conventional ARVN forces. While their effort to hold onto their centuries-old African empire was eventually unsuccessful.000 personnel. a center of insurgency where once five thousand guerrillas operated.35 There were also about 13. Before 1968.114
RESISTING REBELLION
defected from the Guard. there were only 800 left. few decent weapons. the Territorials were given cast-off weapons and very little attention. no promotions.000 rangers.33 Opposed to these were 170.000 paramilitary border patrol police. members developed a tendency to stay inside their flimsy posts at night. Between 1955 and 1960.) As a result. the air force with 43.000.000 guerrillas were operating in the whole country.34 Village militia—Tahan pran—defended their own villages and acted as liaisons with the army to obtain local improvements. and then ambush the rescuing force (if any arrived). and very lowpay. but the latter were few before the mid-1960s. consisted of two main elements: the Regional Forces (RF) and the Popular Forces (PF). the self-defense organization in South Vietnam. In South Vietnam By the mid-1960s.39 A favorite guerrilla tactic against the Territorials was to attack a village or hamlet.36 Backing up these forces was the Royal Thai Army with 141. bordering Laos. As a result of successful militia programs. there were no ranks. the Portuguese employed local defense quite extensively: by the end of the wars in 1974.000.

“The Combined Action Program’s basic concept was to bring peace to the Vietnamese villages by uniting the local knowledge of the Popular Forces with the professional skill and superior equipment of the Marines. while RF/PF lost 69.”48 The U. and on


of the North Vietnamese border. the Regional Forces consisted of 1.Establishing Civilian Security
115
The great Tet Offensive of 1968 galvanized South Vietnam and the Territorials.”45 The Territorials received between 2 and 4 percent of the national budget. Territorial casualties were higher than those of ARVN. “the RF/PF took the brunt of the war.050 enlisted Marines.43 Between 1968 and 1972. working with and training a local Popular Forces platoon of 38 men. The Saigon government upgraded the weapons of the RF/PF. begun in the summer of 1965.500 and an area of about four square kilometers. and as time went on not all were volunteers.44 Indeed.S. The permanent Marine presence assured the villagers that they would not be abandoned. but their desertion rates were lower.932 men. but accounted for 30 percentof North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong casualties.” 46 General Creighton Abrams. the Popular Forces counted 7. By December 1972. all of them situated in the very dangerous Military Region 1.42 Throughout most of the conflict.51 (The destructiveness of the American
.800 onehundred-man companies. was possibly “the most imaginative strategy to emerge from the Viet Nam conflict. The Territorial forces were “the most cost-effective military force employed on the allied side. as well as 2 navy officers and 126 navy hospital corpsmen.41 The previous spring. At its peak the program counted 42 Marine officers and 2. and also passed out weapons to tens of thousands of civilians. or CAPs.”50 At the end of 1967 there were 79 CAPs.

To station a rifle squad of Marines in each of two thousand


villages would have required twenty-eight thousand troops. Peruvian rural defense units were known as rondas (members were ronderos).”55 The Senderista leadership trivialized peasant values and treated Indians as inert objects with but one dimension. few large landowners remained for Sendero to attack. but surely few Americans would want to see their families or their neighborhoods “liberated” in the manner of U. a philosophy professor at a provincial university. Hence the insurgents selected Indian “backwardness” as their target. the “possibility of social ascent through the new Senderista state. and other youths as well. forces in Vietnam or Korea. which would have amounted to about 5 percent of the total American military presence in Vietnam in 1968. Abimael Guzman. using ideas of intellectual superiority and party infallibility. In Peru Oneof the most successful experiments in armed rural self-defense occurred in Peru. He devotes exactly one paragraph in his memoirs to it.”53 In order to understand the origins and success of the rondas. An overexpansion of the provincial university system had produced a large number of unemployed graduates who had hoped to enter the middle class as schoolteachers.”52 It is hard to understand why he said that.”54 Since Peru had undergone extensive land reforms in the 1970s.S. justified the racial hierarchies in which it silently believed.S. troops could have provided vastly increased security to seven million peasants—as well as depriving the enemy of their services. stating. the Shining Path elite. one needs to appreciate the true nature of the Sendero movement. graduates. notably provincial professors. Yet this small


fraction of U. By 1990 the proliferation and successes of these rondas produced “the first real defeat of Shining Path since the war had started. “Instead of eliminating racial sentiment. and students. Sendero Luminoso represented to such disappointed former students.116
RESISTING REBELLION
way of war is a complex question. Sendero Luminoso was never an uprising of oppressed Indians. but rather a movement of the semi-educated middle class. “I simply had not enough numbers to put a squad of Americans in every village and hamlet. founded Sendero as a splinter of one of Peru’s several Communist parties. during the bitter struggle against the Sendero Luminoso insurgency. that
.) General Westmoreland did not support the CAPs program.

Predictably. Many Indians willingly moved into consolidated villages. notable for the absence of salt and meat. InSendero-controlled villages.

as village defense forces. peasant-despising Shining Path. reflecting peculiarities of Colombian political society and the profound ambivalence of that country’s elites toward the question of rural selfdefense.67 Fostered by these improving ties. The armed forces. “the Guatemalan armed forces have demonstrated on two occasions (1966 and 1982) that the mobilization and arming of local populations to fight against guerrillas and the concentration of government services on basic human needs in the areas of conflict are essential elements of a successful counterinsurgency strategy. As a result. the rondas expanded.
. the image and conduct of the army. had often imposed mass punishments on the civilian population. however. and paramilitaries. In Guatemala Various insurgencies smoldered in Guatemala from the early 1960s. out of a 1981 census population of slightly over


six million. the army embarked upon fundamental social reforms in the rebellious regions. the ronda system of the late 1980s and early 1990s worked because it was the true representative of the peasant community against the university-oriented. mainly northern Indians. The insurgents sometimes mounted operations by as many as two hundred fighters. The army also served as a path of upward mobility. police. with a fairly elaborate infrastructure in the Northwest. In addition to peasant mobilization.”71 In Colombia The conditions affecting the formation of self-defense forces in Colombia have differed radically from those in neighboring Peru.118
RESISTING REBELLION
military.68 Guatemala had one of the best armies in the Caribbean Basin. the insurgency began to wither. something on the order of three thousand guerrillas were operating in more than half ofpopulation to be mobilized into militia units. they clearly need support. military operations need to support and supplement clear political objectives. Perhaps future counter-revolutionary exponents would be wise to regard Malaya and the New Villages as aberrations rather than examples. such as aircraft surveillance and special units to harass the guerrillas in their own areas. probably best begun with (1) a variant of the Marine CAPs. in addition to the CAPs.

the ranks of loyalism included many poor backcountry farmers. Indochina. as well as into the complex meanings of nationalism by taking a look at indigenous groups that opposed the insurgent movements in the American colonies. or actually oppose. it appears that at least one-fifth of the white colonial population remained loyal to the crown. with higher percentages in


parts of the South (including perhaps as much as onethird in South Carolina). Napoleonic Spain.2 The popular image of the American Tories as being all rich and well-born is wide of the mark. and Indonesia.122
RESISTING REBELLION
CHAPTER 7
LOYALISTS: INDIGENOUS ANTI-INSURGENCY
This volume examines many insurgent movements that claimed to fight for national independence against foreign oppression.” are often branded as collaborators or traitors. the Philippines. loyalism tended to be high among the Scots and the Germans of North Carolina. the Confederate States of America. Yet these derogatory labels serve to obscure the fact that numerous anticolonial or secessionist struggles bear striking resemblances to true civil wars. Portuguese Africa. Algeria. referred to here by the general term “loyalists. in particular. notable elements in the affected society do not support. In additionto members from the elite class.1
THE AMERICAN LOYALISTS
It is clear that during the American War of Independence the patriotic party comprised the great majority of the politically active population in the former colonies. One can acquire insights into the phenomenon of insurgency. India. Almost invariably. the self-proclaimed independence movement. many frontier smallholders menaced by Indian attacks stayed aloof from the revolutionary cause. and among settlers who had not been born in
122
. Moreover. Afghanistan. however. In the southern colonies. These elements. Nevertheless.

11 Thus. In the aftermath of the war. many Tories remained in the new United States.10 They spread terror in New York’s Mohawk Valley for years. hence efforts to mobilize them were haphazard and disorganized. Leger’s failed expedition on the eve of Saratoga. This sort of activity predictably


provoked ferocious counterviolence. in spite of all this British mistrust and mismanagement.Loyalists: Indigenous Anti-Insurgency
123
the American colonies. Few in London wished to understand that political loyalty to the crown did not necessarily indicate a willingness. but over sixty thousand left for British territory.6 Worst of all.5 In contrast to the patriot party. especially in the cities. when British forces retreated out of or evacuated an area. armed Tory bands were very active. the Tories never produced any national leaders. South Carolina. loyalism seems to have been above average among non-English minorities. The exaggerated belief in southern Loyalist strength undermined the British war effort and prepared the road to Yorktown. All the other colonies furnished as many more.9 Tories composed a substantial portion of St. a thousand-man Loyalist force sufferedannihilation at the battle of King’s Mountain. in October 1780. for a total of about fifty thousand American Loyalist regulars and militia. This lack of initiative was one of the Loyalists’ greatest weaknesses. or an ability.3 Perhaps paradoxically. relying on British direction and seeking protection from British regulars. They made up two-thirds of the British forces in Savannah in 1779.12 Despite some very good monographs
.”8 New York alone furnished fifteen thousand men to the regular British army. And “altogether there were at times more Loyalists in America who were fighting in the British armies than Washington had in his Continental Army.7 Nevertheless.4 After their disaster at Saratoga in October 1777. For their part. At the same time. the British concentrated on the southern colonies in large part because


of their belief that the South was swarming with Loyalists. and eight thousand militia. to bear arms for it. and they often treated such units with indifference or contempt. they often abandoned those who had revealed their loyalism. British commanders were also hesitant to incorporate Loyalists into their own ranks or to grant them regular commissions. In general. and they engaged in plunder and house-burning in the Carolinas. especially in New York and Pennsylvania. they were ineffectual on their own. the British were very late in raising armed Tory units. mainly Canada. the British never developed a clear doctrine of how best to use the Loyalists.

