Brown Verdun 1916

1. Auflage 2003
ISBN: 978-0-7509-6251-3
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

1916 was a year of killing. The British remember the Somme, but earlier in the year the heart of the French army was ripped out by the Germans at Verdun. The garrison city in north-eastern France was the focus of a massive German attack; the French fought back ferociously, leading to a battle that would claim hundreds of thousands of lives and permanently scar the French psyche. To this day one can visit the site of ghost villages uninhabited since, but still cherished like shrines. Memories of Verdun would greatly influence military and political thinking for decades to come as both sides came away with memories of bravery, futility and horror. Malcolm Brown has produced a vivid new history of this epic clash; drawing on original illustrations and eye-witness accounts he has captured the spirit of a battle that defines the hell of warfare on the Western Front.

MALCOLM BROWN was for many years a BBC documentary producer; in 1966 he co-produced with Patricia Meehan the highly successful film Scapa Flow, which led to the publication of this book. Since 1989 he has been a freelance historian at the Imperial War Museum, and is now best known for his books on military subjects, including Tommy Goes to War and a number of IWM books about the First World War.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Brown, Malcolm

Leseproben

3

THE PLAN

Verdun lay so deep in French-held territory that it can seem somewhat incredible that the deviser of the strategy that subjected it to ten months of terror in 1916 had as his prime aim the defeat of Great Britain: or more precisely, of England. Conditioned by long years of imperial rivalry, Germany’s Chief of the General Staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn, saw France, above all, as ‘England’s best sword’. If only that sword could be knocked out of her hand, England would herself surely concede and admit defeat. The destruction of France’s will to resist, by whatever means, was seen as the vital step to that end. Ironically, indeed inevitably, ‘England’ was to be merely a fascinated spectator of the resultant encounter, while the huge casualty lists to which it gave rise were primarily French, though there were also massive losses on the German side.

Falkenhayn’s attitude towards England was not, however, unique to him. German public opinion was far more anti-English than anti-French. France was the old enemy, beaten in previous wars. England was the heart of the Empire which should have been friendly – were not the two countries linked through their royal families? – but seemed determined, casually, almost arrogantly, to bar Germany from her place in the sun.

To produce the result required Falkenhayn proposed that Germany should attack France at a point where the wound would be so hurtful that she would defend to the last, no matter what the scale of sacrifice. As he himself would put it (in a document attributed to December 1915 which would become known as the ‘Christmas Memorandum’):

Within our reach behind the French sector of the Western Front there are objectives for the retention of which the French General Staff would be compelled to throw in every man they have. If they do so the forces of France will bleed to death – as there can be no question of a voluntary withdrawal – whether we reach our goal or not. If they do not do so, and we reach our objectives, the moral effect on France will be enormous. For an operation limited to a narrow front, Germany will not be compelled to spend herself as completely.

Falkenhayn went for the option of an inland battle in his struggle against England because he saw no alternative. Flanders, the obvious area of attack, would probably only produce a military log-jam, as indeed would be the case in 1917. A naval battle was far too risky; when one was attempted later in 1916, at Jutland, the Germans were fortunate to get away with a kind of score-draw. Unrestricted submarine warfare was a possible option – indeed, having been called off after the sinking of the Lusitania and other such ships the previous year, it would be restarted in February 1916 as a second string to the initiative against Verdun. But it would obviously be slow to take effect. If, however, France could be so destabilised that she was forced to sue for peace, England would surely conclude that she too must withdraw from the war. On first consideration this might seem a bizarre gamble, but the German attacks of 1918 were launched on a very similar premise. They were meant to break the Anglo–French forces apart, force the French to give up and send the British back across the Channel, before the arrival of the Americans. Falkenhayn’s policy was basically an earlier variation on the same theme.

The German supremo had two names in his shortlist of places appropriate for attack: Belfort and Verdun. But Belfort, at the eastern end of the front close to the Swiss border, offered restricted scope for manoeuvre; furthermore, any advantage gained there would be too peripheral. Verdun, by contrast, had much to recommend it, not least because, he argued, its closeness to German railway communications offered a point of attack for the French whereby they could make the whole German front in France and Belgium untenable.

