Historiography of the Battle of Verdun

A Symbol,   In France – “They shall not pass!”,   In Germany – Social Darwinism,

The Christmas Memorandum,   After the Second World War,   Recent writers,   A Final Idea

A Symbol

For British people, it is the Battle of the Somme that has carved a PTSD into the national psyche.  But the British forces only occupied a 50-mile stretch of the 500-mile trench-line and – hurtful as it might be to British pride – WWI was essentially a war between France and Germany.  Which might explain why the Battle of Verdun was much more important for the French and Germans than it is remembered in Britain. 

People in Europe and America realised this immediately at the time – Arthur Meyer, editor of the French newspaper Le Gaulois , wrote barely a fortnight into the battle:

“Verdun has become a symbol.  What is its strategic value?  Most don't know it.  But the whole world has its eyes fixed on this single point on the map.”

French writer Maurice Genevoix, who fought in the battle, agreed that Verdun was “the battle-symbol of the entire war” … as wrote French historian Guy Pedroncini eighty years later:

“Par l'héroïsme et le sacrifice des combattants, par son retentissement, par sa résonance émotionelle, elle est bien le symbole de la Grand Guerre.”

In France – “They shall not pass!”

After the war, a large number of personal memories were published in France.  The emphasis was on the horrors and the endurance of the poilu (infantry soldier – though literally: ‘hairy’).  Gradually, during the interwar period, the belief grew up that Verdun was a miracle of resistance, embodying the spirit (the 'chest') of France. 

The 1931 film, Verdun, Memories of History depicts the fury of the German artillery … then turns to a French peasant, furious that his house has been destroyed, taking his hunting-rifle and setting off to confront them -- French pride, French ‘chests’ against German shells. 

Longer-term, the idea of a terrible loss took hold, and some historians have suggested that this underlay the French capitulation to Hitler in 1940 … for example Thomas D.  Morgan (1999):

“The legacy of Verdun would be a generation that in 1939 and 1940 lacked the same strong fiber of the poilus in 1914 and 1916 … France lost its self-confidence in World War I”. 

In Germany – Social Darwinism

In Germany, popular memory took a different and darker turn.  Some writers – such as Arnold Zweig Education Before Verdun (1935) – wrote to show the pointless losses of the battle, but such as Zweig and Remarque were fighting a losing battle against pro-Nazi war novels that presented the hell of Verdun as a necessary proving-ground for the ubermensch who would inhabit the new world of iron and artillery. 

By contrast to France, therefore, the German film Douaumont, Die Hölle von Verdun (1931) celebrated the fury of the bombardment, and shows the German soldiers impatient for it to stop so they can attack.   

The Christmas Memorandum

The Inter-war period also saw a large number of autobiographies – many published to exonerate their authors from any opprobrium that may have attached to them for the battle.  You can guess how reliable they are!  One of them, 5th Army Chief of Staff von Knobelsdorf, has been thoroughly debunked by one historian, who has compared what he wrote after the war to the things he was writing during the battle. 

Most famous – and debated – has been Falkenhayn’s 1920 book, which is open access and you can read for yourself: General Headquarters and Its Critical Decisions.  In it, Falkenhayn portrayed himself as the inventor of the concept of the war of attrition, and even included a Memorandum he had sent to the Kaiser in December 1915, laying it out in detail. 

Even at the time, Reichsarchiv staff writing the official history of the war could not find any such memo and suggested Falkenhayn had made it up, a view which was reiterated in 1937 by the director of the Reichsarchiv, Gerhard Foerster, and effectively proved by German historian Gerd Krumeich in 1996. 

Despite this, the number of histories of the battle which start with an unquestioning acceptance of the Memorandum is alarming. 

The feeling of most historians of the battle is to agree in general with the highly-regarded war historian BH Liddell Hart (1930) that, although the Christmas Memorandum may well be a fabrication, Falkenhayn was:

“always a believer in the strategy of attrition … the keynote of the tactical plan at Verdun was a continuous series of limited advances, which by their menace should draw the French reserves into the mincing machine of the German artillery.”

The immediate problem with this is that the actual battle itself bears no resemblance to the battle Falkenhayn claims to have planned … so how do you overcome this problem?

Suggestions have included:

• his “almost pathological secretiveness” which meant that he never communicated it to the Army commanders (Alistair Horne, 1962);

• his “failure to fully communicate and receive the support of his subordinate commanders” (Maj.  Robert Chamberlain, 2016);

• that the 5th Army Commanders “disregarded the Falkenhayn’s intent” (Sgt Barton J.  Turner, 2019). 

