Verdun 1916

by J E Kauffman

  By rescuing Verdun, General Pétain saved the day for France and he was hailed as the saviour of France. It is undeniable that the fortifications played a major role in the defence of Verdun and Pétain must be given credit for their restoration thereby creating an unbreachable barrier. Even though the Germans hammered the refurbished fortress line and even took Fort Douaumont, they gained no easy victories against the remaining forts. It took bloody and exhausting combat to take control of Fort Vaux, despite the fact that its main defences had already been destroyed. Fighting raged around the Ouvrage of Thiaumont for months and its ruins changed hands many times. The Ouvrage of Froideterre continued to resist even though German troops crossed over its ramparts. The defenders threw them back and put a stop to their chances of taking the position from where they could dominate Verdun. The Ouvrage of Laufée and Fort Moulainville checked additional German attempts to penetrate beyond Fort Vaux. The badly damaged forts of Souville and Tavannes proved to be effective even though they were not as well armed as the others. It must be noted that all the forts and ouvrages occupied key points and were better designed and built to resist German heavy artillery than trenches and scattered bunkers were. To a great extent, Pétain owed his victory to his idea of rearming and returning these forts to their defensive function and making them his last and main line of defence on the east bank.

  General Nivelle took command of the 2nd Army, and his subordinate General Charles ‘The Butcher’ Mangin went on the offensive with almost the same enthusiasm as in early 1914. In May, their attempt to retake Fort Douaumont failed even though their troops reached the superstructure of the fort. Mangin’s 5th Division lost over 5,300 men in its worst 2 days of the war. Despite the growth of the French heavy artillery, the French infantry was beaten back and suffered heavy losses that spring. After the Somme Offensive was launched, the Germans went over to the defensive at Verdun. In October, Nivelle and Mangin again tried to retake the lost forts. In a memorandum of October 1916, General von Zwehl observed:

  The value of Fort Douaumont, leaving aside the great political importance of its possession by us, lies in the possibility of our artillery dominating the terrain in front of it, thanks to the excellent observation posts in its armoured turrets.

  We can only prevent a surprise of our first line by its means. Moreover, to a certain extent, the fort gives our reserves good shelter two kilometres from our first line.

  This time, Pétain obtained two of France’s largest railway howitzers. These 400mm weapons inflicted enough damage on Fort Douaumont to force the Germans to evacuate it before the French infantry attack. The big guns succeeded in part because their rounds landed on the rear sections of the fort, its weakest point. Taking the two forts was almost an anti-climax. This time, the French surprised and overwhelmed the defenders after short intense bombardments followed by swift infantry advances. The French suffered significant losses nonetheless.

  General Pétain was sidelined when General Joffre was replaced by Robert Nivelle. However, Nivelle’s Champagne Offensive (2nd Battle of the Aisne) of 1917 did not bring the promised decisive victory in two days. Instead, the French suffered over 180,000 casualties in less than a month of combat between April and May. The resulting French Mutiny brought Pétain back into the limelight. By this time, Verdun was no longer a major concern.

  Surprisingly, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg provides in his own memoir, The Great War, the best summary of the battle and its importance to Germany. The Verdun Offensive was undertaken at the cost of putting the Eastern Front on the defensive. Hindenburg and his colleagues had remained silent on the subject in February because of their own doubts. Despite that, he wrote, ‘the idea of capturing Verdun was a good one’. Taking the fortress would ‘remove the salient at our most sensitive point’ and open new strategic possibilities.

  In my opinion the importance of this fortress justified an attempt to take it. We had it in our power to break off the attack at any time if it appeared impossible to carry it through, or the sacrifices it exacted seemed to be too high. Moreover, had not the boldest and most improbable actions in attacks on fortresses succeeded brilliantly time after time in this war?

  After the end of February the word ‘Verdun’ was no longer uttered secretly, but loudly and joyfully. The name ‘Douaumont’, like a beacon of German heroism, lit up the far distances of the East….

