Verdun
Page 4
So, not surprisingly, on 23 September 1914, they launched a major offensive on the right bank, and succeeded in cutting off the main supply lines from the south. At that point, defending Verdun became an extremely difficult proposition. So properly speaking, there were two battles for Verdun in the first months of the war. Those battles, Verdun 1 (September 6–12) and Verdun 2 (September 23–October 4), are described in chapter four.
The French understood their peril, and launched two separate offensives, one on each bank. The right-bank offensive lasted roughly from January 1915 to early April, when it was finally called off. The left-bank offensive consisted of a series of intermittent offensives, the first being in midwinter (1914–1915). The two offensives were supposed to be coordinated, and there was supposed to be a final offensive in the summer of 1915, but the Germans attacked first, aborting what was to have been a major French effort.
So, to sort through a complicated and confusing situation, we can therefore speak of Verdun 1 (the coordinated German offensives of August 1914), Verdun 2 (the right-bank German offensive of September 1914), Verdun 3 (the French left-bank offensives of 1914–1915), and Verdun 4 (the French right-bank offensives of spring 1915).
So the most famous Verdun battle, February–July 1916, is actually Verdun 5. The French right-bank offensive on the right bank in fall 1916 is Verdun 6, and the fall 1917 left-bank offensive is Verdun 7. The two Franco-American offensives in August and September 1918 are thus Verdun 8 and Verdun 9.
Verdun 5 is the most famous. Except for the last two—whose purpose is generally misunderstood—the others hardly appear in the standard English histories of the war, and get short shrift even in France. So there’s an understandable tendency to assume they were little more than minor skirmishes, footnotes in a war that pale to insignificance beside Flanders and the Somme and Champagne.
A MATTER OF SCALE
To the American reader nurtured on those battles, the scale of the Verdun fighting is startling. So too for the French reader whose knowledge is derived from one of the standard histories the war. As the English-language reader may not be aware of the more well-known battles the French army fought during 1915, here is a brief list of them taken from an authoritative and really excellent history.
During 1915 there were four grandes offensives.29 The first, Champagne I, which began on 15 March, involved the Third Army Corps (two divisions and supporting elements). That offensive was followed on 25 September by a second attempt, involving the Fourth and the Tenth Army Corps—four divisions. There were two offensives in Artois, the section of the front to the northeast of Champagne. Artois I began on 9 March, and was carried out by the Sixth Army Corps. Artois II was coordinated with Champagne II, and relied on the Third and the Sixth Army Corps.
In theory, a French army corps had a strength of 45,000 men: two divisions of 16,000, with the rest being made of cavalry and artillery personnel. As the war progressed, the sizes of the units shrank, and gradually enumerations were of divisions and even brigades. But as a rough rule of thumb then, for the French and the Germans, initially a division was about 20,000 men, and a brigade about half that.
Very early on in the war, the whole issue of counting heads became extremely complex. The counting, or rather the miscounting, by the Allies was one of the major intelligence failures of the war, the implications of which emerged in spring 1915. But a simple enumeration of the sizes of the forces engaged in the battles for Verdun is illuminating.
In Verdun 1, the French deployed no less than five separate army corps and four independent divisions to counter a German threat comprised of four army corps and elements of the Fourth Army Group. The battle lasted for nearly a week on a front of nearly 50 kilometers—an area almost the size of the Champagne and Artois fronts taken together, and hardly insignificant by any standard of measurement.
For Verdun 4, known in France as the Battle of the Woëvre, the French unleashed six army corps, two independent divisions, and a brigade drawn from the Verdun garrison, all directed against the German positions on the right bank. Coincidentally, in numbers, the French force was basically the same as the German deployment at Verdun for the February 1916 attack.
As the numbers involved grew, so did the casualties. In absolute numbers, French losses in Verdun 4 were about the same as British losses on the Somme, with even less to show for it.
