Battle of Verdun

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Battle of Verdun
Part of the Western Front of World War I
Battle of Verdun
Date 21 February – 18 December 1916
Location Verdun-sur-Meuse, France
Result French victory
Belligerents
Flag of France France Flag of German Empire German Empire
Commanders
Philippe Pétain
Robert Nivelle		 Erich von Falkenhayn
Crown Prince Wilhelm
Strength
About 30,000 on 21 February 1916 About 150,000 on 21 February 1916
Casualties and losses
378,000; of whom 163,000 died 330,000; of whom 143,000 died
v • d • e
Western Front

The Battle of Verdun was one of the most critical battles in World War I on the Western Front, fought between the German and French armies from 21 February to 18 December 1916 around the city of Verdun-sur-Meuse in northeast France.[1]

The Battle of Verdun resulted in more than a quarter of a million deaths and at least a million wounded. Verdun was the longest battle and one of the bloodiest in World War I and more generally in human history. In both France and Germany it has come to represent the horrors of war, similar to the significance of the Battle of the Somme in the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth or the Battle of Gettysburg to the United States.

The Battle of Verdun popularised the phrase "Ils ne passeront pas" ("They shall not pass") in France, uttered by Robert Nivelle, but often incorrectly attributed to Philippe Pétain.

Contents

[edit] History

For centuries Verdun had played an important role in the defence of its hinterland, due to the city's strategic location on the Meuse River. Attila the Hun, for example, failed in his fifth-century attempt to seize the town. In the division of the empire of Charlemagne, the Treaty of Verdun of 843 made the town part of the Holy Roman Empire. The Peace of Munster in 1648 awarded Verdun to France. Verdun played a very important role in the defensive line that was built after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. As protection against German threats along the eastern border, a strong line of fortifications was constructed between Verdun and Toul and between Épinal and Belfort. Verdun guarded the northern entrance to the plains of Champagne and thus the approach to the French capital city of Paris.

In 1914, Verdun held fast against German invasion, and the city's fortifications withstood even Big Bertha's artillery attacks. The French garrison was housed in the citadel built by Vauban in the 17th century. By the end of the 19th century, an underground complex had been built which served as a workshop, munitions dump, hospital, and quarters for the French troops.

[edit] Lead up to the battle

After the Germans failed to achieve a quick victory in 1914, the war of movement soon bogged down into a stalemate on the Western Front. Trench warfare developed and neither side could achieve a successful breakthrough.

In 1915, all attempts to force a breakthrough—by the Germans at Ypres, by the British at Neuve Chapelle and by the French at Champagne—had failed, resulting only in terrible casualties.

According to his post war memoirs, the German Chief of Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, believed that although a breakthrough might no longer be possible, the French could still be defeated if they suffered a sufficient amount of casualties. He explained that his motivation for the battle was to attack a position from which the French could not retreat, both for strategic reasons and for reasons of national pride, so imposing a ruinous battle of attrition on the French armies. Falkenhayn stated that the town of Verdun-sur-Meuse was chosen to "bleed white" the French: the town, surrounded by a ring of forts, was an important stronghold that projected into the German lines and guarded the direct route to Paris. By early 1916, Verdun's much-vaunted impregnability had been seriously weakened. It had been "declassed" as a fortress the previous summer and all but a few of its guns and garrison had been removed. This was primarily the work of General Joseph Joffre, C-in-C of the French Army, who, with others, had presumed from the relatively easy fall in 1914 of the Belgian fortresses at Liege and Namur that this form of defence was redundant so far as modern warfare was concerned. Between August and October 1915, Verdun was denuded of over 50 complete batteries of guns and 128.000 rounds of ammunition. These were parcelled out to other Allied sectors where artillery was short. The stripping process was still going on at the end of January 1916, by which time the 60-odd Verdun forts possessed fewer than 300 guns with insufficient ammunition.

In choosing the battlefield, Falkenhayn looked for a location where the material circumstances favoured the Germans: Verdun was isolated on three sides; communications to the French rear were poor; finally, a German railhead lay only twelve miles away, while French troops could only resupply by a single road, the Voie Sacrée. In a war where materiel trumped élan, Falkenhayn expected a favourable loss exchange ratio as the French would cling fanatically to a death trap.

Falkenhayn stated in his memoirs that rather than a traditional military victory, Verdun was planned as a vehicle for destroying the French Army. He quotes from a memo he says he wrote to the Kaiser:

"The string in France has reached breaking point. A mass breakthrough—which in any case is beyond our means—is unnecessary. Within our reach there are objectives for the retention of which the French General Staff would be compelled to throw in every man they have. If they do so the forces of France will bleed to death."

However, recent scholarship by Holger Afflerbach and others has questioned the veracity of this so-called "Christmas memo".[2] No copy has ever surfaced and the only account of it appeared in Falkenhayn's post-war memoir. His army commanders at Verdun, including the German Crown Prince, denied any knowledge of a plan based on attrition. Afflerbach argues that it seems likely that Falkenhayn did not specifically design the battle to bleed the French Army, but justified ex-post-facto the motive of the Verdun offensive, despite its failure.

Current analyses follow the same trend and exclude the traditional explanation. The offensive was probably planned to crush Verdun's weakened defence and then take it, opening the whole front. Verdun, as the core of an extensive rail system, would have immensely helped the Germans.

[edit] Battle

Map of the battle
Map of the battle


Verdun was poorly defended because most of the artillery had been removed from the local fortifications, but good intelligence and a delay in the German attack due to bad weather gave the French time to rush two divisions of 30th Corps—the 72nd and 51st—to the area's defence. The French strength was now 34 battalions against 72 German.

The German High Command aimed to launch the offensive on the 12 February; however, fog, heavy rain and high winds delayed the offensive for a week. The battle began on 21 February 1916 with a nine-hour artillery bombardment firing over 1,000,000 shells (including poison gas) by 1,200 guns on a front of 40 kilometres (25 m), followed by an attack by three army corps (the 3rd, 7th, and 18th). The Germans used flamethrowers for the first time to clear the French trenches. Newly introduced Storm Troops led the attack with rifles slung, the first time in the war, and went into battle with grenades in hand. These shock tactics were new to the French, the main reason they lost so much ground to the Germans on the first day. By 22 February the Germans had advanced three miles (5 km) capturing the Bois des Caures after two French battalions led by Colonel Émile Driant had held them up for two days, and pushed the French defenders back to Samogneux, Beaumont, and Ornes. Later that day, on the 22nd February, Colonel Émile Driant was killed, rifle in hand, fighting alongside the 56th and 59th Battalion de Chasseurs a pied. Only 118 Chasseurs managed to escape. Poor communications meant that only then did the French command realize the seriousness of the attack.

On 24 February the French defenders of XXX Corps fell back again from their second line of defence, but were saved from disaster by the appearance of the XX Corps under General Balfourier. Intended as relief, the new arrivals were thrown into combat immediately. That evening French Army chief of staff, General de Castelnau, advised his commander-in-chief, Joseph Joffre, that the French Second Army, under General Philippe Petain, ought to be sent to man the Verdun sector. The Germans were now in possession of Beaumont, the Bois des Fosses, the Bois des Caurieres and part of the way along La Vauche ravine which led to Douaumont. On 25 February a 10-man patrol of the German 24th (Brandenburg) Infantry Regiment of 3 Corps captured a centrepiece of the French fortifications, Fort Douaumont and took possession of its three guns while the French garrison of 56 artillerymen slept. Oberleutnant von Brandis CO of 8th Kompagnie won for this action the Pour le Mérite.

Castelnau appointed General Philippe Pétain commander of the Verdun area and ordered the French Second Army to the battle sector. Petain decided that the Verdun forts should be strongly re-garrisoned to form the principal bulwarks of a new defense. He mapped out new lines of resistance on both banks of the Meuse and gave orders for a barrage position to be established through Avoncourt, Fort de Marre, Verdun's NE outskirts and Fort du Rozellier. The line Bras-Douaumont was divided into four sectors, each sector was entrusted to fresh French troops of the 20th "Iron" Corps. Their main job was to delay the German advance with counter-attacks. On 29 February, the German attack was slowed down at the village of Douaumont by heavy snowfall and by the tenacious defense of the French 33rd Infantry Regiment, which had been commanded by Pétain himself in the years prior to the war. Captain Charles de Gaulle, the future Free French leader and French President, was a company commander in this regiment, and was taken prisoner during the battle. The slow down gave the French time to bring up 90,000 men and 23,000 tons of ammunition from the railhead at Bar-le-Duc to Verdun. This was largely accomplished by uninterrupted, night-and-day trucking along a narrow departmental road: the so-called "Voie Sacrée" . The standard gauge railway line going through Verdun in peacetime had been cut off since 1915.

As in so many other offensives on the Western Front, by advancing, the German troops had lost effective artillery cover. With the battlefield turned into a sea of mud through continual shelling it was very hard to move guns forward. The advance also brought the Germans into range of French artillery on the west bank of the Meuse. Each new advance thus became costlier than the previous one as the attacking German Fifth Army units, often attacking in massed crowds southward down the east bank, were cut down ruthlessly from their flank by Pétain's guns on the opposite, or west, side of the Meuse valley. When the village of Douaumont was finally captured on 2 March 1916, four German regiments had been virtually destroyed.

Le Mort Homme and Hill 287, May 1916
Le Mort Homme and Hill 287, May 1916

Unable to make any further progress against Verdun frontally, the Germans turned to the flanks, attacking the hill of Le Mort Homme on 6 March and Fort Vaux on 8 March. Mort Homme possessed double peaks and offered two advantages. First it sheltered a particularly active battery of French field guns, and secondly, from its heights there stretched a magnificent all-round view of the surrounding countryside. After storming the Bois des Corbeaux and losing it to a determined French counter-attack, the Germans prepared another attempt on Mort Homme on 9 March and this time from the direction of Béthincourt in the NW. They seized the Bois des Corbeaux a second time, but at such a crippling cost that they could not continue. Results were depressingly similar on the right bank of the Meuse, where the German effort faded out beneath the walls of Fort Vaux. In three months of savage fighting the Germans captured the villages of Cumières and Chattancourt to the west of Verdun, and Fort Vaux to the east finally surrendered on 7 June. The losses were terrible on both sides. Pétain attempted to spare his troops by remaining on the defensive, but he was removed from command by being promoted to Army Group Centre 1 May, being replaced with the more attack-minded General Robert Nivelle.

The Germans' next objective was Fort Souville. On 22 June 1916, they shelled the French defences with the poison gas diphosgene (known to the Germans as "Green Cross Gas" because of the distinctive markings on the shells containing it), and attacked the next day with 30,000 men, taking the battery of Thiaumont and the village of Fleury. The Germans, however, proved unable to capture Souville, though the fighting continued until 3 September.

The opening of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, forced the Germans to withdraw some of their artillery from Verdun to counter the combined Anglo-French offensive to the north. The battle of the Somme was launched by the allies to try to take some of the pressure off of the French at Verdun.

By the autumn, the German troops were exhausted and Falkenhayn had been replaced as Chief of the General Staff by Paul von Hindenburg. Hindenburg's deputy, Chief Quartermaster-General Erich Ludendorff, soon acquired almost dictatorial power in Germany.

The French launched a counter-offensive on 21 October 1916. Its architect was General Nivelle. It combined heavy bombardment with swift infantry assaults. The French bombarded Fort Douaumont with new 400 mm guns (brought up on rails and directed by spotter planes), and re-captured it on 24 October. On 2 November the Germans lost Fort Vaux and retreated. A final French offensive beginning on 11 December drove the Germans back almost to their starting positions.

A further minor French offensive took place at Verdun in August 1917, recapturing the Mort Homme.

[edit] Casualties

It was crucial that the less populous Central Powers inflicted many more casualties on their adversaries than they themselves suffered. At Verdun, Germany did inflict more casualties on the French than they incurred—but not in the 2:1 ratio that they had hoped for, despite the fact that the German Army grossly outnumbered the French.

France's losses were appalling, nonetheless. It was the perceived humanity of General (later Marshal) Philippe Pétain who insisted that troops be regularly rotated in the face of such horror that helped seal his reputation. The rotation of forces meant that 70% of France's Army went through "the wringer of Verdun", as opposed to the 25% of the German forces who saw action there.

At any one time, there were 24 French divisions fighting at Verdun. French losses are estimated at 161,000 dead, 101,000 missing and 216,000 men wounded. German losses are estimated 142,000 killed and 187,000 wounded.

Perhaps even more than the Battle of Somme, Verdun symbolizes the sheer waste of World War I.

[edit] Significance

The Battle of Verdun—also known as the 'Mincing Machine of Verdun' or 'Meuse Mill'—became a symbol of French determination, inspired by the sacrifice of the defenders.

The successes of the fixed fortification system led to the adoption of the Maginot Line as the preferred method of defense along the Franco-German border during the inter-war years.

[edit] See also

Verdun Memorial
Verdun Memorial

[edit] Further reading

[edit] References

  1. ^ Alistair Horne The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 (Viking-Penguin, 1991) p.1
  2. ^ Holger Afflerbach: Falkenhayn. Politisches Denken und Handeln im Kaiserreich (München: Oldenbourg, 1994); "Planning Total War? Falkenhayn and the Battle of Verdun, 1916," in Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914-1918, Roger Chickering and Stig Foerster, eds. (New York: Cambridge, 2000)

[edit] External links

World War I Portal
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