Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (37 page)

At the time of his death in 1980 at eighty-seven, Tito’s view still prevailed. Four years later, at the Winter Olympics held in Sarajevo, the world witnessed Tito’s vision of Yugoslav nationhood. Yet the following decade saw Sarajevo, and much of the rest of the country, turned into a charnel house that would consume the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents. Tito’s dream was shattered.

The fall of Yugoslavia should be viewed as having occurred in spite of all that Tito did, not
BECAUSE
of what he did. As Misha Glenny observed, for all his exploits as a partisan leader, perhaps Tito’s greatest accomplishment was that he “succeeded in ending the mass slaughter of Croats and Serbs born of the complex conflict which developed among the ruins of monarchist Yugoslavia during the Second World War.”
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He did this by promoting a greater national identity, which he shored up during the dark war years—despite Nazi efforts to foment internecine strife—and continually reinforced during the many decades of the Cold War. That a homegrown fascist, the Serb leader Slobodan Milosevich, would one day pick up the Nazi playbook again and reawaken old hatreds does not detract from Tito’s accomplishment. The dissolution of Yugoslavia merely confirmed something that Tito believed all along: the only truly mortal threat to his nation would come from within.

COUNTERINSURGENT:
FRANK KITSON

Victor Patterson

Armed resistance to foreign occupation, so widespread during World War II, rose to an even higher level of activity in the postwar years. This was because the idea of nationhood—a key to Tito’s success, which had depended on all the various Yugoslav ethnic groups flocking to his banner—came to animate “peoples’ liberation movements” around the world that aimed at throwing off colonial control. The view that common people could drive out their conquerors and colonizers was as old as Clausewitz’s discussion of it in his classic
ON WAR
. And surely Abd el-Kader and Garibaldi who, knowingly or not, acted on Clausewitz’s formulations were early exemplars of this ideal. The same could be said of Lawrence. But Abd el-Kader failed, and in order to win Garibaldi had to ally with the royal House of Savoy. Even Lawrence saw the Arab Revolt end in a reassertion of outside rule, for the most part, with new masters. But Tito’s striking success at irregular warfare, so thoroughly consolidated in the years after the fighting ended, became the benchmark for many other aspirants.

Soon life grew hard for the world’s colonial powers, as the “big war” against the fascists was followed by a spate of small conflicts aimed at the imperialists. Almost all these wars of liberation, many of them supported by the Soviet Union, were conducted using various mixes of insurgent and terrorist tactics. As Robert Taber once put it, this was an era of “the war of the flea.”
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Possessing the world’s largest empire, Britain was particularly pressured by these movements. Containing or countering them became a principal strategic goal, beginning almost immediately after the final defeat of the Axis powers. It was to prove a rearguard action at best, however, given that during the period 1947–1980, forty-nine colonial entities would break free from the British Empire.
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But the manner in which the British met these many challenges to imperial control reflected a growing sophistication on the part of their military. Fresh from its many massive battles against the Germans and Japanese, Britain learned to wield its arms with a new suppleness.

The early going was hardly auspicious. Britain simply let India go in August 1947, with Pakistan being split off and a war between the two new nations erupting immediately. The following year Israel was granted its nationhood, in part due to world sentiment in the wake of the Holocaust favoring establishment of a home for the Jews, but in part also because the Jewish insurgents that Orde Wingate had done so much to train had worn down British will. Burma was also set free about this time; but thereafter it was determined in the high councils in London to hold on to the remainder of the empire, come what may. A series of insurgencies and terror campaigns soon erupted, putting British skill and resolve to the test.

One of the most vexing uprisings broke out in Kenya, which Britain had controlled since 1887. Tribal lands had been appropriated and settled by a few thousand white planters who employed and oversaw an indigenous population numbering in the few millions. The Kikuyu, at slightly less than two million, were the largest tribe and the one most dispossessed of its traditional territories by the colonists. They were also the most resentful and, once the dust had settled from World War II, began agitating for their freedom. At first they simply sought to follow Gandhi’s model of nonviolent resistance, which had worked so well in India, but the British reaction in Kenya was to hunker down and hold out.

When, inevitably, violence occurred, notably the killing of a pro-British Kikuyu chief by Mau Mau fighters
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in October 1952, a full-blown state of emergency was declared. But by then Kikuyu discontent was so great that it took only a short while for more than fifteen thousand fighters to take the Mau Mau oath and begin killing in the name of independence. Members of the constabulary and pro-British Kikuyu were among the principal targets at the outset of this conflict, but white farmers were also attacked. More than two dozen of them were murdered, enough to terrorize the roughly forty thousand Europeans living throughout Kenya at the time.

The most spectacular single act of terror committed by the Mau Mau was the so-called Lari Massacre in March 1953, in which another pro-British tribal chief’s village was overrun and seventy men, women, and children were slaughtered. In the wake of this terrible incident, British reinforcements began to arrive, bringing troop levels to more than twenty thousand by June 1953 when General George Erskine arrived. They were soon employed, quite ineffectually, in a mixture of garrison duty and broad-based sweeps to hunt down the Mau Mau.

