The American Guerrillas

How to Multiply Small Numbers by an Anti-Communist Factor

IN North Carolina's Uwharrie National Forest, 50 men broke camp in the swamps and headed stealthily out to intercept and disrupt regular U.S. Army troops on maneuver. In Alaska, a similar force worked with Eskimo scouts in the tundra. Another outfit was learning to handle explosives at the U.S. Navy's underwater demolition school in the Virgin Islands. In the Philippines, another detachment on maneuvers against the 2nd Airborne Battle Group of the 503rd Infantry, slipped through the jungle lines, dropped imitation poison in the drinking water, captured trucks, and otherwise raised sufficient havoc to delay the "advance."

The stealthy marauders are part of a select band of 1,800 specialists who make up the U.S. Army's Special Forces, a growing nucleus in U.S. military operations. Their job is to drop far behind enemy lines to rally partisan bands and teach them the prickly science of guerrilla warfare. Though the group was organized in 1952, its training and operations (two overseas units: one in Okinawa, one in West Germany) have been largely soft-pedaled. They blossomed from the shadows last week after President Kennedy-who has been reading books on guerrilla warfare by Mao and Castro's leftist lieutenant, Ernesto ("Che") Guevara-ordered the Pentagon to step up the U.S.'s capability in unconventional warfare.

Exploiting the Advantage. After World War II the U.S. began to realize that it had been left far behind in the art of guerrilla warfare, and that its then emerging cold war antagonists, Communist Russia and China, were experts. The Army set up the U.S. Army Special Warfare Center in a collection of old buildings at Fort Bragg, N.C. Its first weapons were volumes on guerrilla tactics by such unsurpassed veterans as Red China's Mao Tse-tung and T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), who used guerrilla warfare against the Turks in World War I. Chief lesson: a band of well-trained, well-supplied guerrillas can harass and tie down 10 to 15 times its own number in conventional enemy troops--for example, 300,000 partisans could easily keep 3,000,000 troops entangled. The Army reasoned that the U.S.-Communist ratio might run much higher, since the U.S. has one big advantage over the Communists: the waiting millions of anti-Communists in Communist-conquered countries.

No Heroes. Since the emphasis in the Special Forces is on organizing and teaching partisans-so that they in turn might fan out and pyramid their own numbersthe men are chosen for their high intelligence and maturity as well as for their physical courage. "This is no place," says Group Commander Ike Edwards, "for the hot-blooded hero type." All Special Forces recruits must have at least a year's prior military service, must be qualified paratroopers; unlike conventional paratroopers, they make all their training jumps by night. Their 38-week training course is a killing tenure of unrelieved work and pressure. After getting instruction in communications, medicine, weaponry and demolitions, they are formed into detachments of nine to twelve men and refined into crack team-operators capable of moving into action in any kind of territory. The morale of the Special Forces guerrillas is very high, and their re-enlistment rate is at an enviable 49%.

Guerrilla fighters at the key European operations center at Bad Toelz, Germany, sport a variety of languages ranging from Russian through most of the tongues and dialects of the satellite countries. During the training course, the officers and enlisted men parachute into simulated target countries. If, for example, the country is Hungary, they must know how to find a street in Budapest, be able to talk knowingly about the principal Hungarian poets, and know the proper words for romance. The Pacific center at Okinawa consists of a core of 350 men, well versed in jungle warfare, who operate in flexible units ranging from a single man to teams of 30 or 40. During the crisis in Laos last month, Okinawa guerrilla fighters were packed and ready to go. Says Colonel Francis B. Mills, C.O. in Okinawa: "We are ready to move anywhere within hours."

Anti-Guerrillas. Once dropped behind enemy lines, the task forces seek out partisan leaders and willing followers and set up clandestine schools. The guerrillas can remove an appendix, fire a foreign-made or obsolete gun, blow up a bridge, handle a bow and arrow, sweet-talk some bread out of a native in his own language, fashion explosives out of chemical fertilizer, cut an enemy's throat (Peking radio calls the operators "Killer Commandos"), live off the land. The all-important aim is to elicit support from the local people by promises, threats, bribes, or by any other means. The Fort Bragg school is broadening its training in counterguerrilla warfare, numbers among its students officers from Latin American and Southeast Asian countries. "Once a guerrilla force knows that it is being stalked by hostile guerrillas, its full attention must be focused on the destruction of this immediate threat," says the Army handbook. One aim is to persuade enemy guerrillas to switch sides. Such converts usually become impassioned, "galvanized guerrillas," often the best for intelligence work.

Tactically, the Kennedy-ordered buildup of guerrilla training will add a new arm to the U.S.'s limited-war capability, and potential strength to small nations threatened with Communist infiltration. The project opens up the hazard that enthusiastic anti-Communist guerrillas may take off on a limited war of their own without an American by-your-leave. But this hazard is small compared with the value of training Communist-threatened allies in countering the Communists' favorite infiltration tactic. One new project in the works with an eye cocked toward Castro's Cuba: a branch school for counterguerrilla instruction, to be set up in the Canal Zone. By training Latin Americans in the skills of guerrilla warfare, the U.S. hopes to put teeth into President Kennedy's promise "to work with our sister Republics to free the Americas of all foreign domination and tyranny."

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