Originally guerrillas were unorthodox soldiers fighting behind enemy lines, challenging conventional forces with harassing actions, and never allowing themselves to be forced into a pitched battle where the conventional super-iority would defeat them. The word is of Spanish origin, dating from the Napoleonic Peninsular wars, when some Spanish partisans kept up such unconventional combat. Still in this original sense, the heyday of guerrilla warfare was in the Second World War and, after, in Asia. Mao Zedong’s peasant armies, when fighting the better equipped Nationalist forces in China, resorted to such techniques, and, indeed, Mao wrote what is still probably the definitive textbook. Thereafter independence movements elsewhere in Asia, especially in Malaya and what was then French Indo-China, used the tactics to try to force out colonial powers. In Malaya the British army managed to develop counter-guerrilla tactics which worked effectively, but Ho Chi Minh’s guerrillas ultimately defeated the French colonial forces, leading to the creation of North Vietnam.
Subsequently guerrilla warfare contributed to the defeat of the US forces in the Vietnam War, though it should be noted that the more conventionally organized North Vietnam Army was the force that actually inflicted serious harm on US forces.
Since the 1960s the phrase ‘guerrilla groups’ has taken on another meaning, to cover the so-called ‘urban-terrorists’, for example extreme left-wing groups like the Red Army Faction and the Baader-Meinhoff gang in West Germany, and similar violent opponents of the regimes in Italy and Japan. The tactics are analogous in as much as they consist of sniping and harassment raids against the state power, rather than the building of a conventional revolutionary underground intended to fight a pitched battle against police and army. Part of the theory of guerrilla warfare was always to try to force the conventional enemy into repressive actions which would cause those exerting the repression to lose the support of the general population. Although it took a long time for the lessons to be learned, the professional military in most Western countries have developed very powerful anti-guerrilla techniques. Many senior officers in the British and American armies have become converts to the idea that countering guerrilla warfare tactics is the prime professional activity, an argument made all the more powerful with the diminution of traditional military activities with the ending of the cold war. Such approaches have come even more to the fore since the launching of the USA’s ‘war on terrorism’ after the atrocity of 11 September, as can be seen by the huge reliance on ‘special forces’ rather than conventional infantry in, inter alia, the Afghanistan campaign.
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