The Volokh Conspiracy

All this week, the Volokh Conspiracy is kindly allowing me to run excerpts from my newly released book, Invisible Armies: an Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Modern Day. Today’s final section concerns Orde Wingate, the eccentric British general who made his reputation in the 1930s-1940s by leading unconventional troops in Palestine, Abyssinia (Ethiopia), and Burma:

His pioneering efforts to add guerrilla tactics to the arsenals of conventional armies often met with disdain and disbelief from more conventionally minded officers. Wingate did not care. “Popularity,” he believed, “is a sign of weakness.” Considered by his peers to be either a “military genius or a mountebank” (opinions differed), he had been locked in an unceasing war against his superiors from his earliest days.

Even as a young cadet at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, he “had the power,” recalled his best friend, “to create violent antagonisms against himself by his attitude towards authority.” Later, as a junior officer, Wingate was known to begin meetings with generals by placing his alarm clock on the table. After it went off, he would leave, announcing, “Well gentlemen, you have talked for one hour and achieved absolutely nothing. I can’t spend any more time with you!”

Wingate’s first rebellion was against the stifling religious atmosphere in which he was raised. His father was a retired Indian Army colonel with a devotion to a fundamentalist Protestant sect called the Plymouth Brethren. He and his wife brought up their seven children, including “Ordey” (his family nickname), in what one of his brothers called a “temple of gloom,” with prayer mandatory, frivolity forbidden, and “fears of eternal damnation” ever present.

By the time he arrived at Woolwich, to train as an artillery officer, he had left the Plymouth Brethren, but he never lost his religious outlook. For the rest of his life he would be deeply influenced by the Bible, on which he had been “suckled” and which a friend said “was his guide in all his ways.” Another legacy of his childhood was that he developed a violent aversion to being regimented. At Woolwich he was in constant trouble, and he formed a low opinion of the “military apes” who tried to discipline him.

After graduation he learned Arabic, and in 1928 he joined the British-run Sudan Defense Force as an officer overseeing local enlisted men. Here he battled elusive gangs of slave traders and poachers within Sudan, learning the hit-and-run tactics he would employ throughout his career.

He also developed many of his unconventional habits, such as wearing scruffy clothing (“his socks were very smelly and all in holes,” a subordinate later noticed), subjecting himself to great danger and discomfort, and receiving visitors in the nude. (He would become notorious for briefing reporters in his hotel room while “brushing his lower anatomy with his hairbrush.”)

Other Wingate trademarks: a pith helmet, which he wore in the manner of a -nineteenth-century explorer; an alarm clock, which he carried (he claimed “wrist watches are no damned good”); raw onions, which he munched like apples because of their supposedly salubrious properties; and a beard, which he grew from time to time in contravention of the King’s Regulations, which permitted only a mustache.

While returning home on a steamship from the Sudan in 1933, he met an Englishwoman, Ivy Paterson, and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Lorna. Ivy noted Wingate’s “medium height” (he was five feet six inches tall), the “forward thrust” of his head, and his “beautiful hands.”

But his most impressive feature was his eyes: “Rather deep set, and of a periwinkle blue, they were the eyes of a prophet and a visionary. . . . [I]n their fire and intensity, one was aware of the unusual force of his personality.”

That impression was reinforced when she heard Wingate hold forth in what another listener described as a “sandpaper voice” (“like the grating of stone against stone”) on almost every “subject under the sun”—including his love of Beethoven and his dislike of “the wireless,” as radio was then known. “He spoke brilliantly. But he could also be very quiet and silent for long periods.”

Ivy’s daughter, Lorna, was instantly smitten. Orde was thirty-one years old and already engaged, but he, too, fell in love with this winsome schoolgirl. They married two years later shortly after her graduation from high school. His former fiancée was devastated but remained so devoted to Orde that she never married, because she felt no other man could match him. This was evidence of the strong devotion that Wingate could instill to counterbalance the antipathy he so often engendered..

In 1936 Captain Wingate was dispatched to Palestine, then under British rule, to serve as an intelligence officer in the British force striving to put down an Arab rebellion. Notwithstanding his Arabist background, he became enamored of Zionism—so much so that even dedicated Zionists described him as a “fanatic.”

