Verdun: A Diversion from the German Way of War?

By John Beatty

The Plan

Erich von Falkenhayn's Western Front offensive of 1916 aimed directly at the traditional invasion route between the Rhine and Paris. The French had fortified the area called the Heights of the Meuse heavily over the years. These fortifications culminated in a series of forts that, at the very least, allowed them to observe the entire Meuse-Rhine Plain for artillery. 

The German plan was simple: take the forts, make the French commit their strategic reserves protecting the route to Paris, build up behind the bulge, press on to Paris in the summer months until France gave up so Germany could march home in triumph before fall. The strategic motivations, however, were far more complex. Losing manpower hurt German agriculture, which was also sorely affected by the British blockade—much more than Germany could withstand. Though Germany had suffered less than had Britain and France on the battlefields, combined the Allies had far more manpower than did the Central Powers. Germany, the most powerful of the Powers, was in the second year of a war she had expected would last two months.

French Troops Marching Out of Verdun to the Battlefield

Knocking France out of the war was the key to Germany's survival.

On 21 February 1916, the Germans unleashed their Fifth Army on the French Second Army manning the nineteen fortresses of the Verdun complex. The first French fort to fall three days later was Douaumont, the largest and highest of the outer ring forts, by a small German raiding party. Even though the bastion had been unoccupied for months, the French public was scandalized, and in a Gallic rage the French Army threw more and more men into the maw of the German offensive.

German Artillery Hammering Verdun

This was a diversion from the German way of war.

While most scholars feel that this was the German intention all along, German military theory and doctrine never, ever had an attritional battle in mind. Prussia/Brandenburg, the font of Imperial German military tradition with the largest WWI armies, never had the numbers nor the temperament for a drawn-out brawl with anyone, and always preferred maneuver—preferably to encirclement—to merely adding up casualties. Tannenberg, the August 1914 double-envelopment of the Russian Second Army in East Prussia, was far more to the Prussian/German liking than was the long slog of Verdun. It is likely that post-Verdun German commentators merely claimed that lengthy attrition was the German plan all along, when in truth the French defense, orchestrated by Robert Nivelle, was more persistent and successful than they had imagined was possible.

German Infantry at Verdun

Verdun would rage on unabated until 18 December—ten months.

It would consume the lives of some 300,000 men on the French front alone, out of the million committed, and occupying the full attention of over a hundred divisions. To the north, another bloodbath started by the British on the Somme on 1 July to ease German pressure on the French would rage inconclusively until 18 November and consume another million lives. For these millions, was the German diversion from her way of war worth the cost?

Destroyed German Artillery Position at Verdun

It was impossible for the rest of the world not to notice.

The Americans looked on in horror and in contemplation at the specter of the 2,300 French and German casualties (about a regiment) every day on the Verdun front alone. President Woodrow Wilson had forbidden American military men to prepare contingency plans, but that did not prevent preparedness plans from being put into action with some urgency. The Plattsburg Movement, a civilian-driven, military favored program of camps that trained young collegians around the country, had finally come to fruition in the National Defense Act of 1916, which also created the Army Reserve. While the effect wasn’t immediate, it made the Americans just a little more prepared when America joined the war in 1917.

John Beatty is the author of the novel Steele's Battalion, which takes place after the Verdun/Somme slaughterfest, but depicts its own horrors on the Western Front from 1917 to 1918. Steele's Battalion is available from your favorite bookseller or autographed by the author by becoming a PAID subscriber his Substack HERE.