Verdun

by John Mosier

  A FEW DIFFICULTIES

  The problem with Joffre’s scheme was that he lacked the resources to carry it out, even waiting for the summer to roll around, hoping that the Germans would occupy themselves in the east. Basing your plans on the assumption that your opponent will allow them to ripen is always a bad idea, although it seems strangely typical of a good deal of strategic planning.21

  Then too, Joffre and his British colleagues, and their subordinate staffers, seem not to have seriously considered the consequences of failure. What if the Germans spoiled their plans? What if the breakthrough failed to occur? There doesn’t seem to have been a plan B, in other words.

  That was not the only difficulty. Regardless of contingencies, Joffre simply lacked the resources to succeed. He lacked the men, and he lacked the firepower. So when the Germans attacked in February, the French were simply unable to match the overwhelming firepower the Germans brought to bear. For that matter, they hardly had the manpower to hold the section of the front that was under attack.

  Both of these deficiencies are critical to an understanding of what actually happened when the Germans attacked at Verdun in February 1916. Although the artillery problem is, once again, rather technical, it is also crucial. So too with the manpower situation: the German attack set off a series of chain reactions, one event having a dramatic influence on the next. The attacks of spring 1916 crippled Joffre’s plans for the Somme. The divisions he had intended for the French share of the offensive had largely been used up by June 1916, one of the main reasons why the July offensive there failed so signally. From that point on, a whole string of dominoes fell, so that by August 1918, it was left to the Americans to force the Germans back from their positions around Verdun. The French no longer had the ability to conduct offensive operations on that scale.

  The artillery problem is particularly relevant. When the German bombardment began, nothing like it had been seen in warfare. Nowadays, accustomed, perhaps even hardened, to photographs of blasted cities, to enormous vistas of carnage caused by missiles and bombs, it is difficult to grasp the magnitude of the barrage with which the Germans began their offensive.

  And given the technical nature of the subject, and how systematically the French misrepresented it, it is natural to assume that there was some sort of equivalence between the two sides, when in actuality they were asymmetrical.

  THE ARTILLERY PROBLEM

  As we have seen, when the war broke out, France’s artillery park consisted of approximately 4,000 of the new 75-millimeter guns, and a few hundred antique heavy guns from the 1870s. Despite what outsiders believed, and were told, when the war began the gunners had none of the modern 105-millimeter Schneider howitzers in service, and only about 100 of the 155-millimeter weapons.22

  But if the army was to be believed, after the first months, the situation steadily improved. By July 1915, in addition to the 4,000-odd field guns, the army had no less than 2,470 heavy weapons in service. That was the claim, and when Joffre penned his memoirs, he repeated it.

  But on 11 July 1915, the cabinet was given an entirely different accounting. It turned out that actually, there were only 2,800 field guns in service. The Germans had captured 500, and another 1,200 had in one way or another been destroyed. In response to a pertinent question, it was revealed that the factories were not able to produce guns fast enough so that the losses could be made good.

  It should be pointed out that in the normal course of use, artillery pieces wear out. So, leaving aside captures and weapons destroyed by the enemy, there has to be a steady flow of replacement guns into the units to replace those worn out through use. But, like the enormous expenditure of ammunition modern war required, this had not been foreseen. Although the exact production figures for the 75 are not readily available (or available at all), we can, by a rough rule of thumb, see that only a few hundred a year were being produced for the army in the years before the war, so it is hardly a surprise that the factories were having difficulties.

  That was particularly the case since most of the raw materials for the gun had to be imported from abroad. Moreover, the 75, like the 155, was an extremely complicated mechanism, and was basically built by hand. It was hoped to increase production dramatically, up to what looked like over 200 a month or more, but here it was nearly a year into the war, and promises are cheap.

  The situation with regard to heavy artillery was dreadful. The 2,740 figure was basically a sleight of hand. The army was counting the field guns that the 75 had replaced in 1898 as heavy weapons, since technically they had bigger barrels. So 1,230 of those guns consisted of the 90– and 95-millimeter weapons of the 1890s that the 75 had supposedly rendered obsolete.

  That hardly passed muster with the cabinet, but the numbers were horrifying. There were 75 of the new Schneider howitzers, and 104 of the older 155-millimeter weapons. So if the French were going to equip their divisions to the same scale as the Germans, they had enough field guns to equip 26 divisions, enough 105-millimeter howitzers to equip four, and enough of the heavier howitzers to equip 10.

  As for the truly heavy weapons, the army had exactly 312 155-millimeter guns in service. There were enormous stocks of weapons in the forts: between 2,500 and 3,000 guns. Of course, all of them dated from the 1870s, and gun mounts would have to be fabricated if they were to be used in the field at all, so the situation was grim.

  The horrifying part of this report was the total absence of the two categories of weapons that the Germans possessed in quantity: the hundreds of portable trench mortars used by the combat engineers, and the large arsenal of heavy weapons of 21, 30.5, 38, and 42 centimeters that they had brought into action at the start of the war.

