Verdun, a hundred years on...

[Hauksbee 103]

World War I’s Iconic, Ironic Battle

By PAUL JANKOWSKI

 

 

French troops under shellfire during the Battle of Verdun.

 

 

One hundred years ago, on Feb. 21, 1916, 1,200 German artillery pieces began firing on French positions around Verdun, the ancient fortress town on the Meuse River in eastern France.

 

It was the middle of World War I , and the fighting all along the Western Front that ran between the Channel and the Alps had settled into a static confrontation of men, planes and guns — guns, above all. That day the Germans dropped a million shells onto the forts, forests and ravines around Verdun, and in the 10 months that followed, 60 million more would fall in the area. By then the French had stopped the German advance and even recovered most of the terrain they had lost, reduced by then to a lunar landscape bereft of vegetable or animal life. And 300,000 men had died.

 

What exactly are we commemorating when we gather at the forts, shell-holes and monuments of the former battlefield? We like our battles to have a beginning and an end, to mark a moment and leave a meaning that posterity can grasp and visitors can celebrate — usually, a symbolic or strategic turning point, when one side loses the initiative and never regains it, as at Gettysburg or Stalingrad.

 

We won’t find it at Verdun. The French won a great moral victory — the last, in fact, that their arms would ever achieve — but it did not significantly weaken one side more than the other, alter the strategic picture, or determine the outcome of the war. Verdun declines to boast such significance. There is little to celebrate, and we wander its hills today only as pilgrims to a site of immense suffering.

 

On Sunday an expanded and renovated museum will reopen on the site of one of the ruined villages; later this year, President François Hollande and Chancellor Angela Merkel will inaugurate it officially, and add their names to the long list of dignitaries who came before them. They will say what President François Mitterrand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl said when they visited in 1984 and clasped hands before the great ossuary that holds the shattered remains of the dead — that this must never happen again, that this cannot happen again.

 

They will speak of Europe. French heads of state here once spoke of national unity, of patriotism, of resistance, of heroism. Away from Verdun, authors and survivors wrote of all that and much more. Germans wrote of noble failure, of brave soldiers betrayed by a cynical or inept high command. Some spoke of it in cautionary terms, as a military folly to be avoided at all costs. Never again, wrote one of the architects of the German blitzkrieg of World War II, Heinz Guderian. “I do not want a second Verdun there,” Hitler said of Stalingrad in November 1942, as though to condemn in advance the protracted siege warfare that would cost him his entire Sixth Army.

 

What, the visitor asks, is the meaning of what happened? Like all battlefields, Verdun is silent.

 

Between an older narrative of heroism and a more recent one of pointless slaughter lies an ocean of ambiguity, mingling grandeur with absurdity. Through 1916 French and German losses kept climbing in a macabre pas de deux. Under a sky illuminated by shellfire, in ravines and on hillsides denuded of natural or man-made cover, huddled in what was left of their trenches, the French and Germans lived Verdun in the same way. They used the same words to describe it — “L’Enfer,” “Die Hölle von Verdun” — and spoke too of entering another world, severed from the one they had left behind, and pervaded perhaps by an evil presence. Yes, the French stopped the German offensive on the Meuse. But so what?

 

To a historian 100 years later, Verdun does yield a meaning, in a way a darkly ironic one. Neither Erich von Falkenhayn, the chief of the German General Staff, nor his French counterpart, Joseph Joffre, had ever envisaged a climactic, decisive battle at Verdun. They had attacked and defended with their eyes elsewhere on the front, and had thought of the fight initially as secondary, as ancillary to their wider strategic goals. And then it became a primary affair, self-sustaining and endless. They had aspired to control it. Instead it had controlled them. In that sense Verdun truly was iconic, the symbolic battle of the Great War of 1914-18.

 

Paul Jankowski, a professor of history at Brandeis University, is the author of “Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great War.”

 

Edited February 20, 2016 by Hauksbee

[Olham 164]

Good one, Hauksbee!

 

[Hauksbee 103]

Sweet Jaysus, Olham! If these are Before-and-After pictures, I'm very happy I was not there to see it happen.

Edited February 20, 2016 by Hauksbee

[Olham 164]

One can hardly believe that there were still alive people down there.

But there were.

Here is another "before & after" - Passendaele...

 

 

 

[Capitaine Vengeur 263]

The French and German armies did not fight at Verdun exactly in the same way. While the French side was constantly held by the 2e Armée, the French divisions within were rotated after a system called "la noria" (the waterwheel). Even decimated during the most terrible moments of the battle, the soldiers there were assured to be relieved after one or two weeks, and sent onto another sector. On the Germany side on the contrary, the Kronprinz's 5. Armee constantly used the same about 20 divisions. Even when removed for rest, the soldiers were assured to be committed back to the same bloody mess. And it became to them a more and more hellish mess, as the German army was removing more and more artillery to counter new threats on other fronts by Summer 1916, while the French on the contrary were bringing more and more heavy batteries to make up for their initial critical imbalance. The German soldiers had no exit from Verdun but death, mutilation, capture or desertion. The French made lots of shocked and demoralised prisoners in the last months of the battle.

