by John Mosier
No one knows how many of the shells fired during the war failed to explode, and simply buried themselves in the earth. But the unwary or the foolhardy have been getting blown up with depressing regularity as they gambol about on the battlefields of northeastern France ever since.
The main point here is that a cratered landscape means a great many misses. A waffled and corrugated landscape, devoid of vegetation, is an infallible indicator that the infantry assault across it was fruitless—that instead of a breakthrough, there was a massacre.
Given their lack of heavy weapons, French gunners had not yet had to grapple with this issue, although as Fayolle’s comment reveals, the men who were actually directing the attacking infantry had become aware of it rather quickly.
Now on the right bank, the Germans faced a peculiar problem. Although as we have seen, the successive defensive positions formed by the trench lines were rudimentary to nonexistent: neither the forts nor the reinforced concrete strongpoints that anchored the initial line of defense were vulnerable to artillery fire. A few direct hits would not destroy them, and in the case of modernized or recent forts like Douaumont, which was the most forward of the forts on the right bank, destruction was physically impossible.
However, the proper sort of bombardment, which extended far behind the first defensive position, could paralyze the enemy, isolate him in his strongpoints, deny him reinforcements, and prevent him from sending or receiving orders.
However, in order to grasp the effects of the bombardment at Verdun on 21 February 1916, we must realize that, in the words of one French officer, it was “a preparation of artillery, the violence of which surpassed anything that had been experienced up to that time,” a terse phrase that is perfectly true.3 Verdun was the first time such a massed artillery attack had occurred in the history of warfare. No one had experienced anything like it before. The barrage extended from Avocourt on the left bank all the way across to the easternmost forts on the right bank, and then down into the Woëvre, so the section of the front it encompassed was unprecedented.
Given the mixture of heavy weapons, the Germans were able to reach far behind the first line of defenses. Shells fell as far back into the salient as the town itself, and the bridges across the Meuse were targeted, rendered impassable.
By midday, visibility had increased, so the artillery fire became heavier, since observers were able to see the fall of the shells more distinctly. In this they were aided immensely by aerial observation.
TACTICAL AIRPOWER
As we have seen, German gunners were relying on aerial observers from the start of the war. Given the state of early aviation, they relied on a mix of airplanes and balloons. As the front stabilized at the end of 1914, observers in balloons became more and more important. They were cheap, relatively stationary, allowed the observers in the air to communicate directly with the ground by telephone.
The disadvantage of the balloons was that the observer was actually behind the lines, while planes could fly directly over the enemy positions. Whenever possible, the Germans therefore used both. For Verdun they had gathered together seven balloon units, each operating two balloons, and six units of fixed-wing aircraft.4 The generic German designation for such units, Abteilungen, is not a reliable indicator as to the size, so the exact number of aircraft involved is unknown, but probably between thirty and forty.
The tripartite division of the fledgling air forces of the war is routinely noted: observers, bombers, and fighters. However, most of what has been written in the histories of early military aviation focuses on fighter planes, while the airpower theorists who emerged in the 1920s in Italy and Great Britain wrote as though the idea of strategic bombing were something new and untried. Not so—both sides tried to bomb the opposing cities early on.
The reason this aspect of the air was minimized was twofold. First, it was an area in which the Germans had a considerable advantage: their planes were bombing London and Paris with reasonable frequency, while the Allies rarely were able to get even across the Rhine. Second, the results were minimal. Although the Germans inflicted 6,608 mostly civilian casualties in their raids on the two capitals, their losses were surprisingly heavy, particularly given the rudimentary ground-to-air defenses that were hastily organized.5 To the extent that when the war was over, the Germans concentrated on tactical as opposed to strategic bombing: the new German air force that emerged during the Hitler years was almost entirely a tactical arm—that is to say, air-to-ground attacks were directed at military targets behind the enemy lines, and were simply an extension of the artillery barrage. So Verdun was yet another first in the history of warfare. On 21 February German aviators swarmed the skies over Verdun. As French officers were forced to admit, their enemy had complete mastery of the air.
On the one hand, that enabled the observers to work undisturbed. The reason that the barrage intensified in the afternoon was that improved visibility meant the effects of the morning shelling could be observed, and fire could be corrected—directed on objectives that had been missed, or on new ones that had emerged.
To protect the observers, over 60 fighter planes were used, divided into ten fighter units. Although from the viewpoint of the fighter pilots, their duels in the air were what early aviation was all about, the truth is more prosaic. Fighter planes were used either to protect observers or to destroy them. Battles with other fighter planes were incidental to that aim.
Although as the battle developed, French fighter squadrons fought back vigorously, in this, the all-important opening of the offensive, they were caught off guard, so the Germans were able to proceed without any opposition at all.
Their mastery of the airspace over Verdun allowed the Germans to deploy two of their five squadrons of strategic bombers. These units had the blandly misleading designation of Kampfgeschwader der Deutsche General Stabs Staff, which, abbreviated as Kagohl, perhaps confused Allied observers. However, the five squadrons of Kagohls were Germany’s strategic bombing force.