  At one point someone in the cabinet, observing that the Germans were shelling Dunkirk, wanted to know why the army wasn’t shelling Baden, since the distance from the French positions to the duchy was about the same as from the German lines to the town on the channel. Embarrassed silence: The French simply didn’t possess guns with that range.

  But the charade continued on, unchecked. Officially, there were no less than 828 pieces of artillery located at Verdun in this same time period, a figure that to the layman would seem more than sufficient. But of that number, 468 were field guns whose restricted angle of fire made them highly impractical, and only 255 of those were the modern 75-millimeter weapons. Except for 49 155-millimeter guns, the balance consisted of antique mechanical-recoil pieces from the 1870s.

  Just as the British, in their section of the front, kept their cavalry horses at the ready so as to exploit the breakthrough that their generals were convinced would eventually take place, their French colleagues kept on counting the antiques in their arsenal as though they were actually pieces of heavy artillery. A queer war indeed, as H. G. Wells had remarked.

  So in other words, the French still were grossly outnumbered by the Germans when it came to heavy guns. The great increase in numbers was achieved by counting all the mechanical-recoil weapons produced half a century earlier and pressed into service because that was all the army had.

  Looking back, what is really striking is the lack of any sense of urgency about the situation. There were worries about supplying the gunners with enough shells, but there’s nothing about supplying them with weapons to match the German artillery park. Instead, the people responsible for artillery design, and the headquarters in Chantilly, took refuge in two arguments.

  First, they observed, correctly, that French shells contained a much higher explosive payload than German shells did. This rather obscure technical point was true across the entire range of weaponry. The French 120-millimeter gun fired a 20-kilogram shell that contained 4.2 kilograms of explosive, while the German 13-centimeter gun fired a 40-kilogram shell that contained only 2.5 kilograms of explosive. The 75-millimeter gun delivered 0.650 kilograms, as opposed to the German 7.7 centimeter’s 0.160-kilogram payload.23

  Then there was the argum
ent that the 75 completely outclassed its German and British equivalents. Not only did it fire shells with considerably more high explosive, but it fired more of them per minute. It was also lighter, more accurate, and had a longer range. And that was that.

  True enough, but the argument was seriously flawed, because it overlooked the importance of weapons firing shells at a very high trajectory, so they would descend at the near vertical, what French gunnery experts called tir courbe.

  The consequences of the lack of modern artillery with a high angle of fire . . . were the following: 1, the lack of effects against German fortifications. . . . French artillery, almost completely composed of guns firing shells over a flat trajectory, with very rare 155 millimeter howitzers and 220 millimeter mortars having a slow rate of fire, were seriously lacking the means to destroy the German fortifications.24

  In an extremely important note appended to this argument, General Gascouin makes the following observation.

  German artillery had light howitzers disposing a great number of shells, sufficiently powerful for all our fortifications, capable of rapid fire with precision. They had, in addition, a great number of heavy howitzers and trench mortars capable not just of a high trajectory of fire, but of vertical fire. Hardly any part of our line was immune to their shells. On the contrary, there existed until 1917 and even 1918, many dead angles, in the greater part of our sectors, where a shell never fell, owing to the generally flat trajectory of our weapons as described above. The study of aerial photographs of certain sectors shows that clearly (116).

  Obstinately, the experts stuck to their position. On 22 January 1919, well after the end of the war, General Fayolle had dinner with Émile Rimailho and General Sainte-Claire Deville. Rimalho, it will be recalled, was the man who had invented, or rather developed, the 155-millimeter gun the French used. The two men showed Fayolle photographs of new guns and mounts for the 75 that enabled it to have a much higher angle of fire. Why weren’t these adopted during the war? Fayolle asked. “The rivalries of the chapels,” the men replied.25

  Chapel was the word used in the army to characterize officers who adhered to certain beliefs with the obstinacy of members of a religious cult. They resisted the conclusions reached by inductive reasoning based on evidence, no matter how strong those conclusions would seem to be in retrospect. Or, to put it another way, they had come to certain ideas, and those ideas had become assumptions, beliefs, that they clung to regardless of the evidence.

  Given the dramatic changes in warfare that the Great War ushered in, and particularly in artillery, it is not surprising to see such a phenomenon among gunners. The refusal to accept that the field gun of 1914, basically the lineal descendant of the cannon of earlier centuries, was not the right weapon for the modern battlefield, was one of those notions, even though in the decades after the end of the war, every army in the world replaced those guns with howitzers of the same configuration and size as the Germans had been using from the start.

  It is easy to identify other examples of beliefs that were held in complete defiance of reality. In the years before the war, field guns like the French 75 had two different types of shells. There were shells whose payload consisted of nothing but high-explosive, adulterated TNP, in the case of the French, TNT, in the case of the Germans. Then there were shells whose payload consisted mostly of bits of metal. Those shells, generically called shrapnel shells, were designed to be used against troops, preferably against troops caught in the open.

  When the war began, French and German field gunners therefore carried a mix of high-explosive and shrapnel shells. Now, when soldiers were entrenched, or simply hiding behind a barrier of some sort, clearly only high-explosive shells were of any use. That was particularly the case as the typical entrenched position began to emerge: soldiers sheltered in dugouts or blockhouses, with barbed wire preventing access to their positions.