 

Among those who fought in junior ranks at Verdun, Lt de Lattre de Tassigny became commander of the French 1st Army occupying Danubian Germany by 1945, and as such was humbly visited by former Kronprinz Wilhelm, commander of the German 5th Army during the Battle of Verdun. The deposed Crown Prince begged for the protection of his properties in Soviet-held Eastern Prussia, and for subsidies to maintain his own standard of living in his castle. De Lattre sharply replied that at the same moment, millions of Germans were starving of fighting in hopeless conditions, and dismissed the Prince: "You are pathetic, Sir, pathetic!" Ironically, former Kronprinz Wilhelm and former Maréchal Pétain, once opponents at Verdun in 1916, then both relieved in a humiliating way, both died in July 1951, Pétain just three days after Wilhelm.

 

Captain Charles de Gaulle, later promoter of the French-German reconciliation as the French President in 1963, was wounded and captured as soon as March 1916 when his 33e R.I. was decimated near Douaumont. He could never escape, in spite of countless colorful attempts. His partner Chancellor Adenauer did not fight during WW1, he was 40 already by the time of Verdun, and councillor of the city of Cologne. But he could assess well enough the cost of total war on the interior front of mobilized and blockaded Germany.

[Olham 164]

Thank you for the info, Capitaine!

 

On May 29 of this year, President Hollande and chancellor Merkel will meet at the newly opened Verdun memorial.

The memorial now shows the suffering and the losses of both sides, the French as well as the Germans.

I think that is a great step forward for a closer European way and understanding.

I guess it may not have been easy for many French people, to make this step.

So I am even more impressed that they did, and I feel very positive for a friendly future.

Vive la France!

 

 

EDIT: What is that incident in your signature, Capitaine? I knew nothing about any air combat of FW 190 Ds,

other than their airfield defense for the Messerschmidt jet planes.

Do you have a web-link to the story?

Edited February 22, 2016 by Olham

[Capitaine Vengeur 263]

EDIT: What is that incident in your signature, Capitaine? I knew nothing about any air combat of FW 190 Ds,

other than their airfield defense for the Messerschmidt jet planes.

Do you have a web-link to the story?

Olham, the story actually comes from Clostermann's book "Une sacrée guerre!" (interviews gathered by Daniel Costelle, edited by Flammarion 1990). I had once read the book, but do not own it now. If I remember well, it is also during one of these interviews that he explained his pro-Argentine stance during the Falklands War, which shocked the British for coming from a former hero of the RAF, DSO, DFC&Bar).

 

This event happened on 21 April 1945, and Clostermann may have felt confident for he had just confirmedly shot down two FW-190D "long nose" the previous day (a picture in an older edition of "The Big Show" that I own, presents a "long nose" crash-landed near a lake as one of his victims, specifying that the pilot died of wounds). His victor on 21 may have been Hans Dortenmann, JG 26, 18 kills out of 38 flying the 190D, one of the main aces on this model. Clostermann could crash-land his plane, himself unharmed, and once back to his squadron, was welcomed with banners displaying his "famous last words". Also, the French Wiki confirms that these "famous last words" were quoted by the RAF's Training Memorandum volume 5 number 3 of June 1945 ("Tee Eem", a RAF monthly confidential bulletin with advice, information, accounts, etc), in its column "Most Highly Derogatory Order of the Irremovable Finger" devoted to the most stupid things done that month by RAF pilots. Typical British humour...

 

As you can see, the "long nose" had a short but intense military career, was usually feared by the Allied pilots for its powerful engine and deadly firepower, and woe betide those tackled it carelessly!

Edited February 22, 2016 by Capitaine Vengeur

[Olham 164]

Thank you for the info, Capitaine!

I have meanwhile even found a German page on Clostermann (which I guess you may not be able to read - sorry).

Here, they say the German ace might have been Rudolf Wurff (48 victories), JG 301.

 

"...von einer Fw 190 D-9 des JG 301, die vermutlich von Rudolf Wurff, selbst ein As mit 48 Abschüssen, geflogen wurde."

 

http://www.pilotenbunker.de/Jagdflieger/France/Clostermann_Pierre/clostermann_pierre.htm

 

I always found the FW 190 D-9 looked sexy (same goes for the D-12 and D-13, but there were hardly any of those).

Here is one captured by the Americans (note the "Thunderbolt" in the background):

 

Edited February 22, 2016 by Olham

[Hauksbee 103]

I always found the FW 190 D-9 looked sexy...

Is this still a "Fw-190" and not a Ta-152?

[Olham 164]

It is a D-9 or D-12, Hauksbee, with more or less the same wings as the A-types.

The Focke-Wulf Ta 152 had much longer wings, like a sail plane.

It was designed as a high interceptor.

 

Edited February 22, 2016 by Olham

[Hauksbee 103]

The Focke-Wulf Ta 152 had much longer wings, like a sail plane.

Aha! I see the difference. Thanks, Olham.

[JimAttrill 24]

Capt. Eric Brown (who died recently aged 97) flew the TA 152h and was disappointed in its rate of roll caused by the longer wings.  And they had no MW (water methanol) or nitrous oxide to get the best speed out of it.   I think that given half a chance he would have rated the FW190 above all other fighters such as the Spitfire IX and the P51.  The FW190A had a terrific rate of roll so he writes.  And good visibility because of the characteristic nose-down flying attitude and the clear canopy. 

[Olham 164]

Jim, I bet the roll rate of the Ta 152 was bad with those sailplane wings -

but one must consider, that it was never made as a fighter for dogfights.

It was designed as a high altitude interceptor.

Edited March 13, 2016 by Olham