by John Mosier
So the next logical step was to design a turret that not only could be raised and lowered, but also be rotated on its mount. In theory, this turret was the ideal solution, and the lighter 75-millimeter gun, coupled with its more compact shape, made the notion of a rotating turret much more practical. The smaller the weapon, the smaller the turret; the smaller the turret, the less weight, and that in turn reduced the motive power required to move it. In the years before 1914, motive power was a major issue, as the idea of diesel-powered generators was still simply an idea.
The idea was even more practicable if machine guns were used instead of field guns, so those were built as well. So now the engineers felt they had devised a set of complete solutions to their original problem. The upgraded forts were basically shellproof. The new turrets and casemates gave them integral firepower that would largely be immune to enemy bombardment. Meanwhile, the emplaced batteries that were shielded by the forts would be able to shatter the attacking forces.
Now, since almost everyone who has any familiarity with the opening of the First World War knows that the Germans overpowered the Belgian forts rather quickly, an account of these expensive engineering efforts seems pointless. And indeed, as we noticed earlier, at the same time as the engineers were solving the problems posed by the new shells, other factions in the army were increasingly restive about the whole concept of the forts.
READING BACKWARD
To a certain extent, everyone reads history backward. In this case, there is an almost irresistible temptation to view the whole Séré de Rivières project in the light of the prevailing idea about the Maginot Line, to see it either as an exercise in folly, or as a sign of defeatism, and to come to the conclusion that it certainly didn’t work.
So the whole notion about the forts—in both wars—is a great example of a complex error loop, how one basic deficiency leads to another, until the conclusion becomes almost completely the opposite of what actually happened. Erroneous conclusions are often quite seductive, and untangling them can be difficult and tedious. So it is here, although the basic facts of the case are simply stated.
The first point to note is that the French and the Belgians were not the only people building forts. The Germans fortified key parts of their new possessions on the left bank of the Rhine: Strasbourg, Thionville, and, notably, Metz. They matched the French step by step in the process we have described. Nor were they the only power to become involved in such massive construction projects. Romania did the same thing, within the limitations of its budget. In fact, the genesis of the whole notion of the disappearing turret can be found in an 1885 competition organized by the Romanian government for armaments for fortifications defending Bucharest, in which both German and French designs for steel turrets were submitted.
Second, to return to the idea of reading backward, between the wars the Germans built fortifications on both frontiers, and this continued after Hitler came to power in 1933. Hitler even interfered with the designs and insisted on the engineers using his as opposed to theirs. The Swiss and the Belgians built fortifications as well. To the best of their abilities and means, so did the Finns and the Russians.
Third, as far as France goes, the Maginot Line positions were not, as is often assumed, simply bypassed. They were subjected to heavy attacks by artillery, by dive-bombers, and even by infantry assaults. When France asked for an armistice, the garrisons of the forts were still holding out. None of them had surrendered. The idea of a Maginot Line mentality is one of those wonderful fictions that has no factual basis whatsoever. Rather it rests on an astonishing level of ignorance.
Airpower, far from rendering the forts useless, proved incapable of destroying them, or even inflicting much damage. In 1944, the aging Franco-German forts around Metz, manned by the dregs of the German army, held up Patton’s American forces for months, just as the primitive structures the Finns built did with the Russians in 1939–1940.
As we have seen, there were sound reasons why the engineers spent decades upgrading the forts they had built, and creating new kinds of artillery emplacements for them. They realized that the exposed masonry structures of the 1870s were not proof against the new shells and guns being developed. But all these renovations and additions took a great deal of money. The French and the Germans spent it; the Belgians did not. In consequence, when the war began, German gunners destroyed the Belgian guns mounted in the forts right off.
In some cases, their heavy guns did substantial damage to the structures themselves, although subsequent investigations revealed that the damage was substantially less than was believed at the time. But that same level of investigation makes clear that the French forts that had been upgraded and modernized were basically invulnerable to the biggest and most powerful shells.
