Who invented guerrilla war

They intercepted Union supplies, cut communication lines, destroyed rail cars and railroad track, carried out surprise raids, and often donned blue uniforms to invade Yankee camps.

These tactics frightened and demoralized Union soldiers, a phenomenon which came to a head in with the formation of Col. The efforts of guerrillas to antagonize the Union army were undeniably successful. In response, Union commanders tried sending out scouting parties to capture the guerrillas. These attempts, however, accomplished little. Guerrillas, who had the advantage of surprise and knowledge of the territory, were nearly impossible to catch and efforts to capture them only distracted soldiers from fighting the Confederate army.

Their inability to stop the guerrillas who continued to destroy Union supplies and kill Union men encouraged a growing dislike among Northern soldiers for the Southern population from which the guerrillas came. Union commanders began to hold civilians responsible for the actions of guerrillas, often by burning homes and communities, arresting civilian non-combatants, and in some cases evacuating entire counties.

By , the guerrilla war throughout the South had become confused, bloody, and disorganized. The Union Army had ceased to tolerate guerrillas, and met their attacks unhesitatingly with retaliation. Civilians, exhausted by the violence in their communities and hopeful of preventing Federal retaliation against their homes, lost their support for the guerrilla movement and it soon began to die out. Despite the significant role that guerrillas played during the war, academically they have received very little attention.

Early Civil War historians characterized guerrillas as interesting yet irrelevant, and as a result the importance of guerrillas during the Civil War has been largely understated.

Today, however, historians are beginning to recognize the role that guerrillas played in shaping both the outcome of the war and wartime society. Guerrillas, whether they fought as bushwhackers, jayhawkers, or partisan rangers, influenced both the Confederate home front and Union military policy, and proved to be important, if slightly overlooked, figures in the American Civil War.

Ash, Stephen V. Grimsley, Mark. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Mackey, Robert R. Norman: The University of Oklahoma Press, Sutherland, Daniel E. Learn More: Logistics of the Civil War. Civil War Article.

Guerrilla Warfare. Hometown heroes and villains. By Kara E. Kozikowski Guerrilla's raid a Missouri town. Library of Congress Throughout the American Civil War, as vast armies in blue and gray clashed on conventional battlefields, a drastically different kind of conflict was raging as well: a bloody guerrilla war that erupted in the South in response to Federal invasion. Wikimedia Commons Several different kinds of guerrillas emerged during the Civil War.

Quantrill and his men raid Lawrence, Kansas. Library of Congress Guerrillas and partisan rangers in the east, however, focused their attention on harassing the Yankee invaders, and soon emerged as a real and constant threat to the Union army.

Taylor The efforts of guerrillas to antagonize the Union army were undeniably successful. Since World War II guerrilla warfare has been employed by nationalist groups to overthrow colonialism, by dissidents to launch civil wars, and by Communist and Western powers in the cold war.

There have been dozens of such conflicts. After the French defeat at Dienbienphu , France withdrew from the conflict; but the Geneva Conference brought no permanent peace, and Communist guerrilla activity continued in Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam.

In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge waged guerrilla warfare to win control of the nation and, after being ousted by the Vietnamese army, again resorted to it until the group's disintegration In Algeria guerrilla warfare against the French was begun by the nationalists in and conducted with ever-increasing violence until Algeria won its independence in Greek nationalists in Cyprus carried on guerrilla warfare against the British from until that country gained independence in Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara in launched a guerrilla war in Cuba against the government of Fulgencio Batista; in , Batista fled the country and Castro assumed control.

This success gave encouragement to rebel guerrilla bands throughout Latin America. In , Guevara was killed by the Bolivian army while leading such a rebel band in the jungles of Bolivia. In the late s, Palestinian Arab guerrillas intensified their activities against the state of Israel.

In , after a full-scale war with the Jordanian army, they were ousted from their bases in Jordan. After the PLO was forced to leave Lebanon , its fighters were again dispersed, but it continued to mount attacks until peace negotiations in the early s. Since the late s, terrorism —long an element in conflict and a hallmark of many Hamas attacks—and other tactics see Intifada have increasingly marked the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The United States has sponsored guerrillas, most notably anti-Castro Cuban forces and Nicaraguan contras.

Modern urban guerrilla activities such as hijacking and kidnapping are frequently inspired by ideology rather than patriotism and are often tinged with elements of terrorism. The Irish Republican Army late s to mids and Peru's Shining Path engaged in both attacks on government forces and various forms of terrorism. Since the s many nations experienced some degree of ongoing societal disruption due to persistent unconventional warfare, among them Afghanistan, Algeria, Burundi, Cambodia, Colombia, Iraq, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Turkey in Kurdish areas.

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