“Superior information is the guerillas’ greatest asset,” wrote Gubbins; “it must be used. . . . to counteract the enemy’s superior armament and equipment.”

At the outbreak of the war, Gubbins served with a British liaison mission in Poland, where he witnessed Nazi Germany’s offensive power and also began fostering relationships with what soon became the Polish General Staff in exile, Britain’s essential link to the Polish resistance.

The Special Night Squads, deployed in Palestine, included many of the features Gubbins advocated: intelligence, initiative, deception, and strong leadership.

Here we see three themes, all of which can be found in Gubbins’s writings: the centrality of the ambush, the importance of secrecy and surprise, and the role of the local population.

T. E. Lawrence and the Arab Revolt

Their source material came from the conflicts in which they had fought—the Russian Civil War and the Irish Revolution—as well as from the earlier Anglo-Boer Wars, the guerrilla campaign of Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck in East Africa, T. E. Lawrence’s exploits in Arabia, and such recent affairs as the Spanish Civil War, the Sino-Japanese Wars, and the

In addition, most works that seriously considered guerrilla warfare as a military phenomenon did so from the counterguerrilla’s perspective not from the guerrilla’s own. Thus, Gubbins’s genius lay in synthesizing existing ideas into a concise and usable form.

The third element, the “psychological,” was of particular importance to Lawrence considering the Arabs’ relative inferiority. “We were so weak physically that we could not let the metaphysical weapon rust unused.”173 He explains, “We had to arrange [our Arab soldiers’] minds in order of battle, just as carefully and as formally as other officers

123 The prime minster had long been intrigued by irregular warfare. As a young man Churchill had observed the Cuban War of Independence and particularly admired the way the guerrillas used intelligence to enhance the effectiveness of their limited forces.124 He likewise observed the Second Anglo-Boer War at very close range—including capture by and