What runs through the analysis of both the Belgian and French forts—in both wars—is a very time-honored principle. As it happens, there is an excellent historical analogy: with the fortress island of Malta, which Napoleon captured in a bold stroke in 1798. Militarily speaking, the place was impregnable—provided the defenders had the will to fight. They did not. Malta fell without a shot being fired.
That observation is not simply a historical curiosity. It leads us to a consideration of that most excellent French word moral. The word is related to the usual meaning of the English word morale, but it encompasses a great deal more than that. When Pétain observed that Verdun was the boulevard moral of France, he meant that it was a physical place that summed up all of the country’s spiritual and intellectual qualities, embodied all of the country’s mental faculties, its intellectual state of mind (simply to parse a standard French dictionary).
Or, to put it in more concrete terms, relate it to particular circumstances: the Knights of Saint John, who held Malta, weren’t willing to fight for it. The Belgians who manned their forts over a century later were willing to fight, but only up to a certain point: the point at which concerns of personal safety, coupled with a sense of futility, outweighed their duty to their country—a calculation hardly confined to the Belgians: the Confederate officers who were in command of forts Henry and Donelson in 1862, like General Pemberton at Vicksburg 18 months later, all came to the same conclusion. They quit.
In all those cases, cowardice or courage had little to do with it, as indeed it has precious little to do with combat. But great captains, from Napoleon to U. S. Grant (and those before and after) all instinctively understood the importance of this French adjective. To translate it into American situations: the Alamo was the place moral of Texas. Belleau Wood was bois moral of the American marines. To fail there was such a horrifying possibility that it was inconceivable—even if that meant fighting to the last man.
Now, this linguistic and psychological digression may seem out of place in the midst of a discussion about the concrete, about the most physical and tangible parts of war. But Pétain’s little phrase, like many of his seemingly bland remarks, is the key to understanding everything that happened there. The fight was not about territory; it was about willpower, the will to power, and given the emphasis a whole phalanx of German philosophers had placed on that idea, it’s hardly surprising that their country’s officers, who were a highly educated group of men, would fail to grasp it. The territory seized was simply the physical manifestation of a triumph of abstractions.
The real mystery is why certain men in certain situations will fight to the death, and why, in other situations, they simply quit. That observation takes us to the heart of the fundamental mystery of the Great War. One French historian, after noting that in this war, prisoners were treated very well on both sides, addresses the question directly: “Why weren’t there more prisoners?”16
There are no easy answers to that question, and indeed, in that sense, the remark by Wells about this being a very queer war is really a deep insight. Indeed, as we wade through page after page of horrific battles, with death tolls that are really incomprehensible, the question becomes mo
re and more disturbing.
4
The September Wars for Verdun
One could develop a complete theory about modern France under the heading: failure seen as success.
—Jean Dutourd1
The French call the fighting of August and September 1914 the Battle of the Frontiers. Although there were certainly some serious battles directly inside the northeastern frontier, August 1914 was not, as the rubric suggests, a repeat of 1870. Like much else about this war, the idea of battles on the frontier was a combination of wishful thinking and misrepresentation.
Most of the fighting, the worst of it, was deep inside France. The worst of it was very bad indeed. About 2.8 million men were deployed to stop the German offensive, and by the end of the second month of the war, 329,000 of them were either dead or missing, by far the highest death toll of any equivalent period in the entire war.2 The medical services broke down to the extent that the army was never able to come up with any estimates of wounded cases for this period.
Out of this mountain of corpses, the army high command decreed a victory: the Battle of the Marne. The Germans had been stopped, were in precipitous retreat. Paris was saved; the dead hand of von Schlieffen had been thwarted.