Verdun had a number of other advantages from the German viewpoint. The fighting of earlier months had left it in a salient, overlooked, in the style associated in British minds with Ypres, on three sides and therefore ripe to be pinched out. Additionally, its links to the rest of France were minimal. The main railway line between Verdun and Paris’s Gare de L’Est via Ste Menéhoulde ran so close to the enemy’s lines as to be at the mercy of his guns. There remained one narrow-gauge railway and one road, linking Verdun with the departmental capital, Bar-le-Duc, almost sixty kilometres away. On the German side, by contrast, fourteen railheads were available through which the men and the matériel required might be brought to the points of attack.

A valuable aid to the understanding of the concept of the Verdun battle is the 1919 Michelin Guide, entitled Verdun and the Battle for its Possession. Produced, like all the others in this emotive series, ‘in memory of the Michelin employees and workmen who died gloriously for their country’, it is a volume of commemoration, a guidebook, and a thumbnail history. The following is its graphic caption to a double-page map (reproduced here) entitled ‘Plan of the German offensive of February, 1916’:

‘Concentrate an all-powerful artillery, cut with gun-fire the only main railway connecting Verdun with France, crush the French defences, isolating their occupants with heavy artillery barrages, then rush the town with huge masses of men, irrespective of losses, crushing the last vestiges of resistance’ – such was the ‘kolossal’ [sic] plan which the Germans set out to execute on February 21st, 1916.

This, in a nutshell, was the essence of the German intention, though it is significant that it takes for granted that the Germans wished actually to take Verdun whereas in fact there was, and there still remains, considerable ambiguity as to precisely what it was that lay at the heart of Falkenhayn’s strategy.

The key question to be asked is: what would best serve Falkenhayn’s purpose? The seizure of Verdun would be a great coup, but would that lead to the destruction of the French army? Would it not be better to turn the Verdun sector into a kind of open wound, which the French would keep pouring men and resources into to staunch? In other words, would it not be more productive to make attrition the purpose of the offensive, rather than victory?

That, however, was not how an offensive could be sold to the soldiers to be involved. There was nothing ‘dulce et decorum’ in dying for so arid and ruthless a policy.

Thus it was necessary that Crown Prince Wilhelm’s Fifth Army, which was to carry out the attack, should believe that Verdun itself was the target. In his Army Orders the Prince defined his aim as ‘to capture the fortress of Verdun by precipitate methods’. Confirmation that his troops assumed that such was the basic intention occurs in the memoirs of a French commander whose reputation was soon to be made in the forthcoming struggle, the future Marshal Pétain. He wrote of the pre-battle period: ‘[N]umerous letters found on prisoners mentioned an early action to be led by the Crown Prince, also a military review scheduled to be held toward the end of February on Verdun’s parade-ground, and even predictions of the ensuing peace’. With such prospects in view, the Germans would contemplate the ordeal facing them in a better frame of mind than would have been the case had they known they were to take part in a kind of timeless killing-match.

A caveat must be entered, however, before the story continues. Recent research has questioned the whole basis of the Falkenhayn view of the Verdun battle. The text of his so-called ‘Christmas Memorandum’ only occurs in his book General Headquarters 1914–1916 and its Critical Decisions, written in 1919. The German Official History quotes it, but obviously uses the autobiography as the source, since it states that no copy was found in the official archives. It has therefore been suggested that the Memorandum too was written in 1919, to justify in retrospect why Verdun was never captured, the argument being: ‘it never fell; I never meant it to fall’. Some students have therefore taken the view that the standard explanation view of the origin of the battle is no longer valid. By contrast, a recent highly respected scholar in this field, Holger H. Herwig, accepts that the document might have been written later but nevertheless believes it still reflected Falkenhayn’s overall intention in 1916. The situation remains suspicious but not proven; indeed it could be argued against a revisionist interpretation that Falkenhayn was doing little for his own reputation in the wake of Germany’s defeat in aligning himself with a deliberate policy of attrition for attrition’s sake, just at the time – 1919 – when at last the belligerent nations were able to look back on the war and count its terrible cost.

But another question has been raised: why was Falkenhayn so sure that an attack on Verdun would persuade France to pour out her life-blood to hold the breach? Looking back on Verdun 1916, do we not invest it retrospectively with the status it would shortly acquire? Was Falkenhayn in fact so surprised at the amazing French response and tenacious resistance that he had to invent his ‘bleed France white’ philosophy to explain it?

A historian and politician, and indeed soldier, of the time who saw Falkenhayn’s strategy as primarily one of attrition was Winston Churchill. While the battle was still in progress he wrote an article for the London Magazine...