Battle Of Verdun

On the morning of February 21, 1916, at 7:12am, a shell from a German Krupp 38-centimeter long-barreled gun, which was one of more than 1,200 weapons aimed at French forces along a 20-kilometer stretch of the Meuse River, hit a cathedral in Verdun, France. It is unknown if this was their target, but the destruction set off a chain reaction that marked the start of the longest battle of World War I. The Battle of Verdun was a grueling fight that would last 10 months. The war in France, in early 1916, stretching from the Swiss border to the English Channel, had turned into the treachery of trench warfare. While the conditions were harsh, Erich von Falkenhayn, the German army’s chief of staff, believed the path to victory wasn’t through battling Russia in the east, but by defeating the French in a decisive fight on the Western Front. So, they would just have to persevere in the trenches.

In December 1915, Falkenhayn persuaded the kaiser that despite opposition from other military leaders like Paul von Hindenburg, pairing unrestricted submarine warfare at sea with a major French defeat on land would drive the British, whom he considered the strongest of the Allies, out of the war. Falkenhayn’s planned offensive targeted the fortress city of Verdun, located on the Meuse River in France. Verdun was chosen not only for its symbolic value…it had been the last stronghold to fall in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, but also because it could be attacked from three sides, making it a strategically appealing objective. In 1915, despite warnings about a possible German attack in the area, the French command began pulling heavy artillery from Verdun, a key element in defensive warfare. They chose instead to focus on an offensive strategy crafted by General Ferdinand Foch, head of the army’s prestigious War College, known as Plan XVII. As a result, when the Germans launched their attack on February 21, the French were caught largely unprepared.

Right from the start, the Battle of Verdun caused massive losses for both sides. Falkenhayn openly admitted that his goal wasn’t to seize the city quickly, but to wear down the French, even if it meant higher German casualties. Just four days into the bombardment along the Meuse, French front-line divisions had lost over 60 percent of their troops, with German losses nearly as severe. After some rapid German territorial advances, the battle ground to a halt, with heavy casualties piling up on both sides. The newly promoted French commander, Henri-Philippe Pétain, was set on dealing maximum damage to the German forces, famously vowing to his commander-in-chief, Joseph Joffre, “They shall not pass.”

By mid-1917, German forces were under intense strain, facing both a British-led push along the Somme and Russia’s Brusilov Offensive in the east. In July, the kaiser, frustrated with the situation at Verdun, replaced Falkenhayn, sending him to lead the 9th Army in Transylvania, while Paul von Hindenburg stepped into his role. Earlier in April, Petain had been succeeded by Robert Nivelle, who by early December had successfully led the recapture of much of their previously lost ground. Between December 15 and 18, the French captured 11,000 German prisoners, and on December 18, Hindenburg finally halted the German attacks after ten exhausting months. With German losses at 143,000 dead (out of 337,000 total casualties) and French losses at 162,440 dead (out of 377,231), Verdun came to epitomize the relentless, bloody grind of warfare on the Western Front during World War I.