Wingate admired the Jews for making the desert “blossom like the rose,” and he felt that they would be more valuable allies for Britain than the Arabs. This was not a view shared by the rest of the colonial administration, which, Wingate found, was “to a man, anti-Jew and pro-Arab.” “Everyone’s against the Jews,” he said, characteristically, “so I’m for them.”

All this week, the Volokh Conspiracy is kindly allowing me to run excerpts from my newly released book, Invisible Armies: an Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Modern Day. Today’s section concerns Michael Collins, the strategist who was the driving force behind Irish success in winning independence from Britain in 1922:

Twenty-nine years old in 1919, Collins was already a veteran revolutionary who had spent time in a prison camp in Wales after taking part in the Easter Rising. He had grown up in county Cork, the youngest of eight children born to a prosperous if elderly farmer who died when Collins was still a boy.

He was influenced not only by the traditional heroes of the Irish independence struggle, the “Bold Fenian Men,” but also by De Wet and the other Boers who had given the British a black eye. (Years later he wrote to De Wet to thank him for having been his “earliest inspiration.”) He was convinced, he later recalled, that “Irish Independence would never be attained by constitutional means,” and that “when you’re up against a bully you’ve got to kick him in the guts.”

To do just that, he was sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1909 and then into the Irish Volunteers in 1914 while living in London, where he worked first for the British civil service and then for two financial firms.

“Mick” was tall, broad-shouldered, athletic, square-jawed, with “a mind quick as lightning,” boundless energy, and undeniable charisma—“hearty, boisterous, or quiet by turn,” in the words of an IRA officer. He was fond of whiskey, cigarettes, swearing, and female company. A woman who knew him thought he was a “real playboy”—an Irish Garibaldi, if you will, but without the Italian’s air of sanctimony.

Collins’s friends described him as “full of fun” and a keen practical joker, but he also had a foul temper and a domineering temperament. He could be “harsh and sneering” with those who did not meet his high standards.

It was in a British internment camp, later dubbed by a British intelligence officer “the nursery of the I.R.A.,” that he first showed the gift for leadership that led fellow inmates to dub him “the Big Fellow.” After his release in December 1916, having served six months, he assumed a leadership role in all three major nationalist organizations—the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Irish Volunteers, and Sinn Féin—an unusual hat trick that put him at the center of the action.

Half accountant, half swashbuckler, Collins was capable of doing meticulous paperwork while also taking enormous personal risks. Throughout the war he seldom left Dublin (population: 230,000), even though he had a heavy price on his head. He worked from various homes and storefronts and frequently changed where he slept. He routinely put in seventeen- or eighteen–hour workdays before repairing to a pub or hotel to blow off steam. Sometimes he would pop up at an IRA safehouse without warning to swap a few jokes and ask, “Well, lads, how are ye getting on?” His visits bucked up morale among his men, who, one of them recalled, “loved and honored him.”

He traveled without bodyguards or a disguise, cycling through the streets on an “ancient bicycle whose chain,” one of his men wrote, “rattled like a mediaeval ghost’s.” He was stopped multiple times, but in his neat gray suit, which made him look like a stockbroker not a revolutionary, he always managed to bluff his way through—or else to threaten the police so convincingly that they did not feel like risking their lives to capture him.

On more than one occasion he escaped out of a building through a skylight or a back door while British troops were rushing in through the front. One of his chief pursuers wrote that “he combined the characteristics of a Robin Hood with those of an elusive Pimpernel.”

Part of the secret of Collins’s success was his penchant for secrecy. He said, “Never let one side of your mind know what the other is doing.” His best-kept secret was all the agents he cultivated inside the British administration. No fewer than four members of the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s detective bureau, G Division, secretly reported to “the Big Fellow.” So did at least a dozen uniformed constables.

Other spies, working as secretaries in Dublin Castle or clerks in the post office, passed along important British correspondence and ciphers. In April 1919 one of his moles even gave him a midnight tour of G’s headquarters, where he was able to spend five hours reading their most sensitive files. He then sent his men to warn the “G-men” to stop harassing the IRA—or else.

Those who ignored the warnings were targeted for “extermination” by Collins’s personal hit team, known originally as the “Twelve Apostles” (it began with a dozen members) and then, when it grew, as “the Squad.”

