The War of the Flea, Summary

Robert Taber covered the Cuban revolution for CBS and went with Castro’s columns from the Sierra Maestra to Havana. The War of the Flea, published in 1965 as American troops were arriving in Viet Nam by the division, is his account of how guerrilla war works and why armies keep losing it. Its governing image gives the book its title: the guerrilla fights “the war of the flea,” and his military enemy suffers “the dog’s disadvantages: too much to defend; too small, ubiquitous, and agile an enemy to come to grips with.”

What follows takes the book a chapter at a time, in summary, with short passages in Taber’s words. The chapter synopses are his own, from the table of contents. A 2002 edition from Potomac Books adds a foreword by Bard O’Neill of the National War College, who notes how much the vocabulary of insurgency has sharpened since Taber wrote, and how much of his analysis still holds.

Chapter 1: The wind of revolution

Popular will as the key to strategy. The confrontation of the haves and the have-nots. Fallacies of counter-insurgency. Guerrilla war as an extension of politics. Cracks in the armor of the modern state.

The book opens on two dispatches from South Viet Nam in 1964. In one, ninety-six helicopters carry a thousand assault troops into Ben Cat, the largest airlift in the history of warfare, after Saigon’s information officers have alerted photographers days ahead; the Viet Cong are gone when the troops land. In the other, two Ranger companies walk into an ambush beyond a rubber grove and fifty-one men die. A senior American officer calls it “the same damn story.”

Taber defines guerrilla war as revolutionary war, a civilian population, or a large part of one, engaged against the military forces of an established or usurping authority. The banners differ from case to case. The Viet Cong fight a war that is at once nationalist and class-based. The Cuban revolt began with no visible ideology at all, as a protest against a police state. Moroccans rallied around an exiled sultan, and in Palestine religion and nationhood made the struggle a holy war. Beneath all of these Taber finds one impulse, a new consciousness “not of ‘causes’ but of potentiality,” the discovery that conditions that had seemed fixed can be changed.

Two errors keep counterinsurgency specialists from seeing this. The conspiracy theory holds that revolutions are planted by outsiders and that people left alone would never choose them. The methods fallacy holds that guerrilla war is a kit of tactics any army can adopt. Against the first, Taber sets Roger Hilsman’s description of the Viet Cong as something like “gangland warfare,” and notes that Castro never had more than fifteen hundred armed men in a country of seven million, yet the whole island claimed the victory. Against the second, he argues that the guerrilla’s basic tactics are unavailable to the army, because their positions are opposite. The guerrilla holds the initiative. The army must guard cities, roads, crops, convoys and its own expensive weapons, while the guerrilla has “the freedom of his poverty.” The civilian population is his camouflage, quartermaster, recruiting office and intelligence service.

The chapter ends in history. Medieval serfs had no lever but their labor, and lived too close to starvation to withhold it. Industrial society changed that: production, distribution and consumption all depend on mass participation, and governments that depend on investors, allies and their own voters must appear popular and cannot be as ruthless as suppression requires. They must be “wooers as well as doers.” Taber’s formula, after Clausewitz, is that guerrilla war is the extension of politics by means of armed conflict.

Chapter 2: The war of the flea

Political and military objectives. Creating ‘the climate of collapse’. Organization of insurgent forces. Guevara on guerrilla war: the base.

The chapter’s epigraph is Mao’s formula: the enemy advances, we retreat; the enemy camps, we harass; the enemy tires, we attack; the enemy retreats, we pursue. Taber calls the formula common sense. What Mao added was the deliberate use of guerrilla action for political ends, without regard to the outcome of battles, so long as the revolutionaries survive. Cuba gave the clearest example, a war of skirmishes that brought a government down as surely as a lost battle.

Constitutional governments are the most exposed. Batista fell, Taber argues, not because he was a dictator but because a country with democratic institutions, dependent on American favor, would not let him be dictator enough; his counterterror only widened the opposition. Franco, who had stifled the idea of political liberty in Spain, stood. The guerrilla’s own weakness, by contrast, is merely, as Taber puts it, “a military weakness.”