THE FIRST BATTLE FOR VERDUN: (1) REVIGNY AND THE LEFT BANK
In the French Army archives, the Marne was subdivided into four separate engagements.3 The biggest and bloodiest of these was called Revigny, for the town that lay closest to the deepest penetration. The names given to these four engagaments are geographically misleading. The engagements that defined the Battle of the Marne occurred in a great arc sweeping from the north of Paris to the south of Verdun. Like the Battle of the Frontiers, this appellation obscures some fundamental realities
The town of Revigny was at the southern end of a 50-kilometer arc that curved to the northeast, ending at Verdun, about 200 kilometers east of Paris and well over 20 kilometers north of the Marne river. There is a river nearby: the Ornain, which runs through the town.
Students of the opening phase of this war sometimes get the impression that the chief German aim was to encircle Paris in a vast flanking movement. As we noted in chapter one, the actual strategy was aimed at a complex double envelopment of the French armies that had been deployed to the northeast of Paris. But the double envelopment was complex, because within that giant pincers was a secondary double envelopment directed at Verdun, and by 6 September, units of the German Fifth Army were well below Verdun on both sides of the Meuse river.
The advancing Fifth Army was strung out in a flattened arc from Nixéville, about five kilometers from the forts of the southwestern quadrant of Verdun through Souilly, Rembercourt, the river Cher, and Revigny.
To get an idea of just how far to the south of Verdun the Germans actually were: Souilly is a village on the road that runs from Verdun south to Bar-le-Duc. It is about 16 kilometers south of the city of Verdun, and was Pétain’s headquarters during the spring 1916 German offensive. The road itself became famous as the Voie Sacrée, the only remaining link into the forts.
So the Fifth Army was not simply trying to envelop Verdun. They had already achieved that. The French responded to the threat. General Maurice Sarrail, commanding the Third Army, had the Fifth and Sixth Army Corps attacking the advancing Germans on their right flank, with four reserve divisions holding his right flank—that is to say, their position was anchored on Verdun.
As fighting began, both sides attempted to turn the other’s extended flank, with the German Fourth Army trying to break through a rough line: Andernay-Revigny-Villers-sur-Vent. At Revigny-sur-Ornain, where the French Third and Fourth Army boundary was, a sizable gap had developed as the Third Army had been pushed back. In the face of German attacks on both sides of the Argonne, Sarrail (the original commander, Ruffey, had been sacked at the end of August) was folding his front down like a swinging door, the hinge being Verdun. His troops were retreating in a southeasterly direction, in order to keep from being outflanked and cut off from the French armies locked in major battle outside of Nancy, about 90 kilometers to the east.
By September 7, there was a real possibility that units of the two German armies would break through on both sides of Revigny, as the French Fifth Army Corps had now been forced back to the outskirts of the hamlet of Bussy-la-Côte, hanging on by its toenails.
As the Germans pressed on, the French General Staff shifted a new army corps, the Fifteenth, over from Commercy. This shift was a desperation move, which would have fatal consequences very shortly. However, in the three days of desperate fighting, the French managed to hold the line.
The consequences of a failure were catastrophic. Sarrail had already committed his reserve divisions to hold the northern end of the line (above the river Aire). There was literally nothing between the battlefield and Nancy, where the French were equally desperate. If the Germans broke through on either side (around Nancy or around Revigny), the entire section of the front from Verdun to Toul would simply implode. Not only would the Germans have Verdun, but they would have either destroyed or captured an entire French army group.
But then, abruptly, to the surprise and relief of the French, the Germans disengaged from the battle and began to retreat to the north.
One of the best writers to emerge from the war was Maurice Genevoix. In September 1914, he was a very junior lieutenant (age 23). His regiment, the 106th, was part of the 12th Division, 6th Army Corps, engaged in a desperate fight south of Souilly. On the evening of the last night, he was dispatched to try to get reinforcements. He walked most of the night, finally arrived at headquarters, where he was told there were no reinforcements available. So he walked back up the front with his grim news. But by the time he arrived, the battle was over. The surviving French troops, exhausted, were jubilant. The Germans had pulled back.
