LETTER TO (SANITIZED) FROM WILLIAM J. CASEY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88B00443R001500080044-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 24
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 24, 2007
• Sequence Number: 44
• Publication Date: June 7, 1984
• Content Type: LETTER

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The Director of Central Intelligence
Wishinnmt.D.C20505
Executive Registry
84- 2550
7 June 1984
Dear Mr. Martin,
I very much enjoyed our talk at the Jedburgh
Reunion in the American Ambassador's residence last
week. We promised to exchange some writing we had
done on those days. I'd like very much to see your
account of the and I enclose a lecture
I gave at the Smithsonian a couple of years ago about
the "War Behind the Lines." I look forward to receiving
your piece and hope our paths will cross again one of
these days.
Sincerely,
STAT
STAT
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REMARKS OF WILLIAM J. CASEY
DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
SMITHSONIAN RESIDENT ASSOCIATE PROGRAM
"GREAT AMERICAN BATTLES OF WORLD WAR II: NEW PERSPECTIVES"
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, D.C.
July 15, 1982
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WAR BEHIND THE LINES
In World War II, secret armies were organized to fight behind enemy lines
in many countries -- France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Greece, Norway, Italy, Russia,
Burma, China, Thailand, Holland, Denmark to name a round dozen. There are
good books describing these epic undertakings. There are two excellent books
surveying the whole range of resistance activity in Europe.
Guerrilla movements in Yugoslavia, Greece and Albania were a major factor
in keeping some 40. German, Italian, Bulgarian, and Croatian divisions in
Southeast Europe far from the arena of decision. Resistance armies-in Norway,
Denmark, Holland and Belgium tied up other German forces and delayed their
movement to reinforce fighting in France. I will confine myself largely to
the sage of the French resistance because I know something about that from
first-hand experience and because it played the largest role in support of
American forces.
When Great Britain found itself alone, its ground weapons and much of
its army left behind on the continent, it could only carry on a war of
attrition on the economy and the morale of the victorious Germans using the
only weapons it had left -- the Royal Navy to blockade, the Royal Air Force to
b and the people of Occupied Europe to sabotage and undermine.
To do this, Churchill created SOE, the Special Operations Executive,
and issued the memorable orders, "Set Europe aflame." That proved to be
easier said than done. There were many brave Brits ready to become commandos
and many brave Europeans eager to risk their lives to inflict damage on the
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conqueror and redeem their national pride and honor. Europeans at large
cheered them on until they discovered what the occupier would do in reprisal,
like wipe out an entire village. That turned the SOE and the resistance
groups that sprang up all over Europe largely away from exploits of one-shot
sabotage and hit 'and run raids toward long, careful, slow organizing, training
and equipping of specialized groups and networks to get intelligence, spread
propaganda, do quiet and difficult-to-detect sabotage and develop paramilitary
units capable of striking when the time came. A long slow process, some three
to four years, of building building skills, support structures, training
capabilities, organization and relationships set in.
There were three separate but loosely tied together organizations which
guided and supported this process from outside France -- SOE, the Free French
in London and Algiers and, during the last two years, the OSS from Washington,
London and Algiers. Inside France there were five principal strands from
which separately led and frequently rival resistance forces developed.
Indigenous resistance groups sprang up all over France and consolidated into
some half a dozen movements, more or less focused in particular regions of
the country. When the Germans attacked Russia, French Communist and far
left groups which had largely supported the occupiers went into resistance
and began to form their own units. SOE and General De Gaulle's intelligence
action service separately sent organizers and radio operators all over
:France to recruit resistance groups and provide them with communications,
training and weapons. Finally, when the occupier imposed a labor draft,
thousands of young men left their homes to hide in the hills and forests
and ultimately formed themselves into military units seeking arms from
London directly or through one of the earlier resistance networks.
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These were the principal actors when the Americans of OSS arrived on
the scene in London and Algiers, late in 1942 and early in 1943.
