By the end of 1916, all this had changed. At its peak was the small village of Vauquois, a peaceful place where 170 or so inhabitants quietly went about their business. Before the war, it was a large hill some 290m high.
The Butte de Vauquois is located about 15 miles from Verdun. But there is one place in particular that stands out in this vast area of murdered nature: the Butte de Vauquois. Everywhere, the brutal scars of war are visible. The ground is simply grey, and it is doubtful whether anything will grow there again. In parts, the earth was so shattered by high explosive, poisoned by toxic gas, and infected with thousands of rotting corpses that even today it will not bear life. Photograph by Matt Leonard (CC-BY-NC-SA). Signs exclaiming INTERDIT VERBOTEN FORBIDDEN are commonplace, and unlike elsewhere on the Western Front, visitors pay attention to the warnings.ĭamaged landscape of the Verdun battlefield. Millions of unexploded shells still litter the forest floors. Even today, much of the surrounding area is still off limits to the public. Landscape is transformed, and this transformation can be seen in its most extreme forms at Verdun. The modern, industrial nature of the weaponry used in the Great War meant that the landscape was changed forever modern warfare creates as well as destroys. It was a national struggle, a battle for the survival, the honour, and the sacred heart of France. The ordeal of Verdun is even more deeply ingrained in the French consciousness than the Somme is in the British. So began one of the most savage struggles of the First World War, one that claimed over a million casualties in under a year. His plan was not actually to capture the city, but simply to kill as many Frenchmen as possible. The German Commander-in-Chief knew that the French would never abandon Verdun and would hurl every soldier at France’s disposal into the furnace he was going to create. The rich history of Verdun endowed it with mythic status in the French psyche, a fact known to Von Falkenhayn when he launched his siege in February 1916. A French city since the Peace of Munich in 1648, it survived numerous attempts to capture it, not least during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871. Considering it is the key to understanding the huge loss of life on the Somme, this is a strange feature of modern battlefield tourism. A French and German battlefield, it is rarely visited by other nationalities. The intense shelling had left the roads back to the hospitals impassable for field ambulances, leaving badly injured French soldiers laying everywhere.The full horror of 20th century industrialised warfare was nowhere more intense than at Verdun in 1916. In one 15,000-strong French division, 9,000 men were dead, wounded, or simply missing. The might of the German attack pushed the French line back a mile and over the next three days, horrifying losses were sustained as they were forced to retreat further.
As this tool of destruction made its battlefield debut, French trenches were burned, with men roasting inside them. Some Germans were armed with a new weapon, the flamethrower. An officer recorded, “We are surrounded by wounded and dying men whom we are totally unable to help.” Once the barrage ceased, German assault troops rose from their trenches and pushed forward. The German artillery crews were instructed that “no enemy line is to remain un-bombarded,” and that “nowhere should the enemy feel safe.” The French were overwhelmed by the relentless onslaught. On February 21, 1916, more than 1,220 German guns around an eight-mile perimeter fired two million shells at the French in the opening eight-hour bombardment of the battle. His scheme to inflict a relentless slaughter on the enemy and win the war was called Operation Gericht-a term loosely translating as “judgment” or “place of execution.” He planned to lure the French army into a battle of attrition, expecting that his opponent “would be compelled to throw in every man they have.” Falkenhayn anticipated a kill-ratio of five French for every two Germans. Falkenhayn targeted Verdun because of its position on the Allied line and its sentimental value to the French people. In his estimation, this would then force the British to sue for peace. In a letter to Kaiser Wilhelm II in late 1915, Falkenhayn argued that the war would only be won by bleeding France to death and draining its will to fight. The British sector of the Western Front also did not lend itself to offensive operations. Out of reach across the Channel, this great foe could not be assaulted directly.
German General Erich von Falkenhayn regarded the British as the most formidable of the Allied Powers in the Great War.
0 kommentar(er)
