The Battle of Verdun is now a month old and with absolutely no end in sight. German Army
Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn had launched the assault as a plan to bleed France to death
in a war of attrition... or had he? Was that really his plan, or a justification made after
the fact? Well, in the comments to our regular Thursday episodes about Verdun you’ve had
a lot to say about it, so let’s take a look.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War special episode about Erich von Falkenhayn
and his motivations for the Battle of Verdun.
You could, of course, simply believe Falkenhayn, since it was his offensive after all.
Verdun, as a location, didn’t matter to him but it did to the French, and they would
send endless men to their deaths to defend it. Indeed, they would either shed so much
blood by holding it or lose so much prestige and morale by abandoning it that they wouldn’t
be able to continue the war, so to Falkenhayn it wasn’t about conquest, but Ausblutung-
bleeding out- destroying the French by a war of attrition.
In 1919, Falkenhayn insisted that this had been his plan in an article in a military
journal, and once again in his memoirs that were published in 1920. He referred there
to a memorandum he had written to the Kaiser on Christmas Eve 1915 detailing this very
plan, to bleed France to death.
But you know what? No one, no war historians or anyone has ever been able to find any trace
of that memorandum. It was cited again and again through the years when referring to
the battle, and while many criticized its thinking, no one questioned its existence
for quite some time, and once the German army archives were destroyed in 1945 it was never
gonna turn up anyway, but in recent generations historians have begun to challenge that the
memorandum ever existed and claim that it was a fabrication by Falkenhayn after the
fact, but if the memorandum was a lie, were at least the thoughts and plans behind it
Falkenhayn’s actual plans?
He died in 1922 so no one would ever learn otherwise straight from the horse’s mouth,
but let’s look at Falkenhayn in general for a minute.
This man had enemies. General Ludendorff hated him, Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria hated him,
Marshal Hindenburg, Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, Foreign Minister von Jagow were all his enemies
and he had more in the government and in the army, and if not for the Kaiser, Falkenhayn
would have been entirely on his own. Here’s something; if you’re surrounded by enemies
you’re not especially communicative, and to describe Falkenhayn that way would be an
understatement. He kept his designs to himself. In fact, he kept most everything to himself;
his plans for the execution of Verdun were so secret that his immediate subordinates
didn’t know what was going to happen.
What we do know is that he fervently believed the war would be won in the west. He did not
share Ludendorff’s and Hindenburg’s belief that Russia could be decisively beaten, he
certainly did not think the Italian front deserved much attention, and he did not want
to take men away from the Western Front. To Falkenhayn, Germany’s real enemy was time.
So throughout 1915 he had looked up and down the Western Front at the Somme, Alsace, Belfort,
and finally Verdun and a way to win the war in 1916.
Thing is, it doesn’t seem like Verdun was actually an end to itself. Several of Falkenhayn’s
military contemporaries, General Groener, Graf von Schulenberg, said that this was only
part of a larger strategy, and the Kaiser himself years later said that Falkenhayn had
told him straight out that Verdun would cause the French to attack elsewhere and then cause
a premature British relief attack somewhere, which Germany would successfully counterattack
and smash. The Kaiser said, “The hope persisted to break up the English front.” Verdun was
to be the prelude.
Even in January 1916 Falkenhayn was talking about such attacks and counterattacks and
late in the month denied requests to send more divisions to Verdun, replying that they
would need them in Artois against the British. He really thought that with Verdun under attack
the British would have no choice but to attack and on February 11th, one day before the beginning
of Verdun was originally supposed to take place, General Groener wrote that Falkenhayn
thought of Verdun as the first step to a decision in the west.
So the Christmas memorandum is very much at odds with the recollections of Falkenhayn’s
contemporaries.
It had little to say about Verdun being the beginning point of a chain reaction and a
lot to say about Ausblutung, but Falkenhayn had spoken much about the former and almost
nothing about the latter at the time that he supposedly wrote the memorandum. When he
met the Kaiser at Pless in early December 1915 he spoke of a series of partial offensives
and the Allied counterattacks that would bring back a war of movement and that would bleed
the enemy to death, but he was no more specific than that, and at the time his first target
was still Belfort, not Verdun.
He knew that breaking through was not a real feasible option. The British and French had
had a million man advantage in 1915 and they hadn’t broken through. At Champagne, 18
French Divisions couldn’t break through seven German ones and since he was only going
to have eight at Verdun, could you really expect a breakthrough? And then what? The
Germans still held territory 100 kilometers from Paris, would a narrow breakthrough three
times that distance away really help much?
Falkenhayn didn’t begin talking about Ausblutung until the battle was weeks old. By that time,
none of the expected Allied counterattacks had materialized anywhere else on the front.
Historian Paul Jankowski writes in his excellent recent book “Verdun, the longest battle
of the war”, “Was Ausblutung a possibility or a plan? Falkenhayn’s contemporaries confused
the first with the second when they trusted his recollection... The Christmas Memorandum’s
apologia for Ausblutung, appearing belatedly in memoirs composed apparently without original
sources at hand, bears all the marks of contrivance and none of authenticity.”
Here’s a brief historiography- a history of the history - of the Ausblutung proliferation,
also courtesy of Jankowski.
By 1920, French historians like Gabriel Hanotaux were writing about it. In 1935 Albert Malet
and Jules Isaac wrote about Verdun as symbolic of the horrors of modern war using Falkenhayn’s
sinister plan to illustrate it. In 1966, for the 50th anniversary of the Battle le Monde
published an article called “To Bleed white the French army” and the historian Alistair
Horne, in his seminal work on Verdun, quoted by everybody including myself, gives credence
to Falkenhayn and his belated claim.
But by the 1990s historians were beginning to dissect that claim and in the new millennium
began to publish their thoughts. In 2008, a Franco-German history of the war called
the Christmas memorandum a forgery and Ausblutung just an excuse for failure at Verdun; that
same year some school books began to say the same.
But what’s the actual truth?
Well, I don’t know. Falkenhayn was a very secretive man who hid his plans from even
his closest comrades and advisors, so maybe this really was his plan all along and he
was just keeping it under his hat till things got underway; maybe the traditional viewpoint
is correct. On the other hand there is very compelling evidence - or lack of evidence
- that modern historians are correct and that the memorandum was a fabrication after the
fact to simply excuse failure on a scale that was both colossal and monstrous.
To see both sides, but also to read two really good books about Verdun, both the battle history
and the theory and culture that surrounded it, definitely check out both Paul Jankowski
and Alistair Horne’s works on the subject; if you order them through our Amazon shop
we even get a little piece of the proceeds. And to see the beginning of the battle itself,
click here for our episode about that.
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