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Concept
Partisan (military)
Summary
A partisan is a member of an irregular military force formed to oppose control of an area by a foreign power or by an army of occupation by some kind of insurgent activity.
The term can apply to the field element of resistance movements. The most common use in present parlance in several languages refers to occupation resistance fighters during World War II, especially under the Yugoslav partisan leader Josip Broz Tito.
The initial concept of partisan warfare involved the use of troops raised from the local population in a war zone (or in some cases regular forces) who would operate behind enemy lines to disrupt communications, seize posts or villages as forward-operating bases, ambush convoys, impose war taxes or contributions, raid logistical stockpiles, and compel enemy forces to disperse and protect their base of operations.
George Satterfield has analysed the "partisan warfare" ( petite guerre ) in the Netherlands campaigns of 1673-1678 during the Franco-Dutch War of 1672-1678.
Some of the practices of ninjas in feudal Japan resembled irregular partisan warfare.
De Jeney, a Hungarian military officer who served in the Prussian Army as captain of military engineers during the Seven Years' War of 1756–1763, produced one of the first manuals of partisan tactics in the 18th century: The Partisan, or the Art of Making War in Detachment... (English translation published in London in 1760.) Johann von Ewald described techniques of partisan warfare in detail in his Abhandlung über den kleinen Krieg ("Treatise on little war", Cramer: Cassel, 1785).
The concept of partisan warfare would later form the basis of the "Partisan Rangers" of the American Civil War of 1861-1865. In that war, Confederate States Army Partisan leaders, such as John S. Mosby, Jesse James, William Quantrill, or Bloody Bill Anderson, operated along the lines described by von Ewald (and later by both Jomini (1779-1869) and Clausewitz (1780-1831)). In essence, 19th-century American partisans were closer to commando or ranger forces raised during World War II than to the partisan forces which would operate in Nazi-occupied Europe.
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