Our new and senior partners of SOE and the Free French had been in
business for some four years and had become proficient and confident in
sending organizers and saboteurs into France and keeping them there. They
had performed sabotage jobs, established organizers and communications,
built up caches of weapons, organized resistance bands and networks of
resistance bands. But using these scattered and irregular forces in support
of large-scale military operations in France was a new problem. It had to
be worked out with military planners and commanders skeptical about the
value of resistance forces. We were in something of a vicious circle. We
had to satisfy ourselves about the reliability of resistance forces and
persuade the arriving American military to provide the plans and equipment
they would require to have any value.
Military commanders coming over from the US were schooled and geared
to secure their objectives by the application of overwhelming firepower,
and they believed they had it. For the most part, they knew little and
cared less about French resistance or guerrilla warfare.
For the generals at SHAEF the French resistance movement might be as
We and as important as OSS and Special Operations Executive said it was.
-On the other hand, the resistance might be a chimera and not materialize
in the crunch. Sure, there were thousands of Frenchmen eager to fight the
occupier, as many as 150,000 by some estimates. But they had to be organized,
armed and directed. Could the still nascent and loosely knit resistance movement
quickly become a cohesive striking force sufficiently under our command and
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control to make a military contribution to the invasion? That belief required
an act of faith. OSS and SOE officers in Grosvenor Street and Baker Street
who had worked with Passy and his BCRA and with the men going in and out of
France were willing to make that commitment. But selling the idea to our
generals and their planners wasn't easy. Their distrust showed up dramatically
in the paucity of arms and equipment-the allies dropped to the Maquis and
other French resistance groups. Arms deliveries to those areas of France
where the invasion was planned had a lower priority than the air lift to
Yugoslav and Italian partisans.
The Germans held the-French resistance in much higher regard than-some
of our own generals. Of course the Wehrmacht had reason to, having lived
cheek to jowl with the resistance for four years and watching it grow from
a few disgruntled groups to a swelling national movement. As early as
October 1943 Field Marshall von Rundstedt wrote a perceptive analysis of
resistance potential:
"The aims of the Resistance movements and of the
British organizations working with them is to set the stage for
action against the rear of the German army to coincide with the
Allied landings. Their most urgent task will be to attack our lines
of communication with maximum force. Such is the danger inside the
country, and it may have a very unfortunate effect in the course of
a major battle. We can undoubtedly combat the Resistance movements
effectively, but this will deplete our available forces and thus
strengthen the position of the British and American troops."
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We had only to look at the map of resistance forces pinned in our
situation room on the fourth floor of Grosvenor Street to see the potential
von Rundstedt discerned. Strong resistance forces threatened virtually
all of the major communications lines linking German troop concentrations
in France with the Reich and with each other. The resistance had built up
strongholds in the mountains of the Haute-Savoie near the Swiss and Italian
borders and from them could hack at links between Germany and the French
Mediterranean coast. Troops defending the Bay of Biscay area were vulnerable
to attacks on their lines to units stationed along the Channel coast. German
Army Group B had its First Army headquartered in Bordeaux and the 19th in
Marseilles. Charged with defending the area between the two coastal cities,
the Army Group was caught in a pincer between resistance forces to the north
in the Massif Central, and to the south in the Pyrenees. They had the potential
for squeezing the-Toulouse-Carcassonne gap. Dijon, Lyons, Grenoble, Avignon
and Limoges were studded with resistance outposts. Clermont-Ferrand was the
resistance center for the whole Massif Central. The Rhone, the major German
traffic artery in southeastern France, was thus threatened from two sides.
Finally, the resistance in the Massif Central and in the Morvan could harass
any troops moved from the south and east to beef up defenders of the invasion
coast. And while underground activities were more complicated in the heavily
pop6 ated and strictly policed north, the resistance was a force the Germans
had to reckon with there, too.
