Verdun
Page 14
The French waited over another month, tried the same approach once more. On 8 December 1914, they attacked for three consecutive days, again with nothing to show for it except casualties.
Right before Christmas, the GQG suddenly noticed that both the main supply lines into Verdun had been cut. On 23 December 1914, Joffre, in his usually bland and ingenuous way, drew “General Dubail’s attention to the situation created by the simultaneous advance of the Germans on the heights of the Meuse and in the Argonne. This advance showed how important were the operations of the 1st Army in the Woëvre, and of the 3rd Army in the Vauquois district.”11
Having written to General Dubail about what to do, a few weeks later, on 5 January, Joffre replaced him with General Pierre Roques. Dubail was now commander of the Army Group East. One of Joffre’s stratagems for getting rid of generals he found lacking in offensive spirit, but couldn’t sack outright, was to kick them upstairs. Roques, like Joffre, was an engineer and, relatively speaking, an intimate of his.
While General Herr, the First Army commander, hatched a plan for an offensive on the right bank, Sarrail, whose Third Army was responsible for the Argonne, decided to expand the scope of the attacks on the Vauquois. After a suitably powerful artillery barrage, the 10th Division would attack the butte, and the 9th Division, reinforced by a detached brigade (the 105th), would attack the German positions on the left flank. Undeterred by the abysmal performance of the Third Army thus far in the Argonne, Sarrail was convinced that this offensive would smash through the German positions, recapture Varennes-en-Argonne, and isolate the Vauquois.
The plan was ambitious, the means woefully inadequate. General Micheler, whose Fifth Army Corps would do the actual fighting, had precisely two batteries of heavy mortars, one of 220 millimeters and one of 270, both dating from 1878.12 These guns had the requisite high angle of fire. Provided they could be emplaced within 5,000 meters or so of the target, given competent observers, they could do serious damage to the German positions. But given that the German lines basically looked down on the French positions, and that the smaller German howitzer vastly outranged the French antiques, their value in the coming battle was mostly symbolic.
That was one problem. The other was that by the time Sarrail worked out his plan and had it approved, it was now the end of January 1915, and the offensive was set for 17 February. So the Germans had over four months to prepare their defenses. Part of the French plan was that Roques and Sarrail would coordinate their attacks, thus pinning the Germans in place, and, like Sarrail’s plan, Roques’s was for a sizable offensive operation.
For the survivors of the first assaults, the artillery barrage was impressive. But then again, it was their first experience. After two hours of what the infantry thought was a horrible pounding that surely must have destroyed the defenders completely, the assault began. Neither Boucheron nor the talented André Pézard was in the first wave—fortunately for them—and Pézard recorded fragmentary and incoherent rumors of success. By four o’clock units of two regiments were reported to have taken the hill, as well as the village of Boureuilles in the west.
At one a.m. on the eighteenth, the supposedly official news that filtered back to the reserves was that their comrades had taken the hill at eleven that morning, and had been thrown back, but had retaken it in a renewed attack, while the Germans were barely hanging on to the cemetery at Boureuilles. Pézard records that the regimental band played “La Marseillaise” in celebration.
With the dawn came a more sobering reality. The butte was roughly 200 meters across, with a noticeable rise from south to north. The village was on the north, or German side. The infantry that managed to scale the butte then had to fight their way into the village, discovering that the shelling had left the defensive positions intact. One speaks of assaults and counterattacks, but the words imply more organization, more determination than was actually the case. The next day saw a few dozen exhausted soldiers hanging on to the edge of the village—the survivors of the two regiments that had struggled to the top. The cost: 800 men dead, wounded, or missing. Given the nominal strength of the two regiments by February 1915, the casualty rate was at least 50 percent and probably higher.
Sarrail’s offensive had multiple objectives: to break through the Germans lines to the west of the Vauquois and thus outflank the German positions there; then to retake Varennes and Montfaucon, the butte to the north of the Vauquois. Achieve those goals and the railroad would be secured.
None of those goals had been achieved. As French official history admits, although elements of the two regiments had “penetrated” the butte, they had been forced to evacuate it. The attack farther to the west basically got nowhere. In terms of securing an objective of high value, the attack had been a failure. Undeterred, Joffre had the GQG order Sarrail to make another attack.
On the seventeenth, the gunners had run out of ammunition, so there was a delay while they were reprovisioned. The artillery was also reinforced by an armored train mounting two 100-millimeter naval guns. Although the range of these weapons was impressive, their relatively flat trajectory limited their value considerably. André Pézard, a platoon leader in the 46th Regiment, recorded the barrage of 28 February with a certain skepticism: “With the great day commences a very feeble cannonade. Is that the ‘magnificent artillery preparation’ of which the colonel spoke?”13
Other observers were more impressed. The houses were almost entirely destroyed; improbably, the only landmark visible was a solitary tree, although the walls of the church were still intact.
