Partisans Guerillas And Irregulars

Essays that explore the growing field of conflict archaeology Within the last twenty years, the archaeology of conflict has emerged as a valuable subdiscipline within anthropology, contributing greatly to our knowledge and understanding of human conflict on a global scale. Although archaeologists have clearly demonstrated their utility in the study of large-scale battles and sites of conventional warfare, such as camps and forts, conflicts involving asymmetric, guerilla, or irregular warfare are largely missing from the historical record. Partisans, Guerillas, and Irregulars: Historical Archaeology of Asymmetric Warfare presents recent examples of how historical archaeology can contribute to a better understanding of asymmetric warfare. The volume introduces readers to this growing study and to its historic importance. Contributors illustrate how the wide range of traditional and new methods and techniques of historiography and archaeology can be applied to expose critical actions, sacrifices, and accomplishments of competing groups representing opposing philosophies and ways of life, which are otherwise lost in time. The case studies offered cover significant events in American and world history, including the French and Indian War, the American Revolution, Indian wars in the Southeast and Southwest, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Prohibition, and World War II. All such examples used here took place at a local or regional level, and several were singular events within a much larger and more complex historic movement. While retained in local memory or tradition, and despite their potential importance, they are poorly, and incompletely addressed in the historic record. Furthermore, these conflicts took place between groups of significantly different cultural and military traditions and capabilities, most taking on a “David vs. Goliath” character, further shaping the definition of asymmetric warfare.

Originally published in 1954, this is a collection of 32 stories from a variety of historic eras filled with missions against all odds. “The stories in this collection are generally firsthand accounts by irregulars. The principles of selection were simple: Were they good stories—interesting, exciting and honest? And did they show fresh and different phases of guerrilla warfare? The weightier writings on irregular strategy and the politics of modern partisan warfare were omitted except for T. E. Lawrence’s classic chapter on the former and Julian Amery’s brilliant and brief analysis of the latter. “I have tried briefly to set these stories in time and circumstance. As editor I have tried not to draw the fine lines between resistance which takes place in urban communities and guerrilla warfare which requires space for movement. I have tried not to belabor the differences between regulars as irregulars and the native guerrilla in the field. I have avoided the fine lines drawn between a guerrilla who attempts sabotage and the saboteur, the guerrilla who collects intelligence and the spy. In short, if too rigid a definition is observed, a fascinating and vital subject could be reduced to a dull and academic one. The irregular’s objective is simply to destroy the enemy. This book attempts to tell of the many ways in which he has tried, and is still trying, to do so.”—Irwin R. Blacker, Introduction

A detailed study of the operations, politics, culture, and autonomy of Soviet partisans (or guerrillas) who fought the German army in WWII. Blending military, political, social, and cultural history, Slepyan also provides a prism for viewing relations between the suffocating Stalinist state and its independent partisan warriors.

Dr Heilbrunn has already established himself as a historian of irregular warfare. But the subject is not merely a matter of past history, because the so-called ‘nuclear stalemate’, which has made total warfare improbable, has at the same time made limited warfare the only kind that the world can afford to risk. One hopes, naturally, that the risk will be avoided; but since even a conventional war of the traditional, pre-nuclear kind might easily lead unintentionally up to a total war between great powers and is therefore also likely to be avoided, there remains the residual danger of what may be called ‘sub-conventional’ warfare in marginal areas, which the great powers would be free to support or disown, to fan up or suppress, according to their immediate interpretation of their own interests. Such are the outbreaks which we have seen in recent years in Malaya, Vietnam, Algeria, Cyprus, Cuba, Laos and elsewhere. These are also, if Korea proves, as we hope, to have been the last conventional war between major powers, the kinds of war we must expect to see renewed in the future. The Resistance during the Second World War was the prelude to this new kind of warfare. It was not, of course, a new invention between 1940 and 1945: one remembers, on the contrary, the Spanish resistance during the Napoleonic Wars, which gave us the word guerrilla to add to our language, and the exploits of Lawrence and others during the Arab Revolt of 1917. But these were side-shows (Lawrence’s own word) in support of a major conventional war, without which they would have achieved practically nothing. Since the Second World War, the corresponding outbreaks of irregular warfare have stood on their own as the major, if not the only, armed conflicts in their particular struggle, not a side-show in support of a major war elsewhere. The Spanish Civil War of 1936-8 is their archetype. Irregular warfare has accordingly become more professional and highly organized. It has had to acquire a sense of strategy, not merely of tactics. Perhaps eventually it will drop the epithet ‘irregular’. Even by 1945 the ‘partisans’ of southern Europe and the Balkans had ceased to so describe themselves, and adopted instead the nomenclature of regular armies. Those who fought with the partisans of the Second World War will find that already there have been profound changes in the evolution of partisan warfare since 1945. But thanks to Dr Heilbrunn’s keen sense of the continuity of that evolution, they will also recognize their own side-shows as forming an integral part of the history of this fascinating subject. He does us the honour of frequent quotation from our accounts of war-time experience; and it is encouraging to find that the lessons of that experience have been confirmed by later application elsewhere. His book is perhaps the first comprehensive study of the theoretical aspects of partisan warfare, at least in the English language. It is firmly grounded in practice, and likely to serve for a long time as a standard work.

Picture essays accompany a chronicle of the Axis conquest of the Balkans and the struggles of partisan troops and guerrillas to undermine and overthrow Hitler's forces

By placing the conflict between Unionists and secessionists in East Tennessee within the context of the whole war, Fisher explores the significance of the struggle for both sides.

This book, as the first volume of a multiple volume endeavor to analyze several revolutions of the “long” nineteenth and “short” twentieth century to show how revolutionary processes evolved, takes a closer look at the Atlantic Revolutions, that is, the American, the French, and the Haitian Revolution. It will therefore use a comparative ten-step model to emphasize similarities with regard to the revolutionary developments in different parts of the world. The book consequently aims at providing a general, but deeper, understanding of revolutions as a global phenomenon of modernity while explaining how revolutionary processes evolve and develop, and how they could and can be corrupted.

This book, first published in 1962, was the first systematic study of partisan war, investigating questions thrown up by the success of guerrillas in the Second World War, where they were never decisively beaten by regular armies. Drawing on lessons from Soviet Russia and China in particular, areas with especially active and large partisan forces, this book evolves a doctrine of guerrilla war in modern conditions, with an analysis of partisans in post-war Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba and Laos.