We could see great possibilities on these maps and there was no end of
plans to exploit them. While how much support to give resistance forces
and just how to use them was debated, time was running out and we had to get
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on with getting organizers and radios in place, supplying them with weapons
and ammunition and shaping up command and control arrangements if any plan
at all was to be implemented.
The debate about whether to support the French resistance was being
slowly resolved in the resistance's favor. Yet although Churchill's forceful
action to increase planes and supplies in February gave France first priority,
the debate on how to use resistance forces continued. French generals in
London and Algiers kept pushing Plan Vidal, named after General Delestraint's
nom de guerre. It called for seizure of large areas in the heart of France
that had the physical geography to aid defense. Once seized, these outposts
would give. the Allies "ports of entry" for airborne troops and supplies.
French and Allied soldiers would then strike at the enemy's rear. SHAEF
thought the plan too bold and too risky and would have none of it. Yet
despite the formal SHAEF rejection of Plan Vidal in February, the notion
lingered on. The French never really gave up on it. And later on resistance
groups in the Alpine areas and in the Massif Central actually tried to put it
into operation. Others argued forcefully that resistance units be located
in "redoubts of Resistance" in those parts of France geographically most
suited for large-scale military operations. There, the Maquis could be
organized and trained, and readied for sabotage and guerrilla operations
behind enemy battle lines. For the professionals, Colonel Passy in London
and Jacques Soustelle in Algiers, these redoubt concepts were hopelessly
romantic. They counselled more sophisticated concepts of guerrilla war.
Hit and run attacks, they argued, should be coordinated into an overall
plan of action to support the military sweep across France. Such a sweep
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would be necessary to liberate France, they believed, but it should be
carried out in such a way as to limit reprisals and conserve strength for
future action. De Gaulle himself advanced a third, even broader concept,
which was to come closest to the reality. All the disparate resistance
elements inside France would simply fuse into an "army of the shadows" to
form a single "French Army."
The most ambitious, and finally the most rewarding, operational plan
for French resistance forces was called Plan Vert because it was typed on
green paper. It featured maps and drawings prepared by 20 draughtsmen and
listed some 800 missions against French railways, all spelled out in detail.
Its centerpiece was a series of simultaneous rail cuts designed to prevent
designated German units from moving toward the front lines. These rail
disruptions were to be maintained while the cross-channel Allied buildup
went forward.
To back up plans for sabotaging the rails, the French Ministry of Roads
and Bridges (remember that the Vichy government continued to function, however
impotently, right up to the liberation) developed Plan Tortue or Tortoise.
It was designed to delay moving up German reinforcements on the road by
cutting highways and blowing up bridges, thus delaying movement of trucks
and armor. The specific focus of the plan was German armor. It provided
information to local resistants on how best to delay Panzer divisions rumbling
toward Normandy -- by blocking possible alternate routes, erecting road
obstacles, and creating bottlenecks.
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The French Post and Telegraph Service, the PTT, provided London with a
study of underground telephone and telegraph lines the Germans used. Plans
were included for making cuts which would interrupt enemy communications
between-front lines and headquarters to the rear. Such cuts would force the
Germans to abandon land lines and take to the air where we could pick up and
read their messages.
In March, Eisenhower came down on our side in a directive which formally
consolidated SO/SOE as Special Forces Headquarters, put it under direct
command of SHAEF and ordered it to implement plans for activities in support
of the invading armies.
Communications and command arrangements with the resistance moved to
the front and center of our concern. Our ability to use these forces
depended on both. Resistance leaders operating behind the lines and officers
commanding invading troops would have to be able to communicate quickly and
effectively if their operations were to mesh. Radio contact alone could not
accomplish this. We needed men in Allied uniforms to advise the resistance
on Allied needs, and specialists attached to the invading armies who understood
the resistance to advise Allied commanders on what French forces could deliver.