The infantry attacked a little after one p.m., and within 30 minutes they were in the ruins of the village on the western side. One of the reasons for insisting on a second assault was the reasonable belief at headquarters that the Germans were stretched to the breaking point on both sides of the river, owing to Roques’s offensive on the right bank. To a certain extent, this was true: The Vauquois was held by only one battalion. There was another one in reserve, but by the time they launched a counterattack, the French were firmly established on the south side of the butte, digging rudimentary trenches in the rubble. The cost: 3,000 men in two days of fighting.
Toward the end of March, as Roques’s offensive sputtered to its horrifying end, the Germans made a tentative effort to throw the French off the butte. Given the fact that the positions were now almost face-to-face, their superiority in artillery was nullified, but they had a new and unpleasant weapon in its stead: early versions of the flamethrower. But the German attacks of March 23 did little more than stabilize the front, which stayed pretty much where it was in March 1915 right up until the Americans finally broke through in September 1918.
In that sense, the battle was a stalemate. Neither side could take complete possession of the butte. But given the reason for the attack, a stalemate was a German victory. If the French had gotten the north side of the butte, they could have called in counter battery fire on the German guns that kept the trains from running. In addition, their observers could have called down artillery fire onto the relatively flat plain behind the butte, thus severely impacting any attempt to shuttle troops laterally along the front to reinforce threatened positions.
By March 1915, even a gunnery officer of modest competence would have the railroad coordinates established, so at that point, if not much earlier, having an observation post on the butte was more of a luxury than a necessity. Right from the start of the war, the German gunners had relied heavily on aerial observation. In addition to fixed-wing aircraft, once the front stabilized, they made extensive use of balloons connected to the batteries by telephone wires.
Neither form was as effective for camouflaged targets as an actual ground-based observer, who could in theory keep a suspected area under continuous observation. But that is hardly the case for a train moving along the track, even at night.
That observation may sound purely theoretical. However, it happens to be true: The French
were never able to make use of either railroad. When the 1916 fighting began, all the supplies and men had to come up from Bar-le-Duc. The undisputed German possession of the butte for those early months was crucial. Afterward, it was only important to keep the French from using it as an observation post.
But since the French never got to that point, there basically was no point. All they had managed to do was to run up a horrifying body count. A secret government report estimated that Sarrail had lost ten thousand men at the Vauquois, and the official history listed Third Army losses from 15 January to the end of March 1915 as 26,540 men and 486 officers, of which 4,534 were dead and another 5,770 missing.14
The observant reader will have noticed that in speaking of the dimensions of the butte, the figures used are somewhat vague. There’s a reason why. By the end of the war, the butte was simply a sequence of enormous craters. Anyone who hikes up to the top of it sees what looks exactly like a child’s sand castle that someone stepped on: The north and south sides of the butte are still there, but the middle is a series of craters. Of the village itself, all that remains are extremely small fragments of roofing tiles and stone chips, most of them about the size of a thumbnail.
Although the war on the Vauquois after March 1915 has hardly any relevance to Verdun, it forms a horrifying and melancholy postscript, since the remains of the butte are one of the seven demonic wonders of the war.
In their February offensive the French had compensated, or tried to compensate, for their lack of heavy guns by setting off mines. They had excavated no less than four separate places, hoping to blow up the defenders from below. The results were inconclusive, but after the March 1915 fighting, both sides began tunneling into the butte. On 14 May 1916, the Germans won the grand prize in this disturbing war. They set off a mine on the west end of the butte that created a crater thirty-two meters deep, and killed 800 men from the 46th Regiment. But the craters, which were simply giant shell holes, made any advance impossible. So the lines never moved until 26 September 1918, when American troops overran the whole area in a few hours.
THE RIGHT BANK: (1) LES ÉPARGES AND THE MASSACRE OF THE INFANTRY
Les Éparges, a 346-meter hillock to the southeast of Verdun, is roughly the companion butte to the Vauquois. But it is larger, higher, and more irregular. There was no village on top; nor does the butte dominate the region as does the Vauquois. The crête de Combres, which the Germans had also grabbed back on 22 September 1914 during the Bavarian offensive toward Saint Mihiel, was 340 meters high, and only some 700 meters distant.
The butte is (or was) an irregular kidney shape, and the Bavarians had spent the fall entrenching themselves, with a bastion at each of the three key points of the kidney. From Point X, the east-end bastion, to Point C, the west-end bastion (in the bend of the kidney), there was a double line of trenches. The steepest side of the butte—and the most important—was the one facing back toward the German positions, and the Bavarians had taken advantage of this to tunnel into the butte, building a series of shelters for their infantry, and tunneling all the way up to the trench line itself.
Worse still for the French, the butte of Les Éparges was not an isolated outcropping, as were the majority of the others in the region, from the Vauquois and Montfaucon to the west of Verdun all the way down to Montsec in the Woëvre plain. Not only was flanking fire possible from Combres, but the topography meant that the Germans could filter men and supplies back and forth with relative impunity. At the Vauquois, it was ultimately possible for French gunners to interdict the supply routes to the butte at least some of the time, because the terrain immediately behind (on the German side) was open country. Troops could shelter in the dead angle of the back side, and be safe from French guns, but at some point they had to venture out into the open, and at key points during the March attacks, the French had managed to cut the butte off temporarily with artillery fire. The corresponding approaches to Les Éparges meant that this was not going to happen.
There was also another nasty problem. The Vauquois was originally what in the American Southwest would be called a mesa. It had a surprisingly flat top, albeit one with a noticeable tilt running (unfortunately) downhill to the French side. But the twin peaks of Les Éparges and Combres were terraced slopes, rising out of an extensive 300-meter-high plateau. Once past the 300-meter line, the attackers were going to be terribly exposed as they worked their way higher along one enormous, exposed slope.
The butte was different strategically as well. The Vauquois was a commanding observation post, one the Germans put to good use. Had the French been able to seize the entire butte, they could, at least in theory, have caused the Germans a great deal of trouble, and they might have been able to secure the reopening of the rail line into Verdun. In any event, at the Vauquois the French needed to regain the butte in order to block German operations. At Les Éparges they needed the butte to secure the only practicable route for an attack into the Woëvre plain: “The possession of les Éparges and the control of its observatories is indispensable to any offensive envisioned in that sector.”15
Writing long afterward, the few French military historians who have studied this battle are of the opinion that the whole idea was ridiculous.16 Although there is some truth to this view, it overlooks the removed vision of the general staff planners at headquarters, who were conducting a war based exclusively on map reading. Nor was General Roques, First Army commander, the man to argue the point. He was an engineer from Provence, not an infantry commander. Most of his service had been abroad, so his knowledge of the topography of the Woëvre was understandably sketchy. And in theory, as was remarked at the beginning of this chapter, the French needed possession of the butte.
But whether possession of the butte was pointless or not, the basic situation described above definitely portended a very difficult struggle.
Hopefully, Roques’s offensive would coincide with Sarrail’s, pin the defenders in place, and prevent them from reinforcing each other. In that sense the plan was sound enough. The basic German tactic in the west was to shuttle reinforcements laterally to whatever point was threatened by an Allied attack, and indeed their defensive line was carefully positioned so as to take advantage of the railroad system in that regard. So the idea that if you attacked a very large area of the front, the defenders would not be able to reinforce one another quickly (or at all) was theoretically correct.
What Roques had in mind was a two-part attack. One of his army corps, the Sixth, would attack the butte; as that attack developed—in synchronization with Sarrail’s attack on the Vauquois—a much larger offensive would be launched into the plain of the Woëvre. He knew that the assault would be difficult, but in addition to its regular infantry regiments, the corps had no less than three battalions of chasseurs.
The word chasseurs is often taken to mean light infantry, and some English historians routinely mistranslate it as “rifles,” which, if we were speaking of the Napoleonic wars, would be correct. But by 1914 it would be more accurate to describe the battalions of chasseurs (BCP) as heavy infantry: their battalions had as many machine guns as an infantry regiment, for example. As elite units, they were (still) the best troops in the army.
The initial attack was perfectly coordinated with Sarrail’s 17 February assault on the Vauquois, and as was the case on the right bank, it began with the explosion of a mine. Indeed, by the time the fighting on the butte had wound down, Les Éparges was in about the same shape as the Vauquois: anyone who drives up to the top of it is surrounded by gigantic craters, and is looking down at sizable trees growing at the bottom. The view is less dramatic simply because the butte is so much bigger.
By February 1915, the defensive tactics of the Germans in this section of the front had already evolved considerably. There was no particular effort to hold the first line of trenches. The infantry strongpoints, consisting of concrete dugouts, bunkers, and pillboxes, were set well back, and generally immune to
the French artillery. When the barrage lifted, the defenders could emerge, reach their defensive positions before the attacking troops could reach the first line.
So when the 106th and 132nd regiments struggled up the slope, clambered into the first trenches, they found them largely empty, took a grand total of 23 prisoners. Then, once the French were actually in the forward trenches, the German artillery zeroed in on them. The barrage was followed up by a series of infantry counterattacks. In three days of fighting, the 10th Regiment was basically destroyed: 600 men killed or missing, 1,000 more wounded. This total was half of its theoretical strength, but it is highly doubtful that by February 1915 the regiment had anything like 3,000 men, since it had suffered heavy casualties at Revigny in September 1914. Anyone reading the horrifying account of Maurice Genevoix, who was still alive and now a full lieutenant, comes away with the feeling that there were very few men left in the regiment.17 At any rate, by the 20 February, the French had been ejected from the butte; so, just as was the case with the Vauquois, there was a second attempt.
The French added four batteries of their ancient 120– and 155-millimeter guns, stockpiled more ammunition, and planned a second assault, this one to be delivered on 18 March, a few days ahead of its left-bank complement. Of course, the weeks that passed gave the defenders time to recover. Not surprisingly, the 18 March assault did little more than recover the trenches lost at the end of the February offensive.
So on 27 March, there was a third assault. This time a few of the chasseurs made it to the far end of the butte, the notorious Point X, which affords a fine view of the countryside between Verdun and Jarny. The Germans promptly counterattacked, throwing the chasseurs back to the southern end of the butte.