![]() ![]() With France KO’d, Hitler felt emboldened to attack Russia and unleash the Holocaust.Īfter Germany was defeated, in the spirit of post-war rapprochement, the French and Germans founded the European Union… Still the thunder of Verdun rumbles on.At 7:12 a.m. So, France fell to the Nazis in June 1940 and the dominoes tumbled. War had gone mobile the French had gone static. Eventually, the massive forts of the Maginot Line were built.Ĭome 1940, Hitler’s panzers went around the north of them. He called for a “Wall of France”, an inviolable chain of concrete fortifications along the Franco-German border behind which France could be secure. Marshal Petain promised no more sacrifices would be forced upon the nation’s youth. ![]() Post-1918 the French became defeatist, unwilling to spill their blood. In other words, of all the French combatants who died in the Great War, one in 10 did so in the shadow of Verdun. If Verdun was a victory of sorts for the French why was it so disastrous for them in the long run? The battle’s cost was terrible 162,000 French dead. By December 18, the last day of the Verdun battle, the French had pushed the Germans back to their original positions. “Everyone stumbles across slippery, decomposing bodies and has to proceed with smelly hands and smelly clothes,” wrote one Poilu. Waves of French troops, flinging as many as 240,000 grenades a day, walked over dead bodies. The French counter-attacked and the Germans dug in. Undermanned, the German offensive at Verdun petered out. The Russian Brusilov offensive on the Eastern Front forced Falkenhayn to send precious divisions from the West.īetter yet, Field Marshal Haig agreed to bring the start date of the epochal British battle of the Somme forward to July 1. At the 11th hour the French were saved by Allied actions in other theatres. Victory was within their grasp… Then came the miracle. The battle see-sawed minutely until in late June the Germans, in desperate wild fighting, took Le Mort Homme and Fort Vaux. The Germans tried ever more devilish weapons. ![]() It assumed its own existence, outside human control. The saturation bombing remodelled the landscape into a pitted wasteland. It is thought 60 million shells may have been fired during the 303-day battle. “The night passes in an inferno of fire,” he lamented. Lieutenant Henri Desagneaux, French 2nd Infantry Regiment, wrote in his diary: “It’s a battle of extermination – men against cannon.” Bombs fell 24/7. When the Germans took some outer trenches and the fort of Douaumont, the French sent General Philippe Petain to defend the town, ordering him to hold Verdun at all costs. The Germans sent over storms of shells, attacked head on the French scraped holes and returned murderous fire. This first day set the pattern for months of fighting at Verdun. The Berthier rifles of the Poilus shot back spiritedly. But as the Germans advanced through the shell-torn terrain and the ruins on the 21st they encountered pockets of Poilus, French Tommies, somehow still alive. With typical pomposity, German planners called the offensive at Verdun “Operation Judgment”. The idea of Erich von Falkenhayn, the German chief of the general staff, was genius in its pure brutality he would “bleed the French army white” in a battle of attrition. “Trommelfeuer”, or drumfire, the Germans dubbed this pulverising of the snow-dressed earth. On the first day alone, the Germans sent 140,000 soldiers into the attack. ![]()
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