Verdun: The Most Brutal Battle of World War I

The First World War shook the foundations of the Earth and reshaped not just the continent of Europe, but the world’s understanding of what it meant to be at war. For far too long, war had been colored by the naïve, almost optimistic belief among major powers of the 19th century that a nation’s young men and boys could be tossed into conflicts with smaller adversaries and expected to come home with nothing more than a cool scar and a few war stories. But the Great War exposed two painful realities: that war is hell, and that overzealous, well-armed nations could visit absolute hell on one another, leaving all participants battered whether they won or lost.

In an entire war of previously unimaginable slaughter, no other battle even came close to the apocalypse that went down at Verdun. For almost an entire year, French and German troops ground themselves and each other into blood-soaked dirt, in a battle of attrition that the world couldn’t have even fathomed — until it played out in a way that nobody could stop.

The Conditions of Battle: Why Neither Side Was Prepared

When the nations of Europe cascaded into battle at the outset of World War I, nobody on any side believed that it would be a protracted affair. The military strategists of both the Allied Powers and the Central Powers expected a war defined by quick and fairly restrained offensive attacks, just forceful enough to make the other side capitulate. According to the thinking of the time, “modern” nations simply couldn’t afford to sustain a long war — after all, their economies had far more important things to do, raising civilization up on a continental scale.

And their weaponry, more advanced than ever, was also efficient — so efficient, in fact, that battles would be decided quickly and decisively. Lots of destruction, all at once, and then everybody could pick up the pieces. That assumption, however, was dead wrong.

Tanks, combat airplanes, flamethrowers, machine guns, and chemical weapons were all even more effective at killing than their designers had initially believed — but the fact that these weapons could kill a lot of individual men on a lot of individual battlefields didn’t make them efficient. Instead, they had an almost magnetic effect; in a war where neither side could stomach defeat, the only way to avoid defeat was to send more men and boys to the front lines, and every time a new soldier arrived, they were almost sure to be mowed down. Generals positioned far from the action had no issue sending more and more troops into those battles, and those troops had very little idea what they were walking into.

By the time they arrived, it would already be too late for most of them to get out alive. By the time French and German forces began massing around Verdun, this horrific process was already well underway. German forces had surged into France, taking significant territory and incurring devastating losses.

But Germany’s successes to that point were just as contingent on French failures as German successes; for example, France was convinced that it could hold its territory by holding hundreds of forts, which ended up being target practice for German artillerymen. French decision-makers had also tended to laugh at the idea of heavy artillery and modern machine guns, which, according to France’s Inspector General of the Infantry, “would not make the slightest difference to anything.” Making matters worse, the French consistently underestimated just how strong German forces were; French strategists badly underestimated the value of Germany’s conscripted troops in their reserves, informed by the fact that French conscripts of the time were widely regarded as being quite poor.

The Germans, however, were not, and when France’s well-respected front-line infantry went up against Germany’s front-line and reserve troops, they would not just be badly outnumbered — they would be badly outnumbered, with their best troops positioned right in Germany’s crosshairs.

Why Verdun Became Germany’s Target

Taken together, these failures meant that by the time German forces were encroaching on Verdun, France was getting shredded apart by the onslaught. French forces had at least had the good sense to dig into defensive positions — trenches — that would keep their remaining men somewhat safer, and in response, the Germans had dug in their own trenches as well. Continued German offensives, with the goal of taking more territory, ended up just leveling the playing field a bit, as now it was the Germans who were unable to fully adapt to changing times.

Despite small breakthroughs here and there, their assaults mostly resulted in the deaths of many Germans, as opposed to relatively few French. The solution, as German leaders saw it, was to force a breakthrough: one massive, focused assault to shatter a part of the French defense, from which the Germans could then begin a much larger campaign of encirclement to overrun the French entirely. Their target was the city of Verdun, a fortress town that essentially served as the gateway to taking Paris outright.

From the German perspective, Verdun was the best target they had; it was surrounded by the Germans on three sides, it could only be supplied on the French side by a single road, and much of the French artillery there had been shifted away to other parts of France, while the town’s forts had been abandoned in favor of defensive trench lines behind the city. As the Germans saw it, Verdun should fall within a month if they could put enough pressure on it, and once Verdun fell, Paris had no hope of survival. The commander of German forces on the Western front, General Erich von Falkenhayn, was committed to enduring a battle of attrition in order to win his victory at Verdun.

