Armies in Revolution

John Ellis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032164267
• eBook ISBN: 9781000534399
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book, first published in 1973, examines seven revolutionary armies ranging from Cromwell's New Model Army to the Red Army of Mao Zedong. In each case it examines the mobilisation and organisation of the army, and the need to balance political ideals and aspirations with military cohesion and discipline, and social stability. This book is an outstanding example of a study of the relationship between the military and society, and shows that no revolution can succeed without an organised army and that few such armies can tolerate for long the ideology that created them.

Chapter 1 Introduction

This is a study of revolutionary war. The chapters are about different revolutions but the book presents two problems common to them all: how military policy affected the development of a particular revolution and how the social roots of that revolution affected methods of war and military organisation.

Why, for example, should the Chinese Communists have adopted the guerrilla mode of warfare whilst the American colonists or the Bolsheviks in Russia devoted all their efforts to the creation of regular forces? What is the significance of the different social origins of various revolutionary armies: the bourgeois Parisian National Guard of 1789, the proletarian and petty-bourgeois Communard forces, or the rurally based Red Armies of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions? What is the role of a political party such as the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks in the creation of a revolutionary army? What degree of operational autonomy can be allowed to the command personnel of such armies and what is the importance of such agents of the central political authority as the Jacobin représentants-en-mission or the Russian and Chinese commissars? Is their central role of an ideological or an administrative nature and to what extent did the chaplains of the New Model Army perform an analogous function? Can an existing regular army be truly revolutionised as was attempted in Prussia or must it be created from scratch as in America and China? Or is the French attempt to amalgamate regulars and revolutionaries the most viable solution? In China the revolutionaries were fighting to seize power whilst in the France of the First Republic and Russia they were fighting to hold on to power. What is the significance of such a distinction for the organisation and tactics of the revolutionary army? And to what extent should the Communards have attempted to seize power in the country rather than trying to hold on to power in the city? How important is it that the armies’ organisation and modes of combat reflect the concrete cultural and political preoccupations of the rank-and-file? How far can revolutionary notions of liberty and equality be equated with the maintenance of adequate military discipline? Why in some cases, such as the English Civil War, does revolutionary zeal supplement military discipline whilst in others, the Commune for example, it seems quite inimical to it?

In answering such questions this book will arrive at a comprehensive, historically based definition of what constitutes revolutionary war. This historical perspective is of vital importance. Contrary to the impression given by certain writers and commentators revolutionary warfare does not begin and end with Mao Tse-tung, nor even with guerrilla warfare as a whole. Although, in certain respects, the Chinese Revolution will be put forward as a paradigm, it will be clear by the time that that chapter is reached that Mao was far from being the first to tackle these particular problems, and that others had sometimes solved them, perhaps in different ways, in earlier times. The Maoist political line was a particular response to a particular problem and not a totally innovatory aspect of military practice and theory. It is time that Mao Tse-tung was put in historical context. At present revolutionary warfare is increasingly regarded as a synonym for the Chinese-Vietnamese mode of guerrilla-mobile war. Revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries alike are in danger of turning guidelines that were specific to a certain situation into dogmas and blindly trying to apply them to circumstances to which they are simply not appropriate. Certainly the Chinese Revolution was of immense significance and that is why it ends this book. But it must not be inferred that Mao is regarded as having said the last word on the subject. The fate of the Hukbalahaps in the Philippines, the Malayan Communists, the Indian guerrillas in Telingana, the Indonesian Communists, Guevara in Bolivia should at least teach us not to think in terms of a unitary ‘third world’ in which the same set of tactics is always applicable. All revolutions are unique but whatever general rules can be discerned must come from a study of the widest range of historical experience.

As must be clear from the list of questions above this book is primarily concerned with the social and political factors that influence military affairs. Each chapter will concentrate upon the most important social and political factors of the revolution with which it deals in an attempt to show how the actual dynamic of mass revolutionary unrest, in the various situations, affected the military policies of the revolutionary groups. But it would be misleading to claim that these factors alone defined the options open to the revolutionaries. To a greater or lesser extent purely physical or material constraints also limited those options, and it would be best at this stage to clear these aside so as to gain a clearer picture of what actual areas of activity are affected by larger social and political considerations. The book as a whole is trying to take military studies beyond questions of mere technique and static models of the ‘rules of war’, but it would be foolish to overstate the case and deny that, in certain cases, geographical and material immutables are bound to influence the formulation of military policy.