Not all the Verdun battles were to this same scale. In Verdun 2, the Germans only deployed two army corps and some detached heavy artillery units. But although this was a small offensive by Franco-German standards, it represented a considerably larger force than the British had in France at that point in 1914, as they had already suffered 56,056 casualties, were hard-pressed to put 35,000 men into action. By comparison, the German offensive of Verdun 2 was gargantuan.30
Verdun 2 was also one of the major victories of the war for the Germans. They caught the French still regrouping from Verdun 1, broke through all the way down the right flank of Verdun. In a war where the Allies measured their gains in one or two kilometers, if that, the Bavarians advanced over 20 on a broad front of roughly 25 kilometers. They crossed the Meuse at the town of Saint-Mihiel, physically cutting the only main rail and road link remaining into Verdun, and forced the main French fort below the city to capitulate.
As measured by the death toll, the fighting was intense. The French 75th Division was simply erased, to use the French word, to such a degree that the army didn’t even attempt to reconstitute it—one of the few instances in the entire war.
The success of the German offensive on the right bank, and the complete failure of the French to reverse those gains, go a long way toward explaining why these engagements quickly disappeared into the memory hole.
Nor were the French ever able to reverse the totality of the German gains. Even by the end of 1917, the French offensives had still not relieved the pressure on Verdun. The Germans had lost territory, but they still had Verdun in a stranglehold.
So in August 1918, there was a joint Franco-American offensive on the right bank that pushed the Germans all the way back to where they had been in August 1914, followed by an offensive in September that did the same thing for the left bank, and freed Verdun completely, and thus the importance of the great American offensives of 1918, Verdun 8 and Verdun 9.
In one of the more interesting passages in his account of the war, Winston Churchill notes how many battles were fought by relatively small forces. It’s an intriguing argument of the sort that specialists find fascinating, and one that makes the scale of these unknown battles all the more impressive.31 Make no mistake: the French threw enormous numbers of men into these battles, and their losses were appalling.
Jean Bernier sums up these disasters perfectly. Significantly, the obscure places he names in this passage were all German strongpoints on the right and left banks.
Then there came, in the mud, in the rain, in a veritable confiture of cadavers, The Argonne, les Éparges, le bois d’Ailly, le bois Le Prêtre, about which France knows only lies. Despite the stupefying percentage of losses, the generals never admitted the regularity of their checks (46–47).
As is the case with many of the most searing passages describing this war, the words are not simply overheated rhetoric, but point to what can only be described as a massacre.
In the attempts to relieve the German grip on the Verdun salient during the first half of 1915, an official but highly secret French government report admitted that the army sustained casualties of 215,000 men, or about a third of all French casualties for the period. By comparison, official British losses for the entire year were 296,583 (as contrasted with French figures of 1,256,000).
It is interesting to compare the actual historical record with the assertion that begins Alistair Horne’s account of Verdun.
Three and a half years elapsed between the First Battle of the Marne, when the Kaiser’s armies reached the gates of Pa
ris, and Ludendorff’s last-gasp offensive that so nearly succeeded in the spring of 1918. During this time the Germans remained on the defensive. . . . Only once did the Germans deviate from this strategy that paid off so handsomely. In February 1916, they attacked in the Verdun sector. . . .32
Indeed, the smooth eloquence of this opening paragraph is exceeded only by its errors. Like much that has been written about this war—and particularly about Verdun—the level of inaccuracy, of ignorance, and of downright falsehood calls to mind the pithy remark usually attributed to the physicist Wolfgang Pauli: so wrong it’s not even wrong.
As everyone knows, the motto of the French republics was “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.” During the First World War, that noble slogan became something else entirely: Mistakes, Misrepresentations, and Myths.
2
How Political Geography Dictated Strategy
Verdun, c’est la boulevard moral de la France.
