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A rearguard or rear security is a part of a military force that protects it from attack from the rear, either during an advance or withdrawal. The term can also be used to describe forces protecting lines, such as communication lines, behind an army.Oxford English Dictionary:
Even more generally, a rearguard action may refer to an attempt at preventing something though it is likely too late to be prevented; this idiomatic meaning may apply in either a military or non-military context.
Narrowly defined, a rearguard is a covering detachment that protects the retreating main ground force element (main body), or column, and is charged with executing defensive or retrograde movements between the main body and the enemy to prevent the latter from attacking or interfering with the movement of the main body.Bond, Paul Stanley (Lt. Col.) and Crouch, Edwin Hunter (1st Lt.), New York: The American Army and Navy Journal (1922) Tactics: the practical art of leading troops in war, pp. 247–253Headquarters, Dept. of the Army, 5-166: Spoiling Attack, Army Field Manual FM 3-90 (Tactics) (July 2001), p. 12-25
Three examples of rearguard actions are:
A World War I-era example is the rearguard action fought by small units of the Serbian Army to protect retreating Serbian troops, the royal family, and Serbian refugees from advancing forces of the Central Powers during their retreat through Albania and Montenegro in 1915–1916.Corey, Herbert, The Serbian Tragedy As I Saw It, Harper's Monthly Magazine (June 1917), p. 334 Big Guns Blast Way in Serbia: Population Joins Retreat, The New York Times, 3 November 1915Frucht, Richard (ed.), Eastern Europe: an introduction to the people, lands, and culture, Vol. 3, (2005) p. 542: The Serbian rearguard actions allowed some 125,000–145,000 soldiers of Radomir Putnik's Serbian Army together with several thousand civilian refugees to reach Adriatic ports in Albania, where they were eventually evacuated, reorganized, and reequipped for the campaign in Salonika. The nature of combat in rearguard actions involving combat between armies of nation-states is typically desperate and vicious, and rearguard troops may be called upon to incur heavy casualties or even to sacrifice all of their combat strength and personnel for the benefit of the withdrawing forces.Sebag-Montefiore, Hugh, Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man, (1st ed.), Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, (2006), p. 233Bimberg, Edward L., World War II: A Tale of the French Foreign Legion, World War II Magazine (September 1997), p. 32: On 9 June 1940, the 97th Foreign Legion Divisional Reconnaissance Group, equipped with light armored cars, made a spoiling attack against German armored forces equipped with Panzer III tanks in order to protect the withdrawal of French Forces. In two consecutive assaults, the unit lost all its armored cars, incurring heavy casualties.
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