Geographical factors, for example, are of considerable importance. The larger a country is the more difficult will it be for a counter-revolutionary force to pursue and pin down a group of insurgents. Its communications will become overstretched, it will have to distribute large numbers of men in a piecemeal fashion to guard all places of importance, and it will be more vulnerable itself to a surprise attack by the enemy. Such considerations are basic assumptions of Maoist guerrilla warfare, but they also hold true for more regularised struggles. The sheer vastness of America, even in the days of the thirteen colonies, was one of the main reasons for the British defeat. Even when the Continentals were overcome in open battle, which was more often than not, they were able to retreat beyond the reach of the cumbersome British columns and slowly regroup. In the meantime the British had to disperse their forces to guard against attack from a wide variety of directions. The lightning forays at Trenton and Princeton are perfect examples of British helplessness in the face of a swift, concentrated American assault; whilst Greene’s retreat through the Carolinas and Virginia demonstrates how the British were doomed in the face of American willingness to use the space at their disposal to keep their armies intact rather than attempt to decide the issue in a single positional engagement.

Terrain is clearly also of importance in this respect. It was of some limited significance in the American War of Independence. British accounts constantly bemoaned the American habit of lodging their infantrymen behind trees in wooded areas where they could fire upon the British with impunity. Similarly Marion’s guerrilla band made its base in the swampy regions of South Carolina where they were almost immune from British or Loyalist attack. Terrain was also a vital component of the Maoist concept of the ‘big country’. The sheer vastness of China was of the greatest significance but the task of the counter-insurgency forces, be they Nationalist or Japanese, was made even more difficult by the impenetrability of the Communist base areas, almost always in mountainous regions. Distance is significant in terms of the amount of time it takes to cover it. Thus inhospitable terrain can be just as important a barrier as a no-man’s-land of many thousand square miles. Indeed, in certain cases it can be much more of a barrier. Castro’s guerrillas were quite safe in the Sierra Maestra area of Cuba, whilst a guerrilla force in Antarctica, for example, would be almost helpless before an enemy equipped with jets, helicopters, or even reliable tracked vehicles.

Thus the existence of a large country, defined in terms of time, is a necessary condition for the waging of a guerrilla rather than a regular war. But even so it does not logically follow that the existence of these conditions will demand a resort to the guerrilla mode. The chapters on the Russian and Chinese Revolutions will show that general social and political considerations are at least of equal importance in deciding whether it is expedient for the revolutionary group to adopt a guerrilla or a regular strategy. Here one is only trying to explain some of the technical parameters within which such a choice is made. Another of these concerns the relative levels of technological expertise. In the American War of Independence, for example, one of the factors that made it possible, though not necessary, for the Americans to adopt the regular form of military organisation that they did, and to be at least able to face up to the British in open battle, even after countless defeats and Pyrrhic victories, was the low level of technological effort required. In the late eighteenth century the essentials of the most advanced type of warfare were the sword, the horse, the musket and the cannon. The nature of the American theatre of operations greatly reduced the importance of the latter. Thus, given that Washington had decided that his army must be made up of regular formations, it was possible, even in view of the parlous financial state of the Continental Congress, to equip such an army; horses, swords and muskets, not to mention rifles, were available in some quantity irrespective of the existence of a formal military organisation. All that was necessary was the manufacture of uniforms, the establishment of a command structure and the inculcation of a suitable spirit of instant obedience. Even when more muskets were needed it required no great technological or organisational breakthrough to supply at least a minimum quantity with the aid of existing gunsmiths.

Much the same is true of the Parliamentary Armies in the English Civil War. The basics of warfare at that time were the horse, the sword, the pike and, to a lesser extent, the arquebus. Because the level of technology was not high the manufacture of such equipment was in the hands of ordinary craftsmen rather than specialised, government supervised production units. Such craftsmen were spread about the country and when the lines of civil war were drawn each side had access to adequate amounts of military material. Thus each side could meet on equal terms in pitched battle and decide the war relatively quickly. Eventually superior Parliamentary organisation and élan proved decisive and the reasons for this will be examined in the next chapter. All that is at issue here is why Puritan militancy should have been able to adopt a military posture so quickly.