not resistance. “The Loyalists in the American Revolution suffered a most abject kind of political failure. was the best way to protect nationalindependence. not France). the role played by the Tories in the War of Independence has virtually disappeared from view. for example. perhaps one
. losing not only their argument. implying that opinion was homogeneous and united on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. the term Afrancesado indicated Spaniards who adopted French manners and/or expressions.124
RESISTING REBELLION
concerning them. At any rate. their war and their place in American society. the War of Secession. fought in the Union armies. twelve thousand Spanish families followed him. Afterward it denoted those Spaniards who supported Napoleon’s imposition of his brother Joseph as king of Spain. ideological (France can bring renewed prosperity and strength to backward Spain). These included about thirty-two thousand Union soldiers from the western counties of seceded Virginia (these counties later emerged as


the state of West Virginia). or self-interested (the anti-French guerrillas will eventually produce social revolution)—and often a mix of these motives were at work. Each of these figures exceeds the number of troops from several northern states. undoubtedly it fluctuated according to the perceived chances of French success in Iberia. The reasons for such support were varied—geopolitical (the true enemy of Spain was England. All told. when erstwhile King Joseph Bonaparte retreated across the Pyrenees in 1813. as a struggle between “North” and “South” (or worse. the “war between the states”). “The core of the Afrancesado position was that collaboration. but even their proper place in history.15
LINCOLN’S SOUTHERNERS
Americans often refer to their Civil War. These are crude and misleading characterizations. a far cry from the reality. Scores offrom doing so. reflect that at Appomattox. thus making a real difference of two hundred thousand between the two sides. The American-led unit that captured Aguinaldo himself in April 1901 was composed largely of Filipinos. with a long tradition of service to Spain and hatred of the dominant Tagalog ethnic group (to which Aguinaldo belonged).S.Loyalists: Indigenous Anti-Insurgency
125
hundred thousand white southerners served in the Union armies. expected American recognition of his new government. several reasons led Filipinos to support the Americans. Aguinaldo and his followers consequently attacked U. and many more joined U.
THE PHILIPPINES AFTER 1898
During the Spanish-American War.18 Predictably. he commanded fifty-seven thousand soldiers.S. and thus a lengthy armed resistance would merely result in
.17 By mid-1901 thousands (mostly non-Tagalogs) were serving as intelligence agents and scouts for the


of an eventual auxiliary force of fifteen thousand. Many Filipinos believed the Americans were unbeatable. forces in August 1898. forces. Another was the McKinley administration’s published written promise to prepare the Philippines for democratic self-government and eventual independence.

000 were Punjabi Muslims and 88. Furthermore. the Indian Army on the whole remained loyal to Britain (actually. In these campaigns they suffered twentyfour thousand dead and sixty-four thousand wounded. Nevertheless. the army of the Indian Republic. which alienated many.5 million of whom were Muslim. To combat
. Algeria has always been sparsely populated. East Africa.000 wounded.
FRENCH ALGERIA
Despite being a sprawling area larger in size than Western Europe. Italy. guerrilla units began using terrorist tactics. with 2. of indigenous troops is “the supreme achievement of a colonial power. to their British officers).in large part. 8. Despite widespread and sometimes violent agitation for independence during the 1930s.000 killed and 70.000 Sikhs. Greece. the American troops in the islands practiced a policy of attraction. Iraq.5 million members the British Army in India during World War II constituted the largest volunteer army in history. North Africa. and Syria. with the approval of nationalist leader and future prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. providing free smallpox vaccination and other medical services.000 Indians. often with soldiers as teachers. Both the advancing Japanese and the pro-Axis Indian National Army (INA) offered the members of the enormous British Indian Army many inducements to desertion or rebellion. During World War I. Iran. the British Indian Army became.20 and also fought in Malaya.
BRITISH INDIA
If obtaining and holding the loyalty. introducing


systematic sanitation in the urban areas. Bravery and obedience were authentic and fundamental values of those Indians who wore the British Indian Army uniform.19 British regiments recruited peasants from backward areas. British Indian forces suffered 36. as well as the obedience. Over the course of that conflict. as the war wound on. improving the courts.126
RESISTING REBELLION
useless destruction of life and property. and—perhaps the most popular measure—setting up free public schools. where loyalty was first to the clan. with a total in the 1950s of only 9. of whom 136. British Indian troops beat the Japanese in Burma.” then the British in India attained that objective.5 million people. that army included 740. and then to the military unit raised among the clan. Not least in importance.21 Because India attainedits independence peacefully.

000. In addition to untold numbers in the militia. the latter figure is almost three times the U.000 loyalist Muslim auxiliaries. in both militia and regular army units blacks and whites served happily together.23 The Algerian Muslims who had fought on the side of the French only to find themselves deserted by them paid a horrific price.000 to 150.”25 The Portuguese often incorporated ex-guerrillas into their service. In the words of one observer. among others. Hence more than 2 percent of the Muslim population served with the French. Indeed.Loyalists: Indigenous Anti-Insurgency
127
the Muslim-led rebellion in Algeria which began in 1954. it was almost certainly some of these who assassinated the well-known independence leader Amilcar Cabral.7 million Americans in 2005.24
PORTUGUESE AFRICA
The Portuguese were employing substantial numbers of native


Africans in their armed forces as early as the 1870s. The army paid its African soldiers relatively good wages. the French utilized the services of 180. Africans of different ethnic and religious derivation from the dominant guerrilla groups believed that they would fare better under the Portuguese than under any possible indigenous regime. the equivalent of 5. and sharing the same barracks rooms. but President de Gaulle abandoned Algeria anyway. Mozambique. more Algerian Muslims actively served the French cause than the revolutionary National Liberation Front (FLN): “At no time from 1954 to 1962 did the numbers of those fighting with the FLN for independence match the number of Algerians on the French side. the Portuguese completely integrated their forces.”22 The French army and its Muslim auxiliaries defeated therebellion. eating the same food. “twelve years after fighting began. losses in the Vietnam War.
. Apparently not one single mutiny or mass desertion in a regular unit occurred.000 who belonged to special operational units.) While the British in Malaya and the French in Algeria had separate European and native units. Estimates of pro-French Muslims executed by the regimes of independent Algeria after 1962 run from 30.S. and Portuguese Guinea between 1961 and 1974. including 60. fifty-four thousand African soldiers—representing 35 percent of regular Portuguese army units—took part in the independence conflicts in Angola. But quite beyond that. both officers and men. (The Portuguese were especially assiduous in their cultivation of Muslims in Guinea.

the Communist regime in Kabul reduced the training period for officers in its army from three


years to two. that the resistance had thoroughly penetrated it. and lengthened the term of conscript service from three years to four.27 These militias normally consisted of ethnic groups different from those supporting the insurgency in a particular province.26 After the Portuguese left their African colonies. Ever more desperate measures followed.
THE KABUL ARMY
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979.128
RESISTING REBELLION
These African conflicts were protracted but not intense. or joined the resistance. in territories sixteen times the size of the state of New York. over half either deserted or defected to the resistance. Such Draconian measures predictably increased the number of mutinies as well as desertions. others found jobs in civilian government agencies. the Kabul army counted thirty thousand. twenty were brigadier generals. Kabul army outposts and baseswere surrounded with thick belts of land mines. went into exile. conscripts were stationed outside of their home areas. and although of questionable loyalty and lacking centralized organization. and various militias. correctly. All these inducements failed. the secret police. Portuguese army combat deaths over a thirteen-year period of struggle. In response to this alarming hemorrhage of manpower. But even Afghans sent to the USSR for officer training deserted or defected. The regime paid well for militia services. The Soviets deeply distrusted this army. plus ten thousand in the air force and forty thousand in paramilitary units. these groups
. one of their first acts was to disarm most units of the Afghan army. totaled four thousand. By the end of 1986. Promotions flowed abundantly: one defector said that of


four hundred men in his unit. bloody conflict between indigenous groups continued for more than a quarter of a century. Any tenth grader who volunteered would receive a twelfth grade diploma upon leaving. not to keep the enemy out but the soldiers in. fearing. Among the eighty thousand men in the preinvasion army. To control desertion. and later to fourteen. Hence in 1984 the regime lowered the draft age to sixteen. Any eleventh grader was guaranteed entrance into a university upon completion of his service. of which 23 percent were African. Many of the eight thousand pre-invasion army officers had been killed by the native Communist regime. Young volunteers received higher pay than pre-invasion deputy ministers.

for the reasons stated above. It is difficult to say whether it wasAmbonese admiration of and loyalty to the Dutch that stimulated conversions. the inability of the Soviets to take better advantage of the abundant ethnic and religious cleavages in Afghanistan is astounding.
INDONESIA
Indonesia before and during World War II was the scene of a dual collaboration—one of ethnic minorities with the Dutch. Conversions to Christianity had begun with the arrival of the Portuguese. along with
. The Ambonese and the Dutch The island of Ambon. A main consequence of all this ineptitude was the Soviet discovery that trying to impose a Communist regime over Afghanistan involved incomparably more fighting than they had supposed. has an area of three hundred square miles. and that. The separateness of the Ambonese had many roots. or the other way around. In retrospect. In 1605 the


Dutch expelled the Portuguese28 and established a major naval base near the island’s principal town. In any event. Perhaps most important of all was the Ambonese acceptance of Christianity. the education young Ambonese received in Christian schools gave them clear advantages over the Muslim population. and of Indonesian nationalists with the Japanese. When the Dutch replaced the Portuguese. if not long before. most of this fighting had to be borne by the Soviets themselves. the Ambonese have considered themselves a people apart. or both. and admiration for Dutch abilities and methods. Educated Christian Ambonese made careers as bureaucrats and soldiers. including their peripheral location in an eastern corner of the Malay Archipelago. one of the Moluccas in the Banda Sea. the Dutch East India Company encouraged further conversionsamong the Ambonese as a means of solidifying their loyalty. Since those days. also called Ambon.29 The relative lack of economic opportunities on Ambon. The Portuguese arrived in 1512 and made the island their military and religious headquarters. a dislike for actual or potential domination of the Indonesian islands by the Javanese (a dislike the Ambonese shared with many other peoples in the area). who shunned all Dutch schools whether Catholic or Protestant.Loyalists: Indigenous Anti-Insurgency
129
often succeeded in keeping guerrilla units out of their immediate territory.

