Page:On Guerrilla Warfare (United States Marine Corps translation).djvu/14

Introduction has yet been undertaken in this country, so far as I am aware. In Indochina and Cuba, Ho Chi Minh and Ernesto (Che) Guevara were more assiduous. One rather interesting result of their successful activities has been the common identification of guerrilla warfare with Communism. But guerrilla warfare was not invented by the Communists; for centuries, there have been guerrilla fighters.

One of the most accomplished of them all was our own Revolutionary hero Francis Marion, "the Swamp Fox." Those present at his birth would probably not have foretold a martial future for him; the baby was "not larger than a New England lobster and might easily enough have been put into a quart pot." Marion grew up in South Carolina and had little formal schooling. He worked as a farmer. In 1759, at the age of twenty-seven, he joined a regiment raised to fight the Cherokees, who were then ravaging the borders of the Carolinas. He served for two years and in the course of these hostilities stored away in his mind much that was later to be put to good use against the British.

When the Revolution broke out, Marion immediately accepted a commission in the Second South Carolina Regiment. By 1780, he had seen enough of the war to realize that the Continentals were overlooking a very profitable field—that of partisan warfare. Accordingly, he sought and obtained permission to organize a company that at first consisted of twenty ill-equipped men and boys (Castro's "base" was twelve men). The appearance of this group, with a heterogeneous assortment of arms and ragged and poorly fitting clothes, provoked considerable jesting among