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Articles
Literary Flourishes: “Take the Enemy into Consideration”
- By RICHARD M. LANGWORTH
- | December 30, 2021
- Category: Churchill in WWI Q & A The Literary Churchill
Q: Accounting for the enemy
“No matter how enmeshed a commander is in the elaboration of his own thoughts, it is sometimes necessary to take the enemy into account.” Churchill was a strong proponent of understanding the enemy’s intentions, before plunging ahead with a military campaign, Can you please confirm whether and where Churchill said this? —C.S.
A: Approximately right
Like the “Curate’s Egg,” parts of it are excellent. The correct wording is: “However absorbed a Commander may be in the elaboration of his own thoughts, it is necessary sometimes to take the enemy into consideration.”1 It is a solid Churchillian maxim, congruent with a similar expression about wartime partners: “In working with Allies it sometimes happens that they develop opinions of their own.”2
Churchill emphasized taking enemy thinking into account many times to his military commanders. Being human, he also occasionally ignored the concept. One thinks of how he brushed away objections to forcing the Dardanelles (1915), or advancing on Vienna through the Ljubljana Gap (1944). The latter, of course, is regarded by some historians as “little more than a bluff.”3 (It helped him get his way over the Italian campaign.) Churchill’s commanders were well aware of enemy abilities to constrict that Ljubljana with an enfilade.
The context: Churchill’s peerless writing
Aside from verifying the quotation, your question sent us to a vivid example of Churchill the literary stylist. After reading his own words below, turn to the “First Phase” account of the Battle of Arras on Wikipedia. The difference is palpable. Churchill really makes complex strategy easy to understand. He tells us what really mattered.
In the passage, he explains how the French artillery commander General Robert Nivelle was frustrated. Planning to attack the vulnerable Arras-Noyon salient in 1917, Nivelle failed “to take the enemy into consideration.” By the time the he attacked, the enemy commander Erich Ludendorff had withdrawn. Churchill writes:
“General Nivelle’s Experiment”4
General Joffre‘s plan for the campaign of 1917 was simple. It was to be a continuation of the Battle of the Somme, with only the shortest possible interlude during the extreme severity of the winter. The salient formed by the German line was to be crunched by convergent assaults of the British and the French….5
At this moment an unexpected event occurred. Ludendorff intervened, and the Germans acted. The great military personality which Germany had discovered in her need, armed in the panoply and under the aegis of Hindenburg, by one sure stroke overturned all the strategy of General Nivelle. Towards the end of February the German evacuation of the whole sector from Arras to Noyon began. Leaving a screen of troops to occupy the abandoned positions and fire off their guns and rifles, the German Army withdrew 50 miles from the threatened area of the salient, and with unhurried deliberation assumed their new deeply considered positions on what was henceforward to be known as the Hindenburg Line.6
Nor does Churchill fail to mention the unnecessary devastation the Germans left in their wake:
The German General Staff called this long prepared operation by the code name Alberich, after the malicious dwarf of the Nibelungen legend. They left their opponents in the crater fields of the Somme, and with a severity barbarous because far in excess of any military requirements, laid waste with axe and fire the regions which they had surrendered.7
Consider the enemy
The retrograde movement, rumoured for some days, was first detected on the front of the British Fifth Army. On February 24 suspicion was aroused by the German artillery shelling its own trench lines. British patrols found the hostile trenches empty. The Fifth Army Operations Order of that same night said, “The enemy is believed to be withdrawing.” Immense clouds of smoke and the glare of incendiary fires by night proclaimed the merciless departure of the enemy. On the 25th he was reported to be retiring on a front of 18,000 yards, and on February 28 the British Intelligence spoke of a retirement to the Hindenburg Line.
Churchill then offers the maxim you allude to:
However absorbed a Commander may be in the elaboration of his own thoughts, it is necessary sometimes to take the enemy into consideration. Joffre’s plan had been to bite the great German salient in February; and whether it would have succeeded or not, no man can tell. The Nivelle plan was to bite it with still larger forces in April.
But by March the salient had ceased to exist. Three out of Nivelle’s five armies, which were to have been employed in the assault, were now separated by a gulf of devastated territory from their objective. All their railroads, all their roads, all their magazines were so far removed from the enemy’s positions that at least two months would be required to drag them forward into a new connection with the war. The remaining two armies were left with no other possibility before them than to deliver disconnected frontal attacks on the strongest parts of the old German line.8
Endnotes
1 Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, vol. 3 1916-1918, Part 1 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1927), 270.
2 House of Commons, 10 December 1942, in Churchill, Secret Session Speeches (London: Cassell, 1946), 79.