enticed young Ambonese to join the colonial army. Most Ambonese soldiers were proud to be seen as such. Japan had long coveted the archipelago for its petroleum. very few of whom joined the army before 1929. Units of the Imperial Japanese Army began landing


in Indonesia in December 1941 and quickly overwhelmed the poorly-equipped Dutch.31 The Dutch recruited the Ambonese primarily for their political reliability.33 rubber.) By the mid-nineteenth century.000 men of the KNIL surrendered to the Japanese. In 1876. as did other Allied units. and tea.”34 During the
. the Royal Netherlands Indies Army (KNIL). and they came to value these recruits highly. the Dutch had undertaken a systematic recruitment of Ambonese Christians. and British allies. 1942.130
RESISTING REBELLION
their religious and emotional affinity for the Dutch. this role engendered widespread dislike of the Ambonese on the part of other Indonesians. the first fleet action of the Pacific war.”30 Until 1921. the Netherlands East Indies had a population of about 70 million. as a result many Ambonese members of the KNIL were stationed outsideAmbon. identification with the KNIL. Dutch policy usually tried to maintain a ratio of one European for every three indigenous soldiers.000 Ambonese. quinine. isolated from the populations among whom they were stationed. nickel.32 It became the common practice for Ambonese sons to follow their soldier fathers into the KNIL. (In this they differed radically from the Muslims. rice. destroyed the small naval squadron of the Dutch and their American. of these. of whom 1 million were Chinese and about 250. The Ambonese “were seen both by fellow Indonesians and the Japanese as loyal supporters of the Dutch. Absent from their own homes and communities. and a feeling of superiority to other indigenous groups. Australian. The Japanese soon began releasing the native soldiers they had taken prisoner. Ambonese units


enjoyed better food and living conditions than other native units in the KNIL. there were approximately 220. According to the 1930 census. to deter possible rebellion by other ethnic groups. the commander of the KNIL wrote to the governor general that “the closer binding to us and promotion of the Ambonese soldiers cannot be too highly recommended. the Ambonese soldiers developed into a subculture based on loyalty to the Dutch. but not the Ambonese. Combined with their differing ethnicity and religion. who had to remain in prison camps along with the Dutch. 4. On March 8. 93. The Battle of the Java Sea in February 1942.000 Dutch nationals.300 were serving in the KNIL. When World War II broke out.

and also from Muslim Indonesians. Early in 1951 about fourthousand Ambonese soldiers and their families were evacuated to the Netherlands. With Japanese backing. In the Javanese capital of Jakarta bitter clashes occurred between Ambonese soldiers and troops of the Indonesian Republic. Ambonese living outside of Ambon were physically attacked. and on the Ambonese.
. Large-scale fighting between the KNIL and republican forces accompanied and sometimes replaced negotiations. Finally the Dutch recognized the federal United States of Indonesia in December 1949.” Indonesian troops destroyed the monument on the island erected by the Dutch in memory of Ambonese soldiers who had suffered for their loyalty to the Netherlands. 1945. On Ambon. Most Ambonese were alarmed by these developments. Returnees to Ambon reported widespread anti-Ambonese atrocities.35 During the period between the Japanese surrender and the reestablishment of Dutch authority. Since then


many others have followed their example. A republican guerrilla group declared war on the Dutch.Loyalists: Indigenous Anti-Insurgency
131
occupation both the Dutch and the Ambonese suffered much from the Japanese. as Ambonese soldiers had always done. including attacks on families. Instead they entered into negotiations with the republican nationalists for an Indonesian federation united with the Kingdom of the Netherlands. the returning Dutch did not prosecute those who had collaborated with the Japanese.36 When Dutch troops returned. Except for a few cases. Ambonese everywhere openly rejoiced. 1945. In subsequent years the increasingly centralized and dictatorial regimes in Jakarta have provoked other revolts in various parts of Indonesia. These experiences served to bind the Ambonese all the more closely in their loyalty to the Dutch. In particular. The outlook for theAmbonese was grim. they much preferred a direct union with the Netherlands along the lines of Suriname or Curaçao. the nationalist leader Sukarno declared Indonesia an independent republic on August 17. a rebellion against the new centralizing regime flared briefly in the name of the “Republic of the South Moluccas. viewing federation as the antechamber to a centralized Indonesia dominated by the Javanese. Ambonese KNIL soldiers gave important assistance to the Dutch reoccupation of Jakarta. identifying the perpetrators as primarily Indonesian nationalists. Most of the emigrants continued to send money home. on Eurasians. In 1950 Sukarno and his allies dissolved the federation and proclaimed the consolidated Indonesian Republic. reaching Ambon on September 22.

There was perhaps more discussion than implementation of this policy. not loyalists. A third fundament of


Dutch rule was assimilation: the aim was to bind Indonesia to the Netherlands by creating a proDutch middle class through Western-style education and then admission into the middle and upper ranges of the bureaucracy. both Portuguese and Dutch. not the Middle East. To counter Islamic resistance. Islam was facing a degree of competition from Commu-
. Islam had taken root in almost all the islands. It is very revealing that the Indonesian Republic claimed for itself those territories of the archipelago—and only those— that had been part of the former Netherlands East Indies. when the Dutch arrived in what eventually became Indonesia. Alliance with the aristocracy was a centerpiece of Dutch rule. and on Sumatra as late as 1908. Aside from nationalism. holy wars of liberation broke out inis not possible. Western education had a tendency to create nationalists. and the colonial governments subsidized both Protestant and Catholic missionary activities.38 Islam served as a rallying point for resistance to Christian Westerners. and learned to adapt itself to societies in the archipelago that had already absorbed heavy doses of Hindu culture. Consequently. Four hundred years later. So was the policy of Christianization. Indonesian Islam was of a special kind: it had arrived by way of India.” Such a country did not exist until the end of World War II. which was often quite lukewarm in its devotion to Islam and definitely opposed to the social predominance of religious leaders.132
RESISTING REBELLION
However wise or unwise their choices may have been along the way.

Japanese insistence on recognition of the divinity


of the emperor. While they supported the idea. not exile. and partly of police surveillance.42 which was called Peta. and throughout the war. as a rule nationalists—mainly Western-educated and urban—did not join the new army. Later the Japanese set up an Islamic volunteer corps called Hizbu’llah. By 1944 Peta counted thirty-five thousand members. early Japanese occupation policy relied on the ancient principle of divide-and-rule. To a large degree. serious Muslims could simply ignore the Dutch presence. the result partly of the long alliance between the Dutch and the local aristocrats. The arrogance of the Japanese occupation forces in Southeast Asia eventually proved deeply offensive even to their collaborators. Thousands of others were enrolled in semimilitary organizations armed only with bamboo spears. to serve as a support organization forPeta. Most of the prominent nationalists were of course Dutch-educated. greatly augmenting their prestige. however. indigenous forces were seen as a means to continue the struggle against the Allies after the Japanese had left Indonesia. Secular nationalism remained relatively weak among the peasantry.43 In Indonesia. naturally. Nationalist groups also flourished under the Japanese. and on the necessity to bow deeply toward Tokyo. most Muslims in Indonesia favored the Axis rather than the Allies. No such option existed. The Imperial Japanese Army that arrived in 1941 was very demanding toward the indigenous peoples and extremely punitive toward disobedience.Loyalists: Indigenous Anti-Insurgency
133
nism as well: in the early 1920s the Dutch quickly suppressed a Communist-led uprising and exiled its leaders to New Guinea. All over occupied Southeast Asia.41 The Japanese-trained officer corps


consisted predominantly of Muslim notables and local aristocrats. with a crescent moon in the center. was of course
. the acronym for Defenders of the Homeland. The Japanese made clear their intention to incorporate the Netherlands Indies into what they euphemistically called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. with the Japanese. Their original purpose was to assist the Japanese occupation in maintaining order. The Peta flag featured a rising sun. who placed them in the seats of power. was their sanction. To accomplish this aim. But after it became clear that Japan was going to lose the war.40 With Japanese favoritism toward Muslims. the Japanese tried to promote Islam. with another twenty-five thousand military auxiliaries. The Japanese soon began building indigenous armed forces. the Army of God. came persecutionof Christians. Death.

44 In summary.45 along with the indigenous southern religious sects.46 large sectors of the native Catholic minority. in fact of the entire thirty-year Vietnamese conflict that ended in 1975. soon followed by the looming defeat of the Japanese conquerors themselves. Thus Japanese-trained armies in Southeast Asia would turn against their Japanese masters late in the war. the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam). and long lasting. As the conflict entered its last and
. training guerrillas to continue the struggle against the returning forces of the Western powers. mobilized 300. mainly Javanese. Besides. That struggle is often portrayed as a contest between French colonialism on one side and the Viet Minh organization on the other. The effects of this fundamental fact on minority groups throughout the


archipelago would be profound. the relatively rapid Japanese defeat of the Western overlords of Indonesia. In this context occurred the February 1945 revolt of Peta at Bitar. but it is misleading. under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap. exposed the myth of imperial omnipotence. Beginnings of the South Vietnamese Army The South Vietnamese Army. By 1953. must always remain obscure unless one grasps that the Viet Minh were opposed by Emperor Bao Dai’s army. Such a depiction is not totally incorrect. both because the Japanese were losing and also because they were reneging on their promises to install their collaborators as rulers of independent states. whatever its other features. the Communist-dominated Viet Minh. was in fact a Vietnamese civil war. hundreds of Japanesesoldiers remained behind in Indonesia after the surrender.
THE SOUTH VIETNAMESE
The history of the state of South Vietnam began with one conflict and ended with another. on Java. had its roots in the 1946–1954 conflict for control of Vietnam. Consequently the story of its army and the fate of the country were one and the same.000 conventional troops and guerrillas.134
RESISTING REBELLION
repugnant to most Muslims. the armed forces of the newly proclaimed Indonesian Republic were composed and led to a large degree by those. who had collaborated with and been trained by the Japanese. and other important social groupings. Hence the 1946–1954 conflict. The subsequent nature and record of ARVN. Despite such serious problems.