  As time went on Verdun was spoken of in yet another tone. Doubts gradually began to prevail…. Why should we persevere with an offensive which exacted such frightful sacrifices and … with no prospects of success?

  Once the Kaiser appointed him as Falkenhayn’s replacement, Hindenburg had the opportunity to end the slaughter:

  On purely military grounds it would have been far better for us to have improved our situation at Verdun by the voluntary evacuation of the ground we had captured. In August, 1916 I could not adopt that course. To a large extent the flower of our best fighting troops had been sacrificed in the enterprise. The public at home still anticipated a glorious issue to the offensive. It would be only too easy to produce the impression that all these sacrifices had been incurred in vain.

  At the end of October the French opened a largely-conceived and boldly-executed counter-attack and overran our lines. We lost Douaumont, and had no longer the strength to recover the field of honour of German heroism.*

  On 25 December 1916, General Hindenburg issued a secret order titled ‘Experience of the Recent Fighting at Verdun’. Some of the more salient points of this order addressed the construction and manning of defences that became part of the ‘Hindenburg Line’ in 1917 when he made a strategic withdrawal in northern France. What he wrote is not exactly new, since Falkenhayn had already employed some of these methods. Hindenburg explained that ‘Single lines of trenches do not suffice’ and ‘A fortified zone must be constructed, organized in depth …’. He decided that the rearward portion of the zone would have to consist of a system of strongpoints, machine-gun nests and other postions that merged towards the front to create a close meshed network of trenches. He forbade the use of deeply excavated dugouts in the front-line trench saying that they were mantraps.1 The dugouts were to be placed towards the rear and in the intermediate zone and should be made of concrete and masked from enemy observation. Large underground accommodations would serve only the reserves and placed far to the rear. He also ordered his subordinates not to build the large stollen near the front where they could become mantraps. Wide obstacles near the front trench and in no-man’s-land, he decided, could be destroyed in a vigorous attack. It was better to place the greatest number of obstacles within the fortified zone all the way to the rear where they would be integrated into the strongpoints. The idea was to entrap enemy forces that managed to break through and to protect the troops still holding out in the front line. ‘At Verdun – he wrote – where there were too many dug-outs in the front line trench, a proportion of the infantry did not get out of them quickly enough. A close-meshed network of trenches was lacking, as were also obstacles running perpendicular to the front.’ He did not overlook the fact that the morale of the German troops defending the area was low. However, he felt that the troops in the rear did not show enough initiative to counterattack and rescue their comrades trapped in the forward positions. He claimed that many German soldiers had surrendered without offering much resistance due to low morale. He told his commanders to increase training, drilling and education to revive the flagging spirit of the infantry. Furthermore, their living conditions had to be improved. Hindenburg also criticized the use of artillery at Verdun claiming that in many cases it operated mechanically instead of seeking out targets. The lessons of Verdun formed his blueprint for future operations in the West.

  Over commitment to Verdun placed both German and French in a ‘no retreat’ situation to maintain morale. According to Hindenburg, the French army under Robert Nivelle threw away its advantage by returning to bombardments of long duration in 1917. The shelling eliminated the e
lement of surprise and allowed the Germans to maintain their positions and inflict heavy casualties on the attackers.

  The Battle of Verdun also marked the renaissance of fortifications after the debacle of 1914 when, in the Battle of the Frontiers, the Belgian and French forts had fallen and seemed to be unsuited to modern warfare. The Russian fortifications had not fared much better. Thus, by 1916 the Allies had largely written off forts as obsolete behemoths. Pétain, however, thought that the forts were of ‘great assistance to our troops during the battle, and contributed largely to our success’. In addition, ‘the forts, in spite of their imperfections, demonstrated that they were indisputably superior to every other system of defence’.* It is clear from an announcement he made at German headquarters in November 1916 that even General Erich von Ludendorff agreed:

  The forts of Douaumont and of Vaux played an important part in the battle of Verdun so long as they remained as French forts in the hands of the defenders. In order to weaken the Verdun position they had to be rendered inoffensive; deprived of their fighting means and largely destroyed, they possessed only a limited value for the assaulting party from a tactical point of view immediately the attack upon Verdun had been interrupted.**

  Only the new Fort Vacherauville and Ouvrage of Falouse had been built of reinforced concrete, whereas the older fortification on the right bank had not. Despite that fact, these obsolescent fortifications were able to take a tremendous battering and keep on functioning. Thus, the French decided to improve and modify their forts in 1917 creating new subterranean links, repairing and adding positions. This work included the construction of a tunnel from the caserne to the 75mm gun turret block at Fort Douaumont and the replacement of the sandbagged barracks face of Fort Vaux with defensive machine-gun casemates. Work began on a deep tunnel system for Fort Vaux, and a tunnel system from the caserne of Froideterre to the combat blocks of Froideterre. In some forts, such as Fort Souville, tunnels extended to outside positions. The Battle of Verdun changed the negative image of forts that had prevailed after the fall of Liège and the Battle of the Frontiers. The successful defence of Verdun led to the birth of the Maginot Line in France and a new wave of ‘Fortress Mania’ in other nations after the war.2

  Topographic map of Verdun.

  Many famous personalities took part in the Battle of Verdun, including postwar politicians and generals such as Edouard Daladier, Charles de Gaulle, André Maginot and Heinz Guderian. In addition, some of the most famous French and German ‘aces’ flew over Verdun. Even the Escadrille Americaine, which, for political reasons, changed its name to the Escadrille Lafayette, served at Verdun. This battle truly characterized the First World War all the way to its indecisive conclusion which allowed the war to drag on.

  Table 6: Fortification and Year Completed (Years of Modernization)

  * William, My War Experiences, p. 223.

  * Hindenburg, The Great War, p. 121.

  * Pétain, Verdun, p. 219.

  ** Erich von Ludendorff, ‘The Verdun Counter-Attack’, in Horne (ed.), Source Records of the Great War, Vol. 4, p. 376.

  Appendix

  Weapons of Trench Warfare

  Trench warfare varied from front to front. On the Western Front, a continuous system of trench lines extended from one end to the other. On the Eastern Front, continuous trench-line systems did not exist because of the length of the front. In the Balkans and in northern Italy, mountainous terrain imposed a discontinuous trench system.

  Although the rifle was the main infantry weapon at the beginning of the war, only the British made marksmanship key to training and combat as they had done throughout the nineteenth century. The French, on the other hand, preferred to ‘fix bayonets’, attack the enemy in mass formations and overwhelm its positions.1 According to French military doctrine, the charge combined with elan would carry the day. In reality, however, the number of deaths by bayonet was rather small. The French infantryman carried a Lebel Mle 1886/96 firing an 8mm round. This rifle was slow to reload since its eight rounds had to be loaded one at a time and its accuracy was poor. In 1915, the 8mm Manlicher-Berthier with a box magazine of three, and eventually five and six, rounds began to replace the Lebel. The German soldier used the Mauser Mle 1898 (Gewehr 98), which was an accurate weapon and had a five-round magazine for 7.92mm bullets. The British used the Lee–Enfield III (1907) firing a .303in bullet with a magazine for ten rounds. All three rifles took a bayonet. However, the French bayonet was longest. In trench warfare, the rifle, equipped with telescopic sights, became deadly in the hands of snipers who, often camouflaged, took up positions, preferably in shell holes in no-man’s-land, where they patiently waited for a target to present itself. As a result, the men in the trenches had to keep their heads down and eventually started making loopholes in trench ramparts. Most rifles had a range of up to 2,500m, but lost accuracy beyond 550m.