General Erskine was sensitive to the shortcomings of this approach and was well aware that over 90 percent of the Kikuyu supported the Mau Mau.
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Other tribes like the Kamba and Masai were also climbing onto the insurgent bandwagon. As the historian John Newsinger wrote, “The inability of the security forces to defeat the rebels was attracting men and women from other tribal groups to the path of armed struggle.”
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In the words of Sir Michael Blundell, the leader of the European settler community in Kenya, the authorities were losing “the battle for the mind of the African everywhere.”
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At this low point in the summer of 1953, a twenty-six-year-old British officer from the Rifle Brigade, with which he had been serving in Germany for seven years, was sent along with other reinforcements to help in the fight against the Mau Mau. Frank Kitson came from a family with a two-century-long tradition of service in the Royal Navy, which he had broken due to asthma. He joined the army instead, beginning his training in the last months of World War II. His initial instruction and his years of service as an occupier in Germany did little to prepare him for the conflict in Kenya.

Kitson, for some reason posted to Kenya as an intelligence officer, strove hard to make up for his lack of preparation with intensive reading about the history of the Kikuyu and with flights over Kenya. He also studied closely the social organization of the insurgency, especially the wide reach and considerable stealth it enjoyed because it was broken into small, widely dispersed “gangs” of fighters. Kitson began to crystallize his insights about irregular warfare, views that he would one day sum up succinctly: “The problem of defeating insurgents consists very largely of finding them.”
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While Kitson was learning, Erskine was developing his own plan to create “safe areas” and conduct sweeps for the enemy, but neither of these remedies showed signs of doing serious harm to the insurgents. By the spring of 1954 he was frustrated enough to launch Operation Anvil, a mass detention of Africans in Nairobi, the goal being to sort out the Kikuyu from among them for resettlement. After this method was employed in the city, it was taken to other parts of the country. Ultimately more than a million Kikuyu were detained and resettled.

Much suffering accompanied this policy, which the British government strove to hide. Erskine was a friend of Winston Churchill—now nearly eighty, and prime minister yet again after a postwar hiatus—who had given him a letter authorizing him to take whatever measures he thought appropriate in Kenya. Erskine carried the Churchill letter around in his glasses case, and whenever he faced objections from his subordinates or the settlers he would, as the historian Caroline Elkins notes, “stop them in their tracks by snapping the case open and then shutting it.”
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In the midst of Operation Anvil, Kitson was developing his own concept of counterinsurgency operations, primarily to have friendly Kikuyu go out in the field pretending to be Mau Mau. The idea was basically the same as that employed by the Germans in Russia and the Balkans during World War II: such pseudo gangs could be used to gather intelligence about the insurgents and even stage raids and ambushes against them. But for the most part it had been the Germans themselves who went about impersonating their enemies, including regular combat forces on occasion, an achievement pulled off by the famous commando Otto Skorzeny both on the Eastern Front and later during the Battle of the Bulge.
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Kitson’s particular innovation was to “turn” a small number of Mau Mau detainees, by a mixture of harsh-then-gentler treatment, convincing them to join the British cause in this covert fashion.

Kitson and his colleagues managed to recruit about fifty former insurgents to the anti–Mau Mau cause. They trained in teams of seven or eight, and were sent out initially at night under the command of British officers in blackface. Early on they were used simply to gather intelligence. Later they were employed with some regularity to mount ambushes. In both types of endeavors the Kenyan cadre performed highly effectively and showed so much initiative that they were eventually allowed to operate on their own. In his own way Kitson had rediscovered George Crook’s insight that tribal peoples are hardly monolithic; they have their differences that can be exploited, and some can be trusted to undertake counterinsurgent work against their fellows. For Kitson, a key to the success of his pseudo gangs’ infiltration work was that the tribespeople “were fairly gullible about accepting anyone who appeared to be a Kikuyu and a friend.”
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Over the course of about a year of such operations, Kitson and his minions basically destroyed the Mau Mau as a fighting force. Until his pseudo gangs had been set loose, the massive sweeps and aerial bombardments that characterized the campaign had proved largely wasted efforts—as John Newsinger observed, “out of all proportion to the results obtained.”
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But Kitson’s “countergang” concept, which was also adopted by the police Special Forces, became, in the view of the great historian of irregular warfare Robert Asprey, “the most successful of all methods employed.”
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These activities were coupled with conciliatory social reforms and even included the embrace of the former Mau Mau adherent and idol Jomo Kenyatta, who would become president of an independent Kenya. Ultimately the policy and tactics led to a restoration of order and a secure peace.

*

For Kitson, Kenya was just the beginning of what would turn out to be a long career in counterinsurgency. As the Mau Mau revolt was winding down he was sent off to Malaya, where yet another vicious guerrilla war had been raging for several years. Here were skillful Communist insurgents whose roots lay in resistance to Japanese occupation during World War II, much like the “Huks” who operated in the Philippines, first as partisans, later as antigovernment guerrillas. But in Malaya the insurgents enjoyed far less popular support from the indigenous population; instead they were favored by the ethnic Chinese minority that had settled there. After a brief attempt to cooperate with the British when they returned at the end of the war against Japan, the Communists mounted a bloody irregular campaign for independence.