They did not pass.
December 20, 2016 1:48 PM   Subscribe

100 years ago the battle of Verdun came to an end. On December 18/19, 1916, the German assault on Verdun is completely defeated after 300 days of some of the most horrendous fighting in World War I. French forces triumphantly led by commanders soon to become notorious (Nivelle and Pétain) regained all the land that the enemy had taken. 11,000 demoralized German soldiers surrendered. "France had won her most brilliant victory since the Marne." (Horne)

Also ending in late 1916: the Somme campaign and the Brusilov offensive.

Previously on MetaFilter: the German attack begins; MeFite visits Verdun.
posted by doctornemo (21 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite
 
I live in Verdun! (the one in Canada). Thanks for the post!
posted by 256 at 1:53 PM on December 20, 2016 [2 favorites]


I find Dan Carlin a little hard to take as a podcaster, but his excellent sequence 'Blueprint for Armageddon' won me over. Episode IV deals with Verdun and the Somme.

Also, anyone whining about "OMG, 2016 was the worst year EVAAR" would do well to have a look at 1916. The scale of loss is hard to comprehend. The closest I've got to understanding the true impact was in country Victoria, in Southern Australia. There had been a policy of recruiting people from the same local area into the same battalion. Made sense - it was good for morale, and presumably promoted a sense of loyalty and teamwork. Every young man in the town would volunteer as one. Many of these country towns have tree lined avenues leading into the town - avenues of honour, commemorating the dead from WW1. I walked down one of these avenues and counted off the dead. All young men, born in 1897 or so, and all dead within a day or two of each other. I remember looking it up on wikipedia - it matched up with some offensive at the Somme. Basically the entire young male population of the town wiped out.

So scale that up to the French losses at Verdun and imagine the social and economic impact.
posted by tim_in_oz at 2:19 PM on December 20, 2016 [18 favorites]


I was a TA in a WWI course years ago. One of the things that sticks with me from the tests we read was a recollection from French soldiers who had been in a set of concrete fortifications buried under a fair amount of dirt -- 3 or 4 meters worth. By the end of the battle, the shells had excavated the fort so it was almost completely exposed (the parts that weren't demolished).
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:26 PM on December 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


I stumbled across this article the other day. It goes into much of the carnage of 1916 and the effects still seen today.
posted by quite unimportant at 2:34 PM on December 20, 2016 [2 favorites]


There had been a policy of recruiting people from the same local area into the same battalion.

Pals battalion. Made sense until 1916 when the result of the destruction of such units on a town became glaringly evident. The BBC series Our World War has an episode about such a unit (I saw it on Netflix US, but can't check if it's on there still as work blocks access).
posted by linux at 2:36 PM on December 20, 2016


Thanks for both of your posts on this battle. I learned a lot from your first post, and went on to listen to Dan Carlin as a result of the thread. I learned a lot there, too. But the account was just too horrible to listen to after a few episodes. Which is saying something, given the amount I read and watch about war.

I've never encountered more horrible fighting than that on the Somme and Verdun. Truly awful.

Someone in the last Verdun thread linked to this picture. (Or one just like it.). It still haunts me. I can't imagine.
posted by persona au gratin at 2:37 PM on December 20, 2016 [2 favorites]


There had been a policy of recruiting people from the same local area into the same battalion...Basically the entire young male population of the town wiped out.

That happened to a fair few places - Britain, Canada, Australia, etc. I remember being at a War Memorials in small towns in Canada, where the list of dead from WWI dwarfs that of WWII for that reason. The concept of Pals Battalions dropped away once conscription started to get introduced.
posted by nubs at 2:37 PM on December 20, 2016 [1 favorite]


It's astounding that after horrors like this and many others during WWI, the world wanted an even bigger helping just 20 years later.
posted by Sangermaine at 2:38 PM on December 20, 2016 [8 favorites]


All war is ugly.

That particular war, for whatever reason, seems so horrific to me. The gassing, the dead mounted troops and artillery horses, the mud, the trenches, the wire...

.
posted by BlueHorse at 2:41 PM on December 20, 2016


and apart from the delightful legacy of munitions still plowed up every year by French & Belgian farmers, there are some parts of France so poisoned by the materials of that war that nothing lives there a century later

even mushrooms can live in Pripyat
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 2:46 PM on December 20, 2016 [12 favorites]


I remember being at a War Memorials in small towns in Canada, where the list of dead from WWI dwarfs that of WWII for that reason.

