![]() Watch Now “Bleed the French white”Īs the war carried on into 1916 and with neither side able to forge a decisive advantage, the German high command began to plan a huge assault on the area, designed to “bleed the French white” and break their morale.įrench commanders quickly realised that a new approach would be needed to combat the immensely powerful German artillery. The loss of such a citadel would be an enormous blow to French morale.ĭan Snow takes an emotional journey through the key battlefields of the Western Front, from the memorial parks at the Somme to the formidable defences around Ypres. ![]() To the French people, Verdun was also a symbolic fortress and a national treasure. Verdun was a fortress city on the River Meuse, and a strategically-vital link in the French sector of the Allied line on the Western Front. By combining the Verdun offensive with a U-Boat offensive against British shipping, Falkenhayn thought France and Britain would be forced to make terms with the Germans. The heavily fortified area of Verdun remained a formidable salient into German territory which threatened the main German communication lines. By attacking Verdun, the French Army would be drawn into circumstances from which it could not escape – for reasons of strategy and prestige.īelieving that the war would be won or lost in France, Falkenhayn hoped that France would ‘throw in every man they have’ to defend it, which would thus drain its army of resources. ![]() Without France’s 96 divisions, the Allies would be unable to continue fighting in the west.Įrich von Falkenhayn, the chief of the German General Staff, believed the key to German forces making a breakthrough on the Western Front was to launch a concentrated offensive against the French. Germany aimed to crush the French army before the Allies grew in strength with the full deployment of British forces. Just why was it so important that the French were successful in the Battle of Verdun, and what strategic implications did this have for the rest of the war? Why Verdun? Significance to Germany: The endless rows of white crosses that now cover the area are testament to the war’s longest and hardest-fought battle which lasted 10 months, from 21 February – 18 December 1916. Alongside the Somme, the name of the fortress town in eastern France is synonymous with the worst horrors of World War One. The result was almost 200 square kilometres of ground that had been blasted, ploughed and poisoned into a wasteland by explosives and gas, so much so that the post-war French authorities were unable to return it to its former agricultural use and simply left it to the elements.Verdun. In addition, fixed defences like the forts of Douaumont and Vaux sparked hellish underground fighting in subterranean pitch darkness that occurred nowhere else on the Western Front. As the battle raged the combatants endured heat and thirst akin to desert conditions together with bottomless mud as bad as at Passchendaele. Massed artillery was employed on a hitherto unprecedented scale the initial bombardment lasted for nine hours and saw 80,000 shells fall on the French trench line, while on the ground the initial attack saw the combat debut of storm-troop tactics and the man-pack flamethrower. Conceived by the Germans as a means of destroying the French army through attrition rather than breakthrough and encirclement, the battle cost 300,000 lives. Fought on the heights above the garrison town of the same name on the River Meuse, 140 miles east of Paris, the Battle of Verdun lasted for ten months, between February and December 1916, double the length of the Battle of the Somme and over three times the length of the Battle of Passchendaele.
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