Verdun - June 25th
A French lieutenant at Verdun, who would be killed by a shell, wrote in his diary on 23 May 1916, "Humanity is mad. It must be mad to do what it is doing. What a massacre! What scenes of horror and carnage! I cannot find words to translate my impressions. Hell cannot be so terrible. Men are mad!"
The French and German armies fired ~10,000,000 shells, with a weight of ~1,370,000 tons from February to December of 1916.
Casualties at Verdun from 1914 to 1918 is estimated at 1,250,000 men. The French lost ~377,000 men and the Germans lost ~337,000 men from February to December of 1916, an average of ~70,000 per month.
The Battle of Verdun was fought from 21 February to 18 December 1916 (303 days) on the Western Front. The battle was the longest of the First World War and took place on the hills north of Verdun-sur-Meuse in north-eastern France.
According to his memoirs written after the war, the Chief of the German General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, believed in 1915 that although victory might no longer be achieved by a decisive battle, the French army could still be defeated if it suffered a sufficient number of casualties. By seizing or threatening to capture Verdun, the Germans anticipated that the French would send all their reserves, which would then have to attack secure German defensive positions supported by a powerful artillery reserve.
The German strategy was to create a favorable operational situation without a mass attack, which had been costly and ineffective when it had been tried by the Franco-British, by relying on the power of heavy artillery to inflict mass losses. A limited offensive at Verdun would lead to the destruction of the French strategic reserve in fruitless counter-attacks and the defeat of British reserves in a futile relief offensive, leading to the French accepting a separate peace.
Falkenhayn had underestimated the French, for whom victory at all costs was the only way to justify the sacrifices already made; the pressure imposed on the French army never came close to making the French collapse and triggering a premature British relief offensive. The ability of the German army to inflict disproportionate losses had also been overestimated, in part because the 5th Army commanders had tried to capture Verdun and attacked regardless of loss; even when reconciled to Falkenhayn's attrition strategy, they continued with Vernichtungsstrategie (strategy of annihilation) and the tactics of Bewegungskrieg (manoeuvre warfare). Failure to reach the Meuse Heights forced the 5th Army to try to advance from poor tactical positions and to impose attrition by infantry attacks and counter-attacks. The unanticipated duration of the offensive made Verdun a matter of prestige for the Germans as much as it was for the French.
French (?) Rucksack from 1916
The Verdun Memorial Museum has fascinating exhibits about the battle (with lots of information in English). The museum is rich in artifacts and works to pair German and French objects; for example, you'll see a circa 1916 loaded-up German rucksack right next to a French one.
The museum was very impressive, covering many different aspects of the battle from both French and German perspectives.
Fort Douaumont
Fort Douaumont was the largest and highest fort on the ring of large defensive works which had protected the city of Verdun, France since the 1890s. By 1915, the French General Staff had concluded that even the best-protected forts of Verdun could not resist bombardments from the German 420 mm Gamma guns. These new super-heavy howitzers had easily taken several large Belgian forts out of action in August 1914. Fort Douaumont and other Verdun forts were judged ineffective and had been partly disarmed and left virtually undefended since 1915. On 25 February 1916, Fort Douaumont was entered and occupied without a fight by a small German raiding party comprising only 19 officers and 79 men. The easy fall of Fort Douaumont, only three days after the beginning of the Battle of Verdun, shocked the French Army. Douaumont was finally recaptured by three French infantry divisions of the Second Army, during the First Offensive Battle of Verdun on 24 October 1916.
Fort Douaumont
Construction work started in 1885 near the village of Douaumont, on some of the highest ground in the area and the fort was continually reinforced until 1913. It has a total surface area of 30,000 m2 and is approximately 400 m long, with two subterranean levels protected by a steel reinforced concrete roof 12 m thick resting on a sand cushion. These improvements had been completed by 1903. The entrance to the fort was at the rear. Two main tunnels ran east-west, one above the other, with barrack rooms and corridors to outlying parts of the fort branched off of the main tunnels. The fort was equipped with numerous armed posts, a 155 mm rotating/retractable gun turret, a 75 mm gun rotating/retractable gun turret, four other 75 mm guns in flanking "Bourges Casemates" that swept the intervals and several machine-gun turrets. Entry into the moat around the fort was interdicted by Hotchkiss anti-personnel revolving cannons located in wall casemates or "Coffres" present at each corner.
Fort Douaumont
With hindsight, Douaumont was much better prepared to withstand the heaviest bombardments than the Belgian forts that had been crushed by German 420 mm Gamma howitzers in 1914. The German invasion of Belgium in 1914 had forced military planners to radically rethink the utility of fortification in war. The Belgian forts had been quickly destroyed by German artillery and easily overrun. In August 1915, French General Joseph Joffre approved the reduction of the garrison at Douaumont and at other Verdun forts. Douaumont was stripped of all its weaponry except for the two turreted guns that were too difficult to remove: a 155 mm and a 75 mm gun. The two "Casemates de Bourges" bunkers, one on each side of the fort, were disarmed of their four 75s. The garrison was mostly middle-aged reservists, under the command of the city's military governor and not the field army.
Douaumont Ossuary
The Douaumont Ossuary is the tomb of unknown French and German soldiers who perished in Verdun's muddy trenches. In the years after the war, a local bishop wandered through fields of bones — the remains of about 130,000 unidentified soldiers. Concluding that they deserved a respectful final resting place, he began raising money for the project — which was officially inaugurated in 1927. The building has 46 granite vaults, each holding remains from different sectors of the battlefield. The unusual artillery-shell-shaped tower and cross design of this building symbolizes war…and peace (imagine a sword plunged into the ground up to its hilt).