—Pétain1
When, in 1871, Otto von Bismarck prevailed on Helmuth von Moltke the Elder and Wilhelm I of Prussia to support his demand that the French cede Alsace and northern Lorraine, he set off a chain of unforeseen consequences that would determine the shape of the Western Front from August 1914 right through to the end of the war.
At first glance, considered from a strategic point of view, Bismarck’s idea seems sound enough. The historic border between Alsace and Lorraine was formed by the crest of the Vosges mountains. Seize the relatively few passes that led through this surprisingly rugged mountain chain, and a French offensive would have the devil’s own time getting into the flat and fertile Alsatian plain.
Germany proper—which is to say, the Germany of July 1870—would be forever out of reach. The old common border that stretched from the Rhine over to Luxembourg was gone. All that territory was now part of what the Germans called Elsaß-Lothringen—a sly reminder that the primary language of over 90 percent of the inhabitants was Elsassitch, a dialect of German, along with their architecture and their cuisine.
This notion may come as a surprise to anyone brought up on the ferocious propaganda of the First World War, with its impassioned plea to free the enslaved peoples of the area, so here are the census figures. In the last census done before the 1870 war, there were 1,097,000 people living in the Alsace, and 1,291,000 living in Lorraine, for a total of 2,388,000 people, of which 1,359,158 claimed German as their primary language. After 1918 census data was collected differently, but as late as 1936, of the 1,219,381 inhabitants of Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin (the two administrative parts of the Alsace), 1,149,251 still listed German as their primary language, and their Germanic roots are amply attested to by significant cultural indicators as well.2 So Bismarck’s idea had a certain basis for it.
The Vosges are a formidable obstacle, but at their northern and southern extremities, they become tamer, easier to cross. With an anxious eye to the extremities, Bismarck wanted northern Lorraine, as the rolling country there was not much of an obstacle to a French invasion.
The key to the north was the town of Metz, perched on a series of bluffs overlooking the Moselle river valley. Unlike the other towns of the two provinces—Haguenau, Verdun, Strasbourg, Pont à Mousson, Mulhouse—the heights of Metz made it a natural fortress.
Initially, Bismarck had wanted Belfort, at the other end of the Vosges, as well. There was a trouée, a natural break in the mountains, that separated the Vosges from its cousins the Alps. In theory this opening afforded an army easy passage northward to the Alsatian plain. But Bismarck compromised, probably because Belfort was too far to the south and east of Paris. Like Germany and Italy and Austria-Hungary, France only had so many men to make up an army. Deployment of a force of any size through the trouée de Belfort would fatally weaken the armies to the north.
Once the war began in August 1914, Germany’s desire to conquer Europe became the obsession of Allied propagandists and their fellow travelers amongst Anglo-American intellectuals, second only to characterizations of the hapless German emperor as a mentally deranged warlord. Germanophobia began as a minor derangement, but quickly metastasized into a mental complex. “I hate Germany, which has thrust this experience upon mankind, as I hate some horrible, infectious disease,” H. G. Wells announced, putting aside his pacifism and expansive humanism.3 At least he was honest enough to tell everyone, didn’t hide behind a mask of scholarly pretense. But the hatred is nevertheless painfully on display, and it rapidly became a sort of religion, whose basic assumptions were not to be questioned.
There was no limit to the perfidies of the ferocious Hun, and the absorption of Alsace and northern Lorraine became exhibit A in the indictment. It was but one tiny step from this cruel annexation to Hitler’s dismemberment of Czechoslovakia.