While most IRA men were part-time volunteers, the Squad consisted of full-time, paid gunmen. Armed with powerful Webley .455-caliber revolvers, at least six Squad members were always on standby at their headquarters, first a house, then a cabinetmaking shop. They would play cards or tinker with lumber to pass the time while awaiting the call for “extreme action.”

All this week, the Volokh Conspiracy is kindly allowing me to run excerpts from my newly released book, Invisible Armies: an Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Modern Day. Today’s section concerns T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia:

After the war Lawrence attended the Paris Peace Conference as an adviser to both the Arab and the British delegations. He caused a sensation by wearing an Arab headdress along with a colonel’s uniform. One American attendee described him as “the most interesting Briton alive . . . a Shelley-like person, and yet too virile to be a poet.”

Lawrence came away deeply disillusioned after the French took Syria and Lebanon while the British helped themselves to Palestine, Iraq, and Transjordan. He went on, however, to play an important role as an adviser to Winston Churchill at the Colonial Office in 1921 in remaking the map of the Middle East. …

Once his work at the Colonial Office was done, Lawrence sought to hide “out-of-sight,” but he found this increasingly hard to accomplish because of an enterprising showman named Lowell Thomas. A former Chicago newspaperman, Thomas had spent a few days with Lawrence in Aqaba in 1918. Out of this thin material he created a popular book and lecture, accompanied by a slideshow, on “Lawrence of Arabia.”

His subject found Thomas’s presentation to be “silly and inaccurate,” but it played to packed houses from New York to London, month after month. Four million people were said to have viewed the show around the world, lured by a romantic tale of derring-do that offered a welcome respite from the aftermath of the mass slaughter of the trenches.

To escape the public klieg light, “the Uncrowned King of Arabia,” as he was dubbed by Thomas, enlisted under an alias as a lowly airman in the Royal Air Force to serve, in his own words, as a “cog of the machine.” Later he legally changed his name to T. E. Shaw. “Damn the Press,” he fulminated, decrying intrusions into his privacy.

In truth T.E.’s attitude to fame was ambivalent. While professing a passion for anonymity, he struck up high-profile friendships with literary giants such as George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Hardy, published a memoir, and sat for numerous portraits by leading artists.

When his charade was discovered by the press in 1925, he had to leave the RAF temporarily and join the Royal Tank Corps, but, thanks to his friendship with the RAF chief of staff, he was allowed to rejoin the air force—“the nearest modern equivalent to going into a monastery in the Middle Ages,” he explained to a friend, the poet Robert Graves. Here he felt a sense of comradeship in the ranks with his fellow mechanist-“monks.”

He had only just left the RAF and settled in a small cottage in Dorset when he died in a motorcycle accident in 1935 while hurtling at top speed down a country lane as he loved to do. Winston Churchill called his death at age forty-seven the greatest blow the British Empire had suffered in years. He told reporters, “In Lawrence we have lost one of the greatest beings of our time.”

Not until much later did one of the more sordid details of his last years emerge. Between 1923 and 1935 he had found some perverse satisfaction in occasionally hiring a younger soldier to whip him—apparently as penance for his ordeal at Daraa. This is what psychiatrists call a “flagellation disorder.” Lawrence’s friends and family had no idea about this private behavior; the beatings became public only when the soldier who administered them sold his story to a newspaper in 1968.

Contrary to the widespread assumption, however, there is no evidence that Lawrence was a practicing homosexual; he consistently professed his own “sexlessness” and in all likelihood never entered into a sexual relationship with anyone, man or woman.

Opinion about this “strange character,” who admitted that “madness was very near” for him, has been sharply divided over the years. Some have derided him, with scant evidence, as an “unfortunate charlatan” who “lied compulsively,” while boosters have compared him, rather preposterously, to Napoleon, Marlborough, and other “great captains” of history.

Lawrence never claimed such importance for his own work in a “side show of a side show.” “My role was a minor one,” he wrote with excessive modesty.

All this week, the Volokh Conspiracy is kindly allowing me to run excerpts from my newly released book, Invisible Armies: an Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Modern Day. Today’s section concerns Shamil, the great Muslim leader who fought Russian occupation of Chechnya and Dagestan in the 19th century. The story begins with the Russian campaign to defeat his predecessor as rebel leader, Ghazi Muhammad:

Given such fanatical resistance, which was hardly typical of nineteenth-century imperial campaigns, the Russians were understandably pleased to have cornered Ghazi Muhammad in 1832. Eliminate him, they figured, and his movement would collapse.

As usual, the murids fought to the death, but the Russians smashed through their fortifications. As they were about to complete the conquest of Gimri, however, a group of soldiers noticed a man in the doorway of a house just outside the aoul. He was “very tall and powerfully built” and was on an elevated stoop. He pulled out his sword, hitched up his robe, and charged through the door. An officer described what happened next:
Then, suddenly, with the spring of a wild beast, he leapt clean over the heads of the very line of soldiers about to fire on him, and landing behind them, whirling his sword in his left hand he cut down three of them, but was bayoneted by the fourth, the steel plunging deep into his chest. His face still extraordinary in its immobility, he seized the bayonet, pulled it out of his own flesh, cut down the man and, with another superhuman leap, cleared the wall and vanished into the darkness.
The Russian soldiers were “left absolutely dumbfounded” by this spectacle, but they thought no more of it. What, after all, was the escape of one man when the rest of the murids had been killed, Ghazi Muhammad among them? Surely now, they must have thought, these ignorant mountaineers would reconcile themselves to the enlightened rule of the tsars.

Little did the Russians suspect that the man who escaped—his name was Shamil—would wage unremitting warfare on them for the next quarter century and become one of the legendary guerrilla commanders of the century….

Much like Toussaint Louverture, another dispossessed freedom fighter of aristocratic lineage, Shamil was born to a nobleman in Gimri around 1796. He was a childhood friend of the slightly older Ghazi Muhammad, who helped him learn Arabic and instructed him in Islam.

A skilled horseman, sword fighter, and gymnast, Shamil cut an impressive figure, standing six feet three inches and appearing taller still because of his heavy lambskin cap, the papakh. His flowing beard was dyed orange with henna, and his face was, in Tolstoy’s telling, “as immovable as though hewn out of stone.”

His force of personality was such that one of his followers said that “flames darted form his eyes and flowers fell from his lips.”

The escape from Gimri gave him a superhuman aura—an impression only heightened in 1839 when he escaped another Russian assault on another aoul by sending a raft loaded with straw dummies floating down a river while he and a few followers went in the opposite direction.

To keep a desperate resistance going against overwhelming odds required the ability not only to inspire hope but also to instill fear. Shamil was a master of both. He traveled everywhere with his own personal executioner, chopping off heads and hands for violating the dictates of Allah and his humble servant, the Commander of the Faithful in the Caucasus. He did not hesitate to slaughter entire aouls that did not heed his demands.

When a group of Chechens, hard-pressed by the Russians, sought permission to surrender, they were so afraid of his wrath that they conveyed their request through Shamil’s mother, thinking this would make him more amenable. Upon hearing what she had to say, Shamil announced that he would seek divine guidance to formulate an answer.

He spent the next three days and nights in a mosque, fasting and praying. He emerged with bloodshot eyes to announce, “It is the will of Allah that whoever first transmitted to me the shameful intentions of the Chechen people should receive one hundred severe blows, and that person is my own mother!”

To the astonished gasps of the crowd, his murids seized the old lady and began beating her with a plaited strap. She fainted after the fifth blow. Shamil announced that he would take upon himself the rest of the punishment, and ordered his men to beat him with heavy whips, vowing to kill anyone who hesitated. He absorbed the ninety-five blows “without betraying the least sign of suffering.”

Or so legend had it.

This street theater—or more accurately the tales told about it, which no doubt improved in the telling—helped animate Shamil’s followers to maintain a fierce resistance. Indeed modern-day Chechen rebels such as the late Shamil Basayev, alleged architect of the 2005 Beslan school siege that killed over 350 people, continue to be inspired by the original Shamil’s penchant for theatrical violence even if they have never been able to match his military success. He mobilized over ten thousand murids to conquer much of Chechnya and Dagestan and inflicted thousands of casualties on Russian pursuers.

But just as extreme ferocity can backfire for a counterinsurgent, the same is true for an insurgent. Over time, his ruthlessness cost Shamil popular support-—as it did for more recent Chechen rebels.

Tribal chieftains who did not want to cede authority to this religious firebrand turned for support to the Russians. So did many ordinary villagers who balked at his demands for annual tax payments amounting to 12 percent of their harvest.

Even some of Shamil’s top lieutenants defected, notably Hadji Murad, who went over to the infidels in 1851. He tried to return to the murids the following year but was killed by Russian troops—a tragic story that formed the basis of Tolstoy’s novella Hadji Murad.

I am delighted to be asked by the Volokh Conspiracy to share with you some of my favorite stories from my book, Invisible Armies: an Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Modern Day, involving some of the most colorful characters from the modern history of insurgency and counter-insurgency. We begin today with Giuseppe Garibaldi, the great champion of Italian unification in the 19th century:

After trying unsuccessfully to pursue commercial enterprises such as selling macaroni, Garibaldi decided he was “destined for greater things.” In 1837 he found his true calling as a soldier when he enlisted on behalf of Rio Grande do Sul, a province trying to break away from Brazil.

In 1842 he joined another war in neighboring Uruguay. He would spend the next six years defending its liberal government against an Argentinean dictator and his local allies.

With his seafaring background, it was natural that Garibaldi would be employed at first as a privateer preying on enemy shipping—a guerrilla of the sea. But he also commanded forces on land. Armies were so small and distances so vast in Latin America that Garibaldi frequently campaigned with a few men in the wilderness.

Often he was pursued by superior forces, but he seldom hesitated to attack even when badly outnumbered, and his audacity usually carried the day. He exhibited preternatural resilience by marching and riding for long periods, notwithstanding illness, wounds, and supply shortages.

Even while combating ruthless enemies who once captured and tortured him, he always observed a “chivalrous” code. If he lacked detention facilities, as he usually did, he would release prisoners rather than kill them, even if he knew they would report his position, and he took care to prevent his soldiers from abusing civilians.

His most notable exploits came in hit-and-run raids at the head of the 800-man Italian Legion, which he organized from among his fellow immigrants in Uruguay—the “brave sons of Columbus,” he called them with his typically florid rhetoric. Their uniform became the red shirt after the government discovered a stockpile of these garments, which had been intended for use in slaughterhouses, where the red color would not show blood.

Stocky, bearded, and long-haired, with a serene expression and “eyes [that] were steadfast and piercing,” wearing a red tunic, black felt hat, and “gaudy handkerchief” around his collar, a cavalry sword dangling from his waist and a pair of pistols in a saddle holster—Garibaldi was, in the words of a British naval officer, “the beau ideal of a chief of irregular troops.”

Among those enraptured with him was Anna Maria Ribeiro da Silva, a young Brazilian woman whose husband, a shoemaker, was away from home performing his army service. She was living in the town of Laguna when Garibaldi’s ship anchored in the harbor. The year was 1839. He was thirty-three, she eighteen.

He claimed, perhaps with romantic hindsight, to have first spotted her with a telescope from his quarterdeck while she was standing outside her hilltop home. He immediately disembarked in search of her. His very first words upon meeting her: “Thou oughtest to be mine.” Instead of slapping him, she found his “insolence . . . magnetic.”

Garibaldi could not have been accused of falling for just another pretty face. The homely Anita was never known as a great beauty; she was described by one of Garibaldi’s biographers as “a big-busted peasant wench.” But, pretty or not, Garibaldi was instantly smitten with her, and she with him. They proverbially sailed away together but were not married until 1842, which, as another biographer notes, was “two years after the birth of their first child.”

Anita traveled and fought alongside Garibaldi, sharing the dangers and discomforts of a soldier’s life for the next decade while giving birth to four children in all. Their romance, which flew in the face of social convention, added to Garibaldi’s growing reputation as a rebel.

I’m about to return from a long blogging hiatus, but let me begin with an announcement that may be of interest to those who plan a career in legal academia. Duke Law School has established a program to bring aspiring law teachers into the law school as visiting assistant professors. Visiting assistant professors spend two academic years at the law school (to give them time to work on scholarship in anticipation of their entry on the law school teaching market). Each visiting assistant professor is provided with an office and is invited to participate in faculty activities open to visiting professors. Each has a very light teaching load – one course per year. Selection for participation in this program is competitive, based on potential for success in an academic career. The website for this program is at http://www.law.duke.edu/teaching.