Battle of Verdun

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Battle of Verdun
Part of the Western Front of World War I
Date 21 February – 18 December 1916 Location Verdun-sur-Meuse, France Result indecisive
Belligerents
France	German Empire
Commanders
Philippe Pétain Robert Nivelle	Erich von Falkenhayn Crown Prince Wilhelm
Strength
About 30,000 on 21 February 1916	About 150,000 on 21 February 1916
Casualties and losses
378,000; of whom 163,000 died	330,000; of whom 143,000 died

v • d • e Western Front Liège – Frontiers – 1st Marne – Antwerp – Race to the Sea – 1st Ypres – 2nd Ypres – 2nd Artois – 2nd Champagne – Loos – 3rd Artois – Verdun – Somme – Arras – 2nd Aisne – Messines – 3rd Ypres – Cambrai – Michael – 2nd Marne – Hundred Days

The Battle of Verdun was one of the most critical battles in World War I on the Western Front. It was fought between the German and French armies from 21 February to 18 December 1916 around the city of Verdun-sur-Meuse in northeast France.^[1]

The Battle of Verdun resulted in more than a quarter of a million battlefield deaths and at least a million wounded. Verdun was the longest battle and one of the bloodiest in World War I and more generally in human history. In both France and Germany it has come to represent the horrors of war, similar to the significance of the Battle of the Somme to the United Kingdom, the Battle of Gallipoli to Australia and New Zealand, or the Battle of Gettysburg to the United States.

The Battle of Verdun popularised the phrase "Ils ne passeront pas" ("They shall not pass") addressed to his troops by General Robert Nivelle on 23 June 1916, but often incorrectly attributed to Philippe Pétain. At the beginning of the Battle of Verdun, on 16 April 1916, General Petain had also issued a prophetic order of the day which ended with the phrase: "Courage ! On les aura" ("Courage! We shall get them").

Contents 1 History 2 Lead-up to the battle 3 Before the Battle 3.1 21 February 1916. The German offensive begins: The fall of Fort Douaumont. Mort-Homme and Cote 304: March 1916 3.2 The fall of Fort Vaux: June 1916 3.3 Fort Souville. The beginning of the end: July 1916 3.4 French counter-offensives. The end game: October and December 1916 4 Casualties 5 Significance 6 See also 7 Further reading 8 References 9 External links

[edit] History

For centuries Verdun had played an important role in the defence of its hinterland, due to the city's strategic location on the Meuse River. Attila the Hun, for example, failed in his fifth-century attempt to seize the town. In the division of the empire of Charlemagne, the Treaty of Verdun of 843 made the town part of the Holy Roman Empire. The Peace of Munster in 1648 awarded Verdun to France. Verdun played a very important role in the defensive line that was built after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. As protection against German threats along the eastern border, a strong line of fortifications was constructed between Verdun and Toul and between Épinal and Belfort. Verdun guarded the northern entrance to the plains of Champagne and thus the approach to the French capital city of Paris.

In mid-1914, during the German invasion of France and the First Battle of the Marne, Verdun held fast as a salient although some forts underwent Big Bertha's artillery bombardment. The French garrison in the city of Verdun itself was housed in the citadel built by Vauban in the 17th century. By the end of the 19th century, an underground complex had been built which served as a workshop, ammunition storage, hospital, and quarters for the French troops. Above all else the city of Verdun was at the hub of an outer ring of 18 large defensive forts (not including many smaller redoubts), many of them featuring retractable artillery turrets equipped with 75mm and 155mm cannons. The overall system had been designed by general Sere de Rivieres and built at great cost during the 1880s (Le Halle, 1998). In effect, it made Verdun a self-contained fortified region extending about 5 miles beyond the city walls. Those outer Verdun forts were of variable quality and size and thus provided unequal potential to resist large calibre artillery shelling. The forts situated to the north and east of Verdun (e.g. Douaumont, Vaux,Moulainville) had been hardened during the early 1900s with very thick steel reinforced concrete tops resting on a sand cushion. Those hardened forts had also been equipped with additional