
The Legend of Verdun - wormold
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/02/legend-verdun
======
crikli
If you've not listened to Dan Carlin's 6-part series on the Great War, take
the time to do so. The "whys" and "hows" of World War I are much harder to get
your head around than WWII...it's just much less linear. Not only does he do
an excellent job of making the mechanics of the war understandable, he draws
the element of humanity into stark relief by interspersing explanations of
troop movements with first hand accounts of the suffering and carnage men
sustained.

Episode IV focuses on Verdun and can be listened to as a stand alone episode
but the rest of the series is very much worth the time.
[http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-
history-53-bluepri...](http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-
history-53-blueprint-for-armageddon-iv/)

~~~
azernik
And if you prefer very long and dense text, I'd strongly recommend John
Keegan's "The First World War" \- similar to your description, it really gets
into the human reality of the war with first-hand sources.

~~~
ghaff
>very long and dense text,

It really isn't by the standards of history books though. It's very readable
because it does get into the human reality as opposed to endless facts. It's
probably the best single book on WWI that I've come across.

------
achamayou
An important reason why the fight was so bitter over seemingly small amounts
of land that this article (and others) seem to miss is that a relatively
limited area of northern France amounted to over half of the country's
industrial production. Coal and steel in particular, critical to the war
effort were overwhelmingly produced there.

Any incremental part of this region lost to the Germans wasn't just a symbolic
loss of ground or a moral defeat, it meant a real long term resource loss
which could tilt the balance of the war in Germany's favour. In comparison,
the allies were largely unable to strike Germany's industrial centers. It's
quite easy to depict all senior commanders of the time as inflexible and
stubborn (some of them were, to various extents anyway), but there's more to
it than that.

Defence in depth just wasn't an option, and mechanised war was a fiction
anyway. With the benefit of hindsight, and ignoring the industrial value of
the North, it's easy to jump to simple but wrong conclusions about why the war
was fought that way.

Edit: Link to English source illustrating my point
[http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/raw_materia...](http://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/raw_materials)

~~~
digi_owl
Best i can tell, when commanders are presented as inflexible and stubborn, its
about the tactics, not the strategy.

Yes, they had good reason to fight there. But the way the fighting was
conducted was more often than not a stilted mess.

~~~
mikeash
Indeed, much of the criticism seems to be centered around the general theme
of, "Charging machine guns over open ground didn't work the last 300 times we
tried it, but maybe today will be the day."

~~~
johngalt
With enough artillery and men it actually did work in many cases. The large
scale assaults regularly made progress measured in miles. The problem was that
you couldn't meaningfully continue an advance or exploit a breakthrough. Once
you left your trenches you also left your supply lines. The enemy could
respond to any breakthrough with overwhelming force mobilized by their own
rails and roads.

------
cm2187
Petain was not the only reason why French officers started sparing men. The
early French officers were professional army men, who cultivated the tradition
of charging the enemy directly, a suicidal exercise at the age of machine
guns. But they not only forced their men to do so, they charged the enemy
themselves too. As a result most of them died in the first year of the
conflict. They were then replaced with drafted civilians who didn't share this
chivalrous conception of war.

The other main reason is that as the men hardened with experience, not only
were they reluctant to participate in a mass suicide, but French officers
started to be increasingly killed by "friendly fire", which somewhat tempered
their strategy.

~~~
antod
_The early French officers were professional army men, who cultivated the
tradition of charging the enemy directly, a suicidal exercise at the age of
machine guns. But they not only forced their men to do so, they charged the
enemy themselves too. As a result most of them died in the first year of the
conflict. They were then replaced with drafted civilians who didn 't share
this chivalrous conception of war._

One historian I heard (not sure how accurate this is) said the British Army
had a parallel but somewhat inverted experience. Before the war the British
Army was much smaller than eg the French or German armies, but was very
professional and had adapted well to modern weaponry and tactics in both
attack and defence.

The trouble was that at the beginning of the war, the war was expected to be
over quickly so the British command didn't worry about sending nearly all its
officers (and their institutional knowledge) to France for the experience and
'adventure'.

It didn't work out as planned though and after getting bogged down and
suffering many casualties very quickly, the huge job of training lots of new
officers and soldiers was left to an older generation of ex officers back home
who reverted to the older tactics. It didn't take long for the British army to
revert to those ineffective suicidal charges too.

------
jstalin
If anyone has an opportunity to visit the Verdun area, please do. It's
surreal. The landscape is still scarred by the war. It feels like you're on
the moon. Craters, pieces of metal still sticking out of the ground,
bunkers... undoubtedly wherever you are walking there are probably soldiers
buried beneath you.

~~~
grahamburger
I visited a few years ago. Haunting and surreal. Here's a few of my photos,
they don't do it justice except to show the craters and pieces of metal like
you described.

[https://goo.gl/photos/WGePPQWYwNHeCaN37](https://goo.gl/photos/WGePPQWYwNHeCaN37)

~~~
prawn
Some of the Bosnian countryside is similarly pocked and then grassed over. I
wasn't sure when driving through a few years ago if that was a remnant of war
or a natural feature?

------
bdavisx
A good movie about the insanity of the trench warfare and some of the French
commanders of WWI is Paths of Glory -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paths_of_Glory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paths_of_Glory).

------
fabrice_d
For those who read French, Le Monde just published and interesting piece about
Verdun at [http://www.lemonde.fr/histoire/visuel/2016/02/21/verdun-c-
et...](http://www.lemonde.fr/histoire/visuel/2016/02/21/verdun-c-etait-une-
boucherie-inouie_4869124_4655323.html)

------
kleiba
I found the use of the word "legend" a bit confusing. Since I'm not a native
speaker, I looked it up in the Oxford Dictionary [1], but still, none of the
meaning seem to be applicable here:

1\. A traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but not
authenticated.

2\. The story of a saint’s life.

3\. An extremely famous or notorious person, especially in a particular field.

4\. An inscription, especially on a coin or medal.

5\. A caption.

6\. The wording on a map or diagram explaining the symbols used

My initial association was along the lines of 1., and so I was afraid to read
an article doubtful of historical consent -- but that was not the case.
Neither was the article about a singled-out person which could give rise to 3.
The last three definitions clearly refer to a different kind of legend
altogether.

Could someone with a better intuition please explain how the title of this
article is meant to be understood? and since 3. refers to a single person).

[1]
[http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/legend](http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/legend)

~~~
ghaff
I'm not sure that the word is quite right in this context but it basically
refers to the fact that the event is deeply embedded in the national
consciousness and that it appears to provide lessons that may not be correct
ones. It's a variant of meaning 1. The sense in which that applies is probably
best given by these paragraphs:

What were the lessons of Verdun, if any? In 1940, Hitler’s smart new generals,
such as Heinz Guderian, tackled the problem of static warfare with a
blitzkrieg technique of fast-moving armoured attack. They went round the side,
and back, of Maginot’s costly fortresses, making them capitulate without
firing a shot. Verdun fell in a matter of hours, France after a six-week
campaign. But Hitler missed the main point, militarily: never make a fetish of
any fortress, any stronghold, so that you become committed to hold it however
unacceptable the costs.

The capture of Verdun in 1916 would have been unlikely to have caused France
to lose the war. Yet in the Second World War, Hitler’s orders to his generals
not to surrender an inch of ground, led to repeated disasters – beginning with
the sacrifice of Friedrich Paulus’s entire 6th Army at Stalingrad, which
eventually brought about the destruction of the Third Reich.

And yet, in the heart of the French army, the myths and the slogans of Verdun,
chimeric as they were, persisted well into the 1950s. Brave young paras died
at Dien Bien Phu in the First Indochina War with Verdun on their lips.

------
julienchastang
I am named after my great-grandfather who perished here along with so many of
his compatriots. He died at Fort Douaumont, as I recall, as the German
soldiers shot into the tunnels of the fort. He had three children and was
around forty years old. My grandmother never knew her father. These tragedies
resonate throughout generations. Astonishingly, it is possible to find his
death certificate online [1].

[1] [http://goo.gl/WdUpid](http://goo.gl/WdUpid)

------
akkartik
Very cool to see Verdun's centenary commemorated by its greatest historian 50
years after he wrote The Price of Glory.

[http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Glory-
Verdun-1916/dp/0140170...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Glory-
Verdun-1916/dp/0140170413)

------
dankohn1
I think of the problems with American politics today is that our politicians
cast many problems in the context of WWII (ISIS are as bad as Nazis; any
negotiation with Iran would constitute another Munich). If they were using WWI
as the analogy, they would come to very different conclusions.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I wonder what the world would look like if WWII had never happened. Nobody
came out of WWI feeling good about the results, and a lot of people were
determined that it should never be repeated; but WWII gave us a lovely tidy
narrative of good vs. evil that arguably restored a lot of shine to the idea
of glorious, heroic battle, at least in places that had not actually been
devastated by it (e.g. the USA).

~~~
Spooky23
Not really -- world war 2 was really a settling of the over-punitive peace
imposed in the first war.

I wouldn't be surprised if future historians view 1914-1989 as one war.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
> _Not really_

I'm not clear which of my points you disagree with.

Also, there were three Axis Powers in WW2, and two of them had fought
_against_ Germany in WW1. It's overly simplistic to say that post-war
suffering in Germany was the sole cause of WW2--especially as there were
terrible sanctions after that war as well, but Germany has not gone to war
again.

~~~
Spooky23
I don't buy the good v. evil position on WW2. The problem with WW1 is that it
was a stalemate or a pause. All parties involved were weakened, but the status
quo continued. The old 19th century system carried on, bereft of its youth and
treasure.

Europe was all about Germany being stuck between a rock (the post-war
sanctions) and a hard place (the threat of the communist revolution that
Germany implanted to defeat the Czar to the money men in Germany). Italy was a
sideshow.

The difference in the post-WW2 era, and the reason we didn't have WW3 in 1960
is simple. The US emerged triumphant and essentially occupied or otherwise
controlled all of the powers, save China and the Soviet Union. As the US
loosened control, mutually assured destruction made WW1/WW2 style "total war"
too costly.

------
chiph
There is a Youtube series called The Great War where they are performing news
casts as if the events had just happened (only 100 years later).

The size of the armies was huge and the loss of life was astounding. Which is
what you get when attrition is the common strategy employed.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfKUd8bvQfc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfKUd8bvQfc)

At this point the US is just getting upset over 128 citizens being killed on
the RMS Lusitania when it was sunk during a period of unrestricted submarine
warfare. Our entry into the war as an Associated Power won't take place until
6 April 1917.

------
danso
I finished the article but went immediately to Google for "Fort Douaumont", to
learn more details of "the world’s most impregnable fort, [which] was, by a
series of almost incredible errors in February 1916, virtually undefended" and
the recapture of which "is estimated to have cost the French as many as
100,000 men".

Wikipedia has a pretty good writeup:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Douaumont](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Douaumont)

> _Kunze and his men reached the fort 's moat and found that the wall
> casemates ("coffres") defending the moat were unoccupied. Kunze managed to
> climb inside one of them to open an access door. But his men refused to go
> inside the fortifications as they feared an ambush. Armed only with a bolt-
> action rifle, the Pioneer-Sergeant entered alone. He wandered around the
> empty tunnels until he found the artillery team, captured them and locked
> them up._

> _By now, another group from the Brandenburg regiment, led by reserve-officer
> Lieutenant Radtke, was also entering the fort through its unoccupied
> defences. Radtke then made contact with Kunze 's troops and organised them
> before they spread out, capturing a few more French defenders and securing
> the fort. Later, more columns of German troops under Hauptman Haupt and
> Oberleutnant von Brandis arrived. No shots were ever fired in the capture of
> Fort Douaumont. The only casualty was one of Kunze's men who scraped one of
> his knees._

