationalist advance.

  The one major area that remained outside Chiang’s grasp was Manchuria, which had been invaded by the Soviet army. When the Russians left in 1946, they turned over copious stocks of captured weaponry to their Chinese comrades. More supplies arrived by train from the Soviet Union, helping to balance out the aid that Chiang received from the United States and speeding the Communists’ transition to conventional operations complete with artillery and armored cars.

  In 1946 Chiang sent half a million of his best troops to conquer Manchuria. Their armored blitzkrieg made impressive progress at first but stopped just short of the Communist capital, Harbin, due in part to a cease-fire forced on Chiang by the American envoy George Marshall, who hoped to create a coalition government between Nationalists and Communists.66 In their initial offensive the Nationalists overextended their supply lines, creating an opening for a devastating Communist counterattack in 1947 under the brilliant generalship of Lin Biao, a graduate of Whampoa Military Academy and a veteran of both the Northern Expedition and the Long March. Elsewhere in China, Mao pursued a rural “people’s war” strategy, slowly gathering his forces to encircle the Nationalist-held cities, which were undermined from within by Communist fifth columns. However, contrary to Mao’s expectations, it was high-intensity conventional military operations that proved decisive, not the efforts of his guerrillas.

  Kuomintang mismanagement and especially the devastation left by the Sino-Japanese war made the insurgents’ job easier. Increasing unemployment, tax hikes, and runaway inflation all eroded Chiang’s popularity. Unable to survive on their salaries, many KMT officials turned to bribes, which further eroded their popularity—a problem later familiar in South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where pervasive corruption did much to undermine American-led counterinsurgency campaigns. Chiang recognized the issues but seemed powerless to address them. He never enjoyed the kind of absolute control over his own forces that Mao did. Chiang was an autocrat, too, but a less vicious, less organized autocrat who could not instill lockstep conformity even on his own army. Chiang himself complained that his commanders failed to obey his orders or cooperate with one another. He admitted that his whole regime was “decrepit and degenerate.”67

  Although more open societies such as the Republic of China, in both its mainland and Taiwanese incarnations, or the post-1979 People’s Republic of China have proven better able to generate economic growth, there is little question that absolute dictatorships such as Maoist China have often been more adept at the type of mobilization and synchronization needed to prevail in wartime, if only because anyone who did not follow orders could expect a harsh retribution. Chiang could instill no such discipline on his own side, with parlous consequences for the future of his regime.

  Once the Nationalist armies had suffered defeat in Manchuria in 1947–48, the entire edifice of Kuomintang power crumbled with stupefying rapidity that caught even Mao by surprise.68 Some Nationalist troops fought hard to the end, but many others surrendered or defected en masse. As the Red triumph became more likely, hordes of waverers joined their ranks. In 1949 the Communists marched into Peking, and Chiang fled to Taiwan.

  The war was over. China’s agony was only beginning. At least fifty million people would die over the next quarter century because of Mao’s deranged policies—far more than had been killed by the Nationalists and Japanese combined.69

  DESPITE THE MALIGN consequences of Maoism, China’s self-proclaimed Great Helmsman maintained a potent appeal as a source of inspiration and support for other revolutionaries, especially in Asia.

  In North Korea, Kim Il-sung won Mao’s and Stalin’s reluctant support for a conventional offensive against South Korea in 1950 that backfired—as had earlier North Korean attempts to wage guerrilla warfare against the South. It would take direct Chinese intervention, including the dispatch of a million armed “volunteers,” to save the Pyongyang regime.

  The Vietnamese comrades were cannier or perhaps simply weaker. They resolved to use guerrilla-style tactics to weaken the French. But all the while they firmly expected that, in accordance with Mao’s teaching, someday they would field regular armies to win their “people’s war.” That day was to arrive sooner than anyone could have expected.

  45.

  ADIEU AT DIEN BIEN PHU

  The Indochina War, 1945–1954

  NOVEMBER 20, 1953. 10:30 a.m. The morning mist had just burned away to reveal the village of Muong Thanh in northwestern Vietnam near the Laos border. It was situated in a valley eleven miles long and five miles wide bisected by the Nam Yum River. All around could be seen “lush green mountains” rising to six thousand feet. On these slopes lived Meo tribesmen who harvested poppies to produce opium. On the valley floor were ethnic Thai, simple farmers living in “stilted, peak-roofed huts built of thick bamboo and thatched with woven leaf.” They were going about their usual routine, harvesting rice with short sickles amid the “clucking of poultry and the grunting of little black pigs.” For the Vietminh troop stationed there it was a day of field exercises. They were setting up their mortars and machine guns around a dirt airstrip when they noticed a flight of two-engine aircraft high above. Later a peasant recalled how the aircraft spread “clouds of white specks that looked like cotton seeds. But soon they opened up and we saw that soldiers were hanging from them.”

  Inside the American-made C-47s, the same cargo aircraft that had delivered the Chindits to the jungles of Burma nine years earlier, the jumpmasters were shouting, “Go! Go! Go!” Two battalions of crack French paratroopers were swiftly out the door. One of the battalions was dropped too far south. That left responsibility for securing the area around the village to the Sixth Colonial Parachute Battalion. Its 621 men—mostly French but also including 200 Vietnamese—were led by Major Marcel Bigeard. He was only thirty-seven years old but already a legend—a modern-day cavalier whose lack of fear and love of combat were reminiscent of warriors as disparate as Shamil, George Armstrong Custer, and Orde Wingate. Everyone in Indochina, it seemed, “knew his high forehead, his fair crew-cut hair, his bird-of-prey profile, his touchy
independence”—and his extraordinary combat record, which would one day earn him four-star rank without benefit of a Saint Cyr education or the war college.

  Born in 1916 to a railway worker, he had left school at fourteen to work in a bank and joined the army in 1936 as an enlisted man. He was still a lowly warrant officer when he was captured on the Maginot Line in 1940. The following year, after two failed attempts, he escaped from a German prisoner-of-war camp, Stalag 12A, and made his way to French West Africa to join the Free French. In 1944, using the call sign Bruno, which would become his lifelong moniker, he parachuted back into France to work with the Resistance and help the invading Allied armies—work for which he won both the French Legion of Honor and the British Distinguished Service Order.

  In 1945, by now a captain, he first came to Indochina. By 1953 he was on his third tour after too many close escapes to recall. The worst of all had come the preceding year. He and his paras had been dropped into the village of Tu-Lê in the northern highlands to stop a Vietminh offensive and allow the evacuation of French garrisons in the region. His battalion was soon encircled by an enemy division. They had to fight their way out, walking nonstop for days through the jungle while carrying their wounded. Entire companies were wiped out en route, but Bigeard and a small group of survivors somehow managed to elude an enemy that outnumbered them ten to one.