There are plenty to see around Verdun but its most significant role was militaristic and it occured during WWI.
The Battle of Verdun, which happened between February 21st to December 18, 1916, World War I engagement
in which the French repulsed a major German offensive.
It was one of the longest, bloodiest, and most-ferocious battles of the war;
French casualties amounted to about 400,000, while Germany has about 350,000. Around 300,000 were killed.
The Prelude
It all started with German Gen. Erich von Falkenhayn
who believed that the war would be won or lost in France,
and he felt that a strategy of attrition was Germany’s best hope of achieving its goals.
Falkenhayn believed that Britain was the most formidable of the Allied powers.
He regarded Russia as already paralyzed and Italy as unlikely to affect the outcome of the war, concluding,
“Only France remains.” and that Germany should bleed France to death by choosing a point of attack
The fortress of Verdun with its surrounding fortifications along the Meuse River was selected
because it threatened the main German communication lines,
it represented a salient in the French defenses,
and the loss of such citadel would be an enormous blow to French morale.
The keynote of the tactical plan was a continuous series of limited advances
that would draw the French reserves into the mincing machine of the German artillery.
Local command of the operation was given to Crown Prince William, the eldest son of the Kaiser
The initial German attack
As early as January 1916, French airmen had detected German preparations,
and on February 11, 1916, a French intelligence officer discovered a buildup of German troops on the right bank of the Meuse.
The French commanders had been almost exclusively focused on their own offensive plans,
their hasty efforts to bolster the defenses of Verdun were very nearly too late.
Over the next 10 days, thousands of men and dozens of guns were moved to Verdun to oppose the expected German attack.
French officers organized a motorized supply chain
on an unprecedented scale, transporting men and matériel to the front in a fleet of more than 3,000 trucks.
The 37-mile (57-km) dirt road connecting the railhead at Bar-le-Duc to Verdun came to be known as La Voie Sacrée (“the Sacred Way”) for its critical role in the French defense.
On February 21, the Germans commenced a massive bombardment and infantry attack
By the end of the first day they made significant gains, penetrating the French lines.
The following day they capitalized on their gains, repelling a French counterattack.
The village of Haumont was razed by artillery fire,
and In three days the Germans had overrun the first line of French defenses,
and both sides hastily reinforced their positions.
The rest of the German line swept through the second rank of French defenses,
capturing villages and estates while advancing on the key fort at Douaumont.
That evening the French commander at Verdun, Gen. Joseph-Jacques-Césaire Joffre,
was set aside in favour of Gen. Philippe Pétain.
Pétain brought a fresh army to the fight, and the French high command soon decreed that a new defensive line, that should be held at all costs.
As the French defense was reorganized, the Germans captured the undefended Fort Douaumont,
arguably the most formidable of the strongpoints surrounding Verdun.
French resistance stiffened over subsequent days, however, and the German advance slowed.
The second phase of the battle
The Germans had failed to gain an immediate victory that they soon realized
that the British army was preparing an attack on the Somme.
For its part, the French general staff hold on at Verdun without ceasing
to prepare for the Somme, exhausting the Germans as much as possible
in advance of the planned Allied summer offensive.
On March 4 the Germans captured Douaumont village. The town was razed during the battle, ensuring that it could not be rebuilt.
On March 10 the Germans cleared the way to a hill known as Le Mort Homme (“the Dead Man”).
Both sides suffered tens of thousands of casualties
during these furious engagements, and on March 14 the Germans captured the lower crest of Le Morte Homme.
The higher crest, could be held by neither side and was considered No Man’s Land.
the Germans spent the next couple of days engaging in a series of bloody but inconclusive attacks on the fort and village of Vaux
and captured it on March 31st.
By April 8 the French had lost all that remained of their former front line on the left bank of the Meuse.
The bloody stalemate continued through April as both armies rotated their commanding officers.
Pétain was promoted to commander of Army Group Centre, and his former command was divided,
with Robert-Georges Nivelle taking charge of French forces on the right bank
and Henri Berthelot leading the defense on the left.
The German command had also divided the field of battle into two sections,
with Gen. Ewald von Lochow replacing Gen. Bruno von Mudra on the right bank;
Gen. Max von Gallwitz commanded the left bank until he was replaced by Gen. Hermann von François in July.
As each army continued to seek the advantage at Verdun,
preparations for the Somme offensive exerted pressure on both sides to push for a hasty and conclusive resolution to the battle.
After days of back-and-forth combat, the Germans captured both positions on June 9,
but they were unable to carry their attack due to the defensive works south of Thiaumont.
Fighting was largely inconclusive,
but on June 15 the French reclaimed roughly a little more than a half mile (one kilometre) of trenches
Such minor gains, which came at an enormous cost in lives, would implify the horrors of trench warfare on the Western Front.
While the Germans retained the initiative at Verdun,
their efforts were frustrated when the were forced to divert attention to the Eastern Front
when victory at Verdun seemed imminent,
the Germans renewed their attack on the on June 21st.
As more French towns fell the situation had become so dire for the French that Pétain,
as sector commander, advised relocating to the left bank if the Germans advanced farther;
on June 27 he was ordered to hold the right bank at all costs.
The tide turns at Verdun
The preliminaries of the great Franco-British offensive on the Somme started on June 24 with a weeklong artillery barrage.
On July 11 the Germans made yet another attack on Verdun, and another attack on August 1st but both failed.
While the French started retaking towns and villages,
Local fighting continued throughout the month, and the final significant German attack, on September 3, yielded no gains.
With that the active period of the Battle of Verdun came to an end.
by December 1916, roughly 75 percent of the French army had seen action on the Meuse.
From February through July, the Germans had used 43 divisions.
French guns at Verdun fired over 10,000,000 rounds with the field artillery,
over 1,000,000 medium-calibre rounds, and 600,000 large-calibre rounds.
At the conclusion of this enormous expenditure of blood and resources, the lines were little changed from where they had been in early February.
In September 1916,
Gen. Charles Mangin, proposed a scheme to liberate the Verdun region.
An offensive was initiated on October 2st1 with an artillery barrage across a broad front.
An infantry assault followed on October 24,
By that evening the French had retaken Douaumont along with 6,000 German prisoners,
and by November 2 the fort at Vaux was once again in French hands.
In order to exploit his successes, Mangin planned to attack again on December 5th
with the intention of retaking in one blow the whole of the former second French line,
which had been lost on February 24.
French and German batteries engaged in artillery duels, and above the battlefield pilots contested for supremacy of the skies.
On December 15, the attack occurred with the Germans starting late.
By nightfall the French had retaken the whole of Poivre Hill.
This engagement, which came to be known as the Battle of Louvemont, was completed on December 18 with the capture of over 11,000 German prisoners.
This finally marked the end of the Battle of Verdun.
The aftermath
Over 10 months in 1916,
the two armies at Verdun suffered over 700,000 casualties, including some 300,000 killed.
The pastoral landscape surrounding the city had been permanently transformed,
and nine villages were entirely destroyed.
After the war the villages were memorialized as having “died for France”
and, although uninhabited, continued to be administered by mayors
to preserve their existence as administrative entities.
The unknown dead were commemorated at the Douaumont Ossuary,
a monument completed in 1932 that contains the remains of 150,000 unidentified French and German soldiers.
An area covering some 65 square miles on the Verdun ridge was declared a Zone Rouge (“Red Zone”)
because of the presence of unexploded ordnance, and development within it was prohibited.
In the 21st century the French Interior Ministry estimated that over 10 million shells remained in the soil around Verdun,
the bomb-clearing units continued to remove some 40 tons of unexploded munitions from the area annually.
It was estimated that at existing rates of clearance, the deminers would be uncovering and disposing of ordnance in the Verdun area for centuries to come.
There are plenty of sights to see in Verdun but according to their brochure there are 5 main sights that are worth seeing.
The memorial transmit the history behind the Battle of Verdun and their fighters, the French and Germans.
2,000 memorabilia's and objects from both sides and testimonials and exceptional audio devices
mingles to recall the fighting experience of these men.
It is the resting place of the unidentified remains of around 130,000 French and German soldiers
collected from the chaotic battlefield. Devastated by 51 months of appalling war.
This iconic monument is the symbol of the Franco-German reconciliation
sealed by the handshake between Mitterand and Kohl in September 1984.
It is the vault key of the fortified system of Verdun.
Fort Douaumont was taken by the German army within the first days of the Battle of Verdun
in February 1916.
It was occupied for eight months until it was retaken on October 24th 1916 after a bitter fighting.
Between March and June 1916, Fort Vaux was bombed by almost 8,000 shells a day.
Its isolated garrison resisted the lead heroic battles before having to surrender due to the exhaustment of its armed forces.
it then became the symbol of the resistance of the Verdun soldiers.
It is in this citadel that on November 1920, that took place the choice of the unknown soldier
who lies beneath the Arc de Triomphe
Its unknown soldier symbolizes the sacrifice of all the unidentified soldiers or those lost
You can also discover the everyday life of the home front soldiers. Thanks to the film animations and constitutions.
So thats it for the history of the Battle of Verdun, its importance
and the five historical places we visited.
I hope you guys learned a lot until next time bye.