American officers arrived to assist in training and expanding ARVN. Instead the Americans built an army capable


of repelling the North Korean invasion of 1950.000.000 more armed personnel mobilized by the sects and the Catholic militias. out of roughly 450. especially Catholics and members of the indigenous sects. Thus. equipment.48 plus 30. Hence neither the Vietnamese in French uniform nor those in Emperor Bao Dai’s army had proper training.000.000 were Foreign Legionnaires. Thus ARVN became roadbound
. U. or leadership. equivalent to nineteen million Americans today—migrated from their ancestral homes and property to face the uncertainties of a new life in the South. Further. only 50. for decades and in great danger. were Vietnamese. when Vietnam was partitioned in 1954 into a Communist North and a Bao Dai South. it must surely have seemed more patriotic—more Vietnamese— to support Bao Dai and his traditionalist nationalism ratherapproximately 330. had fought against the Viet Minh. and North Africans. To this last figure one needs to add another 150.S. over 73 percent.000 personnel on the anti–Viet Minh side.000 in the French naval and air forces. Senegalese.51 When the French army left South Vietnam in 1956. But for others. military advisers did not develop the type of forces that had proved effective against guerrillas in Malaya and the Philippines. And fully 150.Loyalists: Indigenous Anti-Insurgency
135
most desperate phase. In South Vietnam.47 Another 50. Few officers above the rank of lieutenant were Vietnamese. the forces under the French flag totaled perhaps 265. including 15.49 The French were hesitant to create a Vietnamese armed force that might one day challenge them.000 of the soldiers in French uniform were Vietnamese.

s. was inferior


to that of the enemy’s: ARVN did not get the M-16 rifle in any significant numbers until after the Tet Offensive of 1968. ARVN’s American M-41 tanks were inferior to the Soviet-supplied T-54s. as a result competent but unconnected field commanders were left in the field. crucial elements in any counterinsurgency. ARVN was exactly the opposite.57 Northernborn officers (very many of them Catholic) comprised fully one-quarter of the officer corps. Nevertheless. before then it was outgunned by the Communist forces armed with excellent automatic weapons. but generally they served only one-year tours and did not speak the language.56 The shortage of officers was a heritage of the French colonial period.54 Further. 13 percent of colonels. veterans. The French army required that an officer possess a high school education.D.could overcome the traditional advantages enjoyed by the attacker.63 But to say that the South Vietnamese army took higher casualties than the Americans hardly tells the story. During the entire Vietnam conflict from 1954 to 1975. about two hundred thousand ARVN personnel were killed. Every year from 1954 to 1975. South Vietnamese Casualties A persistent. ARVN would do some of its best fighting. ARVN held on to it.60 During the battle for Quang Tri at the end of 1972. provided sufficient ammunition. some authors give higher figures. Nevertheless. one must consider that total American military fatalities in all American wars over the past two hundred years—from the American Revolution through Vietnam. The town of Xuan Loc.Loyalists: Indigenous Anti-Insurgency
137
ally ranked ARVN second only to the Israeli army among free-world


land forces. had suffered fatal casualties in the same proportion to its population as ARVN did in relation to the population of South Vietnam. those U. and in World War II. the NVA concentrated overwhelming numbers against ARVN units in that city. ARVN alone (excluding the militia. military deaths per year. showing that “the South Vietnamese. because the population of South Vietnam was many times smaller than that of the United States. Xuan Loc was the locale of the 18th ARVN Division. To grasp the significance of that figure. and these numbers do not include the militia (or civilians). the Americans incurred an average of four thousand military deaths a year. including both sides in the Civil War as well as World War I and World War II—amountthem to a militia unit near their homes. ARVN waged war for twenty years.”64 This factor accounts for the high desertion rates among first-year soldiers at harvest time and around the family-oriented Tet holidays. In summary. in terms of population. indeed that they desired it. In addition. Desertion in ARVN had sociological. abandoned by its U. desertion rates were close to zero. allies. more than forty times as many fatalities as the Americans. The Problem of Desertion ARVN desertion rates were high. ARVN had an inappropriate structure. there was no social stigma attached to desertion. Other deserters joined militia units closer to their homes. But the nexus between political conviction and military valor is not always direct and obvious. some who deserted ARVN later rejoined. and the Saigon


overwhelmingly from urban areas). gasoline. advisers. it lacked adequate supplies to go on. took enormous casualties. not political roots.138
RESISTING REBELLION
casualty rates were actually higher) suffered. ARVN soldiers served for the duration of the war. Some American journalists concluded from this that the South Vietnamese people did not oppose a Northern victory.

and social organization. one of the world’s best land forces. the average Union desertion rate was 33 percent. and for the Confederates. Such an argument is like claiming that the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865. it is difficult to understand why such a huge military operation was necessary to overcome them. crucial point: desertion from ARVN hardly ever meant defection to the Communists. but rather to a massive conventional invasion by the North Vietnamese Army. is this:Saigon did not fall to rioting mobs.000 had deserted. The South Vietnamese state. or of the Spanish Republic in 1939. the victory of the Hanoi regime. But that statement does not prove that in later years no large social groupings within the population of South Vietnam opposed a Communist conquest. the people of the southern provinces of Vietnam had become notably different from those of the North. The evidence usually offered for this proposition is the eventual collapse of the South Vietnamese state and army. in terms of speech.67 To put this question into some comparative perspective. 40 percent. newly appointed General George Meade arrived to take command of his Army of the Potomac. much less to the pajama-clad guerrillas of American mythology. was no historical anomaly. There


shield of the Union cause during the Civil War was the Army of the Potomac. Recall also that the largest battle ever fought on the continent of North America took place at Gettysburg. If South Vietnamese society was so apathetic. but instead found only 85.68 Popular Opposition to Communist Conquest Another strange but widespread belief about the South Vietnamese is that there was little opposition to.

their support had been slowly declining for a long time. informed observers estimated that less than one-third of the South Vietnamese population supported the Communist side. and others. the ARVN and the Territorials (militia) numbered over a million men. In the South’s large and growing urban areas. the Communists’ popularity suffered severely as they began forcing young men into their ranks to replacetheir enormous combat losses. In addition.”69 thus depriving the Communists of the main source of their rural attraction. the Southern religious sects. ARVN and the Territorials had beaten back the uttermost Communist military efforts. the post–World War II occupation of the North by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces and the South by British troops. the robust membership of indigenous southern religious sects.S. non-Vietnamese mountain tribes. Over the course of the conflict.140
RESISTING REBELLION
counted for and reinforced those differences. Many elements in South Vietnam opposed a Northern takeover. Clearly. the large Chinese minority. These included close to a million post-partition Northern refugees. Consequently. in the early 1970s the South Vietnamese government carried out “the most extensive land reform program yet undertaken in any non-Communist country in Asia. Together. broad strata of the


Southern population opposed a Communist takeover. the urban middle class. the reestablishment of French control first in the Saigon area. especially the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao. During the mid-1970s. The brutal Viet Cong massacres of civilians in the city of Hué during the 1968 Tet Offensive confirmed the rejection of the Communist cause by urban Vietnamese. the necessity for the Viet Minh guerrillas to operate close to the Chinese border. ardent Communist exhortations for the urban population to carry out a general uprising failed resoundingly during the Tet and the Easter Offensives. Catholics. Nevertheless. altogether their membership was nonetheless quite numerous.70 Clearly. neither the Viet Minh nor the Viet Cong had been able to develop much strength. While there was overlapping among some of these groups. would
.far from the Mekong Delta. ARVN officers and their families. the U. While the rural areas were the wellsprings of Communist sympathy in South Vietnam. Japanese wartime administrative policy that reinforced regionalism. the most important being the usual division of Vietnam into a northern and a southern kingdom. and so on. Reinforcing southern separateness were the longer-established French presence in the Saigon–Mekong Delta area (“Cochin China”).

President Nixon assured South Vietnam President Thieu in writing that if Hanoi resumed its effort to conquer the South. in January 1973. Washington and Hanoi signed peace accords. the Paris Agreements.S. gasoline. These drastic cuts “seriously undermined South Vietnamese combat power.S. in contrast. The U. North Vietnam. By 1974. a figure totally inadequate to keep ARVN’s American equipment working. South Vietnam’s American ally


began to turn against it.”74 The Easter Offensive of 1972 had shown that regular NVA divisions. This stunning asymmetry sealed the fate of the South Vietnamese. Meanwhile large quantities of Soviet ammunition. Saigon pleaded for 1 percent of that amount.S. 1973. and heavy weapons flowed in to the North. the United States had spent $150 billion (perhaps $425 billion in 2005 values) on the war. Artillery units in heavy combat areas were limited to four shells per day. U.S. Abandons Its Allies After years of negotiations. By summer 1974. Between 1976 and 1980. air attacks on North Vietnam and provided that the few remaining U.Loyalists: Indigenous Anti-Insurgency
141
decide to withdraw all its forces from the conflict and. were incomparably more vulnerable to air attack than Viet
. to deprive theThe accords prohibited U. but Congress begrudgingly granted them only $700 million. would tacitly be allowed to maintain nearly a quarter of a million troops in South Vietnam. with their tanks. however. Congress gave Hanoi the signal for a new offensive.73 These drastic reductions in American aid to the South convinced Hanoi that the war had reached “a fundamental turning point. in 1973 Congress slashed assistance to the South to but a third of the aid it had received in 1972.

