Verdun 1916

by J E Kauffman

  In April 1915, as the intense struggle for Éparges continued, the French attacked as far east as Priesterwald, adjacent to Port Mousson on the Mosel in an effort to penetrate the St Mihiel Salient. The French launched another effort to clear the salient southeast of Étain against its northern end in the Woëvre. In early April, two newly formed French army corps participated in heavy fighting on the front between Maizery and Éparges–Combres. In April 1915, the French also thrust along the southwest part of the salient from Ailly-Apremont-Fliéry and both sides took heavy losses. At the end of April, the Germans, who held the salient with the V and Bavarian III corps and some reserve divisions, repulsed continued assaults on Fliéry at great expense. The French attacks of 1915 against the salient were generally costly for both sides and ended in failure. The continued pressure on the salient forced the Germans to transfer the newly formed 113th and 121st divisions from Sedan and St Avold as reinforcements. In July, the German 9th and 13th Infantry divisions repelled French attempts to retake the parts of the Tranchée de Calonne they had lost in April.21 The rains, which had not let up since January, had turned the roads into quagmires and left the troops standing knee-deep in mud and water in the trenches. The French forced back the newly arrived German 121st Division, which counter-attacked in the vicinity of the Priesterwald advancing up to 4km along a front of about 1.5km and taking many prisoners in early July. The fight at the Priesterwald lasted for weeks. The German defences of the St Mihiel Salient continued to be as solid as those in the Argonne were for the remainder of the war.

  To the north, around Verdun, the German 5th Army divisions saw limited action for much of 1915, while the French divisions hurled themselves against its left flank in the St Mihiel Salient and against its right flank in the Argonne. On 26 September 1915, the Crown Prince received command of an ad hoc army group that included his 5th Army and the 3rd Army. German intelligence identified the twenty-five French divisions opposite the three divisions of his XVIII Reserve Corps in the Argonne.22 The French employed long-range artillery and aircraft to disrupt traffic behind his lines with great success. Falkenhayn sent the 5th Army all available reserves on the Western Front, which included the 5th and 56th divisions and a few mixed Landwehr brigades. He also received the X Corps from the Eastern Front. The VIII Corps of the 3rd Army was suffering heavily from constant French attacks. However, the attacking units sustained equally heavy losses. This combat was part of Joffre’s second offensive in Champagne in 1915 and the prize was the Tahure Butte, which was eventually captured by Pétain’s 2nd Army’s XVI Corps. Crown Prince Wilhelm, with the German 3rd Army under his command, had his first engagement with the French general whom he would face at Verdun in 1916. The fighting for the heights continued throughout the month. On 14 October, Joffre ordered a halt to the offensive, and four days earlier Falkenhayn had ordered the Crown Prince’s two armies to go on the defensive.

  In November 1915, the Crown Prince inspected the defences of the 3rd Army and the Argonne. He reported the creation of a third trench line about 200m behind the first line near Binarville. His troops built the ‘Crown Prince Fort’, which he described as a model of field fortifications. It was a completely self-sustaining strongpoint surrounded by barbed wire entanglements 50m thick. A full-strength company that occupied the position had concrete shelters situated up to 5m underground to protect it from enemy shells. Sanitary conditions were good. The troops in the strongpoint had a field of fire to the front and flanks of up to 800m in clear weather. Several outposts provided additional security for the numerous occasions when fog covered the area. Like their comrades in the Argonne, the prince’s soldiers prepared for the next winter along the front. As the year ended, the 5th Army began to prepare for the next battle, the longest of the war.

  Crown Prince Wilhelm did not fail to notice the changes warfare had undergone during 1915. The use of aircraft increased in the first year of the war. In the early morning of 3 June 1915, Stenay, where his headquarters were located, was bombed by about forty enemy aircraft flying in waves. They hit a barracks used as a hospital since no one had yet realized the need for marking such locations with a red cross. Other bombs landed in the market place killing some locals. The prince claimed that his own headquarters had been the target of ‘bombs, grenades, and bundles of steel arrows’.* The French dropped 178 bombs in one of the first aerial attacks on an army headquarters. However, cellars offered adequate protection, wrote the prince, and the two-dozen or so casualties could be attributed to curiosity and foolhardiness. There was not much he could do about the raid except order the 380mm naval guns near Loison to bombard a French headquarters in Verdun in retaliation.

  It became obvious to the Crown Prince and every other officer on either side that there was a need for anti-aircraft weapons since friendly aircraft could only attack enemy planes if they were in the vicinity at the time of a raid.23 The threat presented by aircraft was only beginning to be felt in 1915 near the front because most bombing raids had been directed at targets such as air bases, factories and cities. In 1915, aircraft engaged in long-distance reconnaissance as well as tactical missions. Scouting and observation aircraft became more effective in coordinating artillery fire, but they had not yet replaced the tethered balloons. In March 1915, the British introduced aerial photo mosaics to map enemy trenches. Air power played a significant role in the coming battle for Verdun.

