by John Mosier
BOOKS BY JOHN MOSIER
Institutional Research
Men and Women Together
The Artist Under Socialism
The Myth of the Great War:
A New Military History of World War I
The Blitzkrieg Myth: How Hitler and the Allies
Misread the Strategic Realities of World War II
Cross of Iron: The Rise and Fall of the
German War Machine, 1918–1945
Grant: A Biography
Deathride: Hitler Versus Stalin—
The Eastern Front, 1941–1945
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Copyright © John Mosier, 2013
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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-62138-7
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:
Mosier, John, 1944–
Verdun: the lost history of the most important battle of
World War I, 1914–1918/John Mosier.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-451-41462-5
1. Verdun, Battle of, Verdun, France, 1916. 2. Verdun (France)—History, Military—20th century. I. Title.
D545.V3M68 2013
940.4'272—dc23 2013016460
Set in Sabon
Designed by Spring Hoteling
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any
History, it has been said, does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.
—Sir Max Beerbohm
Contents
Also by John Mosier
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Maps
Chapter 1: Battles Known and Unknown
Chapter 2: How Political Geography Dictated Strategy
Chapter 3: The War of the Engineers
Chapter 4: The September Wars for Verdun
Chapter 5: The French Riposte
Chapter 6: France's Winter of Dreams and Discontent
Chapter 7: The German Gamble
Chapter 8: The Most Famous Battle
Chapter 9: Panic, Politicians, and Pétain
Chapter 10: Revanche and Revision
Chapter 11: The Last Battles
Chapter 12: A Conclusion of Sorts
Endnotes
Index
Photo Inserts
MAPS
Meuse River Valley
The Trouées, Avenues into France
Verdun Forts
Verdun Front, End of September 1914
Western Front, December 1915
German Right Bank Offensive of 1916
German Left Bank Offensive of 1916
1
Battles Known and Unknown
If I were to be tied down to one word for my impression of this war, I should say this war is Queer. It is not like anything in a really waking world, but like something in a dream.
—H. G. Wells1
Verdun is one of the great battles of the modern era. It is also one of the most complex, and probably the most misunderstood part of a war only imperfectly grasped, even today.
To begin with, it is a serious mistake to think that there was only one battle for Verdun, that battle being the 1916 struggle described so eloquently and misleadingly by Alistair Horne in his classic study, The Price of Glory.
The original Michelin guides spoke, quite correctly, of multiple battles, and recent French accounts have done the same. A. J. P. Taylor once quipped that the difficulty about the Second World War was trying to decide when it began, and when it comes to Verdun we have an analogous problem. The first battles took place in August of 1914. The German stranglehold was not removed until late September 1918. The difficulty arises when trying to compute exactly how many battles there were.
Although for readers who grew up believing that Alistair Horne’s account was the definitive tale, the notion of multiple Verduns is surprising, perhaps incredible, the idea of several battles for the same piece of ground, and with the same name, is hardly unique. There were two battles of the Bull Run in the Civil War. The Italians and the Austrians fought no fewer than twelve battles of the Isonzo between 1915 and 1917. Although the American reader would never know it, the 1916 Battle of the Somme was not the first battle of the Great War that was fought there. It was the second battle, and it was the first one that stimulated Jean Bernier to his memorable description.
Joffre, comfortably installed, snored: “I gnaw at them,” and threw or let throw on the barbed wire and the German machine guns the purest French blood.
There followed the inexplicable offensives of the first winter, the first battle of the Somme in December 1914, of which one never breathes a word, during which, from Mametz and Carnoy to la Boisselle, the regiments rushed every day the enemy lines, without a cannon-shot fired.2
The admission that this battle was unknown even in France makes us aware of the real—as opposed to the mythic or propagandistic—war that was fought between the French and the Germans.
The presence of rotting logs deep in the forest primeval testifies that they do indeed crash to the earth even if no one’s around to hear them. The fact that a battle is unknown, was passed over in silence, does not by any means justify the notion that it was not fought. Or, more precisely, that in some way it was an insignificant struggle, a mere skirmish. That few people outside of France have heard of the first Battle of the Somme, that the battles of the Isonzo usually run together in the reader’s mind, does not mean they didn’t happen, or that they are devoid of importance.
