Verdun may have been the biggest battle in history--up to that point anyway. It started in February 1916 with the most intense artillery barrage ever by the Germans. It ended in November, with both side pretty much where they had bad been in February.

Meanwhile, eight hundred thousand men had been killed. The front at Verdun sometimes extended sixty miles.

At Stalingrad Hitler announced to his troops "We don't want another Verdun." But that's exactly what he got--a bitter, widespread, tenacious battle. But the ending of Stalingrad was even worse for the Germans than Verdun had been. A whole German army surrendered.

The tricky fact about Verdun was that it was an offensive action to make the French counterattack and therefore allow the Germans to defend.
The Germans had come to believe, by the battles of early 1915, that the advantage was to the defender and sought to attack a French objective that would have to be retaken and thus force the French to attack while the Germans were in the superior postion of defending.
The objective itself was not to be the goal. The problem arose when the initial attacks were so successful and were heralded by the German press and leaders to such an extreme, that the original plan of trading them back to the French at the price of excessive losses was abandoned. The Germans became convinced that they had to keep their gains to avoid giving the French a 'moral victory' by letting them regain the lost ground.

What I always find chilling about it is that it was a battle in which the true objective was not to take something, defend something or some other ordinary military goal but simply to kill Frenchmen, to "bleed France white" as the Germans said.

Verdun is an answer to those tedious people who think the French can't fight, they obviously can but I think it's also the answer as to why France didn't go on fighting in 1940 when it was obvious that they were beaten. They perhaps had had an idea of what it would be like to fight "to the bitter end" and didn't like it very much.
That the Germans hadn't fought to the bitter end in 1918, is of course why Stalingrad happened at all.

North of Verdun similar actions were taking place but it was the British attempting to wear down their opponent. While Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig may not have used words like "attrition" much less "Bleed Germany white" his actions in Flanders suggest that was his intent. This is especially true in regards to Passchendaele in 1917.

quote:

Originally posted by s******_mech:
North of Verdun similar actions were taking place but it was the British attempting to wear down their opponent. While Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig may not have used words like "attrition" much less "Bleed Germany white" his actions in Flanders suggest that was his intent. This is especially true in regards to Passchendaele in 1917.

Perhaps I should have added a "first" in there somewhere although I think that regardless of his ability to do so Haig always had the objective of moving forward.

Many years ago, I talked to a German soldier who had fought at Verdun. He was a member of what they then called "shock troops."

One thing he told me was that when they threw a grenade, they had to rush in to occupy the ground that was cleared before the enemy did.

It has been said--somewhat inaccurately, I think--that if all the dead at Verdun stood up, they wouldn't have room enough to stand.

After the war, the French dug a huge underground mausoleum, featuring crypts for German and French soldiers alike. Several years ago, Mitterand and Kohl toured the site at at time of Franco-German rapprochement.

Also, I saw a film with Catherine Deneuve and Phillipe Poirot about the building of the underground vault. As I recall, she was a war widow who had come to reclaim her husband's body.

That vast underground chamber, BTW, exists to this day. I think it was an unidentified body from Verdun that started the "Unknown Soldier" thing.