Verdun was more than a gateway to Paris; it was a linchpin of the French defense, and a potentially major pressure point for French morale. If Verdun was a city that the French felt they couldn’t afford to lose, then it was perfect for the Germans to pile on the pressure, forcing the French to bleed themselves dry in a ruinous attempt to pay for Verdun with human lives. Von Falkenhayn’s strategy was as simple as it was brutal: first, his forces would make limited advances toward the city, with the aid of a short but hellish storm of artillery fire.

Then, French reserves would be brought forward to respond, only to be caught in the next wave of artillery shelling. The Germans would move forward, the French would respond, and the Germans would bombard them, again and again. Despite Von Falkenhayn’s statements after the battle, modern historians tend to agree that his goal was a swift victory, not a pure battle of attrition for its own sake — but such a battle of attrition was part of the plan regardless, even if it wasn’t meant to go on nearly as long as it did.

The German Assault and Pétain’s Defense of Verdun

During this time, the French had been hard at work planning a counterattack in the same area, and even despite surveillance reports that the Germans were preparing their own offensive, France didn’t discover the extent of the German military buildup until just days before the attack took place. From February 11 to February 21, 1916, the French scrambled to fortify their own positions with thousands more troops and a full complement of heavy artillery, using more than three thousand trucks traveling on a single dirt road to their position. That road would later become known as La Voie Sacrée — the Sacred Way — because of its role as an absolutely critical supply line for the entire battle.

In the early morning on February 21, 1916, the German attack commenced, first in a bombardment that lasted hours, then by advance scouts who determined where the vulnerable points of the French defense were located, and finally by German infantry, who secured significant portions of France’s first-layer defense using flamethrowers and machine guns. On the 21st, the French were forced to pull back three full miles from their initial defensive positions. Over the next few days, the Germans took full control of the first French defensive line despite counterattacks, at the expense of thousands of French troops, who had been told to defend essentially open land with only minimal cover.

Within a couple more days, the Germans were through the second French defensive line, and the French commander at Verdun was relieved of duty. His replacement was General Philippe Pétain, a man who, by the end of the Battle of Verdun, would become a war hero. Pétain was a rarity among French generals, in that he was not only willing but intent on spending just as much time on defensive strategy as offensive strategy.

When he arrived at Verdun, accompanied by an entire army’s worth of reinforcements, he organized the establishment of a new defensive line that would be held at all costs. Rather than throwing all his troops into a trench at the front lines, he organized his defense into a series of strongpoints — a mix of trenches, forts, and other established positions, all of which could cover each other. Pétain’s attempt to stonewall the German advance paid off; although he conceded significant portions of the battlefield, he was able to greatly slow down the German advance and bought valuable time for French airmen to deal with the German airplanes overhead.

Behind his infantry lines, Pétain brought far more artillery than had initially been present in Verdun, and he ensured that those artillery batteries were given the proper communications equipment to coordinate their activity. The Voie Sacrée was kept open at all costs, for more ammunition and supplies to arrive, and France was able to assemble a continual logistical effort, dependent on automobiles, on a scale that the world had never seen with motorized transport. He also instituted a policy of cycling troops in and out of battle quickly, keeping his front-line troops awake and alert while giving respite to those who had endured constant shelling for too long.

Stalemate, the Somme, and France’s Creeping Counteroffensive

Almost as soon as Pétain took command, Germany assaulted a nearby village with a force of five hundred thousand men. But despite such an overwhelming crush of enemy troops, the French were able to rally just in time, digging their heels in just enough that the village was not lost. The French defense, just days earlier, had been on the verge of being overrun completely, but the situation was no longer entirely hopeless.

The Germans were forced to rethink their strategy. Initially, they had been able to advance infantry under cover of a heavy artillery barrage, but because French troops and artillery were now holding stronger defensive positions, moving German artillery forward meant putting it within the French weapons’ range. A full frontal assault was no longer entirely feasible, so attacks around the flanks would have to do.

Both sides might have attempted to take a bit of a breather, if not for the fact that the rest of the war was still raging. The Germans could see a British attack coming, targeted toward the upper part of the river Somme, and they intended to tie up as many French in Verdun as they could. The French, by contrast, wanted to keep German forces from departing Verdun, so that they couldn’t go reinforce the Somme.

