by John Mosier
This was the narrative: like the French army’s complacent assessment of the casualty exchange at Verdun, and its insignificance as a military objective, no amount of contrary fact could dislodge it. Denial is not simply a river in Egypt. Moreover, by September 1916, the war had clearly entered exactly that phase predicted by von Falkenhayn: three powerful offensives in a row, the entry into the war of an entirely new ally, and except for the loss of a few bits of ground here and there, nothing much had changed.
Von Falkenhayn’s plan represented a new way to look at the concept of battle. Perhaps not totally new, but then nothing is. However, in the context of the emphasis on decisive battles of annihilation, of great breakthroughs that would destroy your enemy, of a sort of pseudoscientific idea of warfare, it was a major departure, an early attempt to square the circle, taking into account the enormous potential of the major powers. The former German commander in chief had attempted the same end that would motivate the strategic airpower theorists postwar. They were enormously more successful, although their theories hardly worked much better than his.
At the end of the summer, von Falkenhayn resigned, was forced out, the Germans having the curious and novel notion that when something failed, the man responsible should be held responsible. Joffre followed him in the late fall, finally forced out as the government belatedly began to realize the extent to which the army high command had deceived them.
When von Falkenhayn went, his ideas went with him. Most German generals shared the view of their opponents that set-piece battles that destroyed your opponent represented the end-all and be-all of warfare.
In that sense, von Hindenburg, who now replaced von Falkenhayn, was no different from Joffre, right down to a curious similarity in their appearance. Both men had clearly spent a good deal of time enjoying their meals. The only real difference between them was that von Hindenburg was better at it. Joffre’s great offensives never worked, no matter what yardstick was used. By contrast, under von Hindenburg, the Germans and their Austrian ally won precisely the sort of battlefield victories everyone was aiming to achieve.
Of course, this last is routinely denied by Allied apologists to this day, but anyone who looks at the front lines before and after the German attacks can see the thing clearly enough. As Tolstoy has one of his fictional characters observe after the Austro-Russian defeat at Austerlitz, “We civilians, as you know, have a very bad way of deciding whether a battle was won or lost. Those who retreat after a battle have lost it is what we say.”2 Although not invariably true, it is true enough. And since von Hindenburg went on after the war to win election for the presidency of the new republic, he was much better at politics as well.
That does not however alter the fact that the basic idea was wrong, and that von Falkenhayn was right. Not surprisingly, everyone was delighted to distort his ideas and consign him to the memory hole. Even Kaiser Wilhelm, who in nearly 300 pages of memoirs manages to avoid once mentioning his name.3
But now, with the German chief in disgrace, sent to languish on the Romanian front (where he promptly destroyed the Romanian army and occupied 90 percent of the country), everyone could go back to their old ways, carefully readjusting reality to fit the narrative, and in a way to escape all censure. In London, the shock of catastrophic losses was only beginning to sink in. But in France the peasants—that is to say, the chamber of deputies—were collecting tar and feathers and ordering up the pitchforks. Something had to be done.
REVISIONS: (1) FUDGING THE FIGURES
As we have seen, all through the war, the army had issued wildly inflated estimates of German losses, and had been remarkably reticent about its own. When Poincaré started prying out the figures, he was actually accomplishing a good deal. At Verdun, the immediate reaction of the GQG was to do more of the same. On the one hand they denied the importance of what was lost, and on the other, they wildly inflated German losses.
And as the final weeks of fighting at Verdun were submerged in the horrors of the Somme, the situation became so confused that constructing an alternative view was tolerably easy. Since when the Germans finally called off their offensive, in mid-July, they had not broken through the last French defensive line, had not taken the city itself (which, of course, was irrelevant to both sides), it was easy to spin the battle into a great defensive victory for the French.
Since the Germans were the ones attacking, and since the conventional wisdom was that the attackers always took more casualties, the next step was likewise simple. That, taken together with all the understandable confusion about what Verdun actually was, allowed the Allies considerable leeway. Conceptually, they converted the 150-plus-kilometer stretch of the front, almost a fifth of it, into a small town on the Meuse. It was an excellent public relations and marketing concept.
The difficulty in all this was that it required people to now believe the opposite of what they been told, a sort of early counterpart of the manipulations Orwell portrayed in 1984. During most of the war up until Verdun, the French had claimed that they were mounting successful offensives, not only gaining ground, but killing lots and lots of Germans. So the first Allied meme had linked offensive actions with small gains to heavy losses on the part of the defenders. But now, during Verdun, this was all reversed. The army went back to the meme of August 1914: The Germans were sustaining horrible losses precisely because they were attacking, but without getting anything in return.
As we noted earlier, in mid-March, General Fayolle was under the impression the Germans had lost 400,000 men. He wasn’t the only one who was being deceived in this fashion. The analysis from the New York Times is remarkable.