We had some 90 tough, confident hell-for-leather volunteers completing
their training at an enormous manse called Milton Hall, some 80 miles north
of London. They had been recruited from airborne and infantry training camps
in the States. Some had just gotten wind of "extremely hazardous mission
behind enemy lines" and volunteered. They were a mixed lot -- lawyers,
journalists, salesmen, teachers, West Pointers, a banker, a dairy farmer,
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a stunt man who had done a hand stand on a ledge on top of the Empire State
Building, a French chef in a New York restaurant. With about the same number
of Britishers and Frenchmen, they had been toughened up in Scotland, given
parachute training near Manchester, and were now being instructed in the
gentle art of guerrilla warfare. The Frenchmen were mostly St. Cyr men and
professional soldiers. During this month of March they were "marrying" into
three-man teams, selecting the partners on whom their life might depend.
The concept of putting men in uniform behind the battle lines was a
novel one, and one of the most effective of the war. They were to go in
teams of three -- one French officer, a British or American officer and a
radio operator. One was appointed the leader, another his deputy, the third
served as radio operator. The teams were called "Jedburghs," named after
the town on the English-Scottish border where they were trained. Sending
them in uniform had a double purpose. Showing the flag would boost the
hopes and morale of resistance forces and word would go around France that
the Allies had arrived in uniform. In addition, the uniform offered some
protection against reprisals if captured.
Hitler, the Gestapo and the Vichy militia paid little heed to such
niceties of war as uniforms and terms of the Geneva convention. Indeed,
t Faehrer had issued orders to shoot anyone caught behind the lines, in
:uniform or not. But the Wehrmacht adopted an attitude of enlightened self-
interest. As long as they adhered to the rudiments of the Geneva convention,
chances were the Allies would, too. Thus the uniform did offer some protection
to volunteers inexperienced in clandestine work and speaking at best a barely
passable French that would give them away as quickly as their uniforms.
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Hopefully, however, the Jedburghs would reach the shelter of the resistance
group they were to advise safely. All in all we trained 300 volunteers.and
organized them into 93 teams. They were all dispatched into France after
D-Day.
Halfway between Jedburghs and regular invasion troops were the OSS
Operational Groups (OGs) and the British SAS detachments. Units were larger
and better equipped. Their job was less clandestine and more operational..
Armed with automatic rifles, machine guns, bazookas and explosive charges
they went in to strengthen Maquis units fighting the Germans and to block
or divert enemy forces. Our OGs were made up of 15 French-speaking men.
We would have 14 of them ready by O-Day. The British had 2,000 soldiers in
their SAS and they operated in larger units than OSS Operational Groups,
though their aim and purpose were similar.
Teams of other officers and enlisted men would be assigned to invading
armies as resistance experts. They were to be grouped into Special Forces
detachments and detailed to each Army and Army Group headquarters. Equipped
with direct radio links to OSS and SOE stations in England -- there were six
in all that served the European resistance's central nervous system -- the SF
units were in indirect contact with resistance forces. It worked this way:
S.E woould radio London asking for particulars about a resistance unit operating
in their sector, relay instructions on what the area commander wanted the
resistance unit to do, and receive messages from the French underground
forces about their position and activity. Though clumsy in concept, this
"network" functioned with astonishing precision.
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As D-Day approached, Eisenhower first put the SOE-OSS units supporting
resistance forces together in SFHQ -- for Special Force Headquarters -- and
some weeks later brought SFHQ and the Gaullist groups together in FMFFI,
the French initials for General Staff French Forces of the Interior, and
put the French General Koenig in overall command of all resistance activities
and forces inside and outside of France.
When May arrived, organizational confusion was gradually being overcome,
or, at least, we learned to live with it. Those inside France disposed to
follow De Gaulle would take Koenig's orders, while those distrustful of outside
direction would gravitate to the Communist-led Francs Tireurs Partisans as
the strongest resistance force not integrated in the FFI. Apart from this
split with its postwar political overtones, there was a drawing together of
the internal resistance as the SOE organizers tended to follow their followers
into full support of De Gaulle and virtually all the networks inside France
as well as those organized under the direction of SOE and the Free France
from London and Algiers and Rust became part of FFI.