In early March, the Germans carried out a more careful assault, capturing that aforementioned village and contesting control of a hill that was quickly turned into a no-man’s-land between the two sides. The Germans used these gains to push inward, the French recalibrated their lines, and once the French had an opportunity to dig in again, they repelled subsequent German attacks around the river Meuse, which runs through Verdun. The battle fell into a stalemate for the month of April, and after the catastrophic losses of March, it was a critical reprieve for the leadership on both sides.

But nowhere, on either side, was there much thought of abandoning Verdun entirely; by this point, both sides had reason to think they could win, and both sides had sustained too many losses to stomach the idea of turning tail. In May, despite renewed German assaults, the French began to work toward launching more counterattacks, and although pressure was ratcheting up on both sides to wrap things up in advance of a pivot to the Somme, neither side was in any position to fully bring down the other. The Germans were in a somewhat better position to turn the tide, but their luck changed in early June, when developments on the Eastern front required Germany’s attention to shift away from Verdun.

Although troops on the ground continued to work for control of the city, valuable reinforcements were diverted eastward, and even though sustained German assaults pushed General Pétain and the French to the brink of complete collapse, the Germans were unable to finish the job in time. At the end of June, the Battle of the Somme began, and with both sides focused on that immensely costly battle, Germany’s momentum at Verdun ground to a halt. Forced to weather the failures of Austria-Hungary and a combined assault from the British, the Russians, and the French, the Germans were no longer able to sustain the same war of attrition in Verdun.

More troops had to be pulled away, despite the fact that they were critical to any plans Germany had to take the city. On July 11, a German push forward ended in catastrophe, when twelve regiments proved unable to get the job done, and when the Germans tried to make major headway again a few weeks later, they lacked the ability to break through the French defensive lines. Once more, on September 3, the Germans threw themselves up against the French defense, and once more, they failed.

Germany had been depleted, and the French didn’t skip a beat. With Germany’s soft underbelly finally exposed, the French began to push back. After holding their lines for another month, French forces under the command of General Charles Mangin assaulted the German lines, using a slow, creeping, continual barrage of heavy artillery, followed by three French infantry divisions who mopped up anyone and anything left behind.

Earlier in the battle, this creeping assault could have been countered by Germany’s own artillery or by a counterattack on another section of the battlefield, but now, there was very little that Germany could do to respond. General Mangin’s counterattack claimed thousands of French lives, as well as German ones; even after a trench had been thoroughly shelled, there would still be numerous troops left breathing, each of whom had no other option but to fight to the death when French infantry arrived. But the creeping counteroffensive worked; the French first retook several of Verdun’s critical forts, then gained victory in hard-fought artillery and aerial battles, then retook the second defensive line claimed at the start of the battle, and finally, the front line they’d been forced to abandon nearly a year earlier.

With tens of thousands of Germans captured and the rest left with no other defenses to fall back upon, the French finally managed to retake Verdun for good. After a desperate battle for survival, France had somehow managed to win the battle entirely, saving not just the road to Paris, but the entire Western front.

Living Through Verdun: The Soldiers’ Nightmare

The account of troop movements and territorial gains only tells half the story. Over several months of fighting, the lines of attack and defense in Verdun hadn’t changed in any permanent way, but every push and pull, every attempt by either side to attack the other, had resulted in the loss of hundreds, if not thousands of lives on each side. Often, those losses had been incurred by truly horrific means: bombardment under heavy fire, rolling waves of poison gases, or the use of flamethrowers and melee weapons at close range.

Both French and German troops on the front lines had endured awful battlefield conditions, in a pockmarked landscape of mud, blood, shrapnel, and almost nothing else. The soldiers had a very different understanding of the battle than their generals did. Many accounts of the battlefield describe it as an almost dreamlike place, with a perpetually grey sky completely inundated with artillery smoke, and with once-lush forests memorialized by occasional charred stumps, sticking up from ground that looked more like the surface of the Moon than of any place on Earth.

At night, the skies were alive with flame and explosions. Then there were the bodies, often unrecoverable when they were killed, left out in the open for days at a time. Even when they were buried, in graves that were often shallow and hastily dug, they’d be disinterred when the next artillery shell struck — and the artillery never ceased.

Death and dismemberment went hand-in-hand, with preserved, recognizable corpses being far more rare than unidentifiable, rotting chunks of flesh. Disease ran rampant, the thick stench of decay and chemical weapons hung heavy over the entire battlefield, and troops forced to live their lives next to the dead were indelibly scarred. In the words of one American pilot who had volunteered to fight for France: “Nature had been ruthlessly murdered.

Every sign of humanity had been swept away. Roads had vanished, and forests were fire-blackened stumps. Villages were gray smears where stone walls were tumbled together.

