Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (8 page)

Even on the retreat, Cornwallis lashed out successfully delivering a stinging blow to the Marquis de Lafayette’s pursuing army at Green Spring Farm, where more than two hundred Americans died in a short, sharp action. The Redcoats were hardly a defeated force, as they were still able to rout American troops in battle, yet here they were withdrawing from occupied parts of Virginia. The only reasonable explanation for this was Clinton’s concern about what Greene and his guerrillas were up to in the Carolinas and Georgia. He believed it imperative first to deal with Greene, then to return to campaign again in Virginia. In retrospect Cornwallis was probably right in assessing the chances of defeating Greene as low and the opportunities for success in Virginia as high, given that the terrain there was much less conducive to irregular warfare and Virginia militiamen less inclined to fight in an irregular manner. Which leaves us with one of those tantalizing historical “What ifs?” Had Cornwallis carried the day in his debate with Clinton, the close of 1781 might have seen Britain in possession of New York, Virginia, and, at the very least, Charleston in the south. As matters turned out, they held only New York, having lost Virginia. And even the occupation of Charleston continued only on borrowed time.

For this outcome Nathanael Greene deserves much of the credit. He had gone south and reversed a losing campaign. And he did so against skillful generals in command of veteran troops, in a theater of operations in which a third of the population actively supported the British and another third simply wished to stay out of harm’s way. But it is the manner in which Greene achieved his results that is most distinguishing, in particular his masterful mixing of conventional and irregular operations. As a strategist he had an innate understanding that irregular warfare often demanded that the principles of war be violated, so in the face of a superior enemy he boldly divided his own forces. Later he would march away rather than toward the main enemy army, opening the door to Cornwallis’s invasion of Virginia. The sheer audacity of these moves was further compounded by his willingness to face British forces in pitched battles time and again. Although Greene was careful enough to break off the fighting and retreat from the field when the risk was too great that his army might be broken, such judgments are hardly subject to precise calculation. The very fact that he took the field in this manner meant that, on any given day of battle, he could have lost all.

Without the willingness to take such risks, Greene would not have empowered the guerrillas working with him. Unless he could divert the British with his main force, his irregulars might be hunted down by Banastre “Bloody Ban” Tarleton and other well-practiced irregular hands among the empire’s forces. That the British and their German mercenaries had developed a keen sense of the demands of counterinsurgency is reflected in the classic memoirs of Johann Ewald, who conducted many such operations during the war. In his
DIARY OF THE AMERICAN WAR: A HESSIAN JOURNAL
and his
TREATISE ON PARTISAN WARFARE
Ewald noted the potency of the insurgents but also their vulnerability to countermeasures when no friendly regular forces were nearby. Greene was well aware of this too, and no doubt was willing repeatedly to risk the loss of his Continental regulars because the failure to do so would almost certainly lead to the withering away of insurgent forces.

Nevertheless it took far more than cold-blooded strategic logic to follow such a campaign plan. It also required great courage, not only on the battlefield but in counsels of war. Greene had shown his fearlessness in firefights many times before and knew that a leader had to be an exemplar. On one occasion this duty led him calmly to continue writing dispatches sitting at his open tent while Cornwallis—who had just missed catching Greene at a river crossing—was in frustration bombarding the rebel camp with artillery he had drawn up right to the water’s edge on the opposite shore. But it must have taken Greene just as much courage to make his daring decisions to divide his inferior force and to march away from Cornwallis, allowing the latter an open road to Virginia. It is Greene’s strategic courage that stands out as exceptional in American military history. There has been no lack of brave field generalship over the past two centuries and more. But the kind of command boldness that he showed remains unusual and, when it comes to the irregular, in the words of Russell Weigley Greene, “remains alone as an American master developing a strategy of unconventional war.”
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Do high-level British strategic disputes and errors diminish Greene’s achievements? Not at all. The very fact that Greene persisted against superior forces and skillful enemy generalship was what drove Cornwallis to launch his own controversial move northward. His dispute with Clinton does not weaken the case for Greene’s mastery, for it is the mark of a master that the enemy is placed in such uncomfortable positions in the first place. In any event, military campaigns that proceed without errors are nearly nonexistent. The true mark of mastery is the ability to recover from reverses and misjudgments, as Greene did again and again, and relentlessly to exploit the enemy’s errors, which he also did.

It might be argued that Greene’s achievements are diminished by the rebels’ use of the American rifle, which gave an edge in the war, both conventionally and in partisan settings. It is true that American soldiers tended to be better marksmen. Many frontiersmen were skilled hunters, and rebel riflemen tended to train at longer ranges than their British counterparts. And in firefights, British losses were often higher, at the margin. But the Redcoats had many rifle units of their own to complement their smoothbore “Brown Bess” muskets, they prevailed in many pitched battles, and they got much the better of the guerrillas on numerous occasions. No, Greene’s success cannot be written off by overemphasizing the American edge in rifle fire.

