Insurgents, Raiders, and Bandits (9 page)

Perhaps the most accomplished French practitioner of this subtler aspect of the art of occupation was Louis-Gabriel Suchet, whose operations in Aragon and Catalonia provided a textbook model of this aspect of counterinsurgency. Under his command a large swath of Spain remained, for the most part, peaceful and secure. The historian Lynn Montross has described the situation:

Suchet not only put an end to French looting . . . but actually refunded money extorted by his predecessors. Treating the conquered with scrupulous fairness, he created hospitals, orphanages and schools. By admitting Spaniards into a share in the government, he won their respect to such an extent that soldiers of the army of Aragon were able to go unarmed among the peasantry.
³

Suchet was also a great field commander, defeating several British generals who sought to bring the successful methods Wellington employed on the Portuguese front to other parts of the peninsula. He encouraged the recruitment of Spaniards who were willing to join the cause against the guerrillas—as many of the latter, in the name of freedom, had simply seized upon the opportunity to engage in banditry. While Suchet’s methods did not catch on completely throughout all of occupied Spain, his fellow commanders did strive at least in part to emulate his approach.

In short, the guerrillas were up against tough, smart occupying forces and sometimes had to fight other Spaniards. The conventional forces they tried to operate with were either far off or, when operating closer, beaten by the likes of Suchet. How then did the guerrillas come to prosper in the field and have such a powerful impact on the outcome of the war?

To be sure, the French occupation was resented, especially because both old King Carlos and his son Ferdinand were being held in France as hostages, with Napoleon placing his brother Joseph on the throne—the ultimate act of nepotism. But hard feelings about “overthrow and occupation” were not enough to make for a successful insurgency. That demanded the kind of charismatic leadership that could bring the people together, not only to rise up but also to fight effectively. The regency government in still-free Cádiz in southwestern Spain, wracked with its own byzantine infighting and performing poorly in the field, could not provide this sort of inspiration or even model military leadership. Instead it was left almost entirely to private individuals both to galvanize and guide the resistance.

Many of these insurgent captains arose from the peasantry in various parts of Spain. Some were struck down, others were beaten in battle. Still others either switched sides or seized the opportunity to resort to outright banditry. Some achieved small degrees of success simply by staying on their feet and fighting the French until liberation—like Juan-Martín Diez in Guadalajara,
EL EMPECINADO
(the Indomitable).
4
But in the scale and strategic impact of his operations, one stood out from all the rest: a man who took the name “Mina.” He was almost surely illiterate, a Basque-speaking farmer who was to become the most successful insurgent leader of the resistance. He would suffer stinging defeats and several wounds during the war years but would always rebound. Along the way he would improve his practices, exhaust and befuddle his more numerous French adversaries, and in the end, play a crucial role in their defeat.

*

The Peninsular Campaign and Insurgency

In the beginning, he wasn’t even Mina. Francisco Espoz was a common soldier among the Navarrese insurgents who had joined up to serve in a “land pirate” (
CORSO TERRESTRE
) band of insurgent raiders led by his distant younger cousin, Javier Mina. Only eighteen at the time of the French invasion, Javier was a bright seminary student who came from a better-off branch of the family. He was an excellent speaker and organizer whose anti-French zeal soon became a rallying point for resistance in Navarre. Born in 1781, his cousin Francisco was twenty-eight at the time and was but one of many enthralled by the words and vision of Javier Mina. Later, in a clear example of guerrilla branding, Francisco would tack on his cousin’s name onto his own, becoming Espoz y Mina. But he would routinely shorten it to Mina, allowing the venerated name to take its full effect.

The early actions of the Mina
CORSO
undertaken in the fall of 1809 were concentrated on striking at supply convoys and small detachments of French soldiers. The basic concept of operations was to hit and then run back into the mountains, where the insurgents could move more surely and swiftly, almost always eluding their pursuers. For months the insurgents stuck to this pattern quite successfully. But on occasion Javier would concentrate his forces against larger targets, as in an attack on a battalion of some eight hundred French troops deployed to the town of Los Arcos. In this action the smaller guerrilla force was augmented by hundreds of angry local peasants, from whom the French had been extorting money and requisitioning food. The locals eagerly joined in the attack. The French were driven out and Javier, flushed with success, decided against returning to the mountains. Instead he set up his headquarters in Los Arcos.
5

This move proved to be a bit too impetuous: it drew the growing threat of Javier’s force all too soon to Suchet’s attention. The French commander dispatched a division (some ten thousand troops) to engage Javier, who quickly abandoned Los Arcos and had to stay on the run. He, Francisco, and the rest of the band gave a good account of themselves in the many running fights that ensued at the close of 1809; but by the spring of 1810 the French force had nearly doubled in size, and the guerrillas were forced to operate almost entirely in small, dispersed groups. In March of that year, Javier was traveling in company with a few others when they were ambushed by a French patrol. He was taken prisoner while Francisco remained on the run with six other fighters who would carry on in his name.

A heated debate among the French broke out next over what to do with Javier. One opinion, championed by Napoleon himself—such high-level attention being a sign that the guerrillas were already having an effect—was that he be publicly executed. Suchet and others in the field, however, sought to show clemency, then to use Javier to appeal to other Spanish insurgents to join with the French in bringing “true security” to their own country. This appeal had worked for Suchet in other areas; indeed, in some ways it foreshadowed the American effort two hundred years later to recruit Iraqi insurgents to the cause of countering terror in their country. But Javier would not allow himself to be used in this fashion.