  When the war began, the number of machine guns per battalion of the opposing armies was small, but they soon became the dominant weapons in trench warfare. These weapons were the main killing machine for defending the trenches. The French used a Model 1914 air-cooled Hotchkiss machine gun that weighed 110lb including the tripod. It fired an 8mm (.315in) round in thirty-round strips. Even though continuous firing could overheat its barrel since it was air-cooled, it was a reliable weapon. The British went to war with the belt-fed Maxim machine gun firing 7.7mm (.303in) rounds that was later replaced with an improved Vickers model, which weighed 42lb, but had a tripod that weighed 48lb. The Germans used a 1908 model (MG 08) water-cooled Maxim machine gun, almost identical to the British version except that it used a 7.92mm (.312in round). The gun weighed 55lb, and about 150lb with the tripod. Machine guns positioned in the trench lines or in individual strongpoints could cover the battlefront and mow down exposed troops crossing no-man’s-land.

  Early in the war, the belligerents developed a lighter machine gun that the troops could carry into battle. Except for the German model, these weapons were air-cooled and fired each army’s standard rifle rounds. The British machine gun was an air-cooled Lewis, which went into service in 1915.2 It weighed only 27lb and mounted a forty-seven-round ammunition pan. Later that year, the French developed the Chauchat Mle 1915. It used a twenty-round magazine and weighed only 21lb. This cheaply made, difficult to use and unreliable weapon that often jammed turned out to be the least satisfactory of the main types of light machine guns in use. The German trimmed down the MG 08 into the lighter MG 08/15 which weighed about 47lb (just under 40lb without the water). This weapon, however, did not appear on the battlefield until 1917.

  The above-mentioned rifles and machine guns remained in service through the next world war for the most part. This was true of many weapons either in the original or modified form. Various types of grenades and the flamethrowers also increased the infantryman’s arsenal during this period.

  Only the Germans went to war with a ready supply of grenades.3 None of the Entente members went to war with a stock of hand grenades and it took them until the spring of 1915 to acquire some and these were rather ineffectual. It took the French until 1916 to develop an effective grenade somewhat similar to the British Mills bomb (grenade). The percussion grenade, which exploded on contact, turned out to be the least favourite because of its tendency to explode accidentally. On the other hand, the grenade with a spring-loaded mechanism that ignited after its pin was removed gained popularity. The British and the French experimented with various types of grenade until mid-1915 when the British designed the No. 5 Mills bomb, which weighed 1.5lb. The Germans perfected the stick grenade with a bomb attached to a wooden handle. It had a fuse that burned for 3–5 seconds – the time was stamped on the handle. While the Allies’ grenades were mostly based on fragmentation, the German types, including an egg-shaped model of 1917, relied on blast. The Stielhandgranate or stick bomb nicknamed ‘potato masher’, which came into service in 1915, became the most popular in the German army.

  Before long, several devices were perfe
cted to increase the range of the grenade. Among them were a small catapult that gave a range of up to 145m and a trebuchet that gave 225m. Their use was discontinued between 1916 and 1918. The rifle grenade was adopted in 1914; the British model achieved a range of 180m. The Germans also used rifle grenades until 1916. The French rifle grenade, unlike the others, used a live round instead of a blank to ignite the grenade’s fuse.

  The flamethrower also facilitated the elimination of enemy positions during the assault, assuming the soldiers carrying it could get close enough to the target (see Chapter 4 for more details). The Germans first employed this weapon in combat in the woods of Malancourt on 26 February 1915.4 It was, however, rather ineffective against the French position. At the end of July, the Germans used flamethrowers against the British in the Second Battle of Ypres. Their portable model weighed about 80lb and its flame had a range of less than 20m and lasted for less than 2 minutes. By 1916, each company of the German Guard Reserve Pioneer Regiment had thirty-four portable flamethrowers. The regiment was assigned to general headquarters, but its units were attached to various armies. After the Second Battle of Ypres, the British developed their own flamethrower with almost twice the range of the German, but they seldom used it. The French perfected a portable flamethrower with a range of about 100m with a single burst or up to 25m with eight short bursts, but they did not use it until 1917.