Tens of thousands of civilian family members had settled in the areas to which their soldiers had been assigned. Hanoi agents within the Saigon government spread rumors and panic. But when President Thieu decided to regroup ARVN southward. President Ford made no mention whatever of Vietnam in his


first State of the Union address. Hence the halting of all U. he and his staff had done little serious preparation for such a massive operation. Here was the final disastrous consequence of assigning draftees far from their home villages. where less than 20 percent of the South’s people lived. The Fall When NVA units seized Ban Me Thuot on March 11.S. To this undeniable repudiation of the peace agreements. Thus President Thieu decided on a massive strategic retrenchment: ARVN was to withdraw from northern and central South Vietnam. On March 24. The Hanoi politburo now knew it had a green light for all-out invasion. Many ARVN officers and government officials received no warning about the retrenchment. In December 1974. Halving the amount of territory to be defendedwould be the equivalent of doubling the size of ARVN. As civilians in the northern provinces realized that ARVN was leaving. 1975.
.S. the U. Six days later the NVA entered Da Nang. except for enclaves at Hué and Da Nang. and several of the roads and bridges intended for the retreat to the south turned out to be impassable. Thus. Many of those soldiers. Most of ARVN’s thirteen divisions were in the northern and central provinces. left their units to search for them. within a few days retrenchment turned into collapse. fears of Communist massacres like those in Hué in 1968 galvanized an exodus of refugees. amid scenes of indescribable suffering. making movement difficult and defense impossible. North Vietnamese Army units overran Phuoc Long province. made no response.


Congress rejected President Ford’s pleas for emergency aid. desperate to ensure that their families were moving south. such a strategic retrenchment was long overdue. air activity was an irresistible invitation for the North to violate the peace accords and take the offensive. North Vietnamese aircraft bombed and strafed the civilian columns thronging the roads. the ancient capital of Hué fell. They clogged the roads to Hué and Da Nang. and fall back to Saigon and the Mekong Delta.142
RESISTING REBELLION
Cong units had been. Most ARVN units in the northern and central provinces disintegrated. Actually.

whatever their political frailties. The South still held Saigon. Then. It still controlled all sixteen of the provincial capitals of the Mekong Delta. would by today have made similar advances. and often a salient. rain beganto pour down. The identity of loyalist groups is almost invariably linked to ethnicity. religion. exactly twenty-five years after President Truman authorized the first U. Between the capital and the Cambodian border ARVN units were putting up fierce resistance. protection for more than half a century. But they never got that chance. independent South Korea today lives in unprecedented prosperity. kinship and/or venerable tradition. At any rate.
REFLECTION
One major source of the phenomenon of loyalism is the frequent resemblance of insurgencies and so-called wars of national liberation to civil wars. assistance to the French effort in Vietnam. all was calm. the torrent that would have stopped the NVA. But on April 30.Loyalists: Indigenous Anti-Insurgency
143
But all was not yet lost. One is that loyalty to the regime—domestic or imported—or hostility


an error. sometimes producing violent internal clashes. This event radically disorganized the Sendero movement. Because it can have such lasting effects on intelligence gathering and the potential for future insurgencies. indeed. irregular British forces in the Carolinas often shot captured or surrendered American prisoners on the spot. Various fissures beset any insurgent movement. founder of Sendero Luminoso. In the Malayan Emergency. especially regarding food and women. This was the experience. while he was visiting his girlfriend’s house in Lima. With some help from the U. commanders of South Vietnamese Army units gave little attention to interrogating prisoners.5 By revealing the nature and extent of such divisions. or other cleavage lines. This principle is not always self-evident: in the early 1960s. the increasingly effective intelligence work of the Police1951 at the latest in Malaya.6 On the other hand. or between different segments of the rank and file along religious. The quality and quantity of intelligence available to the authorities also serves as a gauge of how the war is going. during the American Revolution. for example.

as well as their movements. allowing crucial information about the number and condition of his followers. penetrating insurgent organizations. British intelligence benefited greatly from
. during their invasion of Lebanon. In all.”8 Counterinsurgent forces can augment the flow of intelligence by recruiting among the local population. Overcrowded conditions in these places often resulted in the judicial release of enemy prisoners after only two years or less.”9 Sometimes the insurgents cooperate unknowingly (or at least unwillingly) with the counterinsurgent intelligence. These scouts knew


the countryside and the sympathies of its inhabitants. employing technological means such as aircraft and satellites.11 In the South African war. Observing the great increase in the volume of enemy radio traffic helped U.S. Intercepting enemy couriers often provides priceless information. In Bolivia. prisons have proven to be schools for revolutionaries. who turned their prison cells into veritable schools of indoctrination. the U. Proactive counterinsurgent tactics also damage the enemy’s intelligence capability: “A guerrilla band which is constantly harassed and driven from place to place soon loses contact with its own sources of information. In its efforts to subdue Filipino guerrillas after the Spanish-American War.S. the Israelis kept most of their Palestinian prisoners confined in the huge Ansara Prison Camp—a move that inadvertently served to increase the solidaritycoup: the capture of the Philippines insurgent leader Emilio Aguinaldo himself. the Marines’ Small Wars Manual. General Sir Gerald Templer arrived to take charge of insurgency-torn Malaya. blandly states: “The liberal use of intelligence funds will be of assistance in obtaining information of hostile intentions. Templer understood the key role of good intelligence in counterinsurgency. during the Huk rebellion.”)16 The lure of amnesty was another effective enticement to share information.20 Consequently. they learned through close observation to identify supporters of the insurgency. in Peru during the 1980s. In the same country. the intelligence available to the armed forces greatly improved under Secretary of Defense Ramón Magsaysay. commanders often paid handsome sums to those who provided knowledge about the insurgent organization in a village or town. and partly because


a fixed. on March 23. When army units remained in a given area for an extended period.17 (Similarly. Money also purchased much information. 1901. partly because he offered big rewards for information leading to the capture of guerrillas or the discovery of arms caches. He later wrote his memoirs19 and even ran for president of the Philippine Commonwealth (he was badly defeated). Magsaysay was able to bag most of the members of the Philippine Communist Politburo. (That repository of practical wisdom. Promising that “the emergency [conflict] will be won by our intelli-
. Nevertheless.S. Thus. short-term schedule.”22 A former intelligence director. American intelligence constantly improved by exploiting several resources. in one notable raid.) By these means the U.

army. General Giap was convinced. and perhaps the most costly. military intelligencemost of those who had joined the Malayan insurgency had been motivated not by ideology but by a desire to improve their social position. For instance. South Vietnamese newspapers were always full of information concerning political.26 Despite all this access to open-source intelligence. the Hanoi regime made some serious blunders. Budget hearings and debates in the South Vietnamese Congress were available to anyone who was interested. despite being warned by the Communists that if taken by the British they would be tortured and shot.
PROBLEMS WITH INTELLIGENCE
Although army staff colleges around the globe stress the vital importance of intelligence in combat.23 Templer wanted prisoners. but the evidence offered for these violations frequently allowed the North Vietnamese to identify its origins. as he expected. especially defectors. The South Vietnamese government


was constantly able to prove that North Vietnam was violating agreements. financial. that the U. Indeed.24 Many SEPs led the British straight to their former encampments. was the belief that the 1968 Tet Offensive would trigger a massive popular uprising throughout the South (see below). Hence.” he brought with him the second in command of MI5 (the British equivalent to the FBI) to help build up his intelligence services. and he thus insisted on maintaining a numerous militia there. ways.S. quite convenient. At least one student of this conflict expressed amazement at the readiness of these persons to betray former comrades for cash.

often characterizes the relations between these organizations. sometimes quite intense. Thus the Japanese were unprepared for intelligence operations against the Anglo-American Allies in World War II.Rivalry. priority being given to surveillance of other enemies of the regime or of one another. “Intelligence work as a profession was not highly regarded in the Imperial [Japanese] Army.28 Many countries maintain more than one intelligence agency. It seemed in many ways the antithesis of action.S. Similarly.29 One of the most distinguished student-practitioners of counterinsurgency has written: “When I added up the intelligence organizations that were operating in Saigon in 1966 against the Viet Cong there were seventeen.”31
HOW NOT TO DO INTELLIGENCE: FRENCH ALGERIA
From the beginning of their campaign against the French in 1954. and in addition it feared creating an uncontrollable power base if all intelligence activities were to be united under one director. stealth. reflected in budget allocations and career paths. both American and South


Vietnamese. patience. in South Vietnam ARVN had had little experience with intelligence. not counterinsurgency. During the war with the Viet Minh (1946–1954) intelligence had been the responsibility of the French. While the market places were glutted with spies. the security forces were starved of substantial intelligence.The Centrality of Intelligence
151
unglamorous status usually accorded to counterintelligence in many national intelligence organizations). “for all the intelligence services it is a valid criticism that the Viet Cong were generally a secondary target.”27 Moreover. the best students in Japanese military academies of the 1930s studied Russian. not English. military intelligence personnel trained ARVN intelligence for conventional war operations. but they
. requiring caution. and none of them were talking to each other!”30 Consequently. partly because such targets were easier to deal with and lesspermitted to pull the rug out from under the French army yet again. the French army began torturing prisoners to obtain information in order to combat the insurgents’ terrorist plans—a move that would eventually disrupt the army itself. Paratroopers descended upon Corsica and visible preparations were made for a landing on the continent. it set the stage for a collective mutiny against the constitutional authorities of the Fourth Republic by those officers who were participating in. as they had in Vietnam and at Suez. the use of torture was utterly incompatible with this self-image. who had a romantic image of their profession. as well as the preservation of French Algeria against its malevolent enemies. it provided a weapon for those groups in French politics that for one reason


Then the North Koreans seized the USS Pueblo on January 23. Hanoi’s foreign minister Trinh was proposing peace negotiations. is actually not uncommon in war.The Centrality of Intelligence
153
and civilian cooperation. The 1968 Tet Offensive in South Vietnam involved a double surprise: to the Americans and their allies. analogies to the fall of the French fortress at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 panicked many in Washington. the German invasion of Russia in 1941. (Indeed. Many circumstances distracted Americans from the coming Tet Offensive. the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo. American intelligence analysts knew that no general uprising of the urban population would materialize (as did many local Viet Cong cadres). Pearl Harbor. allied
. and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. the Yom Kippur War of 1973. among other examples.including large-scale (“strategic”) surprise. In January 1968 the enemy launched a major sustained attack against the American base at Khe Sanh. the North Korean attack of 1950. the landings in Sicily in July 1943. The Hanoi leadership based plans for the Tet Offensive on the double belief that (1) many if not most ARVN units would crumple or defect.32 the Normandy invasion. through December 1967 and January 1968. They also understood that without such a rising no Viet Cong military offensive could possibly succeed. was on the part of Hanoi. and to the Viet Cong and their Hanoi directors as well. But one can make a powerful case that the main surprise. Nevertheless.”)33 As it turned out. “the concept of a general uprising represents the major Vietnamese contribution


to the theory of people’s war. both the CIA and the South Vietnamese were accumulating much information from prisoners. and yet leaders in Hanoi held onto them despite clear and repeated warnings from numerous and reliable Communist sources in South Vietnam. MacArthur’s landing at Inchon. and (2) simultaneously with the collapse of the army great strata of the civilian population would rise up against the Saigon government. the Ardennes Offensive of 1940.
THE TET OFFENSIVE: SURPRISE ALL AROUND
Surprise. Consider the unanticipated Japanese attack that opened the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. both these beliefs were disastrously mistaken. the Battle of the Bulge. Thus. the French army in Algeria destroyed the Fourth Republic. the supreme “intelligence failure” of the Tet Offensive.