To a large extent the technological variable alters over time rather than from place to place. Thus throughout history technology has become more and more sophisticated. The more sophisticated it has become the more it has been the preserve of a small group of specialists and the more expensive it has become to produce the various components of an advanced technology. All this has meant that governments have increasingly gained the monopoly of certain aspects of such a technology, particularly the military. Almost by definition a revolutionary group does not have access to either the expertise or the financial reserves to give themselves technological parity in the military field. And the more advanced technology becomes the less likely it is that the revolutionaries will be able to build up a comparable production base of their own. Until they have actually seized power they can only attain parity with the incumbent forces by seizing their weapons and equipment. This is inevitably a very slow process, dependent in the early stages upon the use of ambushes and lightning attacks, and the constant avoidance of undue exposure to the enemy’s superior fire-power. The technological differential demands that the revolutionaries adopt protracted, piecemeal, i.e. guerrilla warfare. Clearly this was an important factor in explaining the development of the Maoist theory of guerrilla warfare, particularly in the face of Japanese superiority. And it is a factor that will be of increasing importance in revolutionary struggles of the future.

Nor is the technological factor only of importance in terms of material. It is also of significance as regards the level of expertise. The more sophisticated the actual equipment of an army becomes the more training is required for those who will actually use and co-ordinate it. Even Washington was obliged to use an imported specialist, von Steuben, to teach his Continentals the intricacies of close-order movement. During the Paris Commune it seems likely that one reason why so few of the cannon available to the insurgents were actually used was that few people knew how to load and fire them, or more importantly how to establish the logistical machinery to keep them all in effective action. During the Chinese Civil War yet another reason for the resort to protracted guerrilla warfare was the necessity slowly to train unit commanders at all levels in the actual heat of battle. Even with modern equipment to hand one still needs men able to establish co-ordinated fire-fields and make tactical sense of the deafening chaos of modern combat.

But the technological factor cuts both ways. It can help to explain why certain revolutionary groups might be forced to adopt a protracted mode of armed struggle, but it can also be a factor in helping to explain the success of other groups on the field of open battle. The key distinction here is that between those revolutionary groups fighting to seize power and those fighting to hold on to it in the face of armed counter-revolution. In the former case technology and expertise are likely to be the monopoly of the incumbent regime. But in the latter case, because the revolutionaries have gained control of at least some of the organs of government, they can turn such a monopoly to their own advantage. This will be true in terms of both material and know-how. Thus in the French Revolution the centralised Jacobin state was able to make prodigious efforts in the logistical field. Workers were drafted in, existing armouries were expanded and completely new ones established. During the ancien régime the production of muskets had never exceeded one hundred and fifty per day, but by the end of the Year II this figure had reached at least seven hundred. Similar considerations held true in the field of army organisation. Though the bulk of the original noble officer-corps had disappeared by the time of the Jacobin dictatorship, many lower-ranking officers, noncommissioned officers and regular privates remained. Thus the Jacobins were able to build their new formations around a nucleus of experienced regulars who were later officially used to bolster the morale of the new recruits through joint embrigadement. The relevance of the Prussian example in this respect is obvious; its particular chapter will be concerned with the social and political weaknesses of the attempt by an incumbent, basically conservative regime to politicise its armed forces. Nevertheless, such an attempt obviously had decided military advantages. The debacle of 1806 had weeded out most of the incompetents of the old army and left a solid base of regulars, particularly the officer-corps, upon which to build a new army. Similarly the Prussian reformers had the enormous advantage of access to the stockpiles and production units of a centralised state that had always made the supplying of its armies a high priority.

The Russian example is also highly significant here. Leaving aside for the moment the reasons for the Bolsheviks’ decision to concentrate upon regular rather than guerrilla warfare, it is certainly true that one reason why they were able to adopt such a policy was the very fact that they had taken over state power. Certainly the First World War had occasioned the almost complete collapse of the Tsarist armies. Nevertheless the Communists now had access to the factories that produced the munitions that would be necessary for a new army, as well as such equipment as they were able to salvage from the deserters from the front. Throughout the Civil War war production was a desperately hand-to-mouth business, but it was even so just feasible to think in terms of supplying a large, regular army. More importantly still, it was also possible to think of giving that army an experienced officer-corps. For even after Brest-Litovsk the Tsarist officer-corps still existed, whether in or out of uniform. Because the Bolsheviks were the de facto government many of these officers felt it their patriotic duty to rally to the defence of the Soviet regime. Even those who were not so inclined were hauled into the Soviet military machine. Bolshevik state power meant the proliferation of Red terror and the effective threat of reprisals against the families of recalcitrant officers. Trotsky was able from the beginning to think in terms of a regular army because he was always able to supply that army with its nucleus of experienced officers or ‘military specialists’.