The flea analogy is refined here. The dog does not die of anemia. It becomes overextended in military terms, unpopular in political terms, too expensive in economic ones, and then the fleas, multiplied by many small victories, concentrate for decisive blows. Time works for the insurgent. A government needs loans, investment, allies and a reputation for stability, and the guerrilla’s business is to destroy that image. The outbreak damages the regime’s prestige, survival shows the army’s impotence, and petitions, strikes, sabotage and terror follow. Repression deepens the opposition until the economy and the social fabric give way. Taber names the goal “the climate of collapse,” and calls it the key to everything the guerrilla does.

He is careful to say this cannot be started anywhere. Quoting Guevara, he holds that where a government keeps some appearance of constitutional legality, an outbreak cannot be promoted, since peaceful struggle has not been exhausted. People will accept organized violence only if they believe there is no alternative, the cause is compelling, and success is possible. Even then a guerrilla force needs an urban organization with two branches: an underground of saboteurs, couriers and clandestine printers, and a visible civic front of students, clerks, tradesmen and professionals, “above all, of women,” to raise funds, organize boycotts, feed friendly journalists and discredit the regime.

Chapter 3: Inception and evolution of an insurgency

Transition to civil war. Alternative solutions. The Cuban example.

Taber first describes the course of an insurgency in hypothesis. In the remotest province an arsenal is raided, a police post burned, a proclamation issued. The government fears the publicity more than the losses, since foreign embassies, banks and journalists are watching, and it sends an expedition with as little fanfare as possible. If the insurgents chose their ground well, it fails. They attack only with overwhelming local advantage and for limited ends, chiefly weapons, and use every encounter to show that the army can be defied. Terror and sabotage in the towns, publicized reprisals, martyrs’ funerals and strikes bring more repression, and the alienated join the rebels. Base areas follow, with a rebel government and economy, until the conflict resembles a civil war between a rural, agricultural territory and an urban one under siege.

In small, dependent countries such as Cuba, the decision can come politically, barring outside intervention. The Cuban campaign is the chapter’s example. Castro landed in December 1956 with eighty-one men and within a month had a dozen. When Taber met him in April 1957 he had perhaps a hundred. The largest early action, at the outpost of Uvero, involved about seventy soldiers. Herbert Matthews’s reports in The New York Times made Castro famous, and the publicity helped bring an American arms embargo, a squeeze on credit, and a failure of nerve in Havana long before most of the army had heard a shot.

Five thousand soldiers could not cordon off a mountain range a hundred miles long. Castro executed two bandits accused of rape and murder, establishing a government with a code of law, and granted land to tenants and squatters. Raúl Castro opened a second front with sixty-five men, collected taxes, paid cash for supplies, and let army columns pass through ambushes coming and going until the army stopped sending them. When Batista’s aircraft were found fueling at Guantánamo after the embargo, Raúl’s guerrillas seized some fifty American sailors and marines along with mine and plantation executives. The rebels taxed the coffee crop the government could not do without. In the last months an armored train bound for Santa Clara was derailed and captured, Batista fled, a general strike delivered Havana, and the main garrison at Camp Columbia surrendered without firing. Nearly every rebel weapon had been taken from Batista’s troops, a few dozen at a time.

Chapter 4: Protracted war

Popular forces versus regular armies. The guerrilla as missionary. Mao Tse-tung on the war of the flea. The lessons of China.

Guerrilla war, Taber writes, “is not so much abrasive as subversive,” a growth that works into the crevices of a rotting structure until it bursts. The insurgents cannot easily stop once blood is shed. They fight to survive, and survival requires avoiding battle on the enemy’s terms, which makes the war long.

He sorts revolutionary wars into three kinds. In dependent, semi-colonial countries like Cuba, a discredited government can fall for lack of support, unless the dominant power intervenes, in which case he expects to see Indochina recreated in Latin America. In true colonies, as in Cyprus, the task is to take the profit and prestige out of colonial rule. A third kind must be won on the battlefield, and China is its laboratory.

Following E. L. Katzenbach, Taber reads Mao as replacing the industrial nations’ factors of arms, logistics and manpower with time, space and will. Mao gave up territory to gain time and used time to build the will to resist. Japan, a small industrial power with a large war machine and a thin base of resources, needed a quick decision. China denied it. Mao’s analysis of the contradictions within China, between warlords and government, landlords and peasants, foreign goods and native producers, ends in his line that “a single spark can start a prairie fire.”

Mao’s campaign has three phases. In the strategic defensive, the army’s encirclement campaigns turn more and more of the country into rear areas where guerrillas work best, while the guerrillas cast their net wide to organize and draw it in to strike, using the “five-minute attack” and breaking off before heavy weapons can tell. In the equilibrium that follows, neither side can destroy the other and the guerrillas build their base areas. In the general offensive, mobile columns of divisional strength fight in the open. Red territory spreads on the map like ink on a blotter, from the mountains to the farmland, the villages, the towns, and last the cities. The enemy army is the main source of weapons, and in China of men. Mao’s armies destroyed a force of 3,700,000, and his writings, though “rhetorical, redundant, and often less precise than one might wish,” remain the primer.

Chapter 5: Colonial war and the French experience

Strategy and tactics of Vo Nguyen Giap. How the Vietminh won in Indochina.

Since the Second World War, Taber notes, no colonial people that entered a war of independence had lost it; Malaya and the Philippines are only apparent exceptions. Indochina is the clearest case of a colonial war fought to a military decision, and fought by Mao’s book.

French commanders expected to retake Viet Nam in ten weeks. General Leclerc’s 40,000 troops seized the roads and the crossroad towns of the south against little resistance, and applied the “oil-slick” method of colonial reconquest, combing the country square by square. They lacked the men for it, and their strong points commanded nothing. “The army fights to occupy territory, roads, strategic heights, vital areas,” Taber writes; “the guerrilla fights to control people, without whose cooperation the land is useless to its possessor.” The Vietminh fought on three levels: chu-luc regulars, regional guerrillas, and village militia who were guerrillas by night and peasants by day. Giap himself admits that political work was neglected at first, and that “Land to the Tillers” became a rallying cry only once the war was understood as a peasants’ war.

French politics did the rest. In 1950 Paris ordered troop reductions and forbade the use of conscripts in Indochina. That autumn a chain of frontier garrisons in Tonkin was cut off and destroyed, with the relief columns sent after them; Bernard Fall called it the worst French colonial defeat since Montcalm died at Quebec. Giap’s own early attempt at a general offensive in the Red River delta cost him dearly, and he turned to the highlands, where French armor and air power counted for less. His 1953 invasion of Laos risked little and, by Katzenbach’s tally, spread the French thinner, raised their costs, and cost the United States hundreds of millions in extra aid.

General Navarre’s plan, backed by American money, was to concentrate in the delta, seize the initiative and end the war. Giap answered by attacking wherever the French were weak, forcing them to scatter, and pinning a large force at Dien Bien Phu. In his words the French faced a contradiction: without scattering their forces they could not occupy the country, and in scattering them they became prey. Dien Bien Phu fell on May 8, 1954, after fifty-five days. The war cost the French Union forces 172,000 casualties and ended at Geneva in July.

Chapter 6: The political character of the Second Indochina War

The American role. Expansion of the war. The outlook.

To a South Vietnamese peasant, Taber writes, little has changed in a decade: American uniforms have replaced French ones in Saigon, the Vietminh are now called the Viet Cong, and the war goes on by the same methods toward the same ends. He quotes press accounts from early 1965 describing a war being lost on the ground while bombs fall on the North, and President Johnson insisting that the United States sought no wider war while denying that any civil war existed in the South.

From the Vietnamese point of view, the second war is a continuation of the first, for independence from Western domination and for a socialist revolution. Where France wanted a colony, Taber argues, the United States wants a satellite, and he lines up the official statements of what was at stake, from The New York Times and Life to Eisenhower and McNamara. The differences from the French war mostly favor the insurgents. Washington fights through Saigon governments it cannot control, nine of which had been overthrown since 1963, and through Vietnamese troops who have their own views of the war.

The Viet Cong had grown from scattered bands to more than 140,000 regulars and auxiliaries. Beginning in 1957 they cut the political links between Saigon and the villages by killing village chiefs and council members, an estimated 13,000 lives by 1963. Most of their weapons were American, captured from government troops. “Clear and hold” failed for the reason Giap had given the French: the army, evenly spread, would have put about three armed men on each square mile. Taber doubts the casualty figures, since the weapons captured never matched the enemy dead reported, and quotes Fall on air strikes that destroyed hundreds of houses and recovered nine individual weapons. The strategic hamlets of 1962, modeled on British practice in Malaya, drove young men into the forest. A planned national police force faced the same dilemma as the army, too weak if scattered and useless if concentrated.

The outlook, in the spring of 1965, is a temptation to expand the war. De Gaulle had said there could be no military solution. The likely path for the National Liberation Front was a negotiated coalition, then control of it, then union with the North. “The flea can endure,” Taber writes; his war is fought in space and time, and each day strengthens the third factor, the will of the people to resist.

Chapter 7: Wars of national liberation and their cost

The Irish ‘troubles’ and the role of the Black and Tans. Terrorism in Israel. Rebellion in North Africa.

Wars of national liberation, Taber argues, have been cheap in lives compared with wars between states. Battle deaths in Cuba ran to a few hundred. In its first year the IRA killed at most twenty-six people. The point of such a war is not to conquer but to make occupation intolerable, too embarrassing abroad and at home, too costly to sustain. “In the war of the flea, parliamentary cannonades wreak more havoc than artillery; headlines burst bigger than bombs.” The rebel casts himself as David and maneuvers the occupier into the part of Goliath, and every harsher measure of suppression darkens the picture held up before the world, including the occupier’s own opposition parties.

Ireland is the first case. The Easter Rising of 1916 had almost no popular support; Dubliners jeered the prisoners as they were marched away. Then the British shot fifteen of its leaders and prepared to conscript Irishmen for the war in Europe, and the country turned. The Dáil declared independence in January 1919, and on the same day Volunteers killed two constables in an ambush. Dublin came to resemble an occupied capital, with more than 20,000 house raids in fourteen months. The Black and Tans, arriving in 1920, answered each IRA incident with one of their own, and their reprisals shamed the British press. Michael Collins later put the IRA’s effective fighting strength at 3,000. The truce of 1921 was a political victory that made a military one unnecessary.

In Palestine the Irgun numbered no more than two thousand fighters and Lehi never more than four hundred. When Lehi killed Lord Moyne in Cairo in 1944, the Jewish press and the Jewish Agency denounced it. Taber holds that terrorists of this kind are not deviants apart from society but an early expression of popular resistance, and that the British, with the world watching after the Holocaust, could not go on hanging Jews, and left. In Morocco, after France exiled the sultan, a religious boycott of alcohol and tobacco became a revolt, terror proved more effective than guerrilla tactics, and the sultan’s return in 1955 ended the protectorate. Algeria took seven years and a French army a million strong. The French crushed the underground in Algiers with torture, but the mountains held out to the end, and the cost in money and political turmoil brought de Gaulle to concede independence in 1962.

Chapter 8: General Grivas on guerrilla war in Cyprus

The political uses of terrorism. Errors of British strategy.

The chapter opens with George Grivas defending his methods: “I was looking for results, not precedents.” Grivas, a conservative officer the Greek Communists regarded as a fascist, led EOKA against British rule from 1955 to 1959, for union with Greece. His campaign began in the spring of 1955 with bombs across the island, set by perhaps eighty men organized in small sabotage squads. A time bomb in a Coca-Cola bottle burned a few feet from the governor through a two-hour film premiere in Nicosia and went off five minutes after he left. Schoolchildren carried leaflets. Archbishop Makarios held the purse strings and vetoed some of Grivas’s plans, including an ambush of the British commander in the Middle East.

Grivas never expected a military victory. His written plan aimed to arouse international opinion and inflict “a moral defeat” by keeping up the offensive until the United Nations took up the question. He turned next on the police. After a Special Branch constable was shot down before hundreds of people in Ledra Street, Greek Cypriot police stopped resisting EOKA, and many began informing for it. The British replaced them with Turkish Cypriots, which deepened the hostility between the two communities.

Field Marshal Sir John Harding, in Grivas’s words “the leading British soldier of his day,” arrived as governor and flooded the island with troops. Grivas called it the wrong answer: every area has a “saturation point” beyond which more fighters only make escape harder. He used the towns and the mountains in turn, raising riots in the cities to hold the troops there while his bands struck in the country, and the reverse. By February 1956 some 22,000 British troops faced 273 full-time fighters and about 750 villagers with shotguns. Collective fines failed. The first hangings of EOKA men brought riots in Athens. “One does not use a tank to catch field-mice,” Grivas wrote; “a cat will do the job better.” No such small units were formed, and 43,000 British troops were on the island when the shooting stopped.

The Zurich and London agreements made Cyprus a republic without union with Greece, which disappointed Grivas. Taber counts it a defeat for Britain nonetheless: a colonial question had become an international one, at a heavy price in money, lives and prestige. Grivas laughed, he wrote, at each general who arrived to apply methods that had worked elsewhere, since the struggle “involved not a handful of insurrectionists but the whole people.”

Chapter 9: Failures in the war of the flea

Magsaysay and the Huks in the Philippines. The price of British victory in Malaya. Why the Communists lost in Greece.

Taber extends Mao’s image of the fish in the sea: the few guerrilla movements that have been suppressed were taken out of the water, or left it. In the Philippines the Huks emerged from the war against Japan demanding land and a political voice. By 1950 they had some 12,000 armed men, perhaps a million supporters, and an army of 30,000 unable to touch them. Ramon Magsaysay, appointed secretary of defense that year, ended the army’s terror against villagers, sent small constabulary units after the guerrillas, put most of the army to work on roads, schools and clinics, and offered amnesty and land to any guerrilla who surrendered. Bounties bought weapons and betrayals, and the Huk leadership in Manila was captured. An honest election in 1951 widened the government’s support. The Huks, a peasant movement that never built an urban front or seriously disrupted the economy, dwindled until Luis Taruc surrendered in 1954.

The guerrillas in Malaya were nearly all Chinese, many of them recent squatters, in a country with no deep roots for them. Their jungle refuge held aboriginal tribes who could barely feed themselves, so food came from the villages, and police control cut it off. More than half a million squatters were resettled in guarded villages. Even so the British needed more than ten years and 140,000 soldiers and police. Taber reprints a report of Operation Nassau, a nine-month battalion operation in a swamp that used 60,000 artillery shells, 30,000 mortar rounds and 2,000 aircraft bombs to kill or capture thirty-five guerrillas. He asks how many shaky governments could afford that against a thousand.

Greece is the case of how not to fight. The Communists began in 1946 with ELAS veterans, wartime arms and sanctuaries in Albania and Yugoslavia, and grew from 2,500 fighters to 26,000. Then they stripped the mountain villages of food and people, which turned opinion against them and emptied the war zones, so government pilots could treat anything that moved as a target. From 1947 they tried to hold ground with brigades and divisions, partly because their new government needed territory to show the world. General Papagos rebuilt the army, Tito’s break with Stalin closed the Yugoslav border in July 1949, and within weeks the strongholds at Vitsi and Grammos were overrun. “The Huks lost it,” Taber writes of popular support, “the Chinese in Malaya never had it, the Greek Communists threw it away.”

Chapter 10: Sun Tzu on The Art of War

Principles of guerrilla strategy and tactics. Terrain as a determining factor. Guerrilla war in urban areas. The character of the guerrilla.