However, Bismarck’s aims, as revealed both by his private conversations and the accounts of Adolphe Thiers, the representative of the French government who did most of the negotiating with him in 1870–1871, were purely defensive, and we know from a confidential letter that he wrote to the British ambassador to France in November 1870 that William Ewart Gladstone, the British prime minister at the time, regarded the French position as “quite untenable in the case of a country which has made recent annexations.”4
Bismarck regarded France as an aggressive and expansionist power whose eastward impulses he wanted to check. Thiers, who was a good and honest man, insisted that the new, republican France was no longer the France of the two Napoleons. Insofar as the future president of the Third Republic was concerned, this claim was absolutely true. However, the recent history of France made his claim a difficult one to swallow. Napoleon III had considered the acquisition of Belgium, had installed a foreign regime in Mexico, had ruthlessly pushed the ambitions of Cavour and his adherents toward the creation of modern Italy—and those are simply the high points of a wildly reckless career. Whether reckless adventurism or not, right up until the disasters of August and September 1870, Napoleon III had the enthusiastic support of his subjects.
It requires a great deal of mental gymnastics to suppress such details, but the propagandists of 1914 were certainly equal to the task. Suddenly France was a peaceful and harmless nation, while the perfidious Huns, now invested with all the ambitions any objective observer would have assigned to France prior to September 1870, were capable of any sort of wickedness. Why, Bismarck even tricked the French Chamber of Deputies into declaring war on the North German Confederation in a unanimous and enthusiastic vote! Clearly there were no limits either to German perfidy or ingenuity.
So it is well to recall the words of the great British historian A. J. P. Taylor about the European situation before the war: “Every statesman in Europe regarded France and Russia as the two dynamic, restless powers, who would turn the continent upside down.”5
The point of bringing up these inconvenient details of Franco-German history is, however, not to vindicate Bismarck. The point is that in his anxieties to protect the newly created German empire from a French invasion, he posed successive generations of military thinkers severe difficulties—probably the main reason why von Moltke the Elder was dubious about the whole affair of annexations.
This decision, made for defensive reasons, became a classic example of Merton’s Law of Unintended Consequences. In order to solve one problem, Bismarck created a whole set of others.
THE PROBLEM
Helmuth von Moltke the Elder was, after Frederick the Great, the greatest of German commanders. He had led Prussia to startling victories in three successive wars (against Denmark, Austria-Hungary, and France). He subscribed to the sensible idea that generals should exhibit a certain reticence, and not wander around expatiating on the weaknesses of their adversaries—or their civilian colleagues.
He was hardly the sort of fellow to engage in table talk. But it is easy to imagine his objections. The best way to fight an enemy was to fight them on their own ground, to go on the attack—precisely what he had
done in all three wars—and what he understandably felt the Prussian army did best.
Indeed, given the extent to which historically Prussia had been surrounded by countries that in theory could put substantially larger armies into the field, even in a one-to-one fight, the best strategy was the one perfected by Frederick the Great: to attack your enemy in detail, defeating his forces one by one before he could combine them and overwhelm you. Moreover, the most likely threat in the future, as in Frederick’s time, was a combination of enemies, an anti-German alliance.
Napoleon III had attempted to enlist all of Bismarck’s neighbors in his projected war with Prussia. Once the war began, Thiers ran from capital to capital, trying to persuade the other powers to intervene on France’s side. That the Italians, the Austrians, the Russians, and even the Bavarians stayed on the sidelines was through no fault of the emperor’s before the war, or the future president’s after it began.
The chief object of both French leaders was Russia, the other great European military power, and, not by coincidence one bordering Prussia’s eastern frontier. Thiers was either blind, desperate, or extremely naive. Because Prince Gorchakov, the czar’s chancellor, and the first man to exercise any real power in that position, had a long and amiable history with Bismarck, whom he knew intimately. The prince quite failed to see why he should bring about a sea change in Russian foreign policy to bail out France from a self-imposed disaster.
So long as he was chancellor, the Russians would waffle on the notion of an alliance with France, but the career of an imperial chancellor was precarious and uncertain. The alliance that Napoleon III had pursued might well happen now that he was gone.
And when von Moltke considered the new Franco-German frontier, he didn’t much care for what he saw. Bismarck was absolutely correct: the Vosges is a surprisingly formidable mountain chain. There are passes through it, but few of them are amenable to the deployment of large armies.