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Guerrilla   Listen
noun
Guerrilla  n.  
1.
An irregular mode of carrying on war, by the constant attacks of independent bands, adopted in the north of Spain during the Peninsular war.
2.
One who carries on, or assists in carrying on, irregular warfare; especially, a member of an independent band engaged in predatory excursions in war time. Note: The term guerrilla is the diminutive of the Spanish word guerra, war, and means petty war, that is, war carried on by detached parties; generally in the mountains.... A guerrilla party means, an irregular band of armed men, carrying on an irregular war, not being able, according to their character as a guerrilla party, to carry on what the law terms a regular war.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Guerrilla" Quotes from Famous Books



... favoured the guerrilla warfare waged for four years by the various Celtic tribes against the Roman invader, and it is no doubt partly to them that the old "Belgae" owed their reputation of courage and fortitude. These tribes, occupying the Scheldt and Meuse valleys, formed the rearguard of ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts

... the insurrection was a smouldering fire, put out in one corner only to be renewed in another. If Virginia is a country in which a guerrilla resistance can be indefinitely prolonged, it is more open than the plains of Holland in comparison with the Highlands of that era. Few Lowlanders had ever penetrated them,—scarcely an Englishman. It ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... by means of military camps to establish control and force all the Indians upon reservations, and another commission was sent to negotiate their removal to Indian Territory, but met with an absolute refusal. After much guerrilla warfare, an important military campaign against the Sioux was set on foot in 1876, ending in Custer's signal defeat upon ...
— Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman

... first, with their prosperity. These amiable neighbors were taught, from the first, that the rights of the colored farmers were just the same as their own, and that they would be very apt to retaliate in kind for injuries. Of such a system one result is that no guerrilla-warfare has yet been known in the counties of Virginia where such a peasantry is establishing itself. It is near our posts, it is true,—not nearer, however, than some of the regions where Mosby has won his laurels. We believe that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various

... from the Puglie. It was said that three hundred of them were coming that week from the Terra d'Otranto to work above Ruscino. He reckoned that he and those he led would have the advantage of local acquaintance with the land and water, and could easily, having their own homes as base, carry on a guerrilla warfare for any length of time. No doubt, he knew, the authorities would send troops to the support of the labours, but he believed that when the resolve of the district to oppose at all hazards any interference with the Edera should be made clear, the Government would not provoke an ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida

... right and to the left. On the left shore of the Mississippi, at Cairo, in Illinois, a fleet of gun- boats was being prepared to go down the river, and on the right an army was advancing against Springfield, in the southwestern district of Missouri, with the object of dislodging Price, the rebel guerrilla leader there, and, if possible, of catching him. Price had been the opponent of poor General Lyons, who was killed at Wilson's Creek, near Springfield, and of General Fremont, who during his hundred days had failed to drive him out of the State. This duty had now been intrusted ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope

... reverses. Burgoyne was forced to surrender at Saratoga because he was surrounded and cut off from his base of supplies. As soon as the British got away from Charleston, they were harassed and worried by the guerrilla warriors of Marion, Sumter, and Pickens. Cornwallis could technically defeat Greene at Guilford far in the interior; but he could not hold the inland region he had invaded. Sustained by their own labor, possessing ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... leisurely through France, which offered him safe passage to London. Garibaldi remained on the border, and with a little band engaged in joyous guerrilla warfare, hoping for a general revolt. The time was not yet ripe, and nothing he could then do would gather up the scattered forces ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... compelled the State officials to resign; issued writs for a new election, put in a slavery governor, captured the government, and started back into Missouri. On their way they passed through Pottawatamie. It was a guerrilla warfare. When John Brown reached his son's cabin, he found the settlers preparing for flight. He denounced them as cowards, and when one urged caution, answered, "I am tired of that word Caution. It is nothing but cowardice!" Either the border ruffians ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis

... of vivas announced that the guerrilla captain had finished his oration, and that the attack was about to be made. We saw the chief himself, with one or two others, advance in front of the line, and head towards us, as if intending to ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

... in 1830 (the others are Ecuador and Venezuela). A 40-year insurgent campaign to overthrow the Colombian Government escalated during the 1990s, undergirded in part by funds from the drug trade. Although the violence is deadly and large swaths of the countryside are under guerrilla influence, the movement lacks the military strength or popular support necessary to overthrow the government. An anti-insurgent army of paramilitaries has grown to several thousand strong in recent years, challenging the insurgents for control of territory ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... Maximilian, the brother of Francis Joseph, emperor of Austria, to accept the throne, and agreed to sustain him with men and money. Maximilian arrived in Mexico in 1864. Large bodies of French troops fought on his side. The war resolved itself into a guerrilla contest, in which great cruelties were perpetrated on both sides. The end of the American civil war put the Government of the United States in a position to demand of Louis Napoleon the withdrawal of the French forces. His own situation ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... campaign in the peninsula, where, between the French and the Nationalists, civil administration had fallen into great disorder, and where all sorts of extraordinary tasks devolved upon the British representative. His management of his uncertain allies, the guerrilla chiefs, and his relations with the revolutionary "juntas" called for qualities as rare as those which defeated one after another of Napoleon's marshals and finally worsted the great captain himself. Thoroughness of preparation, the ability to ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy

... IN KANSAS Wilson Shannon Appointed Governor. The Law and Order Party Formed at Leavenworth. Sheriff Jones. The Branson Rescue. The Wakarusa War. Sharps Rifles. Governor Shannon's Treaty. Guerrilla Leaders and Civil War. The Investigating Committee of Congress. The Flight of Ex-Governor Reeder. The Border Ruffians March on Lawrence. Burning of ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay

... again, determined to take up the old fight where they had left off. Even that fight seemed more hopeless than ever, for the Turkish army was now being speedily reorganized and rendered more effective, which meant that the pursuit of the guerrilla bands would be more deadly than it had ever been ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various

... open battle, however, a sort of guerrilla warfare was carried on, in which, thanks to his marvelous steed Bayard, which his cousin Malagigi, the necromancer, had brought him from hell, Aymon always won the advantage. At the end of several years, however, Charlemagne collected a large host, ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber

... Barclay said; "even if they were armed—and where are the arms, for a levy en masse, to come from? If Bazaine be beaten, the only hope of France is for all the troops who remain to fall back under the guns of the forts of Paris; and for France to enter upon an immense guerrilla war. For hosts of skirmishers to hang upon their flanks and rear; cutting every road, destroying every bridge, checking the movements of every detached body, and so actually starving them out, on the ground which ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty

... encounter of opposing forces near Osawatomie in which he and his band were engaged, Brown took no share in the open fighting between the organized companies of opposing forces, and his part in the irregular guerrilla warfare of the period is uncertain. Towards the close of the war one of his sons was shot by a preacher who alleged that he had been robbed by the Browns. After peace had been restored to Kansas by the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Crusade - Volume 28 In The Chronicles Of America Series • Jesse Macy

... were completed, terms were made with a small guerrilla band whose chief undertook to see us safely through to Mexico, and on May ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson

... part of the winter of 1864-65 I was detailed as president of a military commission, called to meet in Winchester to try a man charged with being a spy, a guerrilla, a dealer in contraband goods, and a bad and dangerous man. The specifications recited that the accused had been a member of the notorious Harry Gilmor's band of partisans; that he had been caught wearing citizen's clothes inside the union lines; and that he was in the habit of conveying quinine ...
— Personal Recollections of a Cavalryman - With Custer's Michigan Cavalry Brigade in the Civil War • J. H. (James Harvey) Kidd

... were especially hard pressed by the Turks, they would flee to the mountain fastnesses of Tzherna Gora, the Black Mountain, for here military operations, even in this day of modern artillery, are absolutely impossible, and when it came to mountain guerrilla fighting, the Turks were no match for the Serbs. Thus it was that the Serbs were able to preserve their old traditions, their language and the best blood of their race. And it may be said that to a slightly lesser extent ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan

... and sword-chains where ladies of the court flirted behind ostrich fans with stiff lean-faced lovers. Then Goya's Madrid: riots in the Puerta del Sol, majas leaning from balconies, the fair of San Isidro by the river, scuttling of ragged guerrilla bands, brigands and patriots; tramp of the stiffnecked grenadiers of Napoleon; pompous little men in short-tailed wigs dying the dos de Mayo with phrases from Mirabeau on their lips under the brick arch of the arsenal; frantic carnivals of the Burial of the Sardine; ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... only did they handle all the news relating to it, but many of them were at one time or another personal participants. For example, one of the operators in the Cincinnati office was George Ellsworth, who was telegrapher for Morgan, the famous Southern Guerrilla, and was with him when he made his raid into Ohio and was captured near the Pennsylvania line. Ellsworth himself made a narrow escape by swimming the Ohio River with the aid of an army mule. Yet we can well appreciate the unimpressionable ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... mobilization of a fresh army which ran into scores of battalions and which was vainly engaged for nearly half a year in rounding-up this replica of the Mexican Villa. So demoralized had the army become from long licence that this guerrilla warfare was waged with all possible slackness until a chance shot mortally wounded the chief brigand and his immense following automatically dispersed. During six months these pests had ravaged three provinces and menaced one of ...
— The Fight For The Republic in China • Bertram Lenox Putnam Weale

... commercial crop, accounting for 45% of export earnings. The manufacturing sector, based largely on food and beverage processing, accounts for 18% of GDP and 15% of employment. Economic losses because of guerrilla sabotage total more than $2 billion since 1979. The costs of maintaining a large military seriously constrain the government's efforts to provide essential social services. Nevertheless, growth in national output during ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... September 1, 1919, and lasted through the whole of the week following. More than one hundred Jews were murdered, numerous women and girls were raped, and the entire colony was plundered. This pogrom was carried on by the guerrilla bands led by "atamans" Makhno and Grigoriev, together with regular Bolshevist troops.[2] Do you ask me to believe that these pogroms were deliberately brought about as ...
— The Jew and American Ideals • John Spargo

... the district of Tiberias, the march of the legions, the sieges of Jotapata, of Gamala, and of Jerusalem, form the impressive and carefully studied historic setting to the figure of the lad who passes from the vineyard to the service of Josephus, becomes the leader of a guerrilla band of patriots, fights bravely for the Temple, and after a brief term of slavery at Alexandria, returns to his Galilean home ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty

... He describes the army of the Nizam, which had taken the field against Tippoo Sultan. It consisted of 150,000 infantry, 60,000 cavalry, and 500 elephants, each elephant supporting a 'castle' containing a nabob and servants. He remained in India several years in a sort of guerrilla service, and obtained much favor. He was in Paris early in 1808 and at home in the autumn of that year, when he was appointed (October 2) Colonel of the Fourth Regiment of the U. S. Army." This ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce

... meridional brogue.[103] Then comes the famous catalogue of the Library of Saint Victor, a fresh attack on scholastic and monastic degeneracy, and a kind of joining hands (Ortuinus figures) with the German guerrilla against the Obscuri, and then a long and admirable letter from Gargantua, whence we learn that Grandgousier is dead, and that his son is now the sagest of monarchs, who has taken to read Greek, and shows no memory of his governesses or his earlier student ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... personal contact I had with him was during those two days of the crossing war when we took our meals at the wretched little hotel, facing each other across the table. Fancy! His coarse attempts to treat the situation humorously were more offensive, if anything, than his guerrilla business tactics. An ill-bred, barbarous fellow, this Gordon ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford

... go home, they could never again have been collected; the army would have dwindled into a corporal's guard here and there; the masses the North was pouring down on all sides would have swept the futile resistance before it; and the contest, if kept up at all, would have degenerated into a guerrilla warfare of personal hatred and vengeance, without a semblance ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... 1990, after Chad had endured decades of civil warfare among ethnic groups as well as invasions by Libya, former northern guerrilla leader Idriss DEBY seized control of the government. His transitional government eventually suppressed or came to terms with most political-military groups, settled the territorial dispute with Libya on terms favorable to Chad, ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... commands, many statements palpably false, and regarding events of which the writers could not possibly have obtained correct information, will be found under the most astounding captions, proclaiming the commission of "unheard of atrocities" and "guerrilla outrages," accounts of Morgan having impressed horses or taken forage and provisions from Union men, while highly facetious descriptions of house-burning, jewelry snatching, and a thorough sacking of premises are chronicled, ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke

... of the Missouri Guerrilla Captain and Outlaw, his Capture and Prison Life, and the Only Authentic Account of the Northfield Raid Ever Published By ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger

... with. In these hopes they were not disappointed, for emerging from the woods near Medellin they came upon the guerilleros, with whom they had a sharp skirmish. Rolfe and his party were successful, killing two of the guerrilla and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various

... steep precipices; the chasms are spanned by single-arched bridges, so frail and narrow that they seem likely to be swept away in the first gail that blows. No country could present greater difficulties to the movements of a regular army or lend itself more readily to a system of guerrilla warfare. It was unequally divided between some ten or twelve tribes:* chief among these were the Pasargadaa, from which the royal family took its origin; after them came ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... meant as a hint for me, but I knew also that my very last hope lay in my winning the hearts of the guerrilla officer and his men. So with slightly lowered voice I kept on talking to the men, who looked at me from under their ragged slouched hats with the most eager interest. At the end of one of my stories their amusement broke forth into hearty laughter. The captain stopped writing, and ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston

... of the picture, we must learn also to know that guerrilla warfare against the Germans in, let us say Serbia or Norway, helps us; that a successful Russian offensive against the Germans helps us; and that British successes on land or sea in any part of the ...
— The Fireside Chats of Franklin Delano Roosevelt • Franklin Delano Roosevelt



Words linked to "Guerrilla" :   guerilla force, guerrilla theater, Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army, warrior, urban guerrilla, Maquis



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