The Germans once more used the massed formation, hurling forward whole divisions of men at a time and having them slaughtered in thousands. In the valleys between the hills and other points of vantage, for the possession of which hundreds of thousands of lives were sacrificed, the dead could be seen lying in heaps literally as thick as flies.4
So the 400,000 figure was easy enough to believe. The army realized, of course, that given its previous predictions that the Germans were running out of men, someone might wonder how they could manage to sacrifice hundreds of thousands more. Like any good writer, the government propagandists had a reasonable answer.
Two questions at once arise as to this effort. The first is why it was made at such a time, and second, once it had been decided to make it, why was Verdun, the strongest point in the whole French line, chosen as the point of attack? . . . Germany’s manpower is dwindling. There can be no question of that. The available number is much less than that of the allies, and unless Germany can inflict losses on her enemies out of all proportion to those which she herself sustains in the process, sooner or later she will be worn out. This is merely a matter of arithmetic (Times, 45).
Why indeed, and what to believe?
Now, to any educated man or woman, the answer was quite simple—to André Maginot and Abel Ferry in 1916, Winston Churchill ten years later: look at the casualty figures, and compare the totals.
An idea simple to articulate, but almost impossible to calculate. It is relatively easy to compare the grand totals for the entire war. Indeed, when in June 1916, Maginot went through the computations before the astonished and incredulous chamber, that is exactly what he did. Let us assume, he argued, that our army is telling us the truth about our losses, and the German army is doing the same to our opposite numbers. Voilà! Here are the figures. It had been announced in Germany that as of 29 February 1916, German losses in killed amounted to only 667,833, with another 357,835 missing and 1,658,457 wound cases. But, Maginot pointed out, on 31 March 1916, the deputies had been told that as of that date the French had suffered 625,323 known dead, and the army had admitted that the figure was actually probably 760,000. So even if we assume that all the German missing are dead, and that the army’s figure includes all our missing presumed dead, then it is obvious that our losses are nearly the sam
e as theirs.5
But, Maginot went on to say, the situation is actually much worse than you think, because the German figures are for all the fronts their army is fighting on. Our losses are only for the Western Front.
Pandemonium ensued, since for years the army had claimed that German losses exceeded French losses by some ordinal factor, i.e., three or four to one. At Verdun the army had repeatedly said that the Germans were losing men at the rate of three to one. As noted earlier, that was pretty much the exchange ratio throughout the war, the only problem being that it was the other way around.
But it was some time before Maginot’s figures were proofed, even on the French side. Later on in the year, Ferry went through a more elaborate series of calculations, trying to explain to the government (he was now back in) why the army’s calculations that the Germans were weakening and so one more attack would do the trick.
However, that did not necessarily deflate the army’s claims about the losses at Verdun. That was far beyond the capacities of anyone while the war was going on, particularly given the fact that in 1916, 180 different French divisions had fought there (the French rotated whole units in and out of the line; the Germans simply replaced the losses).
Nevertheless, several analysts made the attempt. Louis Gillet weighed in early, with an estimate of German losses that he had derived from their official lists. His accounting was precise, in that it gave a time period (the end of 1916): 68,500 dead, 8,500 prisoners, 226,500 wounded, 23,000 missing, and 2,000 who died of illness; the total comes to 328,500.6
Now, the interesting thing about this figure is that it is not far off from what is now recorded at the German military cemeteries as posted by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriesgräbenfürsorge. Here are the figures recorded at the military cemetery at Mangiennes, north of Verdun: 41,600 died in combat, 13,165 died of wounds, and 26,739 missing, for a total of 81,504. These totals are very close to the data compiled by the German medical services after the war. For the period February through June, they list deaths for the entire Western Front as 72,237.7
That eliminates the wounds cases, which, as we have seen, is mandatory. Nor does it specify whether the missing are the missing or presumed dead, or does that total includes prisoners (presumably it does). However, making allowances for that, the current figure of 26,739 missing is surprisingly close to Gillet’s derivation of 23,000. Given the difficulties of such computations, the figure of 54,775 is reasonably close to 68,500, and it’s possible that in some way Gillet managed to double-count, added the missing to the total of those killed in action. This is a common computational error, the numerate parallel to the innumerate one of lumping everything together and then claiming the grand total represents deaths.
The French were understandably curious about the matter themselves, and in 1919, a commission of the chamber established that 263,000 French soldiers had died or gone missing.8 This figure is unsatisfactory in various ways, as it appears to lump the various categories of the missing together. Probably the real figure—that is, for the dead alone in the various categories (including those missing presumed dead)—is the one extracted from the report by Huber, who puts it at 179,000 for the period of 1 February to 1 July.9
Figures thrown into the discussion by historians long after the fact, particularly when they are not accompanied by the necessary stipulations, have no particular value, regardless of their source. And as we shall see in our concluding chapter, serious attempts were made after the war to inflate the death tolls at Verdun into the stratosphere.
So, accepting for the moment that these earlier analysts have it about right, then the casualty exchange rate works out to somewhere between three and four to one. Depending on which way one looks at that ratio, it either suggests that insofar as von Falkenhayn aimed to “bleed France white,” he did an excellent job, or, alternatively, that Verdun was just more of the same: all through the war the Germans won the casualty exchange. Not that it mattered in the long run.
REVISIONS: (2) HIDING THE OBVIOUS
Unlike the English, the French admitted early on that the Germans were formidable adversaries, although to a certain extent they did so in order to rationalize their own defeats and checks. But then, the idea that the German army was, by comparison with everyone else, an efficient and effective killing machine is obvious to most people.
However, at Verdun, most of the real German successes were the result of French bungling, and had little to do with efficiency, leadership (except in the sense that there wasn’t any at first), or even superior firepower.
Chronologically, the first of these stupidities was General Order 18, which signaled an evacuation of the Woëvre. As noticed earlier, the order was actually transmitted before being countermanded, and the key individual in charge then stuck to the original order. As a result, the Woëvre plain was simply abandoned. So the largest single piece of ground the Germans gained in the fighting, they gained as a result of what we might call an unforced error on the part of the French. All the opposing Germans had to do was walk in and take over.
The fall of Douaumont was the result partly of a muddle—the troops sent to the position mistook the village for the fort—but it was primarily caused by the absurd decision to abandon the forts the GQG made in August 1915. It is all very well to justify this decision by pointing to what happened to other forts in Belgium and on the frontier. But given how many of these structures there were, finding one that supports the idea at hand is just another form of cherry-picking.
Both these decisions can ultimately be traced back to the incompetence of Joffre’s staff, and the way he passively let such decisions be made. Pétain and Fayolle had it about right, Pétain when he observed that nothing is more dangerous in war than theoreticians, and Fayolle when he wrote, “cretins!” in his diary.
Despite initial attempts to downplay its loss, everyone knew that Douaumont was important. A desperate Joffre tried to get it back in May, and the reconquest of the fort—and Nivelle’s recapturing it in late October of 1916—probably propelled him directly into his brief tenure as French commander in chief, about which more below.
Then comes the real bungling. Reynal had to surrender Fort Vaux because someone had forgotten to keep his water supply topped up. Otherwise, he would have held out indefinitely. Nor were the Germans inclined to go in and get him. So a minor failure handed the Germans a second triumph, and at an extremely inopportune moment.
The worst of these disasters occurred during the fall interim period. On 4 September, there was a terrible accident in the Tavannes rail tunnel. Since the rail line going toward Étain was unusable, had no purpose at all, thanks to the evacuation of the Woëvre, the tunnel was used as a combination aid station and shelter, with electricity being supplied by gasoline engines.
So the tunnel was a mixture of men, explosives, and gasoline. The wires carrying the electricity weren’t insulated. The Tavannes tunnel was a disaster waiting to happen, and when it did, somewhere between 500 and 600 men died.
Now, accidents certainly happen. On May 8, there was a horrific explosion inside Fort Douaumont: The remains of the 679 German soldiers who died in the explosion are still buried there. But the Tavannes tunnel was not simply an unfortunate accident of the sort that sometimes happen; it was negligence and carelessness, pure and simple.
While this incident is hardly in the same category as the others, it suggests a lack of order in the French army. The Germans were routinely castigated for their ferocious discipline, obsession with detail, and overzealous punctiliousness about minutiae. More sober observers spoke of the Germans as being “well organized.”10 In a well-organized and properly run army, events like the Tavannes tunnel fire don’t happen. That they were happening in September 1916 is not a good sign. Or, to put it another way, the May explosion is duly noted. The tunnel is not.
REVANCHE: THE NIVELLE OFFENSIVE
With their final failures of July, as far as
Stenay was concerned, the battle was over. Nivelle made sporadic attempts to persuade them to fight, but his Second Army was almost completely out of artillery. It had only 185 75-millimeter guns for its theoretical complement of 170 batteries, and one of its best divisions, the 3rd Colonial Infantry, had only 15 working guns.11 The manpower situation was equally dire, so although Nivelle did his best to spar with the equally exhausted Germans, making sure that there were no further assaults, the battle was basically over.
However, once the GQG realized that the Somme offensive was simply a repeat of their earlier offensives in Artois, that too trailed off, and high command began to regroup. By now it was obvious to everyone that Joffre was on the way out, but one last offensive was ordered up. So an attack on the right-bank positions was planned for the end of October 1916.
Nivelle, prodded by Pétain, now was able to assemble the bulk of the army’s heavy weapons. There was the usual sleight of hand with the number available, but a third of Nivelle’s 300 heavy guns were modern, so the French were, relative to their earlier situation, in good shape.
The Germans, by contrast, were considerably weaker. All of their relatively sparse reserves had been sent to the Somme in July, and when Romania entered the war at the end of August, six divisions had to be sent to that section of the front right off.12
Besides, von Hindenburg, who was now in command, had resolved on an entirely new approach to winning the war. He was now supreme commander in the sense that von Falkenhayn had never been; that is, he controlled all the fronts. His plan was simple and old-fashioned. First, the bulked-up German forces in the east would drive the Russians completely out of Galicia, working in tandem with a joint force in southeastern Hungary that would defeat the Romanians, drive across the Carpathian mountains, and occupy their country.