  Prelude to 1916

  In December 1916, as winter set in after a year-and-a-half of bloody and largely indecisive warfare in the West, both sides began planning their strategies. Joffre tried to break the deadlock in 1915 by launching repeated offensives in Artois and Champagne with the support of the British army in the hope of destroying the German salient in northern France. During these failed operations and other battles between August 1914 and the end of December 1915, almost 16,000 French officers and 565,000 soldiers were killed and about 400,000 men, including over 6,000 officers, went missing in action. Many of the missing men may have deserted, become separated from their units, been taken prisoner or been blown to pieces leaving little to identify them. There were, in addition, 935,000 wounded, but this number may include soldiers with multiple injuries. This gave a total casualty list of 1,916,000 men.24 In August 1914, The French army had mobilized approximately 3,500,000 men, 1,865,000 of which served in combat units.25 The government called additional men to the colours during that first year-and-a-half. The numbers show that in order to maintain the 1914 troop levels, the French army had to induct as many men as they had mobilized in August 1914 because of the casualties incurred. Joffre had to rethink his strategy.26

  Not known as a great strategist, the grandfatherly Joffre commanded, nonetheless, the affection of his troops. There was opposition to him among some of the French generals, and even the government was concerned about Joffre’s strategy and tactics that had failed to remove the Germanic enemy from French territory and caused massive casualties. The burden of these results, however, was not totally his. He had wanted the government to acquire more heavy artillery before the war instead of relying on the French ‘75’ for the needs of the field army. These rapid-firing guns, which had a flat trajectory, could only dominate a relatively level battlefield with no obstructions to block a direct line of sight or trenches to hide the enemy. The army had few indirect-fire weapons like howitzers, and little heavy artillery. In addition, they went to war, as did many nations, with only enough artillery ammunition for a few days of intense combat since the belligerents expected a short war. In August 1915, Joffre opted for a short-term fix. He ordered fortress commanders strip their forts of artillery and ammunition. This allowed for the creation of new batteries of heavy artillery, although these consisted of old 120mm and 155mm guns that lacked the modern braking system of the ‘75’ and could fire only about one round a minute since their recoil resulted in the gun having to be realigned. The army also created a few new batteries of 75mm guns taken from the forts.27 The value of these guns in Joffre’s
last failed offensive of 1915 in Champagne is debatable. The French leaders realized that elan alone would not win battles as the army learned new tactics, while paying a high price in casualties. General Pétain, one of Joffre’s few successful generals, had shown that a methodical attack was best, but it would not produce the kind of breakthrough that would drive the enemy back quickly. Joffre and his British counterpart mapped out their strategy for 1916. It appeared to be more of the same. The plan was for a massive coordinated assault by the French and British armies along the Somme. If the Russians could recover from the disasters they had suffered on the Eastern Front in 1915, Joffre hoped they would launch a new offensive to maintain the pressure on their enemies.

  Artillery trajectories and reverse slope defences.

  The Germans had their own plans for France in 1916. General von Falkenhayn had to fight his own war against those that despised him for being a young upstart hoisted into the position of power in 1914 when he replaced von Moltke. He could not save the situation in 1914 as the Schlieffen Plan came apart. He did manage to secure the Western Front so that in 1915, when he gave in to the ‘Easterners’ and allowed the Eastern Front to take precedence, he was able to withstand all Allied assaults in the West and usually regain lost ground. Hindenburg, Ludendorff and Mackensen had achieved a number of successes in 1915, occupied Poland and driven the Russians back towards Riga and Brest-Litovsk. Still, as Falkenhayn had anticipated, the Russians, even after suffering crushing defeats, used the vastness of their empire to parry the German and Austrian assaults. Before winter set in, Falkenhayn had redirected the effort in the East to eliminating Serbia and opening a direct route to the Turkish Empire. Bulgaria’s entry into the war helped defeat Serbia and keep Rumania neutral. Despite all this, the Russians had not surrendered, and the Austrians still had to deal with the Italians. The war would continue with Germany locked in a stalemate in the West, while the Western Allies continued to keep the war going and buoy up the Russians and Italians. There would be no German victory unless he could find a way to knock France and Great Britain out of the war. In December 1915, while Joffre worked on his plans for 1916, Falkenhayn did the same. Like Joffre in 1914 and 1915, Falkenhayn sought a knockout blow that would end the war.

  Falkenhayn had a few options to examine:

  1. Resume a new offensive in the East and continue to maintain a stalemate on the Western Front with minimum forces.

  2. Shift additional German forces into Austria-Hungary and help their ally win a decisive victory against Italy.

  3. Reinforce the Turks and eliminate the remaining Allies in the Balkans.

  4. Launch a decisive action on the Western Front.

  The leaves had fallen twice since August 1914 and the expected short war had become a never-ending bloodbath with no end in sight. All sides were suffering from some form of economic problems as the war dragged on. Food shortages for the Central Powers were far worse than for the Entente. The belligerents had to deal with a dearth of manpower as they called up more men. Women had to fill the gaps in manpower to maintain the economy. Medical services had not been prepared in 1914 for the massive amount of casualties they received. No one had prepared for this type of war and Falkenhayn was determined to end it.

