Verdun 1916

The Renaissance of the Fortress

H. W. Kaufmann, J. E. Kaufmann

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473875180
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: History

Wrapped in myth and distortion, the Battle of Verdun is one of the most enigmatic battles of the Great War, and the controversy continues a century later. Before the battle the Germans believed they had selected one of the strongest points in the French defences in the hope that, if they smashed through it, the French would collapse. But Verdun was actually a hollow shell since its forts were largely disarmed and the trench lines were incomplete. So why did the Germans fail to take Verdun? As well as seeking to answer this fundamental question, the authors of this perceptive new study reconsider other key aspects of the battle the German deployment of stormtroopers, the use of artillery and aircraft, how the French developed the idea of methodical battle which came to dominate their military thought after the war. They look too at how Verdun brought about a renaissance of fortress engineering that resulted in the creation of the Maginot Line and the other fortifications constructed in Europe before the Second World War.

Chapter One

The Road to Verdun

‘The First World War had causes but no objectives’

Correlli Barnett, The Swordbearers (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1975)

‘Victory will come to the side that outlasts the other’

General Ferdinand Foch’s order issued during the Battle of the Marne in September 1914

Beginning of War and Mobilization

Proclaimed as the war to end all wars, the First World War failed to achieve that goal. The main players had no objectives other than to crush the enemy, take their capital and end the war in short order. German pre-war planning proved just as bad as that of the French in bringing victory. The Prussian-dominated General Staff had produced a single strategic plan formulated by General Alfred von Schlieffen who assumed that France must be part of any major conflict. By 1905, this plan called for the mobilization of the bulk of the German army on the Western Front. Schlieffen based his strategy on the premise that the army must knock out France quickly before concentrating on the lumbering Russian bear.¹ France, on the other hand, had only one major antagonist, which allowed it to concentrate its forces in the northeast. In July 1914, Austria-Hungary went to war with Serbia, which caused Russia to mobilize to protect its Slavic brothers. The Germans, in turn, considering Russian mobilization an act of war, began massing its troops. The German single war plan – beat the French – drew France into the conflict even though that nation had nothing to do with what should have been a localized problem in the Balkans.

Germany faced a dilemma. The terms of the Entente required France to join a war if another member of the alliance was attacked; however, in this case Russia was initiating hostilities. Unfortunately, Schlieffen’s plan created a rigid mobilization and war plan difficult to change. Once the forces began to assemble, Moltke the Younger, commander of the German army in 1914, would need weeks to redeploy the bulk of the army to the Eastern Front if France remained neutral. The Germans were not greatly concerned about a Russian attack because they had failed to notice the improvements the Tsar had instituted after the disastrous Russo-Japanese War, which had exposed many weaknesses not only within the armed forces but also in the country’s infrastructure. Instead, the Germans were afraid that if they moved their army to the East, the French, who were still seething after their humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, might seize the opportunity for a retaliatory strike. The German diplomats strove to dissuade the French from joining the Russians. On Friday, 31 July 1914 at 7.00 pm, Baron von Schoen, the German ambassador in Paris, received a dispatch from the German Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, instructing him as follows:

Russia has ordered mobilisation of her entire army and fleet … in spite of our still pending mediation, and although we ourselves have taken no measures of mobilisation. We have therefore declared the threatening state of war, which is bound to be followed by mobilisation, unless Russia stops within 12 hours all measures of war against us and Austria. Mobilisation inevitably implies war. Please ask French Government whether it intends to remain neutral in a Russo-German war. Reply must follow within 18 hours. Wire at once time when question was put. Utmost speed necessary.

If contrary to expectation, French Government declares that it will remain neutral, Your Excellency will please declare to the French Government that we must demand as a guarantee of neutrality the handing over of the fortresses of Toul and Verdun, which we should occupy and hand back on the conclusion of the war with Russia.

Reply to this last question must be here before four o’clock on Saturday afternoon.

(signed) Bethmann Hollweg

The French had until 1.00 pm on Saturday, 1 August to reply and confirm that they would not join with Russia. In the unlikely event that the French opted for neutrality, von Schoen’s instructions directed him to present them with the demand that they evacuate the fortified sites of Toul and Verdun, and giving them three hours to comply (by 4.00 pm on Saturday). The time limit and the stipulation made it apparent that the Germans did not anticipate or even want the French to comply. No one could expect the French to accept the humiliation of handing over their strongest fortress, Verdun, and opening the road to Paris. The Germans had war-gamed their Schlieffen Plan for years and counted on this becoming a knockout blow against France. The plan prevented the army from getting bogged down in the heavy French fortifications between Verdun and Toul by launching a surprise assault on neutral Belgium to outflank French fortifications.²

The French mobilized and the German onslaught against Belgium that quickly followed did not come as a total surprise. General Joffre, commander of the French armies, wanted to advance into Belgium before the Germans did, but he was ordered to keep his troops well away from the frontier. Soldiers in field grey (feld grau) and spiked leather helmets (the pickelhaube) swarmed into Belgium on 4 August and isolated the forts of Liège that barred the main line of communications.³ Heavy artillery, including Austrian manned Skoda 305mm and German 420mm weapons pounded the forts into submission after infantry assaults failed to take them. Shortly afterwards Namur suffered a similar fate, but this time the Germans let the big guns do most of the work instead of sacrificing their infantry.

Thus, after the war broke out in the summer of 1914, two factors arose that would eventually affect General Erich von Falkenhayn’s strategy in 1916.⁴ The first was Great Britain’s involvement in the war, which caused Falkenhayn to turn his efforts to forcing the British out of the war in order to assure ultimate victory for Germany. An offensive against Verdun combined with a campaign of unrestricted U-boat warfare, he believed, would achieve this objective. In 1916, however, the German leadership denied his request for a submarine campaign, partially because this type of warfare had failed in 1915 and had already had a negative impact on the USA as a result of the sinking of the British liner Lusitania. The second factor that influenced Falkenhayn was Verdun, which occupied a salient created in the course of German advances in 1914, but to which, the general believed, the French would cling at all costs. An important factor that did not influence the general’s planning was that Joffre, under the mistaken impression that the French forts were as weak as the Belgian forts and would be as easily smashed with big guns, had disarmed its forts. The process, initiated by General Joffre in the late summer of 1915, consisted of stripping the forts of artillery and ammunition to fill shortages in the French field army. Thus weakened, Verdun became the target of the 1916 German offensive even though it was only a shell of its former self.

Alfred von Schlieffen had clearly identified France as the primary enemy and claimed that there was no guarantee that the Russians would actually join France in the next war. Regardless of Russia’s decision, Germany had to concentrate its military resources against one enemy and pull off a quick and decisive victory. By the end of the first decade of the century, neither Schlieffen nor his successor, Moltke the Younger, realized that Russia was no longer the crippled bear of the Russo-Japanese War. It was generally assumed that France would participate in any European conflict involving Germany. Schlieffen had little enthusiasm for building additional fortifications, preferring instead to expand the railroad system. His aim was to avoid getting the German army bogged down in the new line of French fortresses and to deal France a crushing blow by outflanking its armies. The Franco-German frontier with its strong belt of fortifications stretching from Verdun to Belfort presented little room for manoeuvre. To create the needed space, he proposed invading the Low Countries.⁵ The three Belgian fortresses of Liège, Namur and Antwerp were something of a conundrum. The first two lie on the main line of advance and logistical support for an assault on France through Belgium. The answer was to produce heavy artillery able to reduce the forts. Since the French had not defended its frontier with Belgium as heavily as the one with Germany, a rapid advance would allow the Germans to manoeuvre around its main fortifications. Although the occupation of Luxembourg was part of the plan, invading that Duchy alone would merely serve to open an additional railway line to the front since its border with France was very short and did not offer any strategic advantage. The Ardennes of southern Belgium offered the manoeuvre room the Germans needed, but lacked the rail and road routes found in the part of Belgium north of the Meuse (Maas) that were necessary to maintain the large forces required to outflank the French.⁶ One German pre-war exercise consisted of advancing through Belgium and then attempting to turn the French fortified line at Verdun, which was the linchpin. Whether the Germans penetrated behind it or took it outright, theoretically, the move would compromise the entire French fortified line, leaving the road to Paris open. Once Germany eliminated France, supposedly by day forty, the bulk of the German army would be able to shift to the East theoretically before Russia could become a threat.

