Drawing strength from stealth: Guerilla tactics

Paradoxically, the nuclear age of the late twentieth century was also the era of a foot

soldier treading softly in the night. Guerilla war is often fought by outnumbered, ill-

financed bands of revolutionaries moving stealthily against better-armed powers.

Guerilla units venture out under cover of darkness to conduct small-scale raids and set

booby traps.

Guerilla, Spanish for “little war,” first referred to the Spanish peasants who

harassed Napoleon’s conquering forces early in the nineteenth century. Then, as

now, guerilla tactics followed precedents as old as war itself; they were the same

tactics that the sneaky Italian tribes who frustrated early Rome’s Greek-style

phalanx in Chapter 16 probably used. Similarly, the improvisational soldiering of

American revolutionaries sometimes caught Britain’s infantry off-guard in the

1770s. Americans sometimes fired from cover, putting a marching formation of

Brits at a disadvantage.

The British faced guerilla tactics again more than a century later in South Africa. The

Boer War began in 1899 when the Boers, descendants of Dutch colonial farmers, tried

to take away land controlled by Great Britain in the Transvaal. Expecting to beat down

this rebellion of farmers (Boer means “farmer”) in a few months, the British failed to

consider Boer determination and toughness. The frontier-raised Boers rode horses

masterfully and knew the territory intimately.

Against Britain’s superior weaponry, the determined Boers resorted to hiding, raiding,

and bombing. Realizing that this foe would hold on indefinitely, the British were forced

to do what Grant and Sherman did in the U.S. during the Civil War: fight a war of

attrition. The British burned farms and herded Dutch civilians into concentration

camps.

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