  For that reason, when General Gascouin wrote the treatise on artillery we have quoted from above, he omitted any discussion of shrapnel shells: the conditions of the war made them useless—except to British artillery experts, who persisted in the notion that shrapnel shells could be used to cut barbed wire. Two years into the war and British gunners were still firing more shrapnel shells than high-explosive, just as the French were still relying on their antique mechanical-recoil weapons from the 1870s.

  In both cases we have a keen observer who noticed the telling details, and recorded them. “We appeared to be using more shrapnel and the Germans more high explosives, but that may have been just the chance of the day,” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote when he visited the British front in June 1916.26

  The authorities laid on a grand tour of the British, Italian, and French fronts so he would write an encouraging essay on their efforts, and by and large he did. But the man who created Sherlock Holmes noticed other interesting facts as well, proof of why the high commands of the two armies only grudgingly allowed outsiders to see the war, even at a distance.

  There was one little gun which fascinated me, and I stood for some time watching it. Its three gunners, enormous helmeted men, evidently loved it, and touched it with a swift but tender touch in every movement. When it was fired it ran up an inclined plane to take off the recoil, rushing up and then turning and rattling down again upon the gunners who were used to its ways. The first time it did it, I was standing behind it, and I don’t know which moved quickest—the gun or I (89–90).

  So here it was, June 1916, and the French were still using mechanical-recoil field guns.

  Not that one can blame the gun crew Doyle observed. They had to fire something at the enemy, and that was all they had. As General Gascouin observes, modern heavy guns in any quantity did not begin to reach the troops until late 1917 or even early 1918. Yes, by the end of the war, the Allies had weapons that were just as good as the ones the Germans had, and by and large they had learned how to use them. But the qualifier of “by the end of the war” is hardly an insignificant detail.

  MANPOWER AND DENIAL

  Now, as we have seen, Joffre’s plan was based on the assumption that the Allies were getting steadily stronger, and their opponents were getting steadily weaker. Not only did the Allies have more and more weapons at their disposal, but there were more and more British soldiers in France, a growing force that more than compensated for French losses.

  Besides—and perhaps more important—German losses were such that they were simply incapable of doing anything more than hanging on, if that. We have already seen the Allied (mostly if not entirely French) estimates, running into the millions, the most recent being the one reported by Colonel Repington in January 1916: 3.5 million.

  So what the GQG argued was the casualty exchange ratio was the basic warrant for Joffre’s repeated offensives, including his great coup de bélier scheduled for summer 1916. In fact, upon reflection, it is clear that the Allied advantage in the casualty exchange was the key assumption on which everything else was predicated.

  Consider the following hypothetical. Suppose that the cabinets in both London and Paris had believed that the central powers had access to unlimited resources in manpower and munitions, that their armies were powerful enough to fight on three or four separate fronts all over Europe. These men were hardly idiots. It is difficult to imagine that they would have continued to launch their ambitious schemes of flank attacks in the Balkans and Italy had that been their perception. The whole idea of the amphibious invasion of Turkey, of bribing Italy (and laying plans to bribe Romania), the incursion into Greece, the initial dependence on the Russians, all of these notions were predicated on the idea that the Germans had very limited resources that a war on multiple fronts would stretch to the breaking point.

  So too with the reluctant support given to the British and French high commands in their determination to launch repeated offensives on the Western Front. From December 1914 to November 1915, basically a year, there were no less than four s
eparate offensive operations in Champagne and Artois. It really beggars the imagination to suppose that London and Paris would have let those multiple attacks continue had they not really believed that their armies were inflicting far more damage on the German defenders than they were incurring.

  Rather obviously, the Allied advantage in the casualty exchange to a great extent smothered embarrassing questions about the lack of modern weapons, the shortage of shells, and, above all, the failure to make significant territorial gains during these offensive operations.

  Of course, this last was neatly trumped by a certain sleight of hand. As we have seen, the GQG seemed to think that objectives were taken in the same way that goals are scored in football games. It was sufficient to get the ball across the goal line. So the fact that the remnants of a few infantry units managed to get a toehold on one end of the Vauquois, or Les Éparges, or occupy the first line of German trenches somewhere was always accounted a victory. That in tactical terms absolutely nothing had been accomplished was treated as being a matter totally beyond the pale.

  It was only as the summer of 1915 came to an end that the criticisms began to coalesce, which was why in October the government fell and was replaced. But it is clear from reading the diary of the new minister of war that not even a wily old soldier like Marshal Gallieni really understood how badly the GQG was misrepresenting the situation.

  But Gallieni, like everyone else, was dependent on what the army was telling them were the losses.

  It will be remembered that in February 1915, the French minister of war had told the secret committee that army casualties up to that point were 151,900 dead, 217,500 missing, and 368,500 wounded.27 There were two problems with those figures. The first difficulty is that they grossly understated French losses. The actual numbers: 528,000 dead or missing, and at least 580,000 wound cases.28 So the report Millerand gave was thus erroneous by roughly 30 percent.