Precise acts of sabotage were carried out all over France. The
resistance hit factories turning out war material, bridges, canals, railways,
ammunition dumps and communication lines. Supplies dropped from the skies
included much more sophisticated weapons -- bazookas, mortar, anti-tank mines,
incendiaries and grenades, hundreds of tons in all.
The long debate on how far to trust the underground and how much to use
the FFI was resolved by the course of events as much as by conscious decisions
in London. They were to be part of the battle flow but with strict Allied
controls. FFI troops would attack specific targets or German units, depending
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on the judgment of the Allied military commander on the scene. Guerrilla
warfare was to be leashed until it could be coordinated with the military
offensive. Agents were trained to act at precise times and in specific
places to help an approaching Allied force. Anything more, it was agreed
in London, would expose resistance groups to German retaliation. French
units would be chewed up one by one before they could make their most
effective contribution.
Right up to the end of May, Americans, British and French accepted as
dogma that resistance forces should lay low until specifically ordered into
action. But like so much dogma in the hectic weeks that were the countdown
to D-Day, it would be subject to sudden, unexpected change.
In those last weeks before the landings, the wireless reports received
in London in increasing profusion created a growing sense of control over
large areas of France. Our agents would find themselves surrounded by a large
group of people as they landed with fires burning, autos on hand to drive them
through villages and smaller towns under Maquis control. Supply depots and
hospitals for resistance fighters were functioning. German forces kept to
the Routes Nationales and the big towns because they found the secondary
roads too dangerous. By sticking to-them it was possible to drive long
i stances with impunity.
Our planes were parachuting almost 100 tons of arms and ammunition a
week, ten times what we had been doing two months earlier. The RAF was
dropping even more. Still more came from Algiers. The radio set in contact
with London or Algiers had become the great sources of power in dealing with
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resistance factions and their leaders. The tapping of the morse key could,
like magic, bring them step guns, grenades, bazookas and explosives. A single
radio could provide a center of communications for groups of hundreds and
even thousands of resistance fighters extending over hundreds of miles of
winding roads as their leaders came to request arms and propose or accept
missions of destruction, interdiction or preservation.
The radio would give organizers sent into France the clout to insist
that resistance leaders avoid pitched battles and split their forces into
small units to hit and run, so that German troops scouring the countryside,
reinforcing the bridgehead and, later on, retreating, would be ambushed and
harried yet find nothing to fight.
The French were very jealous of their authority and control, but the
saving grace was that Koenig was a very sensible man who'had done a lot of
fighting alongside the Allies. In spite of a certain amount of acrimony and
apparent total confusion, things would work out better than we had any right
to expect. A looseness and laxity in responding to requests would be noticed
in the field, but this would be more than made up by zeal, initiative and
ingenuity of resistance unleashed.
Against so edgy a background, the decision taken at the end of May
about use of the French resistance was even more dramatic and fraught with
friction than it would have been under the best of circumstances. On May 31,
word reached us at Grosvenor Street that SHAEF had turned the policy for
using French resistance upside down. We were told that instead of signaling
the resistance to rise unit by unit and join the fighting on a gradual as
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needed basis, all action signals to resistance groups in every corner of
France would be sent out simultaneously. A year's worth of careful planning
and analysis were to be thrown out the window. Conclusions about not exposing
the FFI to Nazi retaliation until Allied forces were close enough to help were
to be abandoned.
Our first reaction to the new order was one of gloom and foreboding.
If issued as now planned it could touch off a national uprising. The Germans
would have little trouble drowning the revolt in a blood bath with grave
long-term political consequences. Finally, and perhaps most important, our
troops moving across France would be deprived of military support from the
FF1. David Bruce went to argue this out with General Walter Beedle Smith,
Ike's chief of staff. To no avail. The decision was firm. Eisenhower
wanted all the help he could get when he needed it most, at the time of the
landing.