Indeed, as we shall see, the Allies had most excellent reason for glossing over these battles. In every case they failed to come anywhere near achieving their stated objectives. The failure of subsequent generations of historians to correct the record is less excusable, but understandable. The nearly impenetrable secrecy with which the French army cloaked all their operations, the obscurity of the places named (and of French geography in general), the genuine geographical ignorance of foreigners for whom France was as alien as Manchuria or Paraguay, all converged to create a perfect storm of delusional complacency.
THREE SIMPLE ERRORS
But before enumerating these unknown or misplaced battles for Verdun, there are three errors, areas of confusion, to be clarified.
The first is a simple error indeed. The battles fought there were not like the battle for Stalingrad or Berlin, or the 1870 siege of Paris or the 1863 siege of Vicksburg. As we shall see in chapter two, the
actual city of that name had no strategic value whatsoever. Verdun was simply a convenient shorthand for a series of rather awkward French military terms that shifted over time: the camp retranchée de Verdun, the place fortifiée Verdun, the region fortifiée Verdun.
The French terms are doubly inconvenient, as over the years they shifted from one to another. So for the sake of simplicity, when the word Verdun appears, it almost invariably means the area encompassed by the field of fire from the forts. In the few cases where there might be some confusion as to whether the city or the fortified region is meant, the text makes clear which is which.
However, it is a mistake to assume that Verdun was in some way analogous to Vicksburg in the American Civil War or Stalingrad in the Second World War. This observation may seem a truism, but the casual reader can easily come away with this impression, because early on, the 1916 battle was characterized as just such an attempt. As is the case with many of the misrepresentations and distortions of the Great War, the idea is accomplished subtly. One of the first and by no means the least authoritative French accounts of the struggle does just that, beginning with an account of the history of the town, by showing photographs and drawings of its buildings, leaving the reader with the impression that the German objective was the historic city with its ancient citadel, and American accounts often reinforce this idea.3
But Verdun was a very small town, the smallest of the frontier towns. A frontier town—in 1914 it was only forty kilometers from the German border—was the first town of any size a traveler would encounter going west from Germany to Paris. Its population of 12,780 was dwarfed by that of Nancy (83,648), of Reims (99,000), and of Lille (120,570); it was little more than half the size of Belfort.4 There were very few people living there, no industry, and no town of even half the size of Verdun anywhere in the vicinity. The surrounding area was mostly forest. The town, ringed on three sides by commanding heights, had no military value whatsoever. An invading army could easily bypass it, crossing the Meuse river on either side.
But the suggestion, the inference, that the town was an important military objective allowed Allied propagandists to create a straw man, to claim that they had won an important victory because they had kept the Germans from getting into the town itself.
Such suggestions, skillfully planted, in turn led to another important area of confusion: a failure to grasp the sheer size of the battlefield. The forts were not physically connected, but rather were emplaced so as to provide (hopefully) overlapping fields of fire, both from their own guns and from heavy weapons in batteries located behind them. If we establish an imaginary line connecting the forts we get one measurement. If we construct an even more imaginary line connecting the limits of the fields of fire, we get a second. If we measure the forward positions held by the infantry, we get a third, and so on.
Compounding the difficulty is that the French military analysts and historians, many of them veterans of the war, tended to rely on rather elastic geographical concepts as they talked about the various battles. City dwellers do the same thing. They know that there is a legally defined entity called the city, which is contiguous to other legal entities, but that all taken together form the metropolitan area. The difficulty is that although New Yorkers and New Orleanians know all these distinctions, other people do not. So it is when the word Verdun is mentioned, a confusion that has led to a great many more as foreign historians have tried to write accounts of the fighting there.
However, no matter what measurement we use, the sheer breadth and depth of Verdun is impressive. Jules Poirier, a distinguished military historian who wrote the first account of the main battle, gives a figure at the start of the 1916 German offensive of 166 kilometers.5 A simple comparison: in January 1916, that is, before the start of the February German offensive, the British section of the Western Front was 63 kilometers.6 Verdun was larger than the entire British and Belgian sectors combined, larger than all the other sectors of the Western Front west of the Moselle river: Champagne, Artois, Picardy, the Somme.
The third error, then, stems both from an erroneous understanding of the objective and a failure to grasp the size of the battlefield. It is the error of supposing that operations at Verdun were all of a piece, that they can be treated like Gettysburg or Waterloo or even the Somme.