• Historian Robert Foley (2006) not only asserted that the fabricated memorandum “was in fact a true representation of Falkenhayn’s ideas in late 1915 and early 1916”, but that Falkenhayn told the 5th Army Commanders so ... and that (although they did not fully agree at first) they came to do so as the battle progressed. 

However you need to know that there are battle experts out there who call bullshit on the whole ‘attrition’ thing: “Falkenhayn is recorded as believing that a result could be reached in two weeks and the Kaiser was expecting to attend a victory parade at the end of February.  Does that sound like attrition?” writes battle expert Christina Holstein on the GreatWarForum (2014). 

To be honest, we’ll never really know, because the RAF bombed the Reichsarchiv in 1945 and, being cynical, your guess is as likely to be right as anyone’s – so feel free to opine what you think!

After the Second World War

The 1960s saw a revisionism which emphasised the absurdity of war (as exemplified in the film, Oh What a Lovely War), and Verdun came to be viewed in the same light.  The British historian AJP Taylor called it “the most senseless episode in a war not distinguished for sense” (1963).  The French writer Jacques Meyer called it “a war of abandoned men” (1968). 

In 1967, the Verdun ‘World Capital of Peace’ memorial was opened at Verdun to commemorate ALL the soldiers who had fallen in the battle, as part of a Franco-German reconciliation, and that is still the emphasis of the centre today – it is less about ‘remembering’, the French Ministère des Armées tells us, and more about “the construction of a collective memory”. 

1962 saw the publication of Alistair Horne’s Price of Glory – which is still regarded by many as the gold standard of accounts of Verdun.  Horne had lived in France, and had talked to many of the veterans of the battle, and his account was “a compelling narrative that puts the human experiences at its centre”.  Horne’s account laid the blame for the suffering of the soldiers and the defeat of the attack on Falkenhayn’s indecision and secretiveness. 

Into the 1970s and 1980s, many writers sought the opportunity to speak to battle veterans (who were by this time in their 80s and 90s) before they died and the oral record was lost.  The result was histories which were about the soldier – John Keegan introduced the idea of a ‘breaking point’ in human endurance – and about cultural memory.  And perhaps a natural concomitant of this ‘bottom-up’ approach was a generally hostile judgement on the commanders who had led them. 

Recent writers

Recently, there has been a number of books by historians who have tried to understand the battle in an historical sense:

American writer John Mosier (2013), who believed that Germany was winning the War – and would have won at Verdun – until the Americans joined in 2017, presented a polemic which sought to challenge many of the commonly-accepted ideas about the battle.  For him, Verdun was not a single battle, but at least eight separate engagements across 166km over the period 1914-1918: “a bewilderingly complex battle that began in geographical obscurity, ended in confusion, and did not in any way resolve the struggle between France and Germany”.  (He was greatly criticised by military experts for his factual mistakes, and is regarded by academic historians as a maverick.)

Paul Jankowski (2014) addressed what he called the ‘myths’ of Verdun.  For the French, he said, the battle had ‘made’ France; for Germans it was a symbol of noble failure; for people in the US and the UK it is “the symbol almost without parallel of the awfulness of modern industrial conflict.”  However, he said, “such legends distort the facts.”  His conclusion was that – why-ever it started and how-ever it developed, it ended up being about prestige, and that was why, despite the damage, neither side could step back. 

JE and HW Kaufmann (2016) – whose verdict on Falkenhayn was that he was motivated by the need to justify his “absurd“ strategy at Verdun – thought the battle “the climax and the anti-climax of the First World War”.  For them, one of the most interesting aspects of the battle was the “renaissance of the fortress”, which everybody had written off as outdated in 1914. 

Most recently, Michael Bourlet (2023) has sought to redefine the battle altogether, firstly declaring that the battle was “the war of movement in a pocket handkerchief”, and he follows recent Germany scholarship which suggests that it was never at the start intended to be about ‘bleeding the French army’, and only became a battle of attrition after the initial failure and new conditions of the battle.  Verdun, he suggests was a ‘transitional’ battle which “while retaining the characteristics of the classic battles of 1914 and 1915, takes on the main characteristics of hyperbattles.”

A Final Idea

One idea which I found interesting was the idea that the battle of Verdun was so intense that it evolved to be more than just a battle. 

“The ‘war within a war’ at Verdun created its own rules, rendered traditional tactics useless.” (Harro Grabolle, 2004)

“Indeed, Operation Gericht was an invitation to the devil, because it held the potential to unlock forces beyond the control of either side.” (Erik Sass, 2015)

“Survivors recalled how the battle at its height acquired a life of its own.  But what does it mean?” (Kevin Honold, 2017)

For a final judgement on the battle of Verdun, I think ‘war-out-of-control’ is just about as good as any I have read.