Clearly then technical factors are of importance in explaining the successes and failures of revolutionary armies. This book is in no way attempting to underestimate that importance. But in periods of revolutionary unrest above all, military affairs are also subject to the general constraints of the social and political configurations of society at large. Much conventional military history seems to have ignored this rather basic point. For this reason there will be little mention in the individual chapters of purely technical considerations. Undue emphasis upon such factors will always underestimate the human element, the very bedrock of history and the molten lava of revolution. Each of the following case-studies throws up questions that are simply not amenable to a purely technical explanation. Given technological parity in the English Civil War why then should the Parliamentary victory have been so decisive? Given Washington was able to create a regular army why should he have been so insistent upon such a mode of organisation? What happened in France during the First Republic such that the revolutionary zeal of the first volunteers degenerated into the militaristic efficiency of the Imperial soldiery? Why was the Prussian reform movement a military success yet a political disaster? How is one to explain Parisian incompetence in 1871 in the face of the shattered armies of the French state? In Russia technical factors help to explain why the Bolsheviks were able to establish a regular military structure, but why should they be so keen to do this and so emphatic in their denunciations of the guerrilla mode? And if Mao Tse-tung were driven for technical reasons to adopt guerrilla tactics, what were the social and political reasons for his actual success in building up such large, efficient and zealous peasant armies? These questions are basic to each of the case-studies and to answer them requires that one examine those most fundamental human aspirations that drive men to revolution in the first place.

Chapter 2 The English Civil War 1642–9

Chronology

1642

1. 22 Aug The outbreak of the Civil War.
2. 23 Oct The Battle of Edgehill. A Royalist victory.

1643

1. 30 June The Battle of Adwalton Moor. A Royalist victory.
2. 12 Aug The passing of a Parliamentary ordinance permitting county committees to raise regiments by impressment.
3. 10 Sept The Battle of Newbury. A Parliamentary victory.

1644

1. 18 Jan The Scottish Army enters England on the side of Parliament.
2. Feb The Committee of Both Kingdoms is set up to co-ordinate the activities of the Scottish and Parliamentary Armies.
3. 2 July The Battle of Marston Moor. A Parliamentary victory.
4. 15 Nov The second Battle of Newbury. A Royalist victory.
5. 19 Dec The Self-Denying Ordinance is adopted by the Commons.

1645

1. 11 Jan The plan for the setting up of the New Model Army is adopted by the Commons. Fairfax is made the Commander-in-Chief.
2. 30 April The organisation of the New Model Army is completed.
3. 14 June The Battle of Naseby. A Parliamentary victory.
4. 10 July The Battle of Langport. A Parliamentary victory.

1646

1. 19 Aug Royalist resistance is finally crushed with the surrender of Raglan Castle.

1647

1. 18 Feb Parliament resolves to disband the Army without any provision for the payment of arrears of pay.
2. March The cavalry regiments elect Agitators. The Infantry soon follow suit.
3. 21 March A meeting of the army officers and Parliament’s representatives at Saffron Walden. The officers present a petition to Parliament.
4. 27 April The officers present The Vindication of the Officers to Parliament in which they uphold their right of petition.
5. 28 April Eight cavalry regiments draw up the Apologie which is presented to Fairfax. This document includes certain political demands.
6. 30 April The Apologie is presented to the Commons. The House decides to vote money for a partial settlement of arrears.
7. 17 May A meeting of soldiers and officers at Saffron Walden. The sixteen Agitators make a declaration of rank-and-file solidarity.
8. 28 May The Commons orders Fairfax to disband the infantry by 1 June.
9. 29 May Fairfax convenes a Council of War at Bury. The soldiers and officers demand an immediate rendezvous of the whole Army.
10. 4-5 June An Army rendezvous at Newmarket. The officers and soldiers resolve not to disband until their grievances are settled. A General Council of the Army is created, including both officers and Agitators.
11. 4 June The King is seized by Cornet Joyce at Holdenby.
12. 5 June The Commons order the infantry to be paid in full on their disbanding.
13. 16 June The Army issues the names of eleven members of Parliament whom they wish to be purged from the Commons.
14. 26 June The Commons asks the eleven members to absent themselves.
15. 27 June In a meeting at Uxbridge the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The English Civil War 1642–9
• 3. The American War of Independence 1775–83
• 4. The French Revolution 1789–94
• 5. The Prussian Army Reforms 1806–15
• 6. The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune 1870–71
• 7. The Russian Civil War 1917–20
• 8. The Chinese Civil War 1926–49
• 9. Conclusion
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX