Ring of Steel

by Alexander Watson

  Falkenhayn selected Verdun not just because no French government could afford to abandon it. Operationally, the area was well suited for his ‘bleeding to death battle’ (Ausblutungsschlacht). The plan was not to take Verdun, merely to threaten it. If the German infantry could capture the high ground to the east of the city, it would be perfectly positioned, with a mass of artillery behind it, to eviscerate the inevitable French counter-attacks. Verdun’s location in a salient would help the initial advance and subsequent slaughter, for it meant that the sector could be fired upon from three sides. The sector’s extensive rail network also made it attractive, for Falkenhayn envisaged an artillery battle and therefore needed the infrastructure to keep his guns fed with enormous quantities of ammunition.51 The German artillery concentrated in the area comprised three 38cm naval guns, twenty-six super-heavy 42cm howitzers, 416 heavy howitzers, 209 heavy cannon and 550 field guns. They were supplemented by 202 trench mortars to blast a way for the infantry through to the high ground. To make possible an initial heavy bombardment, 213 trains brought up munitions. Thereafter an average of 33¾ munitions trains arrived daily throughout the offensive. Other German preparations for the attack were no less thorough; the General Staff, the only part of the army largely protected from casualties, had preserved its operational prowess. Aircraft carefully reconnoitred French defences. The nine crack infantry divisions designated for the offensive marched to the sector by night in order to maintain secrecy. The attack was rehearsed using mock-up trenches. Some units formed storm-troop detachments armed with hand grenades and trained in the new tactics. Shelters called Stollen, together capable of accommodating 10,000 men, were dug into the front line to hold the assault troops.52

  However, these painstaking preparations could not compensate for some serious flaws in the attack’s planning. Falkenhayn’s preoccupation with limiting losses, and his determination to hold back a strategic reserve to fight the British, motivated him to restrict the offensive to a narrow 14-kilometre front on the east bank of the Meuse, the river that ran through Verdun. The Chief of Staff of the Fifth Army, General von Knobelsdorf, who had responsibility for drawing up a detailed operational scheme and whose troops would carry it out, was dismayed. He rightly recognized that attacking in the east alone would expose his men to enfilade fire from French artillery on the west bank, but his protests were overridden. Falkenhayn did provide two extra corps in order eventually to widen the attack, but he refused to release them immediately.53 Two other factors detracted from the likelihood of the offensive’s success. One was that the Fifth Army’s command did not itself share Falkenhayn’s concept and prioritized actually seizing Verdun’s fortress complex rather than inflicting losses on the French army. The conceptual confusion would cause doubt lower down the chain of command about what the offensive aimed to achieve, and which tactics should be used. The other big problem was the weather. The offensive was scheduled for 12 February, but on that day snow fell in sheets. As the gunners could not see, the attack was postponed. It was hoped at first that the delay would be just twenty-four hours, but rain and snow fell for a full nine days. The French, who had known that an assault was in preparation but had been unable to work out exactly from where it would be launched, were alerted by Alsatian deserters. By the time the weather cleared, the French front had been reinforced and much of the element of surprise had been lost.54

  At last, on 21 February at 8.12 a.m., the German guns opened up, bombarding French lines for a full nine hours. To an officer in the German trenches opposite, it sounded ‘as if the horsemen of the apocalypse were riding by’. There was not one continuous roar but a cacophony, as one calibre crescendoed only then to be drowned out by other guns: at times it sounded ‘like an express train, then like a waterfall, then it warbled into high, then into deep tones’. Mine-throwers, which joined the bombardment at 10 a.m. with ‘a terrible crash that rocked the shelter at its joints’, smashed the French earthworks.55 Gas shells were used to suppress enemy artillery; gunners whose breathing was hampered by gas masks were unable to load their guns quickly. At 5 p.m. German infantry patrols and pioneers armed with flame-throwers climbed into no-man’s-land and captured much of the enemy’s first line. Where woods had hidden the French defences from observation the attackers had to overcome stiff resistance. Elsewhere, however, the positions had been effectively pounded and shaken defenders were relieved to surrender.56

  The first week of the German offensive was a stunning success. The main attack began on 22 February, with troops of the VII Reserve Corps on the right advancing particularly rapidly along the Meuse River. By the end of the third day, the whole of the French first position had fallen and the Germans started to drag their artillery forward for the next assault. Their most spectacular triumph was the capture of Fort Douaumont, which at a third of a kilometre in width, was the largest and most modern of Verdun’s fortresses. Under most circumstances, it should have been impregnable. Its two and a half metre-thick reinforced concrete roof was constructed ingeniously with a metre layer of sand in the middle and up to five metres of earth atop. The sand acted as a cushion and made the fort capable of withstanding blows from even the Germans’ heaviest shells. Retractable artillery and machine-gun turrets, flanking galleries with light artillery and searchlights, two fields of barbed wire, spiked railings, and a moat eight metres deep combined to turn any infantry assault into a forlorn hope. Yet in common with the other forts, most of the guns at Douaumont had been removed in 1915. This was bad enough; even worse was that commanders in February 1916 neglected even to garrison the fortress. An order to man the defences was never sent. In consequence, a pioneer sergeant and two small groups of soldiers under officers from the 24th Brandenburgers were able to carry out one of the most remarkable coups of the entire war. They entered the fort unopposed and took the fifty-seven-strong caretaker garrison prisoner without loss. The fortress became a key shelter, logistical and medical point for the German attackers for the rest of the battle. The effort to retake it, which was only managed in October, cost the French army an estimated 100,000 casualties.57

  The victories lulled Falkenhayn into believing that all was going according to plan. Yet, in fact, even at this early stage there were problems. As the Fifth Army command had foreseen, enfilade fire from the untouched west bank of the Meuse was already causing severe casualties from the second day of the offensive. Additionally, French resistance on the eastern bank was stiffening. Pétain was given command of the Fortified Region of Verdun on 25 February. His first order to his troops to ‘retake immediately any piece of land’ played into German hands, but he was effective in stiffening the defence. Moreover, by the following day, nine French corps were either in or on their way to the sector. On 27 February the offensive ground to a halt. The attackers had advanced up to 8 kilometres and had captured 216 French officers and 14,534 men, but they had lost 25,000 men themselves. To push towards the safety of the Meuse heights, the capture of which was so critical to his attritional plan, Falkenhayn conceded that an attack would also have to be made on the river’s west bank, and on 6 March this began against fully prepared French troops. This time there would be no quick victories. The battle descended into a mutual annihilation. The Germans had not reached the high ground, so their troops lay in positions exposed to heavy bombardment from the flanks and even in some cases from the rear. By the end of March, their losses had risen to 81,607 men.58

  The German army’s performance at Verdun shook the French. Major Raynal, the commandant who led the defence of Fort Vaux, in whose unlit underground corridors some of the most vicious fighting of the battle took place at the start of June 1916, wondered at the enemy soldiers’ courage, discipline and tenacity. ‘Whatever the content of the order, the German carries it out, even if in doing so, it is certain that he will fall,’ he remarked in his diary.59 Yet the Kaiser’s troops were only human, and the heavy shellfire, the difficulty of getting food and water up to the front and the weeks of living in mud among corpse
s tested their resilience. Psychiatric casualties rose rapidly from the start of the battle, and in May they reached an incidence a third above those of the Field Army on the Western Front. Medical officers reported anxiously on an epidemic of nervous digestive disorders (see Fig. 3).60 Nor were German citizen-soldiers as selfless or lemming-like as Raynal’s description implies. The diary of Max Wittmann, a soldier in Reserve Infantry Regiment 207, offers a vivid corrective with its honest description of the chaos, confusion and compromises that actually defined combat.

  Figure 3. German psychiatric casualties in the Second and First Armies (which fought on the Somme in the second half of 1916), in the Fifth Army (which fought at Verdun in 1916) and in the entire Western Field Army, 1914–1918

  Source: Heeres-Sanitätsinspektion des Reichskriegsministeriums (ed.), Sanitätsbericht über das Deutsche Heer (Deutsches Feld- und Besatzungsheer) im Weltkriege 1914/1918 (Deutscher Kriegssanitätsbericht 1914/18). Die Krankenbewegung bei dem deutschen Feld- und Besatzungsheer im Weltkriege 1914/1918 (3 vols., Berlin, 1934), iii, pp. 6* and 42*.

  On 24 May 1916, Wittmann’s battalion was ordered into the attack on the notorious Le Mort Homme hill on the west bank of the Meuse. The artillery had hammered French lines since midday and he spent an anxious few hours crouched at the bottom of a trench, hardly daring to peek over the parapet. All the soldiers were deafened by the shellfire. They awaited the command to go over the top. At 6 p.m. the assault began. The 8th company, Wittmann’s outfit, was designated as the reserve while the rest of the battalion attacked. The company was told to shift to the right but instantly came under heavy fire when it tried, so Wittmann and some of his comrades moved away without orders. ‘Just as well,’ he jotted in his notebook, ‘for after ten minutes everybody dashed back because there had been direct hits on the trenches, with several men buried and dead.’ The attacking companies did no better. The assault was delayed because the battalion’s commander was heavily wounded and its adjutant killed as they went forward to the advance sap, where the operation was supposed to begin. The soldiers, in terror or relief, had ‘skedaddled back as there was no leadership’. After the first squads to be sent over were mown down by machine-gun fire, no one else was willing to go forward.

  This first debacle and refusal to be uselessly slaughtered defined the rest of the tour. After ‘two tough days’ at the front, Wittmann recorded that ‘many in our company have hidden themselves and done a bunk so that we now number around 45–50 out of 170 men’. After a night spent cowering in a shell hole in no-man’s-land under artillery fire, he too decided that discretion was the better part of valour and headed back to German lines in search of deeper shelter. When he rejoined his company as it withdrew the following day, there was no rebuke, just joy that ‘one after the other’ the soldiers were returning. The relief at leaving the battlefield, even though the respite would be only temporary, was overwhelming. ‘God be praised,’ wrote Wittmann when he arrived at his rest quarters and was able to eat, sleep, wash and shave, ‘at least a place where one can say that one is human.’ He counted himself lucky to have survived. ‘My whole squad has disappeared,’ he recorded in his diary, ‘two of them dead, six wounded, I alone remain.’61

  The Verdun offensive raged on even though the rapid capture of the heights, the precondition for the success of the original plan, had failed. Falkenhayn, although anxious about the offensive’s progress, persisted in part because he overestimated the kill ratio: ‘the enemy’s losses were carefully noted and compared with our own . . . for every two Germans put out of action five Frenchmen had to shed their blood’.62 In fact, his information was incorrect. Pétain’s noria system, named after the irrigation wheels whose buckets sweep through water, raising and then depositing their load in an unbroken sequence, rotated 259 of France’s 330 infantry battalions through the front. The Germans misinterpreted this as evidence that enemy troops were being rapidly annihilated. In fact, the French were withdrawing units for rest and refit once their casualties reached 50 per cent.63 This was good practice, for it preserved veteran cadres on which to rebuild and gave the soldiers at the front some hope of getting out of the battle alive. German troops, by contrast, were condemned to stay in the line until so depleted that they could no longer hold. The policy was determined by Falkenhayn’s desire to keep a fresh reserve for a decisive counter-attack once Entente forces had worn themselves out. For the men of the forty-eight German divisions that fought at Verdun, this was terribly hard. As the army’s official history rued, it also ruined their units: ‘some German divisions were so burned out in the battle on the Meuse that only after many months did they again become just about capable of combat’.64