As any student of the next war knows, strategic bombers can carry enormous loads of bombs over great distances. Alternatively, they can carry even heavier loads over short distances. But in the Second World War, neither the British nor the American bomber commands were much interested in infantry support. They felt their mission was strategic bombing, and that tactical air support, to be done by someone else, was a distinctly lesser priority.
During the First World War this idea was still being developed, and the Germans never really took to it. So at Verdun they made use of the roughly 80 heavy bombers they had assembled. As the weather cleared, in addition to the artillery barrage, the French were subjected to some surprisingly heavy bombing.
Verdun was the first time bombers had been used in conjunction with artillery fire.
Now, by comparison with the bombers of the next war, the payload of these early planes was minuscule. Over the first week, the Kagohls only managed to drop roughly 500 bombs on the entire area, or slightly under 5,000 kilograms. No surprise there: in late February visibility is poor, so the planes were able to operate only sporadically.
But this figure should be put in the context of the war. From the first raid of 30 August 1914 to the last, on 15 September 1918, the German air force dropped only 30,000 kilograms of bombs on Paris.6 By that measure, managing a sixth of that in one week is impressive.
A bomb dropped from an airplane has two significant advantages over an artillery shell. By comparison, the bomb is almost entirely composed of high explosive, and it comes straight down. Given the slow speeds and low altitudes of these early planes, together with the absence of coordinated ground-to-air defenses embedded in the infantry divisions, level bombing was not only practicable, but surprisingly accurate.
Moreover, just as the infantry had never been subjected to a barrage of this intensity and scope, they had never been attacked from the air in this fashion. So although the fact of the attack wa
s not in itself a surprise, the scope and intensity of the attack definitely were. Marc Bloch, the brilliant French medieval historian, a veteran of this war, noted that surprise often led to panic, that hardened veterans who had never flinched under enemy fire would suddenly panic and run when startled by the unexpected.7
The physical destruction was very real, and significant. There was the destruction of infantry positions in the open, the wrecking of prepared fields of fire, the destruction of bridges and ammunition dumps, and the consequent loss of wired links back to the various headquarters. But the effect of this unprecedented type of offensive, new in its violence, in its accuracy, and the means employed, had a shattering effect on the defenders. When, late in the afternoon of 21 February, the German infantry began to probe, the French, despite heroic efforts, were disorganized, demoralized, and in no position to mount a coherent defense.
THE ASSAULT ON THE RIGHT BANK
In the popular view, once a bombardment lifted, thousands of heavily encumbered infantry struggled out of their trenches and advanced in waves across no-man’s-land, hoping they would survive the machine-gun fire, or, as they fell into the first trenches, engaging in hand-to-hand combat.
This idea was to a great extent true for the Allies, considerably less so for their opponents. The notion of dense waves of Germans swarming the battlefield was basically a myth. It was partly based on mirroring: that was how the Allies conducted their assaults, so therefore it was assumed the Germans did the same thing. The myth was created early on in the war, and was the basis of the wildly inflated German losses the French claimed to be inflicting.
And, of course, since Verdun was the first large-scale German assault since September 1914, the idea seemed logical enough. One solid assumption that permeated the ranks of cabinet ministers, armchair strategists, and historians was that there was no development of infantry tactics or even weaponry during the war.
In reality, German infantry tactics, which were never understood very well by the Allies, had evolved enormously. Not everywhere on the front, but in the enormous section that was technically controlled by the Fifth Army, there had been dramatic changes. One we have already seen being employed in the Argonne. A small piece of the front trench line would be targeted. Heavy artillery would simply obliterate it to the degree that was possible; then the infantry would close in on the debris, eliminate the dazed survivors, and consolidate their gains. Then the process would begin all over again.
When the beleaguered French infantry in the Argonne spoke of being gnawed, that was what they meant. They were losing territory meter by meter, in a process that was as inevitable as a bucket draining water through a leak. And the French had no idea how to stop it.
At the other end of the sector, in the Vosges mountains, a variant of this was being developed. Instead of a platoon of riflemen, backed by machine gunners and artillery, the Germans put together mixed groups: specially selected infantry, combat engineers, and machine gunners. Instead of a direct frontal assault, these small and heavily armed groups would work around the objectives, attack from the sides. When they encountered strongpoints that could be easily be reduced by grenades, the engineers would deploy their formidable 17-centimeter mortars, while the machine gunners would counter French attacks.
As these tactics became known to the Allies, they were associated with the famous “storm troopers,” a name derived from the German designation of Sturmabteilungen. The tactics, composition, and purpose of these units are fundamentally misunderstood.8 Once the tactics were perfected, the units were deployed across the front, the idea being that they would teach the other soldiers what they had learned. The ideal was to inculcate the entire army with this new idea.
