Seán Keating, The Men of the West (courtesy of TCD Library)

Unconventional Warfare: Guerrillas and Counter-Insurgency from

Iraq to Antiquity

Trinity College Dublin Centre for War Studies

The Printing House, Trinity College 6-7 March 2015

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Programme

Friday, 6 March 2015 1.00-1.30 Registration, Tea/Coffee 1.30-1.45 Opening Remarks (Fergus Robson and Brian Hughes, TCD) 1.45-3.15 Civilians, Insurgents and Counter-Insurgency in the 20th

Century. Chair: Anne Dolan (TCD) Matthew Hughes (Brunel University) Terror in Galilee: British-Jewish collaboration and the Special Night Squads in Mandate Palestine Brian Hughes (TCD) ‘The entire population of this God-forsaken island is terrorised by a small band of gun-men’: guerrillas and civilians during the Irish Revolution’ 3.30-5.00 Guerrillas in Colonial and post-Colonial Warfare in the 19th

Century. Chair: William Mulligan (University College Dublin)

Daniel Sutherland (University of Arkansas), American Civil War guerrillas Guillemette Crouzet (Paris IV) ‘Pirates, bandits and fanatics’. Taxinomia and violence as a tool of empire-building in the Persian Gulf (c. 1800- 1890) 5.00-5.30 Tea/Coffee 5.30-7.00 Keynote Address Michael Broers (University of Oxford), ‘Napoleon’s Other War’: A watershed? Guerrilla warfare in the age of Revolution & Counter-Revolution, 1789-1815 and beyond.

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7.30 Conference Dinner

Saturday, 7 March 2015 9.30-11.00 Guerrillas, Bandits and Counter-Insurgency in Early

Modern Europe. Chair: Joseph Clarke (TCD) Fergus Robson (TCD) Insurgent identities, destructive discourses and militarised massacre: French armies on the warpath in the Vendée, Italy and Egypt Tim Piceu (Leuven) Unconventional warfare and the origins of the Dutch contributions system during the Dutch Revolt (1584-1609) 11.00-11.30 Tea/Coffee 11.30-1.00 Small War in Antiquity and the Medieval World. Chair:

Terry Barry (TCD) Alastair Macdonald (University of Aberdeen), Good King Robert’s testament? Guerrilla war in late medieval Scotland Brian McGing (TCD), Guerrilla warfare and revolt in 2nd century BC Egypt 1.00-1.15 Closing Remarks John Horne, (TCD)

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Abstracts Panel 1. Civilians, Insurgents and Counter-Insurgency in the 20th Century Matthew Hughes (Brunel University), Terror in Galilee: British-Jewish Collaboration and the Special Night Squads in Mandate Palestine' This paper is an empirical study of how the British and Jews in Palestine in the late 1930s collaborated to defeat Arab rebels. It touches on joint intelligence gathering operations between the British Army and Jewish agents but the focus is on joint military operations in the field, notably the Special Night Squads that operated in Galilee in 1938. The British led the Jewish-manned Special Night Squads with small teams of officers and soldiers; the idea for the squads came originally from the unorthodox British officer, Orde Wingate. Wingate and the Special Night Squads are generally well covered in the literature. The originality of this paper comes from its dissection of how the British brutalised Jewish troops by training them in well-established British counter-insurgency methods that targeted whole villages close to rebel attacks. Away from the control of the usual British military chain-of-command, the Special Night Squads became especially brutal in their dealings with Palestinians, an operational method readily absorbed by the many Jewish soldiers who served in the unit under British command. Through its examination of the Special Night Squads, this paper opens up wider issues of how imperial powers collaborate with loyalist colonial minorities, of how they use of irregular forces in pacification campaigns, and how post-colonial regimes carried over methods of control from the imperial era. Brian Hughes (TCD), ‘The entire population of this God-forsaken island is terrorised by a small band of gun-men’: guerrillas and civilians during the Irish Revolution. One of the cornerstones of the traditional nationalist narrative of the ‘four glorious years’ of the Irish Revolution (c. 1918-1922) is majority public support for the Irish Republican Army’s guerrilla campaign. It was accepted then, and widely accepted since, that the success of their guerrilla war depended on the support of the public, offered either actively or passively. Reports from government and police officials, however, continually emphasised that the public