Given the river, and the size of the front, both the Germans and the French tended to treat operations on the two sides of the river as being entirely separate affairs. The Meuse river was not a trivial obstacle. The forces engaged on one side could not be diverted easily to the other (nor were they, in practice), and the outcome of an engagement on the right bank of the river did not automatically have some dramatic impact on what was happening on the left bank. There was certainly leverage, and once the fighting began in August 1914, both the French and the Germans tried to effect that pressure in various ways. However, in terms of actual operations, the forces on either side of the river largely conducted themselves independently of each other.
THE 1916 BATTLES
A brief and basic correction of some of these, the more obvious difficulties, paves the way for an enumeration of the various battles of Verdun, beginning with the most famous one, as it provides a perfect illustration of the various confusions and errors.
Now, the idea of numerous battles is not some recent notion, an attempt to make a novel claim. One of the names proposed for what the French high command decided—purely for propaganda purposes—to call the Battle of the Marne was the Battle of Paris-Verdun. Gabriel Bichet explains, and goes on to establish the linkage.
In 1914, during the historic Battle of the Marne, French dispositions were articulated on two pivots, constituted, as foreseen by Séré de Rivière, by Paris and Verdun. . . . In 1915 the French seized the initiative with an operation on the wings, attempting to retake the observation buttes of the Vauquois and Les Éparges. In 1916 it was the German attack of 21 February. . . . In 1917 the French gained the initiative and rejected the enemy from the positions they held at the start on 1916. In 1918, the Allies maintained that initiative. The position of Verdun was the base for the final Franco-American offensive to the north and east.7
As we shall see, Bichet omits several important details, and skirts around others, but he establishes a very precise framework that allows us to understand the importance of Verdun, and, as well, to make sense out of much about the First World War that otherwise is simply a senseless slogging match.
Breaking any prolonged struggle down into separate installments, or battles, is often something of an arbitrary decision, and this is particularly the case given the enormous size of the Verdun battlefield. So, for example, the German attack of February and March 1916 was exclusively concerned with the right bank. But at the end of March, the Germans launched an entirely separate offensive against the left bank, and then, in May, a joint offensive against both—although the main effort was, once again, on the right bank. We might liken this to the classical one-two-three knockout sequence.
Now, given the sequence of these attacks, with one merging into the other without any real pause, it is perfectly reasonable to lump them together as one continuous battle that began in February and wound down in early July.
That is exactly how the Germans themselves saw it. In July, the staff of their Fifth Army, charged with conducting the offensives on both banks, called off their offensive, went over entirely to the defense, and shifted their resources elsewhere. For the German army, the 1916 battle began in February and lasted until early July.
The French licked their wounds. Nearly three months passed before the fighting on any serious level was resumed. But in October 1916, the French launched their own attack, aimed at regaining the ground lost on the right bank. This offensive occurred in two installments, one in October and one in December, but the French army, reasonably enough, lumped them together. The French high command, the famous (or, in the view of many veterans of the war, infamous) Grand
Quartier Général, or GQG, blandly merged the two together.
This sleight of hand was characteristic of how both the Allied high commands operated. The GQG wanted everyone to believe that the fighting had gone on continuously for nearly an entire year. Equally, they wanted the government to believe that they had forced the Germans all the way back to their January 1916 positions.
As we shall see, this kind of misrepresentation and sleight of hand was typical of the GQG, and before proceeding any further, it is useful to understand how skillfully the Allied high commands manipulated the news. They managed it so excellently that successive generations of historians have rarely been able (or willing) to divine what actually happened. Hardly any claim made can withstand a close investigation, and the realization that the two entirely separate battles for Verdun in 1916 were deliberately conflated—and that historians accepted the conflation—is simply the tip of the iceberg.
THE ART AND SCIENCE OF MISREPRESENTATION
But the conflation was skillfully done. The presumable warrant for this claim was that all through the war, offensives by one side were more often than not met by counterattacks. That was particularly the case when the Allies attacked the Germans, who, in the majority of cases, promptly launched local offensives, most of them meeting with success. But the amount of time that elapsed before the return stroke was measured in hours, not weeks.
So the notion that the 1916 fighting was all one battle that lasted for eleven months is a complete misrepresentation. Bichet, for instance, is unwilling to confront the issue head-on. Instead, he speaks of the 1916 struggle as lasting for nine months, a rather sly way of telling the truth without appearing to say directly that the official story is incorrect.