A more helpful way of describing the result would be to characterize the units that were thus formed as combined-arms units, since they brought together soldiers who historically had operated in complete independence of one another. In August 1914, infantry platoons were organizations armed entirely with rifles. They were entirely separate and distinct from the companies of machine gunners, and the companies of combat engineers, even though these last controlled some of the deadliest weapons available to the infantry: mortars and flamethrowers.
The British and French continued to go down this line, maintaining rigid separations. Heavy artillery was exclusively controlled by the corps or the army group command. Divisional commanders only had control over the field guns. The result, which Marshal Fayolle termed a “gross error,” was that decisions on how to employ the heavy guns were made by men far from the front, completely unfamiliar with local needs. It was, he concluded, “completely crazy.”9 He was right.
The Germans had long since abandoned this idea, parceling out their heavy weapons to the commanders who needed them. So, for example, the 7th Reserve Corps, which would mount the main infantry assault on the section of the right bank roughly between Consenvoye and Flabas, was not only supported by a vast artillery park of heavy guns, mostly 15– and 21-centimeter howitzers, but actually had control of them.
That is, the infantry commanders could ask directly for supporting artillery fire on targets they wanted destroyed, whereas in the French system, that same commander would have to transmit his request all the way up the chain of command, where it would approved or rejected, even if he was a divisional commander.
Integrating combat engineers, machine gunners, and riflemen was simply the next logical step.
So in the late afternoon, instead of hordes of infantry charging (stumbling and staggering, actually) across a blasted and cratered no-man’s-land, we should instead envision small groups working their way cautiously through the fallen trees, maneuvering around the shell holes that were the inevitable result of misses. The caution was because there were no trenches extending from the main German positions toward the French. The distances were considerable, so the troops moved slowly, feeling out the centers of resistance that still remained, which they then destroyed with grenades and this new and horrifying weapon, the flamethrower.
This was not an assault; rather it was a mopping-up. The French divisions holding the first line of trenches were simply overwhelmed, and the reinforcements that were trying to reach them now became hopelessly intermingled. At the woods of Herbebois, for instance, one of the key German objectives, the advancing Germans of the 64th Infantry Regiment were opposed by 15 companies of infantry from four different French regiments. Given that degree of confusion, there was no possibility of a coordinated action.
At dawn the next day, with the snow falling everywhere on the right bank, the assault continued. The objective to the immediate western flank of Herbebois was Caures. The name, like that of Herbebois, indicated a patch of forest, not a town or a fort. But Caures was one of the key positions, the center point of the right-bank trenches. As such it was held not by regular infantry, but by two battalions of chasseurs, the 56th and 59th.
By one in the afternoon, troops from the German 87th and 89th infantry regiments had forced the chasseurs back to the southwestern end of the woods. By four, the two battalions had essentially been annihilated: of the 1,800 men, only 70 were still in action. Their commander was Colonel Émile Driant, the man who had first protested the lack of proper defenses at Verdun.
In one of those grim ironies, he was one of the first senior officers to fall in combat at Verdun. The advancing Germans, soldiers of the 21st Infantry Division, stopped long enough to bury the colonel, their enemy, in the woods, marking his grave with a rude cross. One of the officers collected his personal effects and sent them, via Switzerland, to his widow. Driant was a well-known writer, a member of the chamber, and something of a celebrity. Still, his death and burial is a strange counterpoint to the horrific struggle that was going on all around him.
The advances of these first two days were not deep: about two kilometers on a 12-kilometer front. But the situation was extremely alarming. This was the peak, or crown, of the pos
itions on the right bank. If the Germans succeeded in pushing through it, they were well past the first line of trenches in this sector. That was bad enough, but this part of the front was essentially due north of the city itself, as the zone of attack stretched from the Meuse eastward. Envision a fist smashing down on the center of a ball of rising dough. Keep on going and the sides will collapse.
Now, in the not inconsiderable French experience with assaults, getting into the first line of trenches was a not unusual occurrence. The losses were high, and the gains usually ended up being minimal, because the Germans would attack and reconquer much of what they had lost. Colonel Herbillon had explicitly evoked that comparison in making the army’s reassurances to the government.
What he didn’t say, probably because he didn’t know himself, was that there were no successive defensive positions. Practically speaking, when Driant was forced to retreat from the woods of Caures, the survivors had to go all the way back to Vacherauville. That this fort was actually on the left bank basically sums up the emerging French dilemma. Unlike in Champagne, where the German defenders had simply fallen back to their next line, the French retreat was entirely up in the air. The only thing to do was to try to get the positions back.
So on the twenty-third, the 37th Infantry Division made the attempt. There were a few local successes at first, but by the end of the day, the Germans had pushed forward. The advance was insignificant, a few hundred meters. But it meant the absolute loss of the first defensive line, and the fatal compromise of the rudimentary second. In other words, the counterattack had not only failed to push the Germans out, but it had actually resulted in the evacuation of what had been contested ground the day before.