Some suggested that the French really favored a general call-out,
primarily for political reasons. Others thought -- rightly as it turned
out -- that too many Frenchmen were too eager to smash the hated Boche to
keep them down. Resistance would flare spontaneously almost everywhere.
A policy of closely coordinated control was futile. Still others, including
s within the OSS community, argued that the greatest contribution
,ome -resistance could make was to stretch German forces in France as a whole
to the utmost. A sudden surge of resistance nationwide, they said, was
the best way to achieve that goal. A final argument, and one that seems to
have carried the most weight, contended that only a general uprising could
keep the Germans confused about the site of our actual landing, and thus
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safeguard the Pas-de-Calais deception plan. It cannot be stressed hard
enough, moreover, how many hopes of a successful invasion had been hung on
that deception plan. It permeated a great deal of Overlord thinking.
The issue, of course; was never in doubt. Ike had made up his mind
and that, properly so, was that. The grand deception had to be protected.
Our control over the French resistance was not that sure. We needed help on
the beaches first. The future would have to be sacrificed for the present.
And so, on June 1, the first set of some 300 messages went out over the BBC
alerting resistance leaders all over France that the landings were to come
during that week. The action messages on the night of June 5 triggered the
rail, wire cuts, road and bridge destruction which had been targeted all over
France. The French resistance made 950 cuts in French rail lines on June 5th,
the day before D-Day, and destroyed 600 locomotives in tenr weeks during June,
July and August of 1944. Trains and convoys carrying German troops and supplies
to the bridgehead were delayed for days and weeks, troops had arrived at the
front on bicycles and horse-drawn carts, German headquarters with their
telephone lines cut had to communicate with radios which our codebreakers
in England read with dramatic consequences. Our greatest debt to them is for
the delays of two weeks or more which they imposed on one panzer division
moving north from Toulouse, two from Poland and two from the Russian front
as they crossed France to reinforce the Normandy beachhead. We'll never know
how many Allied soldiers owe their lives to these brave Frenchmen.
In the mountainous parts of France, even before D-Day, large numbers
of Maquis, confident that the Allied landings would not be delayed much
longer, were mobilizing to attack German occupying forces. This went back
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to Plan Vidal, sponsored by officers of the French army, to create some kind
of a redoubt within France as a base to which Allied troops could be sent by
parachute and glider to join with the Secret Army in attacking German forces
from within. This concept was never given the slightest encouragement in
London.
Pitched battles occurred in Vernon,-at Mont Mouchet, at Mont-St. Michel,
and at plateau of Glieres in eastern France near the Swiss border. These
were an unfortunate and unnecessary waste of life and resources. Only the
hit and run protection of flank guerrilla actions paid off. Normandy, jammed
with troops coast to coast, was no place for irregular forces to fight.
This had been foreseen and emphasis in the phase was on activating resistance
forces 50 to 150 miles behind the front to slow down reinforcements, tie
down garrisons and harass German units from the rear. The first concentration
of Jedburghs was in Brittany and on both sides of the Loire. On June 20,
a message, which looked even beyond this, gave a new shot in the arm to our
supply of resistance forces. It read:
"The Maquis has started open guerrilla warfare and is in
temporary control of certain areas of southern France. The Germans
are reacting strongly with fully armed troops. Every effort must be
made to supply the Maquis at once with rifles, Bren guns, Piat guns,
mortars and Bazoukas with ammunition, and whatever else is needful
to prevent the collapse of the movement and to extend it. What is
being done about this? Have you any difficulty in getting men to
repack containers with the right sort of weapons? Could General Wilson
help from North Africa? Pray tell me if I can help you to accelerate
action." (Initialled W.S.C.)
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Those initials had a special magic. They got immediate action. A
message went back from Ike's chief of staff, Bedell Smith, and General Bull,
as G-3 head of operations, "We will do everything we can to prevent the
Maquis in southeastern France from being destroyed in detail by the German
Armed Forces. A daylight sortie of 300 American bombers escorted by fighters
will try to drop arms and other necessities to the Eastern Maquis tomorrow,
22nd June."
