Guerrilla Warfare - History

History

Guerrilla warfare can be traced back to Sun Tzu, in his The Art of War (6th century BCE). Some authors argue that his example directly inspired the development of modern guerrilla warfare.

One of the earliest examples of guerrilla warfare, is Shivaji, the Maratha king. He fought several battles in which he used guerrilla tactics to overcome superior forces. He innovated rules of military engagement, pioneering the "Shiva sutra" or ganimi kava (guerrilla tactics), which leveraged strategic factors like geography, speed, surprise and focused pinpoint attacks to defeat his larger and more powerful enemies.

In North America there is a long history of guerrilla warfare beginning at least with Apalachee resistance to the Spanish during the Narváez expedition in 1528 in present-day Florida. Guerrilla warfare was also practiced during the Hernando de Soto expedition from 1539-1542, the Anglo-Powhatan Wars from 1610-1646, King Philip's War from 1675-1678, the four French and Indian Wars, Father Rale's War and Father Le Loutre's War, among others. This type of warfare was also used throughout the American Revolution.

The Peninsular War (nicknamed the Spanish Ulcer), however, was regarded by Karl Marx, as one of the first national wars, is also significant for the emergence of large-scale guerrilla warfare. It is from this conflict that the English language borrowed the word.

Marx and Engels wrote about other examples of guerrilla warfare during the American Civil War, by Tyroleans and Prussians against Napoleon, by Poland and the Caucasus against Imperial Russia, Pegu (Burma) against the British Empire. Marx and Engels interchanged numerous letters on war and military science and Engels wrote about several military topics.

In 1906, Lenin wrote his paper: Guerrilla Warfare. Lenin begins from the premise that guerrilla warfare must be linked to struggle of the masses of the working class, or else it is against the interests of revolution: 'the acts of individuals isolated from the masses, which demoralise the workers, repel wide strata of the population, disorganise the movement and injure the revolution'". Lenin also argued about the inevitability of guerrilla warfare in some conflicts by saying that

"Guerrilla warfare is an inevitable form of struggle at a time when the mass movement has actually reached the point of an uprising and when fairly large intervals occur between the 'big engagements' in the civil war."