The Twenty Years’ Truce
3.5. Uncivilized Wars
importance of Khalkin Gol was overlooked by the rest of the world
—which came to judge the Red Army only by its poor performance in the war against Finland—and by the Soviets themselves. When the time to ght the Germans came, they were not ready.
European colonial expeditions from Hernando Cortez down as rapacious adventurers, mass murderers, and plunderers. All of this is true. However, we should also remember that these were men—
there were hardly any women among them—of incredible courage, determination, stamina, and resourcefulness. Not an obstacle they did not cross; not an expedition too dangerous for them to undertake. It was these qualities, as much as technological superiority, that enabled them to subdue populations and made possible the creation of the empires over which their countries ruled.
The best-known colonial war of the period under consideration was, of course, the Italian conquest of Ethiopia—at the time, it was usually known as Abyssinia—in 1935–36. Ethiopia was one of the very few African countries that had succeeded in maintaining its independence in the face of European colonialism, its emperor in 1896 having managed to defeat an Italian expeditionary force sent against him. Now Mussolini resumed the con ict.
This, however, looked nothing like the typical nineteenth-century colonial campaign waged by a small group of adventurers or by a regiment or two of redcoats. Where Francisco Pizarro and two hundred men took on the Inca Empire with its estimated population of sixteen million, the Italians used no fewer than a third of a million men, complete with artillery, light tanks, aircraft, and gas.
Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, to his credit, was able to raise about a hundred thousand men, although in matters of organization, training, and equipment his warriors, many of whom went barefoot, could not compete. Combining o ensives from the north and the south, the Italian forces converged in April 1936 at Lake Ashangi, where they in icted a crushing defeat on the Ethiopian levies. From that point on, it was merely a question of mopping up.
Thus the Italian occupation of Ethiopia is best understood as a conventional campaign that pitted one army against another, albeit it was waged not in Europe but in Africa, against exceptionally light opposition, and at the hand of generals such as Pietro Badoglio and Rodolfo Graziani who, faced with real enemies in World War II,
were to prove themselves incompetent and even cowardly. As a colonial exercise the Ethiopian campaign di ered from the experience of other European countries, which, having long ago smashed any native armies, focused on the very di erent task of putting down a rebellion.
By this time, most would-be rebels had learned their lesson.
Rarely did they ght in large units or in the open, that being a course of action for which they had neither the organization, nor the training, nor the weapons. Instead, they focused on more or less covert action in the form of ambushes, hit-and-run raids against personnel and property, and what a later generation was to call terrorism. In the years immediately after 1918, both the British in Iraq and the French in Morocco, were facing this peculiar form of warfare.
Of the two, Iraq ultimately proved easier to deal with. Summoned by civilian advisers who knew the area well, British armored cars roamed Mesopotamia shooting up any opposition they came across, a feat made possible by the fact that light, handheld anti-tank weapons in the form of bazookas and RPGs had not yet made their appearance. British military aircraft assisted, dropping bombs and machine-gunning villages suspected of harboring insurgents. As contemporaries realized full well, the main e ect of their operations was on the rebels’ morale, and in fact the number of casualties was very low.55 What the oft-repeated air patrols really did was not so much in ict death and destruction as disrupt daily life su ciently to convince the village elders that opposition had to cease. The outcome enabled advocates of air-power to convince themselves, and their political masters, that they had found a new, cheap, and easy way of policing a country. It would not be the last time such a conclusion was reached.
By contrast, the Ri uprising in Morocco proved a much tougher nut to crack. France’s original occupation of the country dated to 1906 when the other Great Powers gave Paris permission to go ahead. In the event, occupying and holding the main towns proved
to be one thing; doing the same in the remote, mountainous, practically roadless interior, quite a di erent matter.
What we today would call counterinsurgency operations began almost immediately and went on practically without interruption until the end of the First World War. Although such operations achieved little—and indeed, from 1920 on much of the country was in a state of open revolt—it was also true that the rebels’ greatest victories were won not against the French but in the Spanish- occupied part of the country. At Annual in May 1921 the Ri tribesmen, emerging into the open, actually succeeded in trapping nineteen thousand Spanish troops—out of a total of sixty-three thousand—killing many of them, their commander included. This Spanish Adowa was followed by another rebel victory at Sheshuan, which e ectively put an end to Spanish rule there.
The leader behind these successes was a university-educated former Spanish colonial civil servant and writer by the name of Abd el Krim. In 1923, he proclaimed an independent republic and tried to win international recognition by introducing legal reforms on the one hand and o ering mining concessions on the other. Having failed to get what he wanted, he sent his warriors into the northern parts of French-occupied Morocco, where they engaged in hit-and- run guerrilla warfare. In the end it took more than a quarter million Spanish and French troops—the latter commanded by no less a gure than Philippe Petain, the man who had stopped the Germans at Verdun—four years to nally suppress the uprising. Abd el Krim himself surrendered and was sent into exile.
Even so, it was not until 1934 that the country could really be called paci ed. This was not a gentle struggle—as is made su ciently evident by the fact that a key role was played by their respective foreign legions (the Spanish legion having been created especially for the occasion). Contemporaries felt that the war was
“probably the rst in history when relatively large numbers of highly mechanized troops succeeded in crushing a strong defense in depth with a few powerful blows.”56 With the bene t of hindsight, it would be more appropriate to say that, for the rst time,
“relatively larger numbers of highly mechanized troops” had come into contact with guerrillas and, despite their crushing superiority in everything from boots to cannon, aircraft, and radio communications, took many years to defeat them.
The last colonial war that should be discussed in this context was the one waged by the Palestinian Arabs against the British and their Jewish proteges in 1936–39. Unlike Morocco, Palestine is a very small place, and whereas Abd el Krim was able to convince entire populations to join his revolt, in Palestine the number of insurgents was quite small, probably never exceeding more than a few thousand at any one time. Despite all this, the leaderless (the only Palestinian leader with any pretensions to national status, Haj Amin el Husseini, was captured by the British, escaped, and left the country), ill-organized, ill-trained, and ill-equipped bands kept the British at bay for three years. By the end of that period, the number of British troops had gone up from a few hundred to no fewer than twenty thousand; they were armed with many kinds of modern weapons, from armored cars to aircraft. After ve thousand Palestinian Arabs had been killed, thousands of homes destroyed, and the Palestinian Arab economy left in ruins, it was still only when the British promised the Palestinian Arabs “evolution towards independence within ten years” (plus an end to Jewish immigration, plus an end to land purchasing by Jews) that the revolt nally died down.
Seen from the point of view of the Great Powers of the time, busy as they were squabbling and preparing for another major war with one another, none of these uprisings was considered terribly important and this was re ected in the quantity of troops, and quality of weapons used to subdue and suppress. Whether by military or political means, every single uprising was brought to an end. Yet a comparison with previous periods shows that the going was getting tougher, and underneath the surface, important shifts were taking place.57