Who won the Battle of Verdun?
France won the Battle of Verdun, fought from 21 February to 18 December 1916, by refusing to break under a German offensive meant to bleed its army white, and then by retaking most of the lost ground in the autumn. It was the longest battle of World War I and one of the bloodiest in history: the two armies suffered more than 700,000 casualties, about 300,000 of them killed.2
Some battles are won by a stroke of genius. Verdun was won, at a terrible price, by simply refusing to break. For ten months in 1916 two armies fed themselves into the hills around a French fortress town on the Meuse, and when it was over the front stood almost where it had started, nine villages had vanished from the map, and some 300,000 men were dead.3
Bleed France white
By the end of 1915 the German chief of staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, believed the war would be won or lost in France. In a letter to Kaiser Wilhelm II he argued that Britain was the most dangerous enemy but could not be attacked directly on land, and that Russia was paralyzed and Italy unlikely to matter. “Only France remains,” he concluded. A breakthrough was unnecessary. Germany should instead attack a point “for the retention of which the French would be compelled to throw in every man they have,” and bleed France to death.4
That is the plan as Falkenhayn told it after the war, in a “Christmas memorandum” he printed in 1920, and historians have long doubted parts of it. The German historian Holger Afflerbach calls the memorandum partly an authentic self-interpretation and partly a later fabrication, a clumsy piece of self-justification. The plans of January 1916 aimed at the heights on the east bank of the Meuse, from which Verdun could be threatened, rather than at the town itself, and the word bleeding was not used systematically until the battle was already under way.5
Verdun was chosen because it threatened the main German lines of communication, formed a salient in the French front and, as an old fortress ringed by forts, carried enormous weight in French minds. Command went to the Fifth Army of Crown Prince Wilhelm, the Kaiser's eldest son. The method was to be a series of limited advances, each prepared by a short, violent bombardment, that would draw the French reserves into the German guns.6
21 February 1916
French airmen had spotted the German preparations in January, and on 11 February an intelligence officer found troops massing on the right bank of the Meuse, but the French high command was absorbed in its own offensive plans and reacted late. At 7:15 on the morning of 21 February 1916 the German guns opened fire along an eight-mile front north of Verdun (Rickard). He counts 1,200 guns, including thirteen 420 mm and seventeen 305 mm pieces, with 2.5 million shells stockpiled for the offensive. At about 4:45 in the afternoon the infantry went forward, scouts first, probing for places where the barrage had done its work.7
In three days the Germans overran the first French line. The village of Haumont was razed by artillery, Samogneux and Brabant fell by 23 February, and thousands of French soldiers caught in the open were simply wiped out. On 24 February the second line gave way too, and the Germans closed on the strongest fort of the ring.8 › 21 February in military history, 1916
The fall of Douaumont
On 25 February the Germans walked into Fort Douaumont, arguably the most formidable of Verdun's defenses. It was all but undefended, and the first German into the almost deserted fort, by Rickard's account, was a single sergeant who climbed in through an embrasure. It would take eight months and a sea of blood to win it back.9
Pétain and the Sacred Way
The same day General Philippe Pétain was given command, bringing up the Second Army, and orders to hold the right bank of the Meuse at all costs. He took the artillery under his own hand, brought hundreds of guns to Verdun and linked the batteries by telephone, while French airmen won back control of the sky over the battlefield. When the Germans stormed the village of Douaumont in the last days of February, the line held.10
Pétain's greatest problem was supply. The main railways into Verdun were cut or under German fire, so the French built a motorized supply chain on a scale never seen before. Trucks ran day and night along the dirt road from the railhead at Bar-le-Duc: Britannica counts a fleet of more than 3,000 on a road of 37 miles (about 60 km). The road, which a whole division worked to keep open, came to be called La Voie Sacrée, the Sacred Way. Fresh divisions went up it to the front for short tours and came back down before they were destroyed. By the end of the year roughly three quarters of the French army had passed through Verdun.11
The Dead Man and Hill 304
Checked on the right bank, the Germans widened the battle. On 6 March two reserve corps crossed to the west bank of the Meuse, and from there the fighting turned on two hills, a ridge with the grim name of Le Mort Homme, the Dead Man, and Hill 304. The Germans took the lower crest of the Dead Man on 14 March. Its higher summit was held by neither side. Village after village, Douaumont, Vaux, Cumières, was taken and fought over, and by 8 April the French had lost all that remained of their old front line on the west bank.12
In April Pétain was promoted to command Army Group Center, and the defense of the right bank passed to General Robert Nivelle. The battle had become a mill. Artillery churned the ground into a moonscape of craters and mud, men lived and died in shell holes under constant fire, and small gains of a few hundred yards cost thousands of lives on both sides.13
They shall not pass
In June the Germans made their greatest effort. They attacked Fort Vaux on 1 June, and its garrison under Major Sylvain-Eugène Raynal held out for days until thirst forced it to surrender. In the third week of June a gas bombardment opened a new assault, and the village of Fleury fell. The Germans were now very close to the last heights before Verdun, and Pétain warned that the right bank might have to be given up. He was ordered to hold it at all costs.14
On 23 June Nivelle issued the order of the day that gave Verdun its motto. “Vous ne les laisserez pas passer,” he told his men, you will not let them pass, and it went down in history as Ils ne passeront pas, they shall not pass. Help came from far away. Russia's Brusilov offensive, launched on 4 June, forced the Germans to send troops east, and on 1 July the British and French opened their great offensive on the Somme. A final German attack toward Souville on 11 July broke down on its slopes.15 › Brusilov Offensive, 1916
The failure cost Falkenhayn his post. On 29 August the Kaiser dismissed him in favor of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, and the last significant German attack at Verdun, on 3 September, gained nothing.16 › The Somme, 1916
The French strike back
In the autumn General Charles Mangin proposed an offensive to clear the ground around Verdun, and Nivelle approved it. After three days of bombardment, three French divisions went forward on 24 October behind a creeping barrage. By evening they had retaken Fort Douaumont and 6,000 prisoners, and on 2 November Fort Vaux was French again. A second blow followed on 15 December, when four divisions retook the Poivre ridge and Louvemont. When the fighting ended on 18 December, the French had taken more than 11,000 prisoners in that last attack, and the Germans had lost most of what they had won since February. Mangin's willingness to spend his men's lives earned him a grim nickname: the Butcher.17 › 18 December in military history, 1916
The toll
Over ten months the two armies suffered more than 700,000 casualties at Verdun, some 300,000 of them killed, by Britannica's count of about 400,000 French and 350,000 German casualties. Other tallies differ, from about 378,000 French and 329,000 German losses to well over 400,000 on each side. French guns alone fired more than 10 million field artillery rounds. For all of it, the lines at the end of 1916 were little changed from where they had stood in February. Falkenhayn's plan, whatever it truly was, had failed: Germany had bled almost as heavily as France.18
Verdun became the supreme French symbol of endurance in World War I. About seven in ten French soldiers fought there at some point, so that almost every family in France had someone who had been through it. For decades the battle also divided the two nations: as late as 1966 the French authorities refused to let a German delegation attend the commemorations.19
The Red Zone and the ossuary
The battlefield never recovered. Nine villages, Beaumont, Bezonvaux, Cumières, Douaumont, Fleury, Haumont, Louvemont, Ornes and Vaux, were destroyed and never rebuilt; they are remembered as having died for France and still have mayors, though nobody lives in them. Some 65 square miles of ground were declared a Zone Rouge, a Red Zone too full of unexploded shells to farm or build on. French bomb disposal teams still remove some 40 tons of munitions from the area every year.20
Above it stands the Douaumont Ossuary, its first stone laid in 1920 and inaugurated by President Albert Lebrun in 1932, a 130-meter building topped by a 46-meter tower. It holds the bones of some 130,000 to 150,000 unidentified French and German soldiers, depending on the count, with about 16,000 graves in the national cemetery before it. On 22 September 1984 President François Mitterrand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl stood there hand in hand, and the place of the worst slaughter between France and Germany became a symbol of their reconciliation. Today the ossuary welcomes several hundred thousand visitors a year.21
For France the war went on until the armistice of 11 November 1918, told in how World War I ended. For the wider picture see our guide to the greatest battles of World War I and the World War I era page.22
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