Sun Tzu’s maxims, beginning “All warfare is based on deception,” anticipate nearly every military question of guerrilla war, and Mao borrowed many of them. Taber’s point is that “modern warfare” is mostly a cant phrase. Weapons change, but terrain, weather, space, time, population and morale still decide campaigns. What is new is guerrilla war as a tool of political revolution, in which each battle is a lesson meant to show the army’s impotence.

He lists the prerequisites: an unstable political situation with sharp social divisions, a political objective most people accept as worth any sacrifice, an oppressive government that admits no compromise, and a revolutionary organization able to lead. Above these is a visible chance of success. In Cuba each class had its own cause, from economic nationalism among industrialists to land hunger among squatters, and the overthrow of Batista tied them together.

Tactics rest on evasion, intelligence and terrain. A popular cause gives the guerrilla an intelligence service as large as the population. Castro told Taber in 1957, “We always know where the soldiers are, but they never know where we are,” when he had a hundred men nominally surrounded by five thousand. “The ocean is surrounded,” Taber adds, “but the fish do not care.” The best ground is rough, forested, poorly roaded and thinly but widely settled, close to the people the guerrillas depend on, with hamlets too small and too many to garrison. Band sizes follow the ground: columns of a hundred in the Sierra Maestra, platoons in richer farmland, squads of three to eight near the towns. The army’s “oil slick” sweep needs ten soldiers to every guerrilla and often far more; Taber notes that Castro’s own militia needed 60,000 men and three months to clear 600 CIA-supplied rebels from the Escambray in 1961. Ambushes take the vanguard, so that soldiers stop wanting to lead. In time the government announces a victory it has not won and falls back on containment, and the guerrillas expand.

Taber considers whether the United States itself is immune, quoting Black Nationalist writers who imagined sabotage of dams and power lines. He finds much of it demagoguery but grants that urban, industrial societies are not guerrilla-proof. Technology does not settle the matter: bombs miss men in slit trenches, gas used in Viet Nam in 1965 did nothing but provoke outrage around the world. “The flea survives by hopping and hiding; he prevails because he multiplies far faster than he can be caught and exterminated.” The guerrilla must be loved and admired, must pay for what he takes, and his propaganda must be essentially true to be believed. “Insurgency is thus a matter not of manipulation but of inspiration.” The counterinsurgency experts, he notes, “have yet to win a war.”

Chapter 11: Guerrilla movements in the Third World

The revolutionary base. Outlook for the United States. Proposals for a new American foreign policy in Latin America.

The last chapter draws two conclusions: the war of the flea is the natural weapon of the world’s have-nots, and the United States, as the greatest banker, investor and guardian of the existing order, is cast in the counterrevolutionary role whether it likes it or not. Modern powers want labor, trade and markets from the poorer countries, not empty land, and cannot exploit people without their consent. Force applied short of extermination feeds the resistance; force sufficient to crush it destroys the thing being fought for. “It is a case of shooting the horse because he refuses to pull the cart.”

In Viet Nam Taber sees four choices: a full war of subjugation, a settlement with the Viet Cong, withdrawal, or expansion of the war to Hanoi and China, which he calls a monstrous variation of the first. He looks next at the Congo, where white mercenaries defended mining interests in a jungle that could swallow a dozen South Viet Nams, and then at Latin America, which he considers the real stake. There, by his figures, a tenth of the landowners held nine-tenths of the land, and population grew 2.8 percent in 1960 while production grew 0.3. Television antennas rose over the favelas of Rio, which he takes as a sign of “the revolution of rising expectations.” Poverty alone does not make revolution, but poverty beside visible progress produces “the ambitious poor, the rebellious poor.”

His proposals are to end military aid to the region’s armies, offer an economic New Deal in place of lopsided trade, and, hardest of all, “embrace the revolution,” channeling it toward liberal and democratic-socialist outcomes rather than opposing it. Cuba is his example of options lost one after another: Washington might have repudiated Batista in 1957 and 1958, or subsidized the land reform in 1959, and kept an independent but friendly neighbor. The book ends: “There is only one outcome to guerrilla war, and that is revolution, and there is only one remedy, and that is peace.”