French Casualties in 1915

Most histories of the First World War ignore operations on the Western Front in 1915 since they did not break the stalemate. Most of the attention focuses on Gallipoli, U-boat warfare, Italy’s entry into war and secondary activities outside Europe. In some respects, 1915 was as important year on all fronts. The Gorlice-Tarnów Offensive not only inflicted huge losses on the Russians, but it also drove them a few hundred kilometres back from their borders. Both sides experimented with new weapons and methods in the West. Joffre launched his costly ‘nibbling’ operations which enabled the French army to learn how to fight a trench war, but at a tremendous cost in lives.

The British opened an attack at Neuve Chapelle with a short bombardment from which they drew the wrong conclusions when the incorrect type of shells failed to breach enemy obstacles. As a result, the Allies adopted bombardments of long duration that tore up the battlefield and alerted the Germans to an impending infantry attack. This method led to unproductive offensives which resulted in massive numbers of casualties. There are significant discrepancies regarding the number of casualties, and these can vary by up to 100,000 men or more, but 1915 may have been the bloodiest year for France.

Table 1: War Casualties, 1914–18

French casualties totalled 5,630,000, not including prisoners, or just over 67 per cent of the men mobilized during the war (73 per cent when including prisoners). Robert Doughty, a specialist in French military history, estimates that France suffered over 50 per cent of its casualties of the entire war during the first fifteen months of the conflict.* The next year, 1916, losses dropped to 20 per cent of its wartime casualties. In 1914, French losses numbered about 400,000 and in 1915, they rose to 500,000 on the Western Front or almost a million men lost in the major battles (The Frontier, the Marne, etc.). Doughty’s numbers include losses in typical trench fighting as well as smaller engagements during the Race to the Sea, engagements in Alsace and Lorraine, along the Meuse, at the St Mihiel Salient, in the Argonne and others that brought the total number of losses closer to 3 million if one includes prisoners. In 1915, Joffre’s largely unsuccessful secondary efforts in the Argonne and the St Mihiel Salient alone cost the French another 65,000 men. The French lost another 550,000 men in 1916 before the numbers dropped until 1918. On the Western Front, 1915 passed in almost constant fighting even when neither side was attacking or counter-attacking and even though most advances amounted to a few hundred metres at most.

* Robert Doughty, Pyrrhic Victory: French Strategy and Operations in the Great War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005).

The French strategists were not to be outdone by the Germans. In 1913, General Joffre formulated Plan XVII.⁷ Even though they knew of German plans to invade Belgium, French military intelligence officers incorrectly assumed that the Germans would remain south of the Meuse and advance through the Ardennes. Joffre’s plan placed the concentration area of the 5th Army as far on his left as Mézières where it could meet a German advance through southern (eastern) Belgium. He seemed unconcerned, however, about a German advance north of the Meuse apparently believing that the Belgians could handle the situation. Plan XVII called for an advance into central Germany through Lorraine. Considering the fact that there was a fortified German belt between Thionville and Metz, the plan was faulty because the French relied heavily on their light 75mm guns and had a paucity of heavy and modern siege artillery that would have made it possible to eliminate the German fortresses. In addition, the French soldiers, dressed in uniforms more suited for a parade ground than a battlefield, were expected to carry the day by charging against machine guns bolstered solely by elan and the will to win.

Field Marshal Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, reputed to be Austria’s ‘master strategist’, planned on a two-front war. His mobilization scheme called for putting armies on the Serbian and the Russian border with a large reserve ready to move to the aid of either. He failed to consider, however, that the Austrian railways were incapable of handling such a movement without disrupting the nation’s infrastructure. He also had a plan for mobilizing on the Italian border since he did not trust Italy to honour its alliance and considered launching a pre-emptive war prior to 1914. Germany had to support its ally’s operations in the East and Austria’s failures soon became a major drain on German military resources.

In 1914, the mobilized forces were the largest ever to take the field up to that point in history, however, command and control remained mired in the past. The teleg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: The Road to Verdun
• Chapter 2: Fortifications and Positional Warfare
• Chapter 3: Verdun Campaign, August 1914–February 1916
• Chapter 4: The Battle of Verdun, 1916
• Chapter 5: On Ne Passe Pas
• Chapter 6: Conclusion
• Appendix: Weapons of Trench Warfare
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography