Guerrilla Warfare by Walter Laqueur

Author:Walter Laqueur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Postwar Reflections

When the war broke out in 1939 no one thought that guerrilla operations would play any material part at all in the critical years ahead. And it was perhaps by very virtue of this revival of partisan war being so unexpected in the first place that the pendulum later swung to the other extreme and its importance exaggerated. The impression is sometimes even created that it was the guerrillas who in fact won the war with occasional help of this or that regular army. These sources have it that there were two million partisans in the USSR, 50,000 in France, 462,000 in Italy and 250,000 in Bulgaria.63 The partisans claimed to have killed millions of enemy officers and soldiers, not to mention local traitors; they allegedly destroyed fifteen thousand locomotives, fifteen thousand bridges, four thousand tanks and a thousand aircraft.64 They claim to have diverted enemy forces amounting to between two hundred and fifty and three hundred Axis divisions, forty divisions in the USSR, fifty in Poland, fifty-five in Yugoslavia, more than thirty divisions in France, twenty in Greece, ten to fifteen in Czechoslavakia, eight in Albania and so on down the line. These figures certainly do not err on the side of understatement.

The real number of partisans is virtually impossible to establish. Much, of course, depends on the definition of the term. If one applies it liberally and includes men and women who were ready to hide partisans for a night or who expressed sympathy with them, there may have been millions of them. The dangers involved should not be belittled; it took a brave person to give shelter to a partisan for it could mean execution. If, on the other hand, one counts only those who actually participated in the armed struggle against the enemy, the number is much smaller; the less resistance there was, the taller quite often the claims. Furthermore, there are great discrepancies between the figures given by Soviet, Yugoslav, French and other sources at various times and in various contexts. Recent Soviet sources quote the total number of people involved at one time or another in the partisan movement as seven hundred thousand; Western sources put it at five hundred thousand. But the rate of attrition was high; many lost their lives, others were wounded or captured, some deserted or were sent back to join the regular army. The maximum strength of the Soviet partisan movement at any given time was two hundred to two hundred and fifty thousand men and women.65

The discrepancies are even greater when it comes to the results of the partisans' operations. The Yugoslav partisans alone, it was noted, claim to have killed and wounded almost a million "enemies." If this figure is correct, most of the victims must have been Yugoslavs. The same applies to other European countries; a great many people perished in Europe during and after the war in civil wars, purges and the settlement of all manner of accounts, but this did not necessarily weaken the German war effort.

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