Instead he won because of his conception of a superior strategy, which enabled him to prevail
DESPITE
his tactical inability to win decisive conventional battles. He won because of the skillful blending of regular and irregular forces and operations. And he did so against some of the best field commanders the British employed in North America. In his time Nathanael Greene’s contribution to victory was well and widely understood for these reasons, especially for how tactical defeats contributed to strategic victory. John Adams wrote of the ultimate strategic gains in the wake of Greene’s loss at Eutaw Springs that the battle was “quite as glorious for the American arms as the capture of Cornwallis.”
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Lacking Adams’s more refined capacity for insight, the general public’s instincts were nonetheless the same. Great crowds rallied and cheered at every stop as Greene made his way back to Rhode Island at war’s end. Soon after, the state of Georgia voted to reward him for his services with the gift of a beautiful plantation outside Savannah called Mulberry Grove. Greene found running this operation in some ways more difficult than his campaign against Cornwallis. His situation was further complicated by the sizable personal debts he had accumulated during the war. Run down by years of campaigning in the field, unrelenting hard work, and loans coming due, Greene soon fell gravely ill and died in the summer of 1786. He was just forty-four. What may have died with him was an important strand of thought about irregular warfare in American strategic culture. As we shall see, however, many other cultures would soon demonstrate their considerable capacities for waging unconventional warfare.

GUERRILLERO:
FRANCISCO ESPOZ Y MINA

Galleria de Militar

A million French soldiers died during the Napoleonic Wars, one-fourth of them in Spain. Of these quarter million dead, a bit more than half fell in set-piece battles against British, Portuguese, and Spanish regular troops, including losses incurred on the march to these fights or from wounds suffered in them. The rest of the French losses, amounting to somewhere between eighty thousand and one hundred thousand, came in the bitter “small war” that was waged for nearly five years (1808–1813) between Spanish guerrillas and French imperial regulars. It was characterized by an endless series of vicious, close-quarters clashes. French patrols, isolated small garrisons, and supply convoys were among the favorite targets of the guerrillas. But the insurgents’ impact was also felt on the major battlefields of this war, as their very existence forced the French to disperse widely their troops in Spain—at one point numbering more than four hundred thousand—leaving them unable ever to concentrate overwhelming numbers against the coalition forces led by the Duke of Wellington. Thus British ability to hurt the French in the field, with a force of Redcoats never exceeding sixty thousand, was greatly enhanced by the power of the guerrillas to distract and disrupt their occupiers.

In recognition of the potent direct and indirect effects achieved by the insurgents, historians and strategists have ever since associated the modern concept of guerrilla warfare with this campaign. And it has turned into a mode of conflict that has manifested itself with increasing frequency in the ensuing two centuries, becoming since 1945 the world’s most prevalent form of organized violence.

Beyond conjuring up an evocative image, the term “guerrilla” also offers a tacit homage to these early Spanish insurgents. It needs to be kept in mind, for the leading early historians of the war in Spain—and a few contemporary ones—have tended to downplay the contributions of the guerrillas to the British victory over the French.
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To admit the insurgents’ important role in the outcome of the Peninsular War could be seen as somehow diminishing the Duke of Wellington’s own accomplishments, which even the French preferred to emphasize over their defeat at the hands of a largely peasant revolt. But, the modern historical consensus has come around to acknowledging that, working hand in hand—much like Greene’s regulars and the southern rebel partisans did during the American Revolution—the two types of forces carved out a signal victory together. The military historian David Chandler has perhaps said it most succinctly: “Between them, the Spanish guerrillas and British redcoats were to make life intolerable for the French occupation forces.”
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If the French were ultimately put on the run in Spain, this happened only after several years of hard, brutal fighting. The initial success of Spanish resistance against the small first wave French expeditionary force in 1808, led by Napoleon’s subordinates, was soon followed by the appearance of the Emperor himself, who would swiftly defeat three separate opposing field armies and drive British expeditionary forces to a harried evacuation by sea. After these successes early in 1809, Bonaparte left Spain, never to return. Perhaps he had been let down because the Spanish riches he thought were there to be easily plundered proved illusory. Or maybe he was distracted by the resurgence of Austrian armed resistance to his empire and its continental system of attritional economic warfare against Britain. Then, by the time he had dealt with Vienna, the rumblings of a coming conflict with the Russians may have deafened him to his generals’ pleas for help on the peninsula.

Whatever his disappointments or distractions might have been, Napoleon nevertheless chose commanders to remain in charge in Spain who were drawn from among his very best, including Marshals Soult, Victor, Ney, and Masséna. They would give respectable accounts of themselves in their pitched battles with Wellington, sometimes forcing him to retreat. And even against the guerrillas, they learned on the job some of the skills we have come to associate with counterinsurgency today: winning over the hearts and minds of the populace; creating smaller, more mobile forces; and even coopting some elements of the occupied population to fight against their own countrymen.

In winning over the Spanish people, the French skillfully cultivated many local grandees by ensuring that their fortunes and prerogatives would remain intact. Abuses of power by Roman Catholic Church officials were publicized and punished, appealing to many—from commoners to aristocrats—who had come to resent Rome’s heavy hand in Spanish society. The French occupiers also touted a host of social reforms aimed at awakening a desire for “liberty, equality, and fraternity,” not unlike those set loose by their own revolution.

Further, some French generals showed a great sensitivity to the need to reduce the long shadow cast by military occupation—especially in the form of rape and pillage by their own soldiers—by trying to respect the personal security and property of the Spanish people. The French military’s awareness of the value of treating the populace humanely may have grown from lessons learned the preceding decade when an anti-Republican guerrilla uprising in the Vendée, a coastal area of France just south of Brittany, was tamped down only when respect for basic rights accompanied skillful military action.