ABSTRACT
The fortunes of guerrilla warfare had reached a low ebb in the early years of the twentieth century; they did not improve in the period spanning and embracing the two world wars. Victory in these wars went to the stronger battalions, the decision determined in massive battles between vast armies. In World War I guerrilla tactics were hardly applied at all, in the second they played a certain limited role in some countries in the struggle against the foreign occupier. The first third of the century witnessed civil wars and warlordism spreading whenever central state power broke down, as in Mexico and later in China. But these small wars were quite often big wars manques, in that the military chiefs operated as though handling regular armies, imitating with varying success their strategy and tactics. There were national uprisings in Africa and Asia, such as Abd el-Krim's struggle and the Palestine insurrection in 1936-1939, but less frequent and intense than in the nineteenth century.
