Partisan Warfare

New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1962. First Published [stated]. Presumed first printing. Hardcover. Good/Good. The format is approximately 5.5 inches by 8.75 inches. 199, [1] pages. Maps. Bibliography. Index. DJ has wear, edge tears and some soiling. Corners somewhat bumped. Endpapers have some discoloration. Mailing label of previous owner on fep. Foreword by Colonel C. M. Woodhouse. Dr. Heilbrunn was educated in Berlin, Munich, and Frankfurt Universities from 1924 through 1927. He has been a student of guerrilla warfare since 1952 and, in addition to his books—Communist Guerrilla Warfare (with Brigadier C. A. Dixon), Partisan Warfare, Warfare in the Enemy's Rear, and Conventional Warfare in the Nuclear Age—he has had many articles on the subject published in military journals. Otto Heilbrunn (born March 7, 1906 in Frankfurt am Main; died January 7, 1969 in Buckinghamshire) was a German-British lawyer and non-fiction author. Otto Heilbrunn attended the Wöhler-Realgymnasium in Frankfurt. From 1924 he studied law in Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt and passed his first legal examination in 1927. He received his doctorate in 1929 at the University of Frankfurt am Main. During the Nazi era, Heilbrunn was removed from office and expelled as a Jew. After WW II, Heilbrunn returned to Germany with the Allies. In 1947/48 he worked for the US occupying forces as a legal assistant at the Nuremberg Trials, was questioned for an affidavit in the I.G. Farben trial and worked for the British occupying forces at the Manstein Trial in 1949. Heilbrunn received British citizenship in the 1950s. He wrote books on guerrilla and guerrilla warfare in English, which were also translated into German. This book was the first systematic study of partisan war, investigating questions thrown up by the success of guerrillas in the Second World War, where they were never decisively beaten by regular armies. Drawing on lessons from Soviet Russia and China in particular, areas with especially active and large partisan forces, this book evolves a doctrine of guerrilla war in modern conditions, with an analysis of partisans in post-war Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba and Laos. Dr Heilbrunn has already established himself as a historian of irregular warfare. But the subject is not merely a matter of past history, because the so-called ‘nuclear stalemate', which has made total warfare improbable, has at the same time made limited warfare the only kind that the world can afford to risk. One hopes, naturally, that the risk will be avoided; but since even a conventional war of the traditional, pre-nuclear kind might easily lead unintentionally up to a total war between great powers and is therefore also likely to be avoided, there remains the residual danger of what may be called ‘sub-conventional' warfare in marginal areas, which the great powers would be free to support or disown, to fan up or suppress, according to their immediate interpretation of their own interests. The Resistance during the Second World War was the prelude to this new kind of warfare. It was not, of course, a new invention between 1940 and 1945: one remembers, on the contrary, the Spanish resistance during the Napoleonic Wars, which gave us the word guerrilla to add to our language, and the exploits of Lawrence and others during the Arab Revolt of 1917. But these were side-shows in support of a major conventional war, without which they would have achieved practically nothing. Since the Second World War, the corresponding outbreaks of irregular warfare have stood on their own as the major, if not the only, armed conflicts in their particular struggle, not a side-show in support of a major war elsewhere. The Spanish Civil War of 1936-8 is their archetype. Irregular warfare has accordingly become more professional and highly organized. It has had to acquire a sense of strategy, not merely of tactics. Perhaps eventually it will drop the epithet ‘irregular'. Even by 1945 the ‘partisans' of southern Europe and the Balkans had ceased to so describe themselves, and adopted instead the nomenclature of regular armies. Those who fought with the partisans of the Second World War will find that already there have been profound changes in the evolution of partisan warfare since 1945. But thanks to Dr Heilbrunn's keen sense of the continuity of that evolution, they will also recognize their own side-shows as forming an integral part of the history of this fascinating subject. He does us the honor of frequent quotation from our accounts of wartime experience; and it is encouraging to find that the lessons of that experience have been confirmed by later application elsewhere. His book is perhaps the first comprehensive study of the theoretical aspects of partisan warfare, at least in the English language. It is firmly grounded in practice, and likely to serve for a long time as a standard work.