Battle of Verdun - Significance

Significance

The Battle of Verdun—also known as the "Mincing Machine of Verdun" or Meuse Mill—became a symbol of French determination to hold the ground and then roll back the enemy at any human cost. However, it is quite clear that the French High Command had been caught unprepared by the assault in February 1916. As time passed, Verdun became a battle of attrition in which artillery played the dominant role, leaving craters that are still partially visible today. The intensive use of trucking to maintain the supply of troops and materiel to the front lines was a significant factor that helped level the odds between the two armies. Furthermore, during the summer of 1916, a standard gauge railway bypass (the Sommeilles-Nettancourt to Dugny line) was completed and took over from the traffic on the "Voie Sacrée" and from the narrow gauge "Chemin de fer meusien". The German military planners had neither anticipated the intense trucking on the Voie sacrée nor the later opening of the Sommeilles-Nettancourt to Dugny standard gauge railway line.

The German General Staff had chosen Verdun as a strategic target, instead of Belfort, because the peacetime standard gauge railway lines going through Verdun had long been interrupted. One line coming from the south into Verdun had been severed when the Germans occupied Saint-Mihiel in 1914, while the other, leading westward out of Verdun towards Paris, was under direct German observation and artillery fire at Aubreville. Thus, at the outset, the German planners saw Verdun for what it was: a salient cut off on three sides, a cul-de-sac without standard gauge railway communications and thus an ideal opportunity for springing a trap to strike a fatal blow against the French Army. What they did not anticipate was that once the initial surprise had worn out, French logistics would improve with time and rob them of their initial advantage. It has often been remarked that Verdun was in large part a logistic victory of French trucks over German railways.

The Battle of Verdun popularized General Robert Nivelle's: "They shall not pass", a simplification of the actual French text: "Vous ne les laisserez pas passer, mes camarades" ("you shall not let them pass, my comrades"), on record in Nivelle's Order of the day of 23 June 1916. About two months earlier, in April 1916, General Philippe Pétain had also issued a stirring Order of the day, but it was optimistic: "Courage! On les aura" ("Courage! We shall get them"). Conversely, Nivelle's admonition betrayed his concern for the mounting morale problems on the Verdun battlefield. The French military archives document that Nivelle's promotion to lead the Second Army at Verdun, in June 1916, had been followed by manifestations of indiscipline in five of his front line regiments. This unprecedented disquiet would eventually reappear, but in greatly amplified and widespread form, with the French army mutinies that followed the unsuccessful Nivelle offensive of April 1917.

Marshal Pétain praised what he saw as the success of the fixed fortification system at Verdun in his war memoir: "La Bataille de Verdun" published in 1929. One year later, in 1930, this acclaim led France to adopt the Maginot Line (Ligne Maginot) as the basic inter-war defensive system along its border with Germany. In reality, during the Battle of Verdun, French conventional field artillery deployed in the open outnumbered turreted guns in the Verdun forts by a factor of at least two hundred to one. It was massed French field artillery (over 2,000 guns after May 1916 ) which inflicted about 70% of the German casualties at Verdun. Infantry small arms and grenades, plus a handful of functional turreted guns in the forts account for the rest. Some twenty years later, the Maginot line displayed the same conceptual flaw as the Verdun forts : effective underground artillery turrets but too few in numbers in relation to the enormous tonnage of concrete and steel needed to support their existence. Verdun remained a symbol of French determination for many years. At the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1953–54, General Christian de Castries remarked that the situation was "somewhat like Verdun.". This was not a valid analogy, since French forces besieged at Dien Bien Phu had to be entirely resupplied by air on an exposed landing strip that was within range of Viet Minh artillery fire. In stark contrast, the French forces at Verdun were resupplied by roads and railways that were completely beyond the reach of German long range artillery.

On 22 September 1984, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl (whose father had fought near Verdun in World War One) and French President François Mitterrand (who had been taken prisoner nearby in World War Two) stood at the Douaumont cemetery, holding hands for several minutes in the driving rain as a gesture of Franco-German reconciliation. Conversely, in November 1998, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder made the decision not to attend a joint French and German memorial service with French president Jacques Chirac.