“So,” he asked his captain, “this is a great victory?” The answer was equivocal. But the two officers realized quickly enough that if the Germans were withdrawing, they had held.4
THE FIRST BATTLE FOR VERDUN: (2) FORT DE TROYON AND THE RIGHT BANK
There were six forts on the heights of the Meuse between Verdun and Toul. Génicourt was the closest, and then Troyon, about 12 kilometers south of the forts and roughly the same distance to the east of Souilly, where Genevoix was fighting off the Germans. The Fort du Camp des Romains was just below the city of Saint-Mihiel, while Liouville guarded the eastern extremities of the heights ten kilometers to the southeast of the city. The remaining two forts, Jouy and Gironville, were still farther to the south, and thus played no role in the fighting.
On the left bank below Verdun, there was one fort, Paroches, one of the most elderly. Built in 1879, it hadn’t been touched since then, was basically a battery—that is to say, a fortified artillery position. Its armament consisted of four 120-millimeter guns and 12 90-millimeter guns, all the same vintage as the fort, and expected to use ammunition that predated melinite.
As a result, neither Paroches nor Genicourt was going to be able to offer much support to Troyon, if it was attacked. Given its position, Troyon was the logical candidate. If the Germans could break through there, they could move upstream to Saint-Mihiel without any obstacles, cross the river there, and attack Herr’s defensive positions from the rear. At the same time, they would effectively cut off Verdun from the rest of France, because there were only two main-line sets of railroad track going into Verdun: There was the Paris-Reims-Verdun line coming in from the west, and one paralleling the Meuse river, entering Verdun from the south. Given that the advancing Germans were already far past the former, cutting the latter would mean Verdun would be completely surrounded, unable to receive supplies.
As we explained in chapter two, the southern half of the Woëvre is curious terrain. It is dominated by the heights of the Meuse, with outlying buttes scattered apparently at random. The other dominant feature is a series of lakes, and the conventional wisdom in Paris was
that this land was mostly swamp. That is hardly the case, but all in all, the area is difficult for military operations on any scale. For both sides, the area was terra incognita, so the advancing Prussians, Austrians, and Bavarians moved cautiously.
The French had reckoned that military operations there were basically impracticable. They had a good point. Given the rough terrain of the heights themselves, it was difficult to see how an invader would be able to get his heavy artillery in close enough range to do any serious damage to the forts, and the various valleys that ventilated the heights, led to the river valley, could easily be blocked.
Technically, the defense of the Woëvre was left to the French Second Army under Noël-Édouard de Castelnau, but de Castelnau was spread very thin. Moreover, in order to salvage Sarrail’s hard-pressed troops at Revigny, he had been forced to shift troops across the Meuse.
As a result there were precious few French troops in the part of the Woëvre between Verdun and Saint-Mihiel, so General von Strantz was able to work his way diagonally across the Woëvre and concentrate on reducing the fort. Although there were several places where the French could have put up a good fight, at this point there were simply no French troops available to man those.
Indeed, in studying the records of the fighting in the Woëvre, the impression carried away is that no one at the GQG even knew this part of Lorraine existed. After the defeats along a line stretching from Cons-la-Grandville to Mercy-le-Haut, just inside the frontier with Belgium, the Woëvre had largely been abandoned, was, temporarily, a sort of gigantic no-man’s-land. So on 8 September, von Strantz began pounding Troyon with impunity.
He had at his disposal what was still, in these early days of the war, something of a secret weapon. In addition to a battery of the powerful 21-centimeter howitzers, he had a battery of the much more powerful Austrian 30.5-centimeter ones. Both of these were motorized, capable of navigating the sketchy roads that would put them within range of the fort. The Austrian guns were, in theory, capable of pounding Troyon into rubble, since it had been built to withstand only the standard 150-millimeter French gun of the 1870s.