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were terrorised by a few men with guns and that most nationalists were moderate, if easily frightened, and in favour of dominion home rule and peace. This paper will question these competing narratives by exploring guerrilla attempts to discourage, stifle, and punish dissent among the civilian population, and the actions by which dissent was expressed or implied. An examination of low-level, ‘everyday’ (and mostly non-violent) acts of defiance and punishment will show that civilian interaction with the IRA was far more fluid than is usually allowed. While the ‘everyday’ acts of resistance discussed here could be inconsequential in isolation, their cumulative effect was important. To achieve hegemony over local populations, guerrillas had to punish even small acts of dissent and ensure that they were not repeated. It will be seen that the nature of this punishment was dictated by the perceived seriousness of the offence and, more importantly, by local conditions. Rather than fitting in to one of two neat categories, civilians generally operated in a substantial, often vague, middle ground. As will be argued here, it was not necessarily loyalty and ideology that motivated the actions or inactions of most civilians, but rather concerns about their personal and economic welfare. While the assumption that the IRA relied on the support, either active or passive, of the general population is to a large extent true, it oversimplifies or misses many of the complexities inherent in the local relationships between civilians and guerrillas – complexities that are not unique to the Irish case. Panel 2. Guerrillas in Colonial and Post-Colonial warfare in the 19th Century Daniel Sutherland, (University of Arkansas), American Civil War guerrillas The guerrilla conflict spawned by the American Civil War is often misunderstood as a purely military phenomenon. In point of fact, while Confederate guerrillas could pose serious threats to Union communications, supply lines, and small units of soldiers, their over-arching purpose was to defend the people and property of their communities against invading armies and disagreeable neighbours. Both sides organized irregular bands in the South for that very purpose, although rebel guerrillas easily outnumbered their Unionist counterparts in most places. People spoke not so much of preserving the Union or winning Confederate independence as they did of “home protection.”

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Of equal note, with most guerrillas acting “on their own hook,” acknowledging no rules or regulations that might restrain them, they too often treated non-combatants with a ruthlessness and cruelty that made them more outlaw than irregular soldier. Appalled by this brand of “uncivilized warfare,” the Union army began to treat captured rebel guerrillas as marauders or brigands, an action. However, that only added to a vicious cycle of retaliation and counter-retaliation. As a consequence, the entire war became far more brutish than anyone could have imagined at the onset of hostilities. Guillemette Crouzet, (Paris IV) ‘Pirates, Bandits and Fanatics’: Taxinomia and violence as a toll of empire-building in the Persian Gulf (c.1800-1890). This paper seeks to explore an important episode of the Persian Gulf history, related to the two first British interventions in this space in 1809 and 1819 against what was called “Gulf piracy” or the “Gulf pirates”. It will describe how the Bombay Presidency justified from British India the two violent expeditions against Ras el Khymah and other port cities of the Persian and Arabian shores by creating a rhetorical frame permeated with violence against the populations of the Gulf. Called from the end of the 19th “pirates” or bandits”, the Qawasimis and other populations of the Gulf were accused of leading a violent warfare against Anglo-Indian commercial and political interests in the Gulf and of being “enemies of all mankind” by restricting the access to this main water highway. This paper will describe the “invention” by the British of a Qawasimi violence and piracy and of practises of warfare against British and Anglo-Indian ships. It will highlight that this invention served as a justification and rested upon a deep misunderstand of Gulf societies. Finally, this communication will highlight how to an imaginary piratical warfare, the British answered by a two violent armed interventions which led to the slow enforcement during the long 19th century of Anglo-Indian rule in this space. Keynote Address: Michael Broers (University of Oxford) ‘Napoleon’s Other War’: A watershed? Guerrilla warfare in the age of Revolution & Counter- Revolution, 1789-1815 and beyond. The vast European conflagration sparked by the French Revolution of 1789 and fanned by the Revolutionary-Napoleonic wars raged for over a generation, and engulfed almost all of Europe and Latin America. In a plethora of contexts, and for a multitude of complex, often highly localised reasons, the policies imposed