On January 20.S.34 But American intelligence operatives were simply not ablebehavior does not preclude the rigorous punishment either of criminal elements among the insurgents. and in accordance with the highest civilized standards. They need merely the support of some and the neutrality of most.S. The harshness of Japanese and German counterinsurgency forces worked against their own aims mainly because of its indiscriminate nature: since the peaceful and law-abiding were punished along with. that is.
THE FOUNDATION FOR LASTING VICTORY
The noted theorist and practitioner of counterinsurgency Sir Robert Thompson defines rectitude as meaning that the forces of order are “acting in accordance with the law of the land.

stealing) from the population only create tension and resentment.
. Both civilian fear of disorder and demonstrations of organizational efficacy by the military will reinforce this friendly predisposition. In these circumstances. numerous civilians in


a given area will be supportive of the military and police because they have relatives and friends in those organizations.The Requirement of Rectitude
157
according to norms they see as just. this was a circumstance that was more conducive to the reduction of Spain than force of arms ever could have been. Because they had provided decent administration during their occupation of Manchukuo—in stark contrast to the previous corrupt and arbitrary Chinese regimes—the Japanese won the gratitude of much of the population. especially if military units are stationed in areas from which they have been recruited. the entrance of government forces into a district or village should not resemble the descent of a plague of locusts. Caesar acquired such reputation for his justice in paying for the wood which heeven sincere onetime supporters. in large part because he allowed his wide-ranging armies to “live off the land. mistreatment of civilians and prisoners erodes military discipline. the bad behavior of their armies.9 Indeed one can make a good case that the Nazis’ savage treatment of the population of the Ukraine and western Russia cost them victory in World War II. with the natural result of hardening the resistance you are trying to overcome. and by German units in Russia and the Ukraine. Robert E. merely the notorious SS) in Russia forced many anti-Stalinist civilians to join the Soviet army or the partisans.12 Violations of rectitude during insurgencies on the part of the supposed forces of order. No British commander in chief ever found a way to turn the


KMT armies benefited from a reputation for not mistreating peasants. a higher number even than in the much more sensational Russian campaign.15 The excesses of the Mexican regime and the brutality of its armed forces provoked and sustained the Cristero rebellion. Mao Tse-tung correctly identified Japanese cruelty as a principal justification for his conviction that they would suffer eventual defeat. at least compared to the warlord armies that the KMT fought against. some of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) troops returning to formerly Japanese-occupied areas mistreated Chinese civilians on a vast scale. The use of torture by certain elements of the French army in Algeria to obtain information from captured terrorists contributed to grave disorders within the army.16 At the end of World War II. a constitutional crisis inFrance. both systematic and casual. a strictly limited suffrage. they might easily have recovered the revolted colonies. The great American insurgent leader Francis Marion. the Swamp Fox himself. and the destruction of the careers of hundreds of French officers. The Soviet policy of devastating the Afghan countryside (“migratory genocide”) aroused the Afghan resistance to steely determination. and the support of the army—carried out genocidal policies in the Vendée region. wrote: “Had the British officers acted as became a wise and magnanimous enemy. committed by the Napoleonic armies in Spain directly contributed to the huge numbers of French casualties in that country. The outraged Pickens became a guerrilla chieftain and made his notable contribution to the events that led to Yorktown. they compelled him to send into their region


thousands of troops that might well have made all the difference at Waterloo.’”13 For one instance. The great irony here is that before the war. the Vendeans nevertheless had their revenge.17
. Burned and bludgeoned into submission. Rising in revolt against the return of Napoleon in 1815. They thus undermined Chiang in the looming death struggle with Mao’s Communists. British forces burned down the house of the former South Carolina Revolutionary officer Andrew Pickens. complete with mass drownings and experiments with poison gas. The atrocities.The Requirement of Rectitude
159
ject lessons in British ‘tyranny. after he had given his parole to remain peacefully at home.

the murder of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador at the height of a major insurgency nearly caused the U. as members of the ethnic Macedonian minoritycame to dominate the ranks of the Communist-led insurgents. are among the latest examples of how violations. and deliberately destroyed villages to create refugees for the hard-pressed government to care for.
Of course. In the post-1898 Philippines. counterinsurgent forces are not the only ones that violate rectitude. along with serious failures of the Indian army to maintain military discipline. The Salvadoran FMLN caused many civilian casualties during the later stages of the conflict by placing landmines near inhabited areas.160
RESISTING REBELLION
Chinese military atrocities in Tibet have stimulated the independence movement on Taiwan.18 In South Vietnam. The closing off of a peaceful road to change in Kashmir during the 1990s. guerrilla war often attracts plain criminals seeking a cover of semi-legitimacy. The Peruvian Sendero Luminoso engaged in truly grisly atrocities in


of propaganda directed at the enemy forces is to release captured soldiers and give the wounded medical treatment.20 And—incredible as it may seem in our own era—throughout the increasingly fierce conflict.21 In Manchukuo. when Japanese troops treated their prisoners decently and then released them. right behavior toward prisoners is good training for right behavior toward the civilian population. the Japanese would torture and then kill them. Communist political officers told their guerrillas that if they were captured.23 Finally. no accusation of torture surfaced against either the Boers or the British. as discussed in another chapter. Consequently. treating enemy prisoners correctly discourages the enemy from fighting to the death. They assigned POWs to ordinary jails along with common criminals. when released prisoners return to their units they are livingproof to their comrades that if they surrender they will not be harmed. guerrillas rejected Japanese offers of amnesty because they remembered previous Japanese brutality to prisoners. perhaps.22 (But in other parts of China. guerrilla confidence in their leaders declined. in the early 1960s at least.
. a policy of easy surrender followed by decent treatment can very effectively drain numbers from the insurgent ranks. Of course. prisoners can be a rich source of intelligence. rectitude toward prisoners on the part of the forces of order is crucial for several reasons. Second. Therefore. During the South African war. Conditions in overcrowded prisons often resulted in the judicial release of actual or suspected Viet Cong inmates. ARVN commanders gave little attention to the interrogation of prisoners. And in fact. Ernesto


up virgin lands on some of the southern islands. A house. A guerrilla who accepted amnesty could obtain twenty acres. himself a former anti-Japanese guerrilla.” A well-implemented amnesty program can be a very powerful instrument toward this end in the hands of any counterinsurgent force. In 1951. absence of security—can play a main role. getting away from a dull routine or a confining family situation. help from the army to build a house. a piece of land. their only home. Assuming the cause stems always from economic hardship or government brutality can be grossly misleading. He would henceforth be the dominant figure in the effort against the guerrillas. “To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme skill.

not that they abase themselves. To prove his good faith. InViet Cong could not provide the consolations of an extended family. the Viet Cong leadership and the North Vietnamese Army reacted vigorously against the Hoi Chanh. and whoever killed a Hoi Chanh received the same status as one who killed ten enemies. Chieu Hoi was the beginning of a blueprint for national reconciliation.000 Viet Cong and NVA personnel accepted amnesty under Chieu Hoi. the Communist leadership imposed the death penalty on relatives of amnesty-takers.000 to kill one guerrilla.”11 During the war the cost to process. They ordered heavy increases of counterpropaganda and reindoctrination for their own soldiers. Moreover. Successful amnesty campaigns
. Chieu Hoi settlements provided convenient targets for Communist reprisals. as Viet Cong units came actually to consist more and more of NVA during the 1970s. was spending


size of Pennsylvania.000 soldiers.500 by the end of 1927. complete with mass drownings and poison gas.300 Marines were in Nicaragua during 1926. Just over 3. especially in the Vendée and Brittany.000
. The British in the Boer War and Malaya From 1898 to 1902 the British Empire engaged in a war of conquest against the southern African Boer (Dutch) Republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. forty-seven Marines died in or as a result of fighting—less than one per month. never commanded a force equal to one-tenth of 1 percent of the Nicaraguan population at one time. the counterinsurgents must garrison cities and key installations and protect roads and railways. In the words of the U. militia groups for local defense.S. one for every seven civilian inhabitantsby April 1956 the army had committed 450. General George Meade commanded 85. this was equal to three times the size of U. An American comparison: on the eve of Gettysburg. not counting 10. In 1856. Wellington had 32. the British Expeditionary Force that landed in France counted 75.000.000 men there. and 16. less than one per week. Against them. 112. About 12. the entire white population of the Orange Free State numbered only 90. and scour the intervals
.000 colonial troops (including 17. a variant of those employed against the Vendeans in the 1790s: hold the major towns in strength. and Malayan).The Question of Sufficient Force Levels
173
imperial and 83. At first.000 men.000 British soldiers.5 The half million British soldiers of various sorts in South Africa absolutely dwarf other


British military efforts both before and after. 24. and the United Kingdom. the largest battle ever fought on the continent of North America. In 1958 the insurgents numbered perhaps 40. Germany. after his peninsular victories against Napoleonic forces. Against these approximately half a million troops. station small garrisons in the lesser communities.000 Malayan Federation police. 21.000. At the end of the war in spring 1902.000 had perished from wounds and disease. 512 British and Commonwealth soldiers lost their lives.000 British troops. France. the French took the uprising lightly. by 1954 the authorities were deploying 40. Finland.000 white South Africans. forces in Vietnam at their numerical height.000 armed militia. and 250.7 In the conflict. In 1809. Sweden.000 French troops in all Algeria. fewer than half of whom were actuallythousands of allied Polish and Italian troops. the Imperial forces would have had to number 350. the “command was also distinctly second rate. the French and their allies never came close to having enough soldiers there. a move as fateful for his throne as the Russian adventure four years later. It was the Emperor who brought disaster upon [the French army in Spain] by despising the rebels and so disbursing [the army] in order to occupy all the provinces at the same time. Wellington commanded an Anglo-Portuguese force of 60. whose inhabitants were fanatical.000—then the French would have needed over 800.000 and 300.”9 Worse.
INSTANCES OF INADEQUATE COMMITMENT
The French in Spain In 1808 Napoleon invaded Spain. badly equipped.”10 But it was quantity at least as much as quality that


guerrillas scattered between Tarragona and Oviedo. “each night the roads were left to the enemy.000 soldiers from metropolitan France (out of a population of over 40 million). By the fall of 1965 President Johnson had sent 184. Besides.S.S.000 U. the French and Imperial forces suffered from “far too low a ratio of force to space to [be able to] dominate the country. (Even at that peak. (The notoriously colossal army Napoleon led into Russia actually counted around 500. the grand total is at most 450. and by the spring of 1968 the number had swollen to well over half a million. The French in Vietnam By 1953 General Giap and the Communist-dominated Viet Minh controlled an estimated 300.000 soldiers.000 colonial troops (mainly North Africans and Senegalese).000. Even toattain the quite insufficient ratio of three to one would have required 900.000 in the Catholic and Sect militias. Kennedy entered the White House fewer than 1. forces in Vietnam amounted to less than one-third of 1 percent of the U. population. upon his death less than three years later. they had lost their tactical superiority as well. 20.) This growing Americanization of the conflict in Vietnam was just one of the poisoned fruits of the assassination of President Diem. fewer than half of them French. there were 16. commitment of forces in its Vietnam involvement was massive without being efficacious.The Question of Sufficient Force Levels
175
ment after regiment out of Spain. in the ominous words of one French officer. service people were in Vietnam. Under the standard ratio.”13


ground forces. military personnel in Vietnam in 1968. or unloading large crates of canned peaches. the U.S. Yet Moscow never committed adequate numbers of troops to Afghanistan.”17 An additional grave problem was that most American military personnel served a one-year tour. only 6 out of 194 Soviet combat divisions were in Afghanistan
. as well as the reluctance to fight and the inclination to desert shown by the Kabul troops. Five years after the initial invasion. Thus by January 1980 there were only about 50.? Besides. Of the nearly 600. with a consequent higher casualty rate. it fought a one-year war ten times.S. Merely maintaining a precarious hold on Kabul required 22. they imagined that the troops of the Communist regime in Kabul would do most of what littlein the field. and the Partisans were by no means the only anti-German guerrillas in the country. But that is too easy. yet by 1968 the guerrilla movement had clearly suffered strategic defeat.5 to 1.23 The Chinese forces experienced grave difficulties for years. hastily granted those colonies independence. This gave the Axis a mere 3 to 1 advantage.5 to 1 ratio over the Viet Minh.178
RESISTING REBELLION
having to deal with Kuomintang armies several times the size of the Japanese army in China.6 to 1 ratio over their Viet Cong and North Vietnamese adversaries. (3) the Portuguese. at the height of World War II in Europe. the Batista regime enjoyed an advantage in troops of 15 to 1. with an unimpressive ratio over the various guerrillas in their African colonies


major insurgency.S. Hence if the U. interest in the conflict? • What evidence exists that U. When confronting the possibility of involvement in such a conflict.S. This is not of course to repeat the fatuous insistence by some Americans on instant democracy in South Vietnam.

the U. then intervention will probably be frustrating and frustrated because cultures are slow to change. especially under foreign pressure. Portuguese forces waged largely successful counterinsurgencies in their African
. which will provide sensational pictures for the media and disturb the U. during the height of the Communist-led Huk rebellion in the Philippines. electorate. intervention under consideration? Clearly. however benign. These and other considerations help explain why in some key crises during the Cold War.” The U.S. To accomplish all these ends would seem toof the South Vietnamese. representing the largest such commitment in the history of warfare.Deploying U. Most U. to attain fluency in Vietnamese. Despite General William Westmoreland’s plans to upgrade their status.S. and this seems indeed to have been the case. advisory effort] had grown to about ten thousand a decade or so later. In July 1967 General Creighton Abrams stated that U. The adviser was
. therefore.9 Aside from the question of how the U. one that became and remains profoundly controversial. and “it was no secret that the most successful and popular advisers were those who came back for a second or third tour and spoke the native language well. “Beginning almost unnoticed with a few hundred individuals in 1954. largely because the adviser program was part of


surrounding the American experience in Vietnam have obscured the valuable lessons of the U.184
RESISTING REBELLION
on duty twenty-four hours a day.16 This last is not surprising. often under severe field conditions. Almost all advisers operating with troops had recurrent bouts of amoebic dysentery. they ate most of their meals with the Vietnamese troops.

The attack failed and an uneasy armistice followed. and the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive of 1968. desiring a capital for their “Free Greece.Guerrillas and Conventional Tactics
185
CHAPTER 13
GUERRILLAS AND CONVENTIONAL TACTICS
Sometimes insurgents have abandoned their guerrilla tactics in favor of conventional warfare. the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. government forces beat off the attack. the insurgents’ guerrilla strategy had been reasonably successful: large areas of Greece’s rugged terrain were under their control. Communist-ledguerrillas attempted in early December 1944 to expel newly arrived British forces from Athens. but by January 4 this effort had also suffered defeat. After many casualties on both sides. In December
185
. impatient for victory and jealous of Vafiades. But Greek Communist Party boss Nikos Zachariades. Under their military commander Markos Vafiades. This section considers three major instances of such a fateful change in method: the Greek guerrillas in 1948–1949. 1947. In May 1947. along with a substantial portion of the civilian population. insisted on a permanent turn to conventional war.
THE CIVIL WAR IN GREECE
The Communist-led Greek insurgents passed from guerrilla tactics to conventional tactics more than once. Following the German evacuation of Greece. It is important to note that these insurgent attacks failed when the Greek National


Army was in perhaps its weakest condition. however. near the Yugoslavian border. close to Albania. began on December 25.” the insurgents attacked the town of Florina. A major insurgent assault on the town of Konitsa. In November 1948 Zachariades succeeded in ousting Vafiades from military command. Churchill himself arrived on Christmas Day 1944 to hearten the defenders of the besieged capital. Fighting soon broke out anew.

But in fact one could argue that the change happened much too late: the Communists’ best opportunity to seize power in Greece was probably between late 1944 and the spring of 1945. in which superior French discipline. and prisoners. aid to the Greek government. Nevertheless. After heavy fighting and severe casualties. beginning another big siege of Florina in February 1949. and equipment wouldgrind the enemy down. but Europeans could
. North Africans. Communist Radio Free Greece announced the suspension of hostilities. French Muslim troops could not eat the canned pork ration. and the closing of the Yugoslavian border against the guerrillas. adopting conventional tactics. T’ais. The French Expeditionary Corps in Vietnam included no fewer than seventeen distinct nationalities. most of the surviving insurgents scuttled over the border of Communist Albania. Communist atrocities against civilians.S.186
RESISTING REBELLION
the insurgents launched major conventional actions. Along with U. At any rate. for the last time. was a grave blunder. The fortress became the scene of one of the most famous battles in modern history. the Vietnamese needed rice. which had failed previously.2
DIEN BIEN PHU
The village of Dien Bien Phu lies in northwest Vietnam. At Dien Bien


Phu. Lacking air cover and confronting a much-improved National Army (thanks in part to the effects of the Truman Doctrine). sub-Saharan Africans. On October 16. training. near the Laotian border. The main idea behind building this complex was to lure the Communist-led Viet Minh guerrillas into a pitched battle. Vietnamese. 1949. in August 1949 Zachariades assembled twelve thousand insurgents in an “impregnable bastion” in the Grammos Mountain area. but the French had to fly six different kinds of food into the fortress: one menu each for the Europeans.1 Critics of the Greek insurgents maintain that they turned to conventional war too early. against a Greek army much better organized and equipped in 1948 than it had been in 1947. on November 28 President Truman informed Congress that theMarch 17. the Viet Minh might well have run out of sufficient shells for their own artillery. As one after another of the French defenses collapsed in the rain. Col.
. The fortress also had a brothel. the trenches filled up with water. On almost all sides. Even if they did they would not be able to keep it supplied. transcended description. staffed by Algerians and Vietnamese.”3 The battle began on March 13. The French Command insisted that the Viet Minh would be unable to position artillery up onto that high ground. and in all Indochina only about one hundred combat aircraft were available to support Dien Bien Phu. the water pumps eventually broke down. the fourth day of the siege. The besiegers had a four to one advantage


in artillery. or under cover. In short. French artillery inside the fortress would blow them to pieces. 1954— with a Communist artillery bombardment. the French gunnery chief. Two days later. the suffering of the wounded. killed himself with a hand grenade. the airfield became unusable because of enemy artillery hits. the garrison was left only with its completely inadequate forty-four-bed hospital. Another of the fundamental assumptions of those who planned the fortress was that the wounded would be evacuated by air. so that French pilots could not easily see them. In addition.”5 One noted student of the war observed that antiaircraft fire over Dien Bien Phu was thicker than over Germany in World War II. high ground overlooked Dien Bien Phu.4 “The failure at Dien Bien Phu wasdue to the fact that this isolated base was attacked by an enemy with artillery and antiaircraft. the Viet Minh usually moved at night. Since this was now impossible. then it must be the Viet Minh anti-aircraft gunners and their Chinese instructors. As the fighting went on and the casualties mounted. as soon as any Viet Minh guns fired on Dien Bien Phu. which was at the edge of their flying range.6 “If any particular group of enemy soldiers should be considered indispensable to victory. Further. And available French air power was often misused. French aircraft often mistakenly dropped loads of 105mm shells into enemy lines. Without this unanticipated supply.