Nonetheless by the time this attempt at turning him had failed, Napoleon’s blood had cooled, and Javier was sent off to prison in France. He was freed upon Napoleon’s abdication in 1814 and soon made his way to Mexico where he joined the rebellion against the Spanish monarchy that had been restored after Napoleon’s fall. But Javier could not rekindle his soldier’s luck. He was captured and later executed in Mexico City in 1817.

Meanwhile in the spring of 1810, Francisco headed a team of just six guerrillas fighting for freedom in a province that the French had now apparently pacified, and in which their occupying forces now numbered close to thirty thousand troops, including many cavalry and much artillery, the two areas in which the guerrillas were sorely deficient. Francisco’s first step was to associate himself with his heroic cousin, taking his name and assuring his fellow Navarrese that Mina fought on. Soon new recruits began to join up. As the burden of requisitions and taxes to support the large French occupying force grew, so did Spanish resentment, and the ranks of the rebels swelled.

Still, Mina confronted plenty of problems. Perhaps the most pressing was the fractured nature of the resistance, whose members were enthralled at the time with a chaos-inducing concept they called simply “the Idea.” Its basic point was that every man was the master of his own desires and could not be ordered around by anyone, French or Spanish. While the Idea helped enliven the resistance, it also encouraged freewheeling banditry. So Mina’s first task was to rein in the men of the Idea as well as rival resistance leaders, a mission he undertook with a ruthlessness that was to become as well known as his bravery in battle and his fairness in settling disputes.

One of Mina’s most dangerous rivals was Pascual Echeverría, who in the summer of 1810 commanded a force of guerrillas about half the size of Mina’s, which was now about a thousand strong. Echeverría had established himself in the prosperous town of Estella, whose people bore the heaviest burdens imposed by his band. Mina went straight at him—but under the guise of negotiating an alliance. During their meeting, Mina arrested him on criminal charges, took him prisoner along with five of his most trusted lieutenants, and had them all sent off to a nearby monastery. Mina then seized the moment to recruit more than four hundred new troops, formerly under his rival’s command, into his force—and then ordered Echeverría and his lieutenants shot. The people of Estella celebrated. The new recruits behaved.

Juan Hernández was another insurgent-gone-bad with whom Mina had to deal. He commanded a force composed almost entirely of cavalry and so could not be chased down, as Mina’s force at this point was still made up mostly of light infantry. So Mina made overtures to Hernández, conjuring up images of a winning alliance in the making. The leader of the mounted bandits fell for the ruse, and he too was arrested at his meeting with Mina. After he was executed, his troopers joined the cause, and now Mina had cavalry.

Perhaps the greatest challenge to Mina’s authority came from Casimiro Javier de Miguel, a former cleric who had been appointed a colonel by the Regency government that still held the southwestern strip of Spain and a few other cities. Father Miguel came to Navarre in August 1810 to take over from Mina, who at this point was still viewed with a mix of condescension and suspicion by the junta in Cádiz. For all his ruthlessness in pursuing power, Mina graciously handed over his forces to the colonel; but Miguel’s military incompetence soon had the guerrillas surrounded by a fast-moving French force.

At this point Mina resumed command and extricated his troops from the potentially fatal encirclement. He arrested but did not execute the priest-turned-colonel, sending him back to the regents so that they could contemplate his shortcomings. In September the government in Cádiz formally recognized Mina as the leader of all resistance forces in Navarre, effectively ending his need—at least for the present—to do away with any more rivals.
6

Mina’s rough path to insurgent leadership was perhaps the first real test of his mastery of irregular warfare. The rivals he shunted aside were tough, wily men, and the softer Father Miguel was the favorite of the regency. Thus Mina had to thread his way carefully, tempering the brutal tactics employed against his competitors in the field with patient handling of the government’s man. Future masters like Tito and Mao Zedong would face similar challenges, overcoming them in similar ways. But some, like the great Chechen leader Aslan Maskhadov, would fall short in terms of consolidating their command. Mina pioneered not only guerrilla field operations but the range of strategies associated with achieving command of guerrilla movements.

But while Mina was consolidating the French had not been idle. Although their forces in Navarre had shrunk by more than half after the capture of Javier Mina—a necessary reduction so that the burden of occupation would not weigh too heavily on the Navarrese people—a dynamic new general, Honoré Reille, arrived with a division of fresh, experienced troops to track down Mina. Soon the rebels were on the run once again. Throughout the late summer of 1810, French soldiers chased Mina and his men all over Navarre. But while the imperial troops exhausted themselves during the chase, the guerrillas struck back hard at targets of opportunity. Supply convoys were their favorite targets, especially ones that carried ammunition, the insurgents’ essential need.

They also attacked other types of targets, one of the most important being a surprise assault on an entire brigade of Reille’s force. To their great embarrassment, the French were sent running from the mountainous terrain around the Carrascal Pass, all the way back to Pamplona. In another key action, Mina struck at the French fort of Puente while Reille’s main force was pursuing a small insurgent decoy detachment far to the west. Mina burned the fort down and killed or captured the entire garrison of three hundred troops. Perhaps two-thirds were taken prisoner, in these days to be marched to the Biscay coast where they would be placed on British ships and transported into captivity. Later, as the viciousness of the fighting intensified on both sides, prisoners would not be so humanely treated.