Battle of Verdun (1916): France's Longest Battle of World War I

The Battle of Verdun was the longest single battle of the First World War on the Western Front, fought between the German and French armies around the fortress city of Verdun in north-eastern France from 21 February to 18 December 1916. Germany hoped to wear down the French army in a battle of attrition; instead both sides suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, and Verdun became the supreme symbol of French endurance and sacrifice.

Background: stalemate on the Western Front

After the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914, the war in the west settled into trench warfare from the Channel to Switzerland. Offensives in 1915 by both sides gained little ground at great cost.

Verdun, on the River Meuse, had been a fortress for centuries and stood in a salient, a bulge in the front line that was exposed to German attack on three sides. Its ring of forts, including Douaumont and Vaux, had been built after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. In 1915, however, the French had stripped many forts of their guns for use elsewhere, believing that fortresses were obsolete.

German aims: “bleeding France white”

The German chief of the General Staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, believed that Britain was Germany’s main enemy and that France had to be knocked out first. In his post-war memoirs he described a memorandum to the Kaiser at Christmas 1915 proposing an attack on a place the French would defend at any cost, so that the French army would “bleed to death”.

No copy of this memorandum has ever been found, and historians disagree about whether attrition was the real plan from the beginning. Some argue that Falkenhayn also intended to capture the heights around Verdun and perhaps the city itself. The attack was carried out by the German Fifth Army under Crown Prince Wilhelm, the Kaiser’s eldest son, under the codename Operation Gericht (Judgement).

The German offensive, February 1916

The attack began on the morning of 21 February 1916 with a bombardment by more than 1,200 guns along a narrow front on the east bank of the Meuse, one of the heaviest barrages yet seen. German infantry, including assault troops with flamethrowers, advanced through woods shattered by shellfire.

The German infantry advanced cautiously on the first day, sending strong patrols rather than full assault waves, which gave the shaken French some time to reorganise. Even so, in the first four days the attackers took several kilometres of ground, the largest gains of the whole battle.

French defenders, such as Lieutenant Colonel Émile Driant’s two battalions of chasseurs in the Bois des Caures, held on at heavy cost; Driant was killed on 22 February. On 25 February a small German party walked into Fort Douaumont, the largest fort of the system, which had been left with only a tiny garrison. Its fall was a shock in France.

Pétain and the Sacred Way

On 25 February General Philippe Pétain was appointed to command the defence of Verdun. He reorganised the artillery, ordered that every position be held, and insisted on supplies above all else.

The only usable road into Verdun ran about 75 km (45 miles) from Bar-le-Duc. Pétain had it kept open day and night by thousands of trucks and teams of territorial soldiers who threw gravel under the wheels. The writer Maurice Barrès later named it the Voie Sacrée, the Sacred Way. At the height of the battle a vehicle passed along it every few seconds.

Pétain also introduced the “noria” system, named after a water wheel, rotating divisions through Verdun so that none stayed too long. As a result a large majority of the French army, around 70 of its divisions, served at Verdun at some point, which turned the battle into a shared national experience.

The battle of attrition: March to July

In March the Germans extended the attack to the west bank of the Meuse, where French guns on the ridges of Le Mort-Homme and Hill 304 were firing into their flank. Fighting for these hills lasted until late May.

On 1 May General Robert Nivelle took over the French Second Army at Verdun, while Pétain was promoted to command the army group. In early June the Germans attacked Fort Vaux, whose garrison under Commandant Sylvain-Eugène Raynal held out in its corridors for days without water before surrendering on 7 June.

Conditions for the soldiers on both sides were terrible. Men fought in shell holes rather than trenches, often cut off from food and water for days, under almost continuous artillery fire. Wounded men could lie for hours before stretcher-bearers reached them, and the dead could not be buried. Many French soldiers later said that the shelling, rather than the infantry fighting, was the defining experience of Verdun.

The German offensive reached its high point in June and July. On 23 June, after a bombardment with phosgene gas shells, German troops captured the village of Fleury and approached Fort Souville, the last major fort before the city. A final attack on Souville on 11–12 July failed.

The tide turns

Relief from other fronts

By then the pressure on Verdun was easing. Russia’s Brusilov Offensive from 4 June forced Germany to send troops east, and the Anglo-French Battle of the Somme began on 1 July, partly to relieve Verdun. Falkenhayn was replaced as chief of staff by Paul von Hindenburg on 29 August 1916, and the Germans went over to the defensive.

The French counter-offensives

Using a carefully coordinated “creeping barrage”, in which artillery fire moved forward just ahead of the infantry, French forces under Nivelle and General Charles Mangin launched counter-attacks in the autumn. They recaptured Fort Douaumont on 24 October and Fort Vaux on 2 November 1916.

These attacks were prepared with great care, using heavy guns such as the 400 mm railway howitzers that helped smash Douaumont’s defences, and they cost far fewer lives than the earlier fighting. Their success made Nivelle’s reputation and led to his appointment as French commander-in-chief, although his own great offensive on the Chemin des Dames in April 1917 failed badly.

A final offensive from 15 to 18 December pushed the Germans back further, ending the battle. The front was close to where it had been in February, and Verdun had not fallen.

Key people

• Erich von Falkenhayn (1861–1922), German chief of staff who planned the offensive and lost his post after it failed.
• Crown Prince Wilhelm (1882–1951), commander of the German Fifth Army.
• Philippe Pétain (1856–1951), the French commander who organised the defence and became a national hero; his later leadership of the Vichy regime in the Second World War made his reputation deeply controversial.
• Robert Nivelle (1856–1924), who led the later defence and counter-offensives, and became French commander-in-chief in December 1916.
• Charles Mangin (1866–1925), an aggressive French general who led the recapture of Douaumont.

By the numbers

Casualty estimates vary between sources and depend on the dates and categories counted.

Timeline

• 1915, December: Falkenhayn decides to attack at Verdun.
• 1916, 21 February: The German bombardment and offensive begin.
• 1916, 25 February: Fort Douaumont falls; Pétain is given command at Verdun.
• 1916, March–May: Fighting for Le Mort-Homme and Hill 304.
• 1916, 7 June: Fort Vaux surrenders.
• 1916, 23 June: German gas attack captures Fleury.
• 1916, 11–12 July: The last major German attack fails at Fort Souville.
• 1916, 24 October: French troops retake Fort Douaumont.
• 1916, 2 November: Fort Vaux is reoccupied by the French.
• 1916, 18 December: The final French offensive ends the battle.

Legacy and memory

The battlefield was so devastated that nine villages destroyed in the fighting were never rebuilt; they remain on the map as communes “that died for France”, with no inhabitants. Large areas were declared a “zone rouge” (red zone) and planted with forest. Unexploded shells and human remains are still found today.

The Douaumont Ossuary, inaugurated in 1932, holds the bones of around 130,000 unidentified French and German soldiers, and the national cemetery in front of it contains more than 16,000 French graves. On 22 September 1984 President François Mitterrand of France and Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany stood hand in hand there, a gesture that became a symbol of Franco-German reconciliation.

For France, Verdun became what the Somme became for Britain: the battle that summed up the war. Because the noria system sent so many units through it, a very large share of French soldiers of the generation could say they had “been at Verdun”. The young Captain Charles de Gaulle was wounded and captured near Douaumont on 2 March 1916.

Myths and facts

• Myth: Verdun was a decisive German defeat that changed the course of the war. Fact: The front barely moved; Verdun’s importance lies in its cost and its symbolism rather than in territory won or lost.
• Myth: Falkenhayn’s aim to “bleed France white” is fully documented. Fact: The phrase comes from his post-war memoirs, and the original memorandum has never been found.
• Myth: Almost all the dead were French. Fact: German losses were nearly as heavy as French losses.

Why it matters

Verdun showed the futility and horror of industrial attrition warfare, as later battles such as Passchendaele would again. It drained both France and Germany, shaped French military thinking towards defence between the wars, and remains a central place of memory and reconciliation in Europe.