Battle of Verdun
The Germans attacked Verdun in February 1916 intending to bleed the French army white, and bled with it for ten months. Falkenhayn's memorandum, or the version of it that survives, argued that France would defend the fortress city for reasons of prestige whatever the cost, and that German artillery could therefore kill French infantry at an exchange rate the Germans could sustain and the French could not. The attack opened with a bombardment of about a million shells on a front of thirteen kilometres. Fort Douaumont, the strongest in the system, was taken on the fourth day by a handful of men who found it almost unmanned. Pétain took command with the order that they shall not pass, and organised the supply road from Bar-le-Duc — the Voie Sacrée — along which a lorry passed every fourteen seconds, and a rotation that put most of the French army through the battle in turn, which spread the trauma across the whole nation. The fighting ran through the summer over the same few square kilometres of shell-churned ground and forts changing hands. The French recovered Douaumont in October. Casualties were about 380,000 French and 340,000 German, and the exchange rate that the plan depended on never materialised. Nine villages were destroyed so completely that they were never rebuilt and are still administered as places that died for France. The ossuary holds the bones of some 130,000 unidentified men. Falkenhayn was replaced in August and afterwards denied that attrition had been the object, and the memorandum setting it out survives only in his own postwar account. Whatever the intention, the effect was a battle neither side could stop and neither could win.
- Year: 1916 CE
- Category: Military
