War Of The Flea The Classic Study Of Guerrilla Warfare by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: military

The purpose of terror, said Lenin, is to terrify. He might have strengthened the observation, while weakening the aphorism, by remarking that its greater purpose is to sabotage the orderly administration of government by forcing those who govern into a defensive position in which nothing can be accomplished without the continual, crippling presence of an armed guard. Its secondary effect, if not its purpose, is to induce a counterterrorism that serves the rebel cause better than any stratagem the rebels themselves could devise.

This was the case in Ireland, where, despite a long history of insurrection, public support of the independence movement was lukewarm until fired by the acts of the British themselves-in particular by the depredations of the notorious "Black and Tans," recruited to strengthen the Royal Irish Constabulary.

Of the ill-starred Easter Rebellion raised by Irish nationalists in 1916, four years before the Tans were heard of, Richard Bennett writes in The Black and Tans:

The Easter Rebellion was a sadly mismanaged enterprise. The rebels proclaimed the Republic, occupied a number of buildings in Dublin and held out bravely for a week. A young mathematics teacher called de Valera was the last to surrender. There was little trouble in the rest of Ireland. The Irish people declined the nobly worded invitation 'to prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called,' and looting Dubliners made hay while the shells crashed and the bullets flew.

Never in the history of Ireland had a rebellion inspired so little sympathy. There were nearly a hundred thousand Catholic Irishmen fighting with the British Army, and the rebellion seemed as much a stab in the back to the majority of Irish people as it did to the English. The prisoners, who were marched through the streets, passed between lines of angry, jeering Dubliners. The cause of Irish independence seemed lost, or postponed to some far-distant date.

At this point, the British made a fatal mistake. They proceeded to shoot fifteen leaders of the Easter Rebellion. The executions caused a scandal that spread around the world, and ended any hope of a peaceful solution of the Irish question. The fortunes of the almost discredited Sinn Fein independence movement, provided with a set of holy martyrs, quickly revived. But London went ahead, almost as if deliberately inviting its own defeat, by preparing a conscription act-the Great War in Europe was then in progress and manpower was desperately needed-to draft Irishmen of military age. The measure united the country against the Crown and sent thousands of young men into the Irish militia known as the National Volunteers, soon to be converted into the revolutionary Irish Republican Army. England could not have done more to set the stage for "the troubles" to come.

On January 21, 1919, the Dail Eireann, the legislative assembly of the Sinn Fein party, declared its independence from Britain and proceeded to constitute itself a de facto republican government on Irish soil, soon to be complete even to Sinn Fein courts and police. The maneuver was political in intent; actual war was not envisioned.

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