PREVIEW： Epochs #246 ｜ The Battle of Verdun - Part III
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
167.80609
Summary
This is the final part of the mini-series on the Battle of Verdun, where we cover the events leading up to the fall of Fort Douaumont and the failure of the German offensive to take the Meuse River.
Transcript
00:00:00.640
Hello and welcome back to Epochs. This week I shall be finishing the mini-series on Verdun.
00:00:07.500
Many apologies for those who have been waiting for quite a while for it, for various reasons,
00:00:11.060
for interviews and for timing and technical reasons I won't bore you with.
00:00:15.200
We've had quite a long hiatus between the first two parts about Verdun and this final part.
00:00:20.220
So okay, let's just jump straight into it. I believe we left off last time the story where
00:00:24.300
the Germans had just taken Fort Douaumont outside in the environs around Verdun town and that was a
00:00:33.220
really, really important thing, like really, really sort of tactically and strategically and in terms
00:00:37.840
of morale, national morale on both sides. It was a really important thing. The Germans thought
00:00:43.960
they'd basically won the Battle of Verdun and it was on to Paris and they would win the whole of
00:00:49.400
World War I on the Western Front very imminently after the fall of Fort Douaumont. That was their
00:00:55.100
hope. That was their feeling. There was like a national holiday in Germany. Bells ringing all
00:01:00.160
over the country. The French thought, oh no, again, a similar thing, opposite. They thought a similar
00:01:04.600
thing. Oh no, it's all over. We're going to lose Verdun. The Verdun salient is going to fall.
00:01:09.700
You know, the Germans could be marked. There's nothing between them and Paris. We're done for.
00:01:14.540
It's all over. Although we're still going to try to hold the line as much as possible.
00:01:18.540
It was like a big deal. But turns out, as we all know, the Battle of Verdun ultimately in the end
00:01:24.420
was just one more World War I stalemate effectively. So let's tell the rest of that story.
00:01:31.700
Okay, so the Germans take Fort Douaumont on the 25th of February, 1916. We're in 1916, remember.
00:01:39.980
But by the 27th of February, the overall German offensive had stalled for a number of reasons,
00:01:47.520
classic reasons why a World War I offensive stall. One is sort of the infantry overrun
00:01:52.960
their own artillery protection, right? Artillery, the artillery batteries are used to essentially
00:02:00.860
protect the infantry, keep them covered, keep the heads of the enemies, keep the heads of the
00:02:06.540
French down from the German perspective. You know, keep the French guns from firing.
00:02:12.640
Anti-battery work, you know, artillery jewels. And so if your infantry go beyond that curtain,
00:02:20.200
that defensive artillery curtain, then they're sort of out in the open, hanging out there with
00:02:26.680
their asses in the breeze. And so that's one of the things that happened. The Germans weren't
00:02:32.520
able to move their artillery screen up quick enough. Also, the weather didn't help the Germans.
00:02:39.240
There was some sort of thaw. It was all snowy, right? It's really cold. And there was some
00:02:44.260
sort of thaw and the snow just turns to sludge and mud. And that like really, really hinders
00:02:49.400
the Germans because the Germans are on the offensive, you know, so that's never good for
00:02:53.800
them. And just a few other technical various reasons that the German offensive stalls by just
00:03:02.300
a couple of days between the 27th and the 29th of February, just a few days after they take
00:03:07.260
Fort Duermann. The whole thing sort of basically stalls. But beyond that, there's a bigger question.
00:03:14.280
There's a bigger problem with the German plan on the most meta level, on the most sort of
00:03:19.280
broadly, broad strategic level. There's a problem with it. It's that the Meuse River, the river
00:03:27.760
that runs through this whole region is the Meuse. And von Falkenhayn, I've talked all about him
00:03:33.220
before, remember, the overall commander of the Germans. In the field, that is. Obviously,
00:03:38.840
their overall commander is the Kaiser. But, you know, actually, the military commander on the ground
00:03:43.300
actually gets to make all the real decisions. Von Falkenhayn, he had decided that the German attack
00:03:49.740
should mainly be taking place on the east side of the Meuse only. Because it's difficult to take rivers
00:03:57.360
and cross rivers if the enemy are sort of entrenched and don't want you to. So his feeling was that he
00:04:03.560
didn't, to begin with, right, because we're still relatively at the beginning of this battle, just
00:04:09.100
purely in terms of how many months it goes on. He thought he didn't necessarily need to take the
00:04:13.840
west bank of the Meuse because it just wasn't part of his concept, of his plan. He didn't want to take
00:04:21.020
the whole area. We talked about this before, didn't we, that he didn't actually necessarily want, actually
00:04:25.460
fully take and occupy Verdun. That wasn't the point of the battle. The point of the battle was to force
00:04:31.880
the French to throw all their reserves in, which he would then slaughter. But it wasn't about actually
00:04:38.140
taking Verdun. It wasn't about actually taking the west bank of the Meuse. However, at this point, once
00:04:45.320
they're, once the first sort of phase, the first phase of the battle peters out, they've taken Fort
00:04:51.000
Duhamel and it just seems to everyone involved, including von Falkenhayn, at this point, that either
00:04:57.360
if we're going to do this thing, if this battle is going to be truly a success for the Germans, we need,
00:05:02.840
we do need to take the west bank because otherwise the French, for various reasons, more like tactical
00:05:07.600
reasons, the French can get the drop on us in various ways. They can command the higher ground and
00:05:13.300
they can rein artillery down on us. And the whole point to bleed France dry wouldn't necessarily
00:05:19.180
work. The French could deal out as many casualties on us, the Germans, than we're dealing out
00:05:24.240
to them. And that, again, that negates the whole point of the battle. So in order to prevent
00:05:28.480
that, von Falkenhayn's got a decision about this time in early March, certainly in early
00:05:33.480
March, 1916. So let's call the whole thing off. We did well. We got quite a lot of, quite
00:05:40.340
a big advance. We took Fort Duhamel and that was a big strategic, well, that was a big morale boost,
00:05:44.960
if nothing else. And we can say we beat the French here in this sector at this time. You know, it's not
00:05:50.960
a war-winning effort or anything like that, but it's basically a win for us in this battle.
00:05:56.020
And leave it there, call it there. Or push on. And, you know, what pushing on looks like is taking the
00:06:04.300
west bank of the Meuse, crossing the river and taking all the various hills and other
00:06:10.820
faults around Verdun. And, you know, really, really forcing the French to throw in all their
00:06:19.020
men. Effectively, that's the idea. He's going to bleed France dry. He's going to murder, he's
00:06:23.540
going to kill as many Frenchmen as he possibly can. You know, it's a really quite dark strategy,
00:06:30.740
isn't it? Okay. And apparently there was serious thought, you know, from Valkontine,
00:06:36.620
gave it serious thought of calling the whole battle around this stage, cutting his losses.
00:06:42.060
But he decides not to. And that's, you know, that is a fateful decision because it does mean
00:06:47.260
the deaths of hundreds of thousands more of both young Frenchmen and young Germans.
00:06:53.180
Right. In hindsight, in hindsight, there probably shouldn't have been the battle of Verdun at
00:06:58.380
all. And certainly it would have been best for the Germans, or for both, really. It would
00:07:05.080
have been best if the battle had been sort of called to a halt at the end of February
00:07:09.140
or early March. But it wasn't. And it went on to become the longest battle of World War
00:07:13.940
I. That's one of its monikers. There were a couple of battles that were more bloody, like
00:07:18.320
in terms of sheer number of casualties. But it went on for the longest. It goes on all the
00:07:23.420
way until the winter. It only ends when the snows come again at the end of the year, in
00:07:28.700
like December 1916. It just goes on and on and on. And there's various French attacks,
00:07:35.020
German counterattacks, and back and forth. German attacks. Mostly the Germans are on the
00:07:39.200
attack. Almost entirely the Germans are on the attack. But then there's French counterattacks.
00:07:43.720
Now, some historians have even said, even gone so far as to say, that at this point in the
00:07:49.780
battle, it made, it's easy to say in hindsight, isn't it? But it made absolutely no sense for
00:07:56.440
the Germans to keep going. Absolutely no sense at all. It purely became a matter of, maybe,
00:08:02.640
it purely became a matter of pride that they'd already tried so hard, pushed so hard, built
00:08:09.060
up so many, you know, guns and ammunition, that to have it not be a complete overwhelming
00:08:16.460
victory, the Germans just sort of couldn't accept that in terms of, like, national prestige
00:08:23.680
and pride. Turns out that, you know, eight months later, seven months later, whatever,
00:08:28.980
they still have to end it and retreat anyway. So, but, you know, it's easy to say these things
00:08:35.260
in hindsight, isn't it? If you were in the German high command in, you know, in the 1st
00:08:41.100
of March, 1916, and you had their mindset, I mean, you might think, no, no, this is our,
00:08:46.780
this is our chance to win. This is our chance to either do what von Falkenhay said, bleed the
00:08:52.700
French army white, or actually, actually push, push through, punch through the line at Verdun,
00:08:58.380
you know, profoundly, and march onto Paris and win the whole war, 1870, 1871 style. You know,
00:09:06.860
if you, if you were one of those men, you might think that was realistic. You probably would
00:09:11.920
think that it's, it's a, it's a possibility. It's worth trying. It could cut the war short
00:09:17.740
by two years. Of course, they don't know it ends at the end of 1918, but nonetheless, you
00:09:21.620
know what I mean? We could end the war soon. Okay. So the Germans push on and cross in various
00:09:29.200
points, various ways, cross the Meuse and start attacking all the environs, various small towns
00:09:36.540
and forests and hills around Verdun at great costs to themselves as well. You know, every
00:09:45.200
push, every offensive is always very, very heavy in terms of casualties for those attacking. I mean,
00:09:52.820
in World War I, it's both sides. Well, that's another thing to say that the sort of the horror
00:09:56.680
and the killing is just constant, right? You might think if you read a, if you read a summary of the
00:10:04.260
Battle of Verdun, they will say things like, between this date and this date, there was a German
00:10:08.760
offensive. And between this date and this date, there was a French counter-offensive and so on and so
00:10:12.840
on. And you think, okay, so in between those dates, there's not war going on. The battle isn't going
00:10:19.120
on. Not that many people are dying. No, no, that's not how it is. It's going on constantly all the
00:10:24.460
time. Like there'll be a period where there's a whole month or something where neither side are
00:10:28.820
formally attacking and yet both sides lose 30,000 guys or something in that time. So there's just
00:10:35.500
constant, it's just constant, literally 24-7, depending on where you are on the front. But it's a big
00:10:41.600
front, miles and miles and miles long. It's constant. There's sniping and artillery fire
00:10:45.260
going on the whole time. Mines going off, gas being fired, everything. Absolute nightmare.
00:10:53.280
A lot of the accounts from people that survived or wrote letters home and then died, whatever.
00:10:59.220
The accounts are often things like, and I'm paraphrasing, but they say things like,
00:11:04.880
you can never, like they're writing to their family, you can never understand what this is.
00:11:08.600
You will never be able to understand what it was like here at this time, in this place,
00:11:14.540
in this time in history, that it's complete madness. Every horror you can imagine is going
00:11:20.320
on. If you thought men were mad, if you thought men were capable of monstrous things, you haven't
00:11:27.160
seen anything. You don't know. I can't explain. I barely have the words to explain to you the
00:11:34.760
horror and madness of what's going on here. And yet still, some did try. And yeah, it's
00:11:41.900
just crazy. Like artillery, particularly artillery, does crazy things to the human body. Like
00:11:47.080
sometimes it will, it will flatten the man, like literally flatten him. Sometimes it will
00:11:51.860
rip them all to pieces, rip you from your thigh all the way up your torso to the top of
00:11:57.140
your shoulder, rip you in half. Um, sometimes artillery will blow up and a guy's just like
00:12:03.860
near someone and it hasn't wounded him at all. It's like not a scratch on his body, but he's
00:12:09.060
dead. Right. The, the, just the, the concussion of it. It's really weird what artillery does
00:12:15.320
to people. And that's terrifying, terrifying. You know, of course, there's one thing to get
00:12:20.700
a pretty much a nice, neat bullet hole through your chest or through your head and you die
00:12:26.000
either instantly or quite quickly. You bleed out within a few moments, but artillery can,
00:12:31.120
you know, like it will just turn your, your leg from the shin down into pulp and you don't
00:12:37.360
die for ages or you only die eventually because you get an infection from it and you're in insane
00:12:42.280
pain for days and days and days or months before you actually die of it. Right. Or it's
00:12:47.640
just like off, not often, but you know, it's not that uncommon that it'll blow your jaw off.
00:12:52.140
The bottom part of your jaw is blown off. Something like that. Something horrific or both your arms
00:12:57.880
and legs are blown off, but you, but you don't die. You're a quadriplegic. Terrifying. Just,
00:13:03.740
you know, really, really terrifying. A lot of soldiers say, a lot of them, a lot of them say,
00:13:10.060
I don't mind dying. I'm prepared to die. I made that decision when I signed up or volunteered
00:13:15.240
as long as it's quick. I'm prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for my country, but I want it
00:13:23.760
to be quick. Don't have me half ripped apart and then surviving for a long time. Like maybe just
00:13:30.960
surviving in the mud on the battlefield, in the snow and mud, in like a dirty shell crater that's full of
00:13:37.640
piss and shit and the residue from gas, poison gas. Yeah. I'm prepared to die, but don't make it
00:13:45.460
hell on earth. Don't make it like torturous. But of course, you know, you're in the lap of the gods
00:13:52.720
of war. It's why it's so, so sort of terrifying for both sides. Okay. And so the Germans push on
00:14:00.340
and there's various high points. That's, that's what war is still like very much in world war one,
00:14:06.040
where it's important who controls the high ground. I mean, it's still important to a certain extent
00:14:10.940
nowadays, depending on what type of war you're fighting, right? A war between say, Israel and
00:14:17.980
Iran. It's not, it's not important necessarily who holds the high ground because they do aerial
00:14:23.360
reconnaissance or even satellite imagery and stuff. But back in world war one, even though they have got
00:14:28.720
aeroplanes, they've definitely got aeroplanes and they've got balloon cores, where you can send up
00:14:34.260
a balloon, an observation balloon, or you can send up one of those rickety, very early aeroplanes and
00:14:40.940
even with cameras and take images of what the other side are doing. Still, regardless of all that,
00:14:46.980
because all that is still relatively primitive, it's important. It's really, really important
00:14:51.900
tactically to be able to hold the higher ground, mainly not just for observation, although that is
00:14:58.640
super, super important, mainly so that you can move your guns up there, your artillery, your heavy
00:15:03.560
guns, the bigger the better, and rain down on the other side. So it's really, really important, I mean
00:15:09.820
vitally important. Who holds the highest ground? Now around Verdun, there's various hilltops. It's quite
00:15:16.360
an undulating landscape, really. There's various hilltops and various ridge lines. And so it becomes a
00:15:23.640
case of, when the Germans cross onto the west bank of the Meuse, it becomes a case of fighting over who
00:15:30.720
controls the various hilltops and ridge lines around Verdun. And that's where the bitterest fighting,
00:15:36.900
where, you know, the majority of the hundreds of thousands of casualties aside, but the both sides
00:15:42.720
suffer, go on fighting over these hills. And they swap hands many times. So in those terms,
00:15:49.520
like one hilltop. For example, there's one hill called Hill 304. Very famous. Hill 304.
00:15:56.680
Changes hands multiple times. And tens and tens and tens of thousands of men on both sides die
00:16:02.960
fighting over this same hill. And the hill has been blasted to smithereens, right? When the Germans
00:16:10.120
first try and take it in March 1916, they bombard it so heavily, because it's got French positions on it,
00:16:17.180
to begin with, in the first instance, the Germans bombard it so heavily that they reduce the hill itself
00:16:22.700
by something like four metres. Right? At the beginning, it stood about like 304 metres tall.
00:16:28.340
And after their initial bombardment, it was only 300 metres tall. So imagine that. You reduce a hill by four metres.
00:16:34.740
You know how big four metres it is? It's like the size of a, the height of a house almost, you know?
00:16:38.780
Nearly. Not quite, but you know. A lot. To reduce the top of an entire hill like that, just by artillery fire.
00:16:46.940
In other words, they absolutely pepper it. And the fighting over Hill 304 goes on and on, back and forth, back and forth.
00:16:54.860
So if you count it in terms of how much ground was taken or captured per life, right,
00:17:02.140
it ends up coming out the most insane and bizarre and grotesque results. Like, for every inch of ground,
00:17:09.580
won or lost, hundreds of men died. Mad. And for the, for the individual soldier on the ground, again,
00:17:17.020
on both sides, they can't, it's hard for them to understand. You know, like, say you're just an average
00:17:23.220
French, French soldier, and you know that loads of your countrymen and comrades in arms, even people you knew,
00:17:31.160
friends, family members, perhaps, have been thrown into defending and retaking this one hill from the Germans.
00:17:39.060
And now you're going to be thrown in again. And you, you know, the obvious thing to think is, why, why are we doing this?
00:17:44.640
You know, the futility of it all. Why, this is crazy. Why are we wasting the very flower of our youth?
00:17:52.400
Why are we, and the Germans, throwing in the very flower of our youth?
00:17:58.960
The best and strongest menfolk of our entire nation are being shot and blown to pieces for the sake of this one
00:18:07.680
random hill near Verdun on the Muse. Why are we doing this? Well, because it's much bigger than Hill 304.
00:18:16.960
There was another one called Dead Man's Hill. That was the name of it even before World War One.
00:18:22.560
It just so happened that earlier in the 19th century, a dead body was found up there, a murder victim.
00:18:28.240
Right, long, long before World War One, this one hill near Verdun, a murder victim was randomly found
00:18:34.160
on this hill. And so the hill got called Dead Man's Hill, or Le Morte Homme in French,
00:18:41.440
Le Morte Homme, the Dead Man's Hill. This is another one of these hills, you know, aptly named,
00:18:48.160
like Hill 304, where both the French and the Germans decided, I mean, correctly in battlefield terms,
00:18:56.080
that it was tactically and strategically important to hold that high ground.
00:19:01.840
If we lose that bit of high ground, it gives the other side a massive advantage. So we must not yield it.
00:19:09.360
We must have it ourselves. Both sides think that. If we are to win the Battle of Verdun,
00:19:15.680
and perhaps the hope is win or lose the whole of World War One. So therefore it all boils down to just
00:19:21.760
these few hills, these few ridge lines. And the slaughter is crazy. We can't really,
00:19:30.240
we can't really properly understand it, I suppose. People that were there struggled to describe it,
00:19:36.640
and get their minds around it. The sheer scale, the numbers, you know. It's easy, isn't it, to sit here and
00:19:43.920
read a book or read a Wikipedia page and just say, you know, 600,000 men died at Verdun in 1916,
00:19:52.480
or something like that. To just say, the French lost somewhere between 278,000 and 330,000 casualties,
00:19:59.840
and probably something like 143,000 were actual combat deaths. And a few 10,000 more just simply
00:20:07.040
missing. Just blown into dust. Blown into a red mist. Just gone. Just to say, you know, just to say that.
00:20:14.800
The Germans may have had 160,000. Well, between 145,000 and 160,000 killed. 215,000 wounded.
00:20:25.520
You just say that and you move on. But, you know, to really, really wrap your mind around that,
00:20:31.440
those numbers. The insanity of it. Look, it's so, each and every one of those is a family ruined,
00:20:40.560
right? A life cut short. Many of them, most of them, maybe all of them, got something to offer
00:20:48.640
the world. Men with hopes and dreams and fears. And most of them, the vast majority of them, young,
00:20:56.880
terribly young kids, really. You know, 20-year-olds, 25-year-olds, younger. And put through,
00:21:04.640
it's not just the horror of artillery, but just living in those conditions as well. That's another
00:21:09.840
thing that comes out from a lot of the accounts from Verdun. Red. Lots and lots of the accounts.
00:21:17.760
That's the thing that I find most sort of interesting or harrowing, is just the real life
00:21:24.560
account. The real, the real words of someone that lived through it. For example, in one of those
00:21:29.680
books, there's a whole chapter, a whole section of one chapter. And it talks about, there's this
00:21:34.160
particular tunnel on the French side. And when I say tunnel, it's a big, big tunnel, not just a small,
00:21:40.560
not just a small alcove carved in the clay by men. It was pre-World War I existing. I think it was like
00:21:47.040
a train tunnel that was big and broad and high. And, you know, a bit like an underground in London,
00:21:54.400
like an underground tube station type thing. Quite a big underground thing. It was deep,
00:21:59.760
pretty deep underground. So even the giant German artillery pieces couldn't just blow you up from
00:22:05.440
above. So in that sense, it was safe, basically. And there was lots of space in there. And it was used
00:22:12.800
as all sorts of things like an ammo depot, a makeshift hospital, just somewhere to shelter if there's
00:22:21.280
like a gas attack and things. But the conditions in there were unbelievably squalid and horrible and
00:22:30.160
smelly and atrocious, you know, loads of bodies, men dying, men suffering, the horror and despair,
00:22:39.920
fear, all these things crammed into this little space. And again, people say the stench,
00:22:44.800
the stench of, again, piss and shit, but also of death, of infection, the smell of the smell that
00:22:54.320
not enough to kill you, but the smell of previous gas attacks, to smell it in the air. Like one or
00:22:59.920
two times a fire broke out in there and loads of people died. And like the, the smell of burnt
00:23:05.120
flesh and just, just a horrible hellacious place. And still, you would much rather be there than
00:23:10.000
outside. You, you would give anything to be in there than be in an open trench, anything.
00:23:18.000
And these various faults, not just fault Dumont, there's loads and loads of faults.
00:23:21.760
Another big one would be Fort Vaux, we'll talk about in a moment, we'll talk about a bit later.
00:23:26.880
The same thing in these faults, they smell and they stink and they're actually still quite dangerous
00:23:32.480
because an artillery shell is unlikely to penetrate in. But they, various times, the Germans were able
00:23:39.360
to sort of pump gas in and through the corridors or a fire will break out. Many such times and
00:23:45.440
accidentally a fire will break out. There was one time when in one of the, it might have been Fort Vaux,
00:23:50.560
I might have been doing one when the Germans were holding it. Anyway, it's not uncommon that
00:23:55.360
they'd started using it as an ammo dump and for whatever reason, by accident, your own ammo dump
00:23:59.600
blows up. And you know, a whole company of men are just wiped out in an instant or something.
00:24:04.800
A fire rips through and a whole company of men are just gone, burnt alive. On and on and on,
00:24:11.200
the horror just goes on and on and on. And it's also really, really bad for the Germans. This is both
00:24:17.600
sides I'm talking about. Because where the French very, very often are like the dug-in party, they're
00:24:23.520
the defending party, the Germans are the attackers. So as bad as it is to have one of these tunnels or one
00:24:30.000
of these faults, or even a trench, the Germans quite often haven't even got that. The accounts coming
00:24:37.840
from the German side at Verdun are just as bad, even if not more, even if not worse. They say,
00:24:45.280
they say, we just have to camp out in a forest. And you know, they're experiencing most of the same
00:24:51.680
stuff. The French are bombarding them. The casualties, in the end, despite von Volkenheim's
00:24:57.440
concept, the casualties are very, very similar. The French do lose a few more, a fair few more
00:25:04.640
men than the Germans, but not a fantastic amount more. Von Volkenheim's plan was that he would kill,
00:25:11.520
for every German killed, the French would lose four, five, six, seven, hopefully ten men. That was
00:25:18.000
the idea. And no, it's very similar. Like, almost one for one. Well, two for one, maybe. Something in
00:25:24.880
that ballpark. So in other words, the Germans are taking massive casualties all the time, just like
00:25:29.440
the French are. And they haven't even got faults, for the most part. They haven't even got faults or
00:25:35.360
decent trenches. They're just sort of basically out in the open. Often. Not always, but often.
00:25:41.520
So it's a hellacious experience for both sides. It really is. That's why Verdun
00:25:48.160
I find so interesting, because it's sort of World War I dialed up to 11. There are other places
00:25:55.200
on the Western Front, the Battle of the Somme, the Battle of Ypres. In fact, lots and lots of them,
00:25:59.520
where it's sort of, it's that classic, almost cliched view of what the Western Front was like.
00:26:03.680
But I feel like Verdun is, for me, for many World War I historians and scholars, it's sort of,
00:26:10.320
sort of the quintessential World War I horrific experience. Okay. So the Germans decide they're
00:26:18.400
going to get stubborn about trying to, you know, really win the Battle of Verdun. And the French
00:26:24.080
decide they will not let Verdun fall at any cost. So from Welkenheim's calculation, at least in that sense,
00:26:30.640
was correct. You know, he gambled that the French would do anything rather than see Verdun fall.
00:26:37.120
And again, strictly in that sense, he's not wrong. Right? The French political command
00:26:43.760
and Foch, the very, very top of the French military command, send in Pétain,
00:26:51.760
who goes on to be important and famous all through World War I, and even into the interwar years in
00:26:59.440
World War II. Just quickly to say on Pétain, when Hitler invaded France in 1940, in World War II,
00:27:06.000
and he takes Paris quite quickly, and he allows, you know, a Vichy rump French state to exist. We're in
00:27:15.520
the south of France, and he needs a puppet to rule Vichy France. He picks Pétain, and Pétain accepts.
00:27:23.360
So Pétain's actually, ultimately, in the end, got a reputation for being like a Nazi stooge.
00:27:28.640
Anyway, all that's in the future. At this point, he's brought in, he's known as a good defensive
00:27:35.040
commander, Pétain. He's known, although in modern sense, it's probably, it's nowhere near in the
00:27:40.960
modern sense, but he's known as trying to save his own men's lives if he can. It still seems extremely
00:27:47.120
callous to us now, but in those terms, in 1916 terms, he was thought of as kind to the men,
00:27:55.040
his own men. Try not to waste them in offensives you know are certainly going to fail. For example,
00:28:02.080
right? That was seen as clement and kind, just that, just to not do that. But still, still,
00:28:08.960
does seem very, very callow the way even someone like Pétain would use his men and waste their lives
00:28:17.840
in many, many senses. But okay, he was a defensive commander, because one of the French doctrines
00:28:23.200
was whenever the Germans attack, whenever they attack, what we, the French, do is we just form
00:28:29.600
up a counter-attack immediately, as quickly as we can, form a counter-attack and launch the counter-attack.
00:28:35.520
Okay? Regardless, that was their tactic. That was their doctrine. Regardless of whether that
00:28:42.240
counter-attack would work. Right? That's crazy. So say the Germans do a little counter-attack
00:28:48.880
somewhere, you know, only a few companies or a regiment or two, over just a few hundred yards
00:28:52.720
of ground, say, over a mile's worth of ground, bite and hold. Right? They bite that little bit
00:28:59.120
out of the French line and hold it. And they're able to hold it with, you know, with extreme
00:29:05.520
confidence and ability. They immediately turn it into a bastion of their own. And any French counter-attack
00:29:11.280
will fail, because the Germans have set up, you know, perfect machine gun, overlapping machine
00:29:16.480
gun lists or something or other. Right? So any French counter-attack will fail. But no, it's French
00:29:21.520
doctrine. It's what we do. Right? The generals and the colonels, that level, they're like, no,
00:29:27.680
what we do, what we always do, what we must do, is form a counter-attack and launch it. And so, what,
00:29:33.920
hundreds, maybe a few thousand Frenchmen die for nothing. And anyone that is reasonable and rational
00:29:41.120
knew that they would die for nothing. Right? So Petain comes in and says, stop doing that.
00:29:47.040
Let's put an end to that. We're literally 100% wasting men's lives doing that. Let's stop doing
00:29:53.760
that. So he's got a reputation as being good and kind. And the men love him. Nonetheless, nonetheless,
00:30:01.440
he's throwing unbelievable numbers of men's lives into this meat grinder, still. So the Germans just
00:30:09.760
keep attacking all the way through March and April, all the way into May, really. Losing lots and lots
00:30:18.880
and lots of men in the process. One of the things the Germans would do is they would send in various
00:30:25.280
types of unit, what we would call, you know, companies and regiments and divisions. And they
00:30:31.360
would send them in to Verdun, the Verdun front, the Verdun salient, and keep them there until they were
00:30:37.760
almost wiped out. Or entirely wiped out. You were there and you fought to the end. That was it. Right?
00:30:45.120
That's very old fashioned, even in 1916, sort of an old fashioned way of doing it. So some outfits
00:30:50.880
might have 90% casualties or 100% casualties, even eventually. But was so the French and
00:30:57.760
Pétain, who was, you know, as I said, got this reputation for being kindly. He decided to do it
00:31:05.680
another way. He decided he would cycle units, divisions in, through and out of Verdun.
00:31:13.120
So they don't get entirely annihilated. They might still get entirely annihilated if they're in the
00:31:18.640
wrong place at the wrong time during a big German offensive or something. They might still get
00:31:24.400
completely annihilated. But the idea was that you send in a division, let's say, let's just talk about
00:31:30.160
division level. They send in a division and they're at the very, very front of, on the front lines at
00:31:36.880
Verdun for like a few weeks. And then they're like in a secondary reserve line, second or third
00:31:43.440
trench lines for another few weeks. And then they're cycled away from Verdun entirely for quite a
00:31:50.320
while. You know, maybe, maybe months. Going either on leave or go fight somewhere else on the western
00:31:56.320
front. So your unit, your, your, your regiment, whatever it is, you do, you sort of have to serve
00:32:04.080
your time at Verdun. And obviously, hopefully you survive. And, but some of them, if you do survive,
00:32:10.400
you get cycled through again, like six months later or a year later, your, your men, your unit,
00:32:16.000
has to do another stint at Verdun. And the idea was that individual units, regiments, aren't
00:32:24.720
completely annihilated. And also, if you keep men in, in, in the front line like that, the way the Germans
00:32:32.720
were doing it, you go to the front line, you stay there till you, till you're dead. It quite quickly
00:32:38.320
kind of destroys men psychologically, emotionally. After a while, you know, each man's got his own
00:32:45.760
breaking point. And after a while, even the strongest of men, doesn't break all men. Some
00:32:50.320
men can do it, you know, indefinitely. But most people, after a while, you suffer terribly from, well,
00:32:58.320
what we would call PTSD, uh, what they would call shell shock. Uh, the idea that you can't just put
00:33:05.280
up with that much pressure, the, the, the, the shadow of death hanging over you. You can't put up for
00:33:12.160
that indefinitely, with that indefinitely, uh, without it damaging your mind, your very psyche.
00:33:18.960
And that really was what the Germans were asking of their men. And at least Petain, on the French
00:33:24.880
side, realised that, you know, this was a real thing. You know, like, morale, the breaking point
00:33:31.840
of a human is a real thing. So let's take that into account a bit. Okay, so the French were cycling,
00:33:39.200
cycling their men in, through, and then out of again, Verdun. And most of their army, the vast
00:33:44.880
majority of the whole entire French army went through Verdun at least once. Or like, various
00:33:51.680
accounts say different, either two thirds of the French army or three quarters of the French army.
00:33:56.240
X number of millions of Frenchmen did a stint in Verdun at some point, many more than one stint at
00:34:05.120
Verdun. And, and so there were very few French soldiers that didn't see some action one way or another
00:34:12.720
at Verdun. We hope you enjoyed that video. And if you did, please head over to lotusseaters.com