Nayto wrote:EendragMaakMag wrote:I'd say that a guerrilla/insurgent force can definitely defeat a conventional army. The Anglo-Boer war is an excellent example.
Except the British put the Boer women and children in concentration camps which in effect caused the boers not to actually "win" the war.
Probably a good lesson to learn for hypothetical future prospective incursions.
It was fun reading Christiaan de Wet's book "3 Years War" where a few boers would route the British at odds of 10 to 1, LOL.
The Boers were unwilling to retaliate against the British civilians.
They were also unwilling to take the war to the British Isles. I would have found the Boer Commandos with fluent English skills and smuggled them into the UK with the idea being to set off bombs in London, assassinate the royal family, launch a coordinate assault with a few dozen men on the House of Lords and House of Commons and cripple the government, etc.
I would have also dispatched commandos into Rhodesia, the Cape, and Natal to kill British civilians. I would have also butchered all British POWs and sent their mutilated remains back to British lines to demoralize their comrades since the British had instituted a policy of executing all captured Boers as "traitors" and Kitchener declared that any Brit who took a Boer prisoner would have his own rations cut by 50% to feed the Boer, and if he took two Boer prisoners his rations were cut by 75% to feed the two prisoners.
I would have put a bounty on the head of Kitchener and I would have put bounties, paid in gold, on the heads of all of the members of the royal family, the MP, any PM from the ruling party, and all of the cabinet members. Two thousand pounds of gold to whoever kills a royal, circulate it across Europe.
If I had been in charge of the Boer war effort the war would not have ended just because the women and children were put into concentration camps, the war would have ended after a few thousand elites in Britain were dead and a few dozen bombs had gone off in London and the new British government was begging for mercy and begging for an end to the war.
My take on a war is that you fight to win and you observe conventions and give as much quarter as the enemy. If the enemy puts your women and children into camps to die, then you are free to borrow a page from Genghis Khan and level his homeland and leave mountains of skulls in the wake of your advancing forces.
If I had been in charge of the Boer war effort I would probably have obtained a British surrender or at least a very favorable negotiated peace. I imagine they would have offered to surrender after the assassination of the entire royal family, the assassination of most of the House of Lords, the assassination of most of the House of Commons, the assassination of the Prime Minister and his cabinet, and several thousand Londoners being killed in bombing attacks, as well as tens of thousands of British civilians being killed throughout South Africa and Rhodesia.