They weren't part of Canada during WW1, but the toll on the Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont Hamel as part of the battle of the Somme (which overlapped with that at Verdun). Of nearly 800 men, only 68 survived the day in shape to fight again. About half were killed outright and the remainder were severely wounded. It was one of the single most monstrous wastes of human life in that horrible war.
posted by bonehead at 3:38 PM on December 20, 2016 [4 favorites]


A big idea of the Somme offensive was that an attack by the BEF (and French divisions) would reduce pressure on Verdun. People rightly remember the first day of the battle with awe and horror, but, as the post mentions, they kept it going for another 4 months, until November weather made further operations impossible.
posted by thelonius at 4:09 PM on December 20, 2016


thanks for this.
posted by shockingbluamp at 4:21 PM on December 20, 2016


It's astounding that after horrors like this and many others during WWI, the world wanted an even bigger helping just 20 years later.

It does explain why Chamberlain and others were so willing to appease Hitler, partially why France gave up so quickly, and helps to understand how regular Germans could have gone along with the Nazis who had somehow been able to achieve so many victories while avoiding this kind of battle. That vision was still fresh in the minds of many, and they were willing to do just about anything to avoid it.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 4:32 PM on December 20, 2016 [16 favorites]


I don't know how they teach it in schools now but when I was learning about WWI as a kid, in France, no one ever said that Verdun was a "brilliant victory", it was described as a senseless massacre most of the times.
posted by SageLeVoid at 5:28 PM on December 20, 2016 [4 favorites]


So was it because of Verdun that Petain did what he did in WW2?
posted by 922257033c4a0f3cecdbd819a46d626999d1af4a at 6:03 PM on December 20, 2016


I think that with the British bailing out and it becoming obvious there would be no repeat Miracle of the Marne type of event to save them, Petain started looking at the so called Battle of France and hoping for an outcome with respect to France's future more like the Battle of Sedan, although he was aware what had happened elsewhere throughout Europe, of course. As the loss became obvious, the preservation of the country was on a lot of people's minds, if not specifically because of Verdun than certainly because of general experience with the war, but also Germany's behavior elsewhere. Given the unbelievably high percentage of the overall French army who served in Verdun, I'm sure that sort of thing was on a lot of people's minds as the tanks approached. Of course, Germany would go on to wreck itself once again in another fortress-city meat grinder, Stalingrad.
posted by feloniousmonk at 8:19 PM on December 20, 2016


So was it because of Verdun that Petain did what he did in WW2?

That's a bit of an oversimplification, but it seems impossible to imagine that it didn't figure largely in his mind.

Having only managed to hold off the Germans at Verdun at such astounding cost, and then scaling that cost by the new capabilities they had added by 1940 compared to 1916... I think you have to be very unsympathetic not to see how Pétain could have come to the conclusion, by the time he actually became head of government, that some sort of negotiated settlement was preferable, as the only alternative, to annihilation. With Verdun as your measure of the cost of holding back an invading army, it's not hard to imagine Pétain believing that they just didn't have enough people left to mount an effective defense.

Perhaps someone without the experience of Verdun would have tried calling up more conscripts to fight in the fields and in the streets and slowed the advance, but it's unclear what this would have done in the long run. Plus, Pétain and others in France could not have been unaware of what was going on in Poland (the government-in-exile was based in Paris for a time), and might have reasonably thought that negotiating terms would be better for the French civilian population than what was happening there. It is hard to disagree.

None of that is a defense of his conduct while part of the Vichy government, including the vote of 10 July 1940, the "National Revolution", subsequent official antisemitism, etc. It doesn't seem that there's much defending or rehabilitating him from early July onwards (at least, not that I've ever read). But if Pétain had put a gun into his mouth after Second Compiègne and ended his story there, I'd wager he'd probably be remembered now as a tragic national hero who saved the country twice.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:08 PM on December 20, 2016 [3 favorites]


It is a measure of the scale and horror of WW I that even remains were too difficult to sort out. The Douamont Ossuary contains massive, jumbled piles of bones, with every nationality commingled.
posted by kinnakeet at 4:23 AM on December 21, 2016 [2 favorites]


It would be incredibly unfair to blame Petain for the fall of France. They didn't have an adequate supply of modern fighter aircraft capable of matching the Germans, their tanks were older while the Germans had newer models from Czechoslovakia's Skoda works, and they had placed too much emphasis on the Maginot Line (still fighting the last war). It's not like another French leader could have saved them, or that Petain was alone in realizing defeat was inevitable once the German breakthrough swept the British off the continent. The French military had strong memories of what it took to stop the Germans twenty years before, when they were in a better position, and accepted the reality of the situation when they capitulated.

What they (and Petain) did afterwards in Vichy is a very different story, but they truly had no other choices in June 1940. Continuing the fight would have just made all of France look like Belgium in 1917 at best.
posted by GhostintheMachine at 7:33 AM on December 21, 2016 [1 favorite]


Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching to the Somme by the Irish playwright Frank McGuinness is set among the soldiers of the Ulster Division (Casualties: 5,500 in two days).
posted by AillilUpATree at 12:17 PM on December 21, 2016


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