Our operations map showed six areas aflame with resistance activity.
They stretched across France from Brittany in the west through the Haute Vienne,
Creuse and Correze south and west of the Loire, through the Morvan south of
Dijon and to the French Alps and down to the hills behind the Riviera and
Grasse. Some 33,000 Maquis had been mobilized in areas outside Brittany,
but only 13,000 were armed. Most drops had been made in other parts of
France or the Germans had snatched the supplies.
On June 25 at four in the morning, 180 B-l7s took off with fighter
escort to drop supplies to the target areas. Dubbed Operation Zebra, it
was the first daylight mission, precursor of many more to come. In the
short June nights, we could not afford the cover of darkness and had to
risk flying during the day.
,--'Less than three weeks later, on Bastille Day, July 14, General Doolittle
mounted an even more ambitious air drop operation. An awesome armada of
nine wings -- 349 planes carrying supplies and escorted by 524 P-51 and P-47
fighters -- took off from nine airfields.
On August 1, the B-17s took off again, five wings of 36 planes each to
parachute supplies to five targets.
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This buildup of supplies and the lift it gave resistance fighters paid
off during August and September when resistance groups south of Loire
protected Patton's right flank as he raced across France from Brittany to
Nancy and ultimately liberated all of France south of the Loire and west
of the Rhone. East of the Rhone resistance forces, along Napoleon's route,
protected the flanks of the American Seventh Army as it moved from its
Mediterranean landing beaches to Grenoble in nine days, a march which the
Seventh Army operational plan had figured would require 25 days.
. As Patton swept across France, British and American armies approached
the Belgian border. The port of Antwerp was a great prize. When Belgium
was liberated in September, the Belgian secret army had prevented the Germans
from carrying out orders to destroy it. The port was handed over to us intact.
One of the great foul-ups of command in World War II was the failure to cross
the Aebert Canal to seal off the German 15th Army in its -retreat from the
channel coast. The result was that substantial elements of that army survived
to defeat Montgomery's thrust to cross the Rhone at Arhienm and that we had
to sit until November to clear the approaches to Antwerp so that supplies
could be brought to the front by the shortest and fastest route. The war
would have lasted a good deal longer if we had not been able to use those
port facilities in the late fall of 1944. During the Battle of the Bulge
i December 1944 and January-February 1945, the Danish resistance virtually
brought the railway system to a halt to delay German divisions brought closer
from Norway. This was largely the result of a lot of ingenuity and resource-
fulness in using a few hundred British, French and American officers to support
and direct local resistance fighters and to fake a phantom army which kept 15
German divisions, which might have pushed us back into the channel, sitting
less than 100 miles away waiting for an attack which was never intended.
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When it was all over, General Eisenhower said, "...In no previous war and
in no other theatre during this war have resistance forces been so closely
harnessed to the main military effort...I consider that the disruption of
enemy rail communications, the harassing of German road works and the
continual and increasing strain placed on the German War Economy and internal
services throughout occupied Europe by the organized forces of resistance,
played a very considerable part in our complete and final victory...."
Since then, in Vietnam, we forgot all that and took over a losing war
from locals, ready to fight for their homeland, who might have won it if
intelligently supported and directed and if the external support provided
the invaders had been effectively restricted.
Today we see weak and friendly nations all over the world threatened
by insurgent forces supplied and directed in much the same way and from much
the same source as the victors in Vietnam were.
In the aftermath of Vietnam, the Soviet Union soon began to test whether
the US would resist foreign-provoked and supported instability and insurgence
elsewhere in the Third World. Fully aware of the political climate in this
country, in the 1970s they developed an aggressive strategy in the Third World.
