hoogllasvegas.blogg.se - Battle of verdun ww1

By the end of June, the Germans were almost successful in breaking through.The Germans used phosgene gas and flamethrowers for the first time.

If you abandon Verdun, I will sack you all on the spot.įrench Prime Minister Aristide Briand to General Joffre. If you surrender Verdun, you will be cowards, cowards! And you needn’t wait till then to hand in your resignation. The French defended Verdun, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of soldiers. General Pétain: “Ils ne passeront pas!”.25 February Fort Douaumont taken by the Germans.To annihilate France.įrench soldiers of the 87th Regiment, 6th Division, at Côte 304, France would defend this place with everything they had and would be worn down. Īim : To “bleed the French white” according to Falkenhayn. The Germans chose this site with the knowledge that the French would defend it. Place: Verdun, a fortress of symbolic importance for the French.A German offensive against French lines.Verdun was a triumph for French fortitude and the Generalship of Charles Mangin, Robert Nivelle and Pétain.Īlan Palmer, Dictionary of Twentieth Century History, Penguin, 1979, p.386 French counter-attacks from 23 October onwards recovered the forts and most of the shell-cratered wasteland overrun by the Germans. But the Germans, too, suffered considerable loss of morale for, although two key forts (Douaumont and Vaux) were captured by the Germans and although in June the French were dependent on a single second-class road for supplies, Verdun itself never fell. The 300-day battle destroyed French reserves and left the French too weak and shell-shocked for a resolute offensive without help from other allies. He chose Verdun, a fortified city on the Meuse, whose fall in 1792 had precipitated panic in Paris. The battle arose from a plan of General von Falkenhayn (1861-1922), chief of the German General Staff, who claimed that it would be possible ‘to bleed France white’ by launching a massive attack on a narrow sector where national sentiment would force the French to ‘throw in every man they had’.

The most sustained battle of the First World War, in which the French suffered more than 400,000 casualties and the Germans nearly 350,000. Winston Churchill wrote in ‘The World Crisis’ that the generals were “ content to fight machine-gun bullets with the breasts of gallant men and think that was waging war.”īattle of Verdun (21 February – 16 December 1916).

These large offensives only came to an end when the onset of winter prevented further attacks.

This strategy relied on huge numbers of expendable troops – “ cannon fodder” – and if the breakthrough didn’t come, the attacks continued in the hope that the enemy would run out of soldiers first. Many hundreds of thousands of soldiers from both sides died as a result of these tactics.

Because the bombardment was ineffective, when soldiers went over the top they were confronted with enemy machine gun fire.

The trench system was so well developed by 1916, particularly on the German side, that the initial bombardment was ineffective.

This allowed the enemy to prepare their defences.

It was difficult to keep the enemy’s aerial reconnaissance from noticing the preparations for the push.

There were a number of problems with this strategy:

Once the attack began, huge numbers of soldiers would go ‘ over the top’, leave their trenches and attack the enemy’s positions.

The attack was preceded by heavy bombardment for a number of days to reduce the ability of the enemy to repel the attack.

The planning for such an attack took many months and involved assembling hundreds of thousands of men along with supplies, weapons and support.

The main strategy employed on the Western Front to break the stalemate was ‘ the big push’, that is, a massive, concentrated attack at one point of the front to break the enemy’s lines and renew a war of movement.