How Falkenhayn’s Verdun Strategy Turned Into M.A.A. (Mutual Assured Attrition)

By Barton J. Turner

Falkenhayn’s sole intent, to “…bleed France white,” was not shared by his subordinate commanders in the 5th Army, the formation selected to carry out the task. Crown Prince Wilhelm, overall commander of the 5th Army, was “uncomfortable” with Falkenhayn’s determination to “bleed” the French army.  Both the Crown Prince and the 5th Army’s Chief of Staff, Constantin Schmidt von Knobelsdorf, attempted to distance themselves in later years from the knowledge of Falkenhayn’s true attritional intent behind Verdun. Yet, in both their writings, they acknowledged that Falkenhayn had used the term “exsanguination” [draining blood] throughout the planning process, and was adamant about the concept as being central to his strategy. While it is clear that top military officials in the 5th Army understood Falkenhayn’s intended purpose, they nonetheless re-prioritised objectives, which ultimately contravened the strategic value of the operation. These commanders disregarded the Falkenhayn’s intent, because his strategy ran contrary to the established thinking within the German military.  

For decades, German Chiefs of Staff had planned for and relied upon the principle of fighting a short war, based upon a strategy of annihilation, where a clear victor was decided in one or two decisive battles. However, due to the  industrialisation of warfare during the First World War, a new strategy of attrition was taking hold out of necessity. The German army failed in this new era of warfare by maintaining its theory of seeking and engaging in a decisive victory. Further, Falkenhayn’s subordinate commanders found it difficult to accept a battle without clearly defined territorial objectives, which is why they developed their own objectives.

The battle began on 21 February 1916 with a massive bombardment, fired from over 1200 artillery pieces, and Falkenhayn ordered patrols to survey what was left of the French after the bombardment had concluded. Instead, 5th Army officers exacerbated German casualties by sending their men to capture territory, again disregarding the intended process. General von Zwehl, commander of the Westphalian Reserve Corps, “disregarded these orders” and sent forward his entire force. In fact, upon hearing of Zwehl’s advance that evening, Knobelsdorf “removed all limits” imposed by Falkenhayn on the 5th Army with respect to their advance

Reflecting in his postwar memoirs, Falkenhayn had envisioned that the German troops at Verdun would be “… free to accelerate or draw out [their] offensive, to intensify it or break it off from time to time, as suits her purpose.” Movement of this nature was crucial to "sell" the trap to the French, and to encourage their continued attacks. This deception was so important to the entire operation that Falkenhayn kept the purpose of the battle vague, only sharing the truth with top military commanders. If the French realised the true purpose behind the battle, surely they would not have entered the trap at all. Falkenhayn determined that the soldiers would play their part better if they honestly thought they were sent to capture Verdun.

Due to the General Staff’s secrecy and the disregard for the intent by their corps commanders, troops were manoeuvred in the real sense, rather than for deception. The 5th Army was aiming to occupy territory and change the battle lines, forgoing their role as bait, and proceeding with actual conquest. Importantly, Falkenhayn believed the capture of Verdun itself to be irrelevant. The only objective was to lure in and kill French troops. While introducing the scheme to the Kaiser, Falkenhayn reported that in the off chance that France did not commit troops to the battle, Germany would simply take Verdun, thereby inflicting an enormous moral defeat upon the French, and providing reasons for celebration in Germany. However, as the French were intent upon defending the line, Falkenhayn had no intention of actually capturing Verdun, because attempting to do so threatened to ensnare his own troops in the trap. In an attempt to curb potential losses and ensure his strategy of attrition was being followed, Falkenhayn had ordered that “…all plans of attack, redeployment and eventually withdrawal” had to be sent through him for approval.

Despite this, on 4 March, the Crown Prince ordered his 5th Army to capture the city of Verdun, at which point they suffered “intensive shelling” from French artillery and failed to reach even the outskirts of the city. This is further proof that Falkenhayn’s subordinates continued to disregard his intent, as well as his orders. If they had been committed to following his strategic plan, they would have withdrawn in order to lure more French soldiers to within range of the waiting German artillery.

The reason Falkenhayn was continually undermined was because the German officer corps was brought up on the teachings of Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen, who focused upon strategies of massed breakthrough, encirclement manoeuvres, and decisive victories.  Falkenhayn was not a disciple of these Schlieffen strategies, having only served a short time under the former Chief of the Imperial German General Staff. This contributed to the officer corps’ view of Falkenhayn as an outsider and untrustworthy. Wilhelm Heye, an officer in the German General Staff and supporter of Falkenhayn, wrote, how “…immediately obvious even to us young General Staff officers that he lacked the schooling in operations taught by the genial Schlieffen.” Heye concluded that he was not astonished that Falkenhayn’s operational methods at Verdun found “little acceptance” from the subordinate commanders.

Falkenhayn’s plan for wearing down the French through Verdun rested upon the "miscalculation" that France’s war efforts were near the point of collapse, and that they could be “coaxed to the bargaining table. The French were facing manpower shortages and had “suffered enormous losses,” both realities of which Falkenhayn viewed as the further weakening of their resolve. In his postwar memoirs, he recounted that “…the strain on France [had] almost reached the breaking point” and that his strategy would be the element to push them past it. He was further convinced of France’s decline by virtue of German intelligence reports. In August 1915, one such report stated that, due to the amount of French casualties during the war to that point, the French Government “…will be faced with the question of whether, despite all outside help, the ending of resistance is a more fitting path for the future of the nation.” Reports such as this fueled Falkenhayn’s decision that France would give up after losing thousands more soldiers, so much so that only nine divisions were allotted to the 5th German Army at the beginning of the battle.

This would have been more than enough to execute the feint that Falkenhayn intended but not enough to conduct an actual assault upon a fortified position such as Verdun. In order to "compel" the French to give up, the Falkenhayn relied upon the devastating fire power of the artillery. An enormous amount of artillery and ammunition was massed prior to the battle, the Germans having fired around a million projectiles alone in the initial bombardment, leaving virtually nothing standing within the kill zone.  Falkenhayn did not allocate extra divisions due to his reasoning that the artillery would inflict the wounds, while the troops lured more French into the trap. Had a lengthy and drawn-out resistance been forecast, more troops would have been necessary at the beginning of the battle. The French army, shaken from the initial bombardment, did, in fact, offer limited resistance in a few areas. As the battle raged on in the following months, Falkenhayn merely observed the dogged French resistance as a dramatic last-ditch effort that would surely succumb to German military might.

He had surmised, erroneously, that the will of France would not “slowly and visibly bend” but would rather “snap” all at once. To him, these “most strenuous acts of resistance” were the “last gasps” of the dying French state. This “last gasp,” as viewed by Falkenhayn, turned out to be extremely dangerous and costly to Germany. By assuming that every renewed resistance was at the apex of the French tipping point, German soldiers were repeatedly thrown into the "mill" with the assurance that they were on the verge of victory. Unfortunately for these soldiers, who were being chewed up by this purposeful battle of attrition, France was far from being at the tipping point. In fact, their soldiers were rallying together and strengthening their resolve to fight. They were quite aware they were taking many casualties, but Falkenhayn was right when he picked Verdun as a French symbol that the nation would strive to retain. Once the battle was set in motion, the kill zones created to destroy French forces sucked German soldiers in as well. The planned and purposeful destruction of troops at Verdun had worked, but, unfortunately for the German forces, they would end up suffering almost as much as the French. 

“Ironically [however], despite the symbolic nature of the city, defending Verdun itself made little-to-no strategic sense.” After the Germans began their attack, Marshal Joseph Joffre, the commander-in-chief of all French forces on the Western Front, initially proposed that the city be abandoned, so that better defensive positions could be built on favourable terrain and could thus hold the Germans in place. In fact, the forts around Verdun were viewed as relics of the past. Joffre went as far as having dozens of artillery pieces and more than a hundred thousand projectiles removed from around Verdun in 1915 for use elsewhere on the Western Front. When the local commander, General Frédéric-Georges Herr, voiced his concern over the removals, Joffre replied that the strongholds no longer had a role to play and that Verdun must “…under no circumstances be defended for itself.”

Source:  Excerpted from "Intent upon Destruction: German Strategy at Verdun, 1916," Canadian Military Journal, Spring 2019