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by the French revolutionaries and Napoleon, within France and beyond, as French domination spread, produced popular, overtly counter-revolutionary revolts and local risings of less markedly political character, but equally opposed to many the reforms of the new regimes. As the wars intensified, and the new phenomenon of mass conscription was imposed on bewildered communities, open rebellion evolved into guerrilla warfare, which was itself often, but not always, rooted in atavistic social and economic forms of banditry and smuggling. This period, which saw the birth of mass mobilisation, of warfare waged on a scale hitherto unheard of ( if hardly that of ‘total war’ as it has become fashionable to assert), ironically also saw the emergence of the ‘guerrilla’ on an equally unprecedented scale. Indeed, the nomenclature, itself, derives from the Napoleonic invasion of Spain. That the name now ubiquitously used to describe irregular warfare dates from these wars is not without significance. Although the scale and, eventually, the conduct of the French-Revolutionary wars was unprecedented, its mass armies and holistic approach to the organisation of war efforts, were meant to be deployed in support of conventional warfare; the political and military leaders of the period envisaged warfare in eighteenth century terms, which, on a reading of Clauswitz, had scant comprehension of the ‘nature of the beast’. Militarily, most commanders were taken aback by its appearance, and disgusted by its manifestations. Politically, the revolutionaries were baffled, infuriated and, ultimately, driven to gross acts of atrocity, by the spectre of popular resistance directed against their self declared ‘armies of liberation’. Guerrilla resistance was, as a result, vilified as Manichean conspiracy or castigated as simple criminality. The realities were, of course, more complex, but also, as often as not, a blend of these extremes. Even the regimes allied against France often blanched at the prospect of popular resistance of a lawless, uncontrollable character, however ‘loyal’ the protagonists claimed to be to the old order. The Revolutionary-Napoleonic period represents a ‘flowering’ of guerrilla warfare, as the refinement of popular resistance to avowedly populist regimes, across the western world. It had many roots, many diverse contexts, but almost everywhere, the same target: the work of the French Revolution. Its prolonged nature gave it remarkable shape and form in many places. It is this set of contradictions, underlain by a remarkable uniformity, that this paper seeks to explore.

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Panel 3. Guerrillas, Bandits and Counter-Insurgency in Early Modern Europe. Fergus Robson (TCD), Insurgent identities, destructive discourses and militarised massacre: French armies on the warpath in the Vendée, Italy and Egypt The paper will examine French discourses and practices around the repression of insurrection in the Vendée, Italy and Egypt between 1793 and 1801. What it intends to demonstrate is that the tactics employed by the state and military, differed very little despite the distance in place and period, not to mention the insurgents’ identities or programmes. This is evidence that the over-riding motivation was the re-establishment of order and that once civilian populations had begun to resist the state, they were seen as having placed themselves outside the norms of warfare. This negated their right to be treated as either non-combatants or regular combatants, placing them and their communities in a grey area which allowed for atrocity and massacre in a manner that was uncharacteristic of warfare at the time. Evolving perspectives on combatant-status and atrocity will be analysed through discourses among soldiers, commanders, politicians and the civilian and military press. A qualitative analysis of military action will examine specific examples of massacre and atrocity to gain a more fine-grained insight into the dynamics of violence unleashed by guerrilla war and insurrection. Finally a relatively loose quantitative approach will be used in an attempt to test the hypothesis that the individual theatre of conflict mattered little. Whether within Revolutionary France, in Christian Europe or in the Islamic Middle-East, the scale of massacre and destruction wreaked by soldiers faced with unconventional war depended more upon the scale of the conflict rather than any sense of culpability, duty to humanity or identification with the insurgent forces and the population from which they hailed. Tim Piceu (Leuven), Unconventional warfare and the origins of the Dutch contributions system during the Dutch Revolt (1584-1609) The successful Spanish reconquista of the major rebellious cities in Flanders and Brabant (1584-85) by Alexander Farnese did not bring peace to these provinces. Based in frontier towns such as Ostend and Sluis, which were held by the Dutch, the so-called vributers (freebooters) penetrated deep into Flanders and Brabant to

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wage guerrilla warfare. This paper investigates who the freebooters were, it describes their actions and their impact on life and the economy in the front region, and it discusses the – largely unsuccessful – stratagems developed by both the Spanish and the Dutch to control this very fluid aspect of early modern warfare. It is shown how freebooters suddenly disappeared from the war scene early in the 1590s to be replaced by a full-fledged contributions system run by Dutch civil servants. This contributions system changed life and power relations in the front region and beyond and altered the course of the conventional war leading up to the battle of Nieuwpoort (1600) and the siege of Ostend (1601-1604). Panel 4. Small Wars in Antiquity and the Medieval World Alistair Macdonald, (Aberdeen), Good King Robert’s Testament? Guerrilla War in late medieval Scotland There is a strong belief in both academic and popular historiography that Scotland owed the preservation of its medieval independence to the adoption of a military template stipulating what might be termed ‘guerrilla’ warfare to combat an enemy (the English) clearly more powerful in conventional terms. The argument goes that the Scots embarked on a conventional military defence when invaded by Edward I in 1296, but that after their rapid defeat and the conquest of the kingdom they turned to other techniques, developed first by Sir William Wallace and perfected thereafter by King Robert I ‘the Bruce’. A martial legacy was passed on beyond this king’s death and the military behaviour of the Scots was strongly conditioned by his example throughout the later medieval period. The present paper seeks to investigate this conception in more detail. Key aspects of what are taken to be the Brucean mode of war will be examined. Avoidance of battle and the related techniques of scorched earth and ‘slighting’ of fortifications on home soil to deny their use to the enemy will be considered. Attention will also be paid to those combat techniques deployed by the Scots that might seem analogous to guerrilla warfare: rapid marches, ambush, surprise and trickery. The extent to which Scottish military forces can be seen as unconventional will also be examined by looking at social class, training, equipment and reward mechanisms. Finally, some consideration will be given to the ethics of war. Was savagery and atrocity more practiced by the Scots than their foes, and can this be related to a Scottish war effort that was ‘irregular’ in nature? It will be argued

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that for each of these categories the demarcations between ‘conventional’ and ‘unconventional’ warfare are blurred. It will be suggested that in medieval warfare generally clear, binary divisions between regular and irregular personnel and activity are impossible to maintain. Nonetheless, it will be suggested that nuanced and careful exploration does allow us to note particularities, based on the specific circumstances facing them, in the Scots’ practice of war in the later middle ages. Brian McGing (TCD), Guerilla warfare and revolt in 2nd century BC Egypt Ancient empires, whether Greek or Roman, have tended to receive a good press from classical scholars (who mostly come from countries with an imperial past). Any admiration we may have for the Ptolemaic regime in Egypt was clearly not shared by many of the native inhabitants, who revolted regularly throughout Ptolemaic history for a variety of disputed reasons. The best known of these revolts, the Great Revolt of the Thebaid, lasted for some twenty years (207-186 BC). It is usually presented as a war, with rebel forces confronting government forces, winning and losing territory. But in the first description of guerilla warfare that we have from the ancient world, Polybius (14.12) points the way to a different interpretation of what happened. The situation in Ireland from 1918-1922 also suggests different lines of investigation.

Jacques Callot, Les misères et les malheurs de la guerre (Paris, 1633) (courtesy of TCD Library)