  The offensive was also continued because, with awful irony, as ever more blood was spilt, the Germans, like the French, came to value Verdun as a prestige object. To disengage without shaking public morale meant being able to demonstrate some tangible achievement. For Falkenhayn personally, the outcome of the battle became tied to his reputation and authority. Furthermore, the Fifth Army, which had embraced Falkenhayn’s aim to bleed the French dry, advised that the attack be continued. As troops’ positions were so exposed by the summer, stopping would be suicidal, and the only alternative, returning to the offensive’s start lines, was unthinkable after so many casualties. Only in mid-July, after the onset of the Somme offensive, did the OHL (Oberste Heeresleitung), the German Army High Command, halt attacks at Verdun. Even so, fighting continued at a lower pitch as the French strove to regain lost ground. Eventually, in October and November, the two forts taken by the Germans, Douaumont and Vaux, were recaptured.65 In terms of kill ratios, Falkenhayn’s priority at the opening of the offensive, the campaign was also a total failure. The Germans, far from suffering light battle casualties, had lost 310,231 men between 21 February and 9 September. Some 241,860 of these troops were wounded, 41,632 killed and 26,739 missing. French losses at Verdun are usually stated to be higher, at 377,231, but this figure includes casualties up to December 1916. The losses of the French Second Army, which faced the German Fifth in the battle, totalled 309,998 soldiers to the end of August, making the blood count on both sides near identical.66

  BRUSILOV’S OFFENSIVE

  The AOK, the Habsburg Army High Command, began 1916 in high spirits. Since the previous summer, Galicia had been liberated, Russian Poland conquered and Serbia finally crushed. These achievements had only been possible through combined operations with allies. Nonetheless, the Austro-Hungarian army had not only recovered from its heavy losses but at last appeared to have worked out how to stand against the Russians. The turn of the New Year had seen a mighty Tsarist offensive in Bukovina smashed. For the loss of 20,000 of its own troops, the Habsburg Seventh Army had inflicted 70,000 casualties on attackers amply supported with artillery and double its strength, all without any assistance from the Germans.67 With such a performance, Conrad von Hötzendorf could be heartened about the prospects of an offensive in Italy. True, Falkenhayn had reacted negatively when the possibility was raised with him in December 1915. He had been busy with the preparations for his own attack on Verdun and saw little advantage to a hammer blow in the south; the enemies who would decide the war were on the Western Front. Yet German support was not considered a precondition for the operation. With Russia in abeyance and Conrad’s units filled up with replacements, the Chief of the Habsburg General Staff optimistically believed his own armies to be capable of a great victory.

  Any account of the catastrophe on the Eastern Front that befell Austria-Hungary in the summer of 1916 must start with Conrad’s Italian offensive, because the operation was so fundamental in weakening the Empire’s strategic position. Falkenhayn and Conrad’s failure to agree was spectacularly irresponsible, for the Central Powers’ fates were bound together and their enemies were gathering overwhelming strength against them. With their attention focused on the Western and South-Western Fronts, the eastern theatre was disastrously neglected. Falkenhayn bears much of the blame, being insul
tingly secretive about his plans and contemptuous of his ally. Yet his Verdun battle was at least the product of a reasoned strategy for ending the war. Conrad’s campaign was, by contrast, self-indulgent. He thought not with his head but with his heart. The offensive he planned to launch from the Trentino could scarcely have been more different from Verdun. Where Falkenhayn’s attack was a new approach to overcome static warfare, Conrad behaved as if it were still 1914 and prepared an old-fashioned encirclement. Verdun was the product of cold calculation, statistical analysis and corpse counting. The Trentino ‘Punishment Expedition’ was fuelled by emotion. Conrad had long nurtured a pathological hatred of Italy, made more intense by the former ally’s ‘treason’ in 1915. Romantically, he imagined his troops sweeping out of the Trentino, over the mountain ranges to the sea, cutting the Italian army’s supply lines and winning a famous victory.68