Only the faintest outlines of the great forts of Douaumont and Vaux could be traced against the churned up background… only broken, half obliterated links of the trenches were visible. Nothing in the war ever equaled the intense slaughter and gothic, nightmarish qualities of Verdun.” One French infantryman wrote in June of 1916, as reinforcements finally reached his position: “We’re glad to get out of here because we’ve been completely brutalized by the bombardment; one has to have a strong heart to endure such a martyrdom.

This is not war, it’s a massacre. Oh! when will it end?

It’s terrible to see what’s happening…” Said another, speaking of the dead and dying: “Farther on, there are many wounded to tend, others who are carried back on stretchers to the rear. Some are screaming, others are pleading. One sees some who don’t have legs, others without any heads, who have been left for several weeks on the ground…” And one other: “I stayed ten days next to a man who was chopped in two; there was no way to move him; he had one leg on the parapet and the rest of his body in the trench.

It stank and I had to chew tobacco the whole time in order to endure this torment.” The psychological toll simply cannot be overstated. A French captain reported: “I have returned from the most terrible ordeal I have ever witnessed.

Four days and four nights — ninety-six hours — the last two days in ice-cold mud — kept under relentless fire, without any protection whatsoever except for the narrow trench, which even seemed to be too wide. I arrived with 175 men, I returned with 34 of whom several had half turned insane.” A German soldier related his experience watching men return from Verdun, the only survivors from a company of around a hundred: “We watched as we passed them; they were about twenty.

They walked by us as living, plastered statues. Their faces stared at us like shrunken mummies, and their eyes were so immense that you could not see anything but their eyes.” Even General Pétain himself had some understanding of the depth of the horrors that he had put his men through, writing of them years after the battle: “Their expressions seemed frozen by a vision of terror; their gait and their postures betrayed a total dejection; they sagged beneath the weight of horrifying memories.”

Perhaps one German soldier put it best of all: “Our poor men have seen too many atrocities, have witnessed too many incredible matters. I cannot believe that we will be able to cope with this. Our poor little mind simply cannot comprehend all of this.”

The Aftermath: A Pyrrhic Victory and Its Cost

It is impossible to know just how many lives were taken during the Battle of Verdun. The nation of France estimates that 377,321 of its own citizens were killed or wounded during the battle, while Winston Churchill would later guess that nearly a hundred thousand more French died than France had claimed. Other estimates go even higher.

Germany is believed to have sustained at least 336,000 casualties, and again, individual estimates run tens of thousands higher. There were more costly battles in World War I than Verdun; the Battle of the Somme, by example, claimed over 1.2 million lives, whereas Verdun claimed under a million. But nowhere in the war was death and destruction concentrated so thoroughly on a single place, in a battle fought among so many people.

Historians estimate that as many as 150 individual shells per square yard were spent at the Battle of Verdun, roughly a ton of ordnance spent to obliterate an area where you could hardly fit a kitchen table. Even today, some estimates place the count of unexploded shells around Verdun — still unrecovered a century later — over ten million, packed either with high explosives or deadly chemicals. Nine entire French towns were completely annihilated, and the city of Verdun itself was unrecognizable by the end of the battle.

In a technical sense, the French should be declared the victors; after all, they did push the Germans out of Verdun, they protected the city of Paris, and they established defensive positions that would not be violated for the rest of the war. But in a much more real sense, Verdun is a true pyrrhic victory — a victory so costly for both sides that even the winners, in the end, might believe that the battle was never worth fighting. Forty percent of all French troops at the battle were killed or injured, and so were thirty percent of the Germans.

Although the percentage of killed and wounded among only the troops deployed to the front line cannot be known precisely, such a number would be astronomically high. The Battle of Verdun is almost a perfect caricature of World War I as a whole — a conflict that took far, far more from every participating nation than it gave any of them. With the rise of Nazi Germany and Japan, the even greater carnage of the Second World War, and the abject failure of many World War I leaders to learn the lessons that might have prevented such bloodshed in the future, it seems entirely safe to say that the Great War — and the nearly thirty-nine million lives lost — were all for naught.

The war was merely a showcase of the absolute hell that two halves of humanity can deliver on each other, a truly pyrrhic battle that gained nothing and lost everything. Perhaps it’s only right that the Great War’s biggest and most brutal battle achieved about as little — for as unimaginable of a cost — as the Great War itself ultimately would.

Sources

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