It avoided direct confrontation and instead exploited local and regional
c,lr-cumstances to take maximum advantage of third-country forces (or surrogates)
- to attain Soviet objectives. This enables Moscow to deny involvement, to label
such conflicts as internal, and to warn self-righteously against "outside
interference." There is little disagreement among analysts that Soviet and
proxy successes in the mid- to late 70s in Angola, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Nicaragua,
and elsewhere have encouraged the Soviets to rely on the Cubans, Vietnamese and,
recently, the Libyans ever more aggressively.
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Over the last several years, the Soviets and their allies have supported,
directly or indirectly, radical regimes or insurgencies in more than a dozen
countries in every part of the Third World. The United States and its friends
have had difficulty countering these insurgencies. It is much easier and
much less expensive to support an insurgency than it is for us and our friends
to resist one. It takes relatively few people and little support to disrupt
the internal peace and economic stability of a small country.
Recently, we had our cartographers prepare a map to show the Soviet
presence in its various degrees of influence. They colored in red on a map
of the world the nations under a significant degree of Soviet influence.
Close to 50 nations were in red. Ten years ago, only 25 nations would have
been colored in red. In the ten years between 1972 and 1982, 4 nations have
extricated themselves from Soviet grasp and 23 nations have fallen under a
significantly increased degree of Soviet influence or insurgency supported
by the Soviets or their proxies. It is, in my opinion, no coincidence that
the 11 insurgencies now under way throughout the world supported by Russia,
Cuba, Libya and South Yemen happen to be close to the natural resources and
the choke points in the world's sea lanes on which the United States and its
allies must rely to fuel and supply their economic life. It is not hard to
understand how this has come about. Time and again we have watched agents of
the Communist apparatus move in to exploit underlying social and economic
discontents, which are plentiful throughout the world. They gain a base,
then expand it with trained men and military arms. With this help, local
insurgents sabotage economic targets and drive out investment. This further
heightens political and economic discontent. As discontent grows, more people
go over to the insurgents which makes them bolder and stronger.
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El Salvador provided an example of how we can help these beleaguered
nations defend themselves. The training of El Salvadoran troops and officers
in the United States imparted new capabilities to the government army. The
success of the recent elections in El Salvador came largely from developing
new intelligence sources and showing the El Salvadoran army how to use
intelligence to break up guerrilla formations before they could attack
provincial capitals in order to stop the voting. This resulted in the
American television audience seeing in living color Usulutan, the provincial
capital nearest Nicaragua, with its streets empty and its inhabitants huddled
behind closed doors as guerrillas fired their rifles at doorways. Then, a
minute later, this television audience saw in the rest of the country long
lines of people patiently waiting in the hot sun to cast their vote. That
contrast in a few minutes wiped out weeks of distortion and propaganda about
what has been happening in Central America.
Today, El Salvador has a new government and a vote of the people has
overwhelmingly rejected the insurgents, organized, supplied and directed from
Nicaragua and Cuba, in their attempt to stop the election. Next door in
Honduras, a democratically elected civilian government, to which the military
is fully subordinated, presides over a free and open society. Nicaragua can't
stand this contrast to its own militarized and totalitarian society in which
opposition forces, free expansion, and civil liberties and human rights are
being stamped out. So instructions have gone out and Communist and extreme
leftist elements in Honduras have begun to hijack airplanes, plant dynamite
in buildings and otherwise lay the groundwork for revolutionary violence in
their determination to see that free democratic government does not succeed
in Central America.
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The small and weak countries in which insurgencies can be fostered and
developed to overthrow governments do not need and cannot handle expensive
and sophisticated weapons for which virtually all of them clamor. What they
need is light arms to defend themselves against externally trained and
supported guerrillas, good intelligence, good police methods, good communi-
cations, training in small arms and their use in small unit actions, and
mobility to keep up with the hit-and-run tactics of guerrilla forces. Today,
with a relatively few skilled officers and a tiny fraction of our military
budget, we can introduce an element of stability into the Third World by
helping small countries to develop those skills and capabilities.
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