188

RESISTING REBELLION

During this drama, somewhere between three thousand and four thousand men in the garrison became “internal deserters”—these were


tribesmen, Vietnamese, Foreign Legionnaires, and Frenchmen who threw their weapons aside and literally sat out the siege in remote trenches, in relative safety if not comfort. And back in France, Communists in the labor unions and elsewhere sabotaged shipments of supplies to French forces in Vietnam.9 Dien Bien Phu fell on May 8, 1954, the ninth anniversary of VE Day. When Prime Minister Joseph Laniel announced the fall of the fortress in the French National Assembly, all the deputies present rose to their feet, everybody except the Communists. Dien Bien Phu was a tactical disaster for the French, but hardly a strategic one. The French had committed about one-twentieth of the troops they had in Indochina, of whom 7,800 became casualties. On the other hand, General Giap hadViet Cong and North Vietnamese forces were suffering casualties at a rate that could not be sustained. From 1960 to 1967, thirteen thousand Americans lost their lives in Vietnam. In every one of those years, a greater number of Americans died in the U.S. by falling off the roofs of their houses than died in Vietnam. In contrast, General Giap, victor of Dien Bien Phu, told a journalist that between 1965 and 1968 the Communist side had lost six hundred thousand men. There is no good reason to believe Giap was exaggerating.12 The North Vietnamese regime was requiring its popu-

Guerrillas and Conventional Tactics

189

lation to endure casualty rates higher than those sustained by the Japanese during World War II. (In all of World War II, in all theaters, U.S.


war deaths numbered four hundred thousand.) Many signs pointed to an approaching general collapse of Communist morale. Clearly, something drastically different had to be done to bring the war to an end on terms favorable to the Communist side. The decision to carry out the Tet Offensive was a recognition by Hanoi that its guerrilla-based People’s War strategy was failing. This was the genesis of the Tet Offensive. The rationale for the Offensive was Hanoi’s insistence that in a crisis ARVN would disintegrate and the oppressed masses of South Vietnamese would rise up against the hated Saigon government. However, during the Offensive, although the Viet Cong were better armed than the South Vietnamese forces, the great majority of ARVN units neither collapsed nor defected, but held their own.“The professionalism and steadfastness of ARVN during the Tet offensive surprised not only the enemy but the Americans and themselves as well.”13 General Westmoreland declared that “the South Vietnamese had fully vindicated my trust.”14 Even the militia (the Regional Forces and Popular Forces, RF/PF—called Ruff-Puffs by acronym-loving U.S. soldiers) generally did well.15 The fighting power of ARVN and the militia was not the only shock for the Viet Cong; they were profoundly stunned by the failure of the South Vietnamese people to rise up in support of the Offensive.16 These disastrous surprises were largely due to the Communist leadership’s poor use of available intelligence. Consequently, the Offensive was a military debacle for the Communist side. Of approximately eighty-four thousand Viet Cong involved in Tet, thirty thousand were killed.


Some estimates run much higher. No one knows how many were wounded.17 “In truth, the Tet Offensive for all practical purposes destroyed the Viet Cong.”18 After Tet 1968, the war increasingly became a conventional one with the regular North Vietnamese Army playing an ever more dominant role in place of the broken VC. “Tet was the end of People’s War, and essentially of any strategy built on guerrilla warfare and a politically inspired insurgency.”19 Accordingly, “never again was the Tet strategy repeated.”20

SUMMARY
In each of these cases, the insurgent forces abandoned guerrilla tactics for conventional warfare. Two of the three switchovers culminated in

190

RESISTING REBELLION

defeat for the insurgents. In all of them, the defeated side had underestimated the enemy: the Greek Communist leadership regarding the National Army, the French regardingthe Viet Minh, the Hanoi politburo regarding ARVN. In the Greek case, the change to conventional war resulted as much from internecine Communist party jealousies as from military analysis. Adopting conventional warfare undeniably hurt the guerrillas. Nevertheless, their error affected the final outcome only marginally, since the insurgents had already been defeated strategically, due to U.S. economic assistance, improvements in the Greek National Army, and the rebels’ alienation of much of the rural population. Thus, the outcome of the war was clear before the guerrillas changed their tactics. In 1954, the French set up Dien Bien Phu as an enticement for their guerrilla enemies, whose war-making capabilities they had consistently—and unaccountably—disparaged, to the extent of setting their “trap” for the Viet Minh in a place that was both


overlooked by high ground and beyond the effective range of French military power. The Viet Minh, much better informed about their adversaries than vice versa, took the “bait” and overran Dien Bien Phu (with substantial Chinese assistance), breaking the will of the French political classes to continue the war. In 1968, the Hanoi regime, ignoring intelligence from its own sources and insisting that ARVN would crumble and the civil population would revolt, hurled the Viet Cong into a disastrous conventional confrontation from which it never recovered.21 After Tet, the conflict in South Vietnam became essentially a conventional war in which North Vietnamese Army regulars increasingly filled the place of the disrupted Viet Cong, even in so-called Viet Cong units. The post-Tet conflict would last another seven years.

The Mythof Maoist People’s War

191

CHAPTER 14

THE MYTH OF MAOIST PEOPLE’S WAR
Out of China came one of the great myths of the twentieth century, the myth of guerrilla invincibility. During the 1930s and 1940s, Mao Tse-tung worked out methods of peasant-based revolutionary guerrilla warfare, linking guerrilla tactics to political organization. He then wielded this type of warfare to checkmate the Japanese and defeat the Kuomintang. That, at any rate, is the myth, which throughout the second half of the twentieth century exerted incredible power over revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries alike.1 In order to evaluate the Maoist myth, one needs to review both the genesis and nature of Maoist revolutionary guerrilla warfare, and the strategy and tactics it employed against the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese army. Contemporary Chinese politics begins with


the Revolution of 1911, which overthrew the Sinicized but still foreign Manchu Dynasty. The major catalyst for this event had been the series of humiliations suffered by China during the nineteenth century at the hands of foreigners, especially the notorious Opium Wars. The crowning humiliation was the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), in which a small but burgeoning Japan achieved rapid and total victory over a huge but foundering China. The war stunned a whole generation of educated young Chinese, who thereafter searched desperately for leaders with an effective program to lift China out of her backwardness and weakness, and out of the clutches of the encroaching barbarians. One may summarize Chinese politics between the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and the entry of Mao into Peking in1949 as the rivalry between the Nationalists and the Communists to establish their identity as the true saviors of China. It had been easy to overthrow the senile Imperial regime in 1911. It was much harder to establish an effective republican government in
191

192

RESISTING REBELLION

its place. The vacuum of legitimate power led to the militarization of Chinese politics; indeed, “the role of the military in shaping twentiethcentury Chinese politics and society cannot be overemphasized”2 because “in no country in the world have soldiers dominated politics so extensively and for so long as in China.”3 A few years after the revolution China descended into the era of warlord politics: provincial military governors exercised semisovereign powers in alliance with or in opposition to the central government in Peking, often under the


tutelage of the Russians or the Japanese. Not for the first (or the last) time, China seemed in danger of falling apart into a gaggle of small, squabbling states.

THE KUOMINTANG
The father of modern Chinese nationalism was Sun Yat-sen. Born near Canton in 1866, he was educated at an Anglican school in Honolulu and a medical college in Hong Kong. Active in the 1911 Revolution, Sun founded the National People’s Party—the Kuomintang (KMT)— to advance his vision of a reunited and rejuvenated China. The KMT soon became one of the two great contenders for the right to lead China into modernity and unity. Then, as now, there were two Chinas: heartland (interior) China and maritime (coastal) China.4 Despite the impositions and invasions of militarily superior foreign states, by theyear 1900 the overwhelming majority of Chinese had never even seen a foreigner in the flesh. The great interior heartland, remote, poor, and immobile, had remained relatively untouched by foreign incursion and influence. The impact of Europeans and Japanese had been almost completely limited to the great coastal cities of maritime China. There, the increasing presence of foreign personnel, ideas, and methods had produced a significant number of Chinese with “modern,” or at least certainly nontraditional, aspirations. This emerging middle class became the basis of the KMT’s support. The KMT wanted to end warlordism and imperialism—that is, to establish an effective central government. It wanted to modernize the country under the leadership of the educated classes. It wanted, in short, a political revolution, not a social one. The


following the Revolution of 1911 convinced Sun that the KMT could achieve power only if it built its own army. Thus Chiang, graduate of a Japanese military academy and Sun’s military adviser, came to the fore. The first director of the KMT military academy at Whampoa (near Canton), he journeyed to Moscow to enlist Soviet help in the coming campaign against the warlords. After breaking violently with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Chiang turned to the army of Weimar Gemany for advice and equipment. When Sun died in 1925, Chiang became head of the KMT. He had two key aims: (1) territorial integrity, meaning the expulsion of the imperialists and abolition of the unequal treaties they had imposed on China, and (2) national unification, meaning the destruction ofand potential enemies. Thus, even to get the Northern Expedition started, Chiang had had to enter into alliances with local warlords in and around the KMT’s Canton base in Kwangtung Province. As he progressed north, Chiang offered the warlords in the path of his army a stark choice: resist and be destroyed, or join the KMT. Several warlords prudently chose the latter alternative, bringing their armed followers onto the side of the KMT; in return they were confirmed as being in control of their territories, not as warlords but as official KMT governors. This policy of co-opting warlords allowed the KMT to present the Northern Expedition as an instrument of unification rather than conquest. More fundamentally, if Chiang had not been willing to accept the conversion of at