Hardly any British units achieved their July 1 objectives most fell apart under German machine gun and shellfire, caught in fields of barbed wire which all that shelling was supposed to have taken care of-but didn’t.īritish losses on July 1 came to a staggering 57,500 men, with more than 19,000 killed-most of them in the first hour of the battle, as the infantry fixed bayonets and marched straight into German fire. After a week of shelling German entrenchments, British infantry from 16 divisions assaulted the enemy. Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, has received torrents of criticism for the last hundred years for his mistakes, but the simple fact was that the BEF wasn’t ready for the job it was given on the Somme. On July 1, Britain launched its ill-starred offensive on the Somme river, 150 miles north of Verdun, to take pressure off their beleaguered French allies. Germany’s great problem was that it was fighting a multi-front war, and Verdun wasn’t the only attritional slugfest it got embroiled in during 1916. Falkenhayn’s plan to bleed the enemy white had bled his own forces just as badly, and he was cashiered from his top post as a result.
Alarmingly for the Germans, their losses had been almost as high as France’s. None dispute that at least 300,000 men were killed around Verdun in 1916. No less than 700,000 French and German soldiers were killed, maimed or went missing in the struggle for Verdun, while some estimates place the true number north of 900,000. The bloodbath was so extensive that the armies lost track of their losses, many of whom disappeared in the muck and shellfire. The butcher’s bill of Verdun was like nothing ever seen. In all, the Germans had gained a few miles of shattered terrain overflowing with rotting corpses. Indeed, the front was pretty much where it had been in February. By the time the last French effort to regain lost ground was halted on December 17, Paris could proudly say they had kept the enemy out of Verdun. Both armies kept at it all through the year. The wrestling match Germany sought turned into a nightmare. Hills and forts changed hands over and over again, with thousands of men falling on both sides in each fight, without changing anything of consequence strategically. The fight around Verdun became mutually attritional. As a result, virtually every division in the French army fought at Verdun at some point in 1916.Įverything thereby went wrong for Falkenhayn. The fury of French counterattacks startled the Germans, and by the spring French generals had established a rotational system, moving units into the Verdun meat-grinder then getting them out before they completely collapsed.
Initial German advances were met with dogged resistance, and Verdun quickly became a rallying cry for all France: On ne passe pas-They shall not pass-was the national watchword that year. That part of Falkenhayn’s vision worked as predicted-at least at first. Falkenhayn correctly assessed that France would fight doggedly for Verdun, an ancient fortress-city, thereby allowing the Germans to operate a meat-grinder that would run until the enemy ran out of men. On the orders of Erich von Falkenhayn, Berlin’s top general, German forces initiated the Verdun offensive not to gain ground, not to break through, but simply to bleed France white. German generals accepted this horrific logic first, realizing that the war was now about attrition, not finesse. Victory would come to the army that endured the brutal struggle the longest. A year into the war, it was evident to any wise observer that the conflict had become a stalemate. Throughout 1915, efforts by the French and British-especially the former, who had lost so much of their territory to the invader in the opening months of the Great War-to regain ground ended in agony, with offensives petering out against German fire and entrenchments.
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