George Washington fought a guerilla war? Washington commanded a regular army in the type of formal battles that were fought in those days. He deplored militias and irregular troops. Certainly some guerillas, notably Francis Marion, played a significant role in the revolution, but Washington wasn’t one of them.
Guerrilla warfare as it refers to the American Revolution stands in contrast to the traditional type of fighting usually practiced by the British, who fought face-to-face in an open field in a European style called “linear tactics”: two armies would face one another at less than a hundred yards in tight formations, three ranks deep, firing volley after volley. As they shot, they moved closer together, often closing the fight with a bayonet charge as one force drove the other from the field.
Guerilla warfare was used at Lexington and Concord in April 1775,with the skirmishes that started the fighting. At first the colonial militiamen were in linear formation. As the British force retreated to Boston, the colonists, armed with their own civilian weapons, sniped at the Brits from behind fences and trees rather than confronting the “regulars” in formal lines of battle. With such guerilla tactics, the militiamen killed and wounded more British soldiers than British soldiers killed and wounded Americans.