  Falkenhayn concluded that the first option of resuming an offensive in the East would not result in a decisive victory since the Russians would trade space for time drawing their opponent deeper into Russia. This would continue to widen the front and require more divisions and logistical support.28 The Italian leadership proved itself incompetent, suffering massive losses in the battles of the Isonzo. Fighting in the mountainous terrain did not offer prospects for a quick victory, but even the collapse of Italy would not alter the situation on the Western or the Eastern fronts drastically enough to force the Allies to the peace table. Helping the Turks was simply a sideshow in which the Allies had already committed a number of troops with disappointing results in 1915. The forces of the Entente had failed at Gallipoli, and those in Salonika, sent to rescue the Serbs, offered no threat. The Turkish Minister of War, Enver Pasha, had led an invasion of the Caucasus region and suffered a major defeat at Sarikamish in January 1915. Forced to retreat, the Turkish forces sent to the Caucasus Front spent most of the year licking their wounds. A British threat from the south was checked when the Turks besieged a major British force in Mesopotamia at Kut at the beginning of December 1915. The only possible decisive action for the Turks was an assault on the Suez Canal. The British prepared the defences of the canal area in 1915 while allowing the Turks to occupy the Sinai. The difficult terrain and the distances would have limited any substantial German support beyond despatching advisors.29 Victory in the Middle East or another effort on the Russian front offered no hope of bringing the Allies to their knees.

  Falkenhayn concluded that only a decisive blow in the West could end the war. He also decided that he had to commit veteran troops to the Western Front since trench warfare required more experienced soldiers than the more fluid Eastern Front. The Germans usually established a belt of three lines of trenches. In 1915, the first line, which was most vulnerable to artillery bombardment, was manned sparingly. The troops were concentrated in the second and third lines from where they could counter-attack before the enemy soldiers could haul the artillery needed to support the assault on the next line of trenches through no-man’s-land. Both sides ended up creating complex and extensive trench systems. The question that faced Falkenhayn was how to outperform the French in the attack. Falkenhayn had no illusions about breaking through to the ‘green fields beyond’ and return to a war of manoeuvre in the West.30 He believed that his only option was to break the enemy’s will to resist.

  Falkenhayn summarized the situation in a letter to the Kaiser in December 1915:*

  France has been weakened almost to the limits of endurance, both in a military and economic sense31 – the latter by the permanent loss of the coalfields in the northeast of the country. The Russian armies have not been completely overthrown, but their offensive powers have been so shattered that she can never revive in anything like her old strength. The army of Serbia can be considered as destroyed. Italy has no doubt realized that she cannot reckon on the realization of her brigand’s ambitions within measurable time and would therefore probably be only too glad to be able to liquidate her adventure in any way that would save her face.

  … the chief among them cannot be passed over, for it is the enormous hold which England still has on her allies.

  It is true that we have succeeded in shaking England severely – the best proof of that is her imminent adoption of universal military service. But that is also a proof of the sacrifices England is prepared to make to attain her end – the permanent elimination of what seems to her the most dangerous rival…. Germany can expect no mercy from this enemy, so long as he still retains the slightest hope of achieving his object. Any attempt at an understanding which Germany might make would only strengthen England’s will to war as … she would take it as a sign that Germany’s resolution was weakening.

  [England] is obviously staking everything on a war of exhaustion. We have not been able to shatter her belief that it will bring Germany to her knees and that belief gives the enemy the strength to fight on and keep on whipping their team together.

  What we have to do is to dispel that illusion.

  With that end in view, it will not, in the long run, be enough for us merely to stand on the defensive…. Our enemies, thanks to their superiority in men and material, are increasing their resources much more than we are. If that process continues a moment must come when the balance of numbers itself will deprive Germany of all remaining hope. The power of our allies to hold out is restricted, while our own is not unlimited. It is possible that next winter … will bring food crises, and the social and political crises that always follow them, among the members of our alliance, if there has been no decision by then…. there is no time to lose …

  He continued, stating t
hat Germany could not inflict a defeat upon the English on their home island since it was beyond the reach of the navy. Instead, the Germans must strike ‘only against one of the continental theatres where England is fighting’. Thus:

  We must rule out enterprises in the East…. Victories at Salonica, the Suez Canal, or in Mesopotamia can only help us in so far as they intensify the doubts about England’s invulnerability…. Defeats in the East could do us palpable harm among our allies …

  In Flanders … the state of the ground prevents any far-reaching operations until the middle of the Spring. South of that point [the Loretto Ridge] commanders consider that about 30 divisions would be required. Yet it is impossible for us to concentrate those forces on one part of our front. Even, as was planned, we collected a few more divisions from the German sectors in Macedonia and Galicia, in violation of our military conviction, as well as common prudence, the total reserve in France would still amount to little more than 25 or 25 divisions. When all these are concentrated for the one operation all other fronts will have been drained of reserves to the last man.

  The document reveals Falkenhayn’s logic for deciding on making 1916 the year of decision on the Western Front. This may be why he designated the operation name as ‘Judgement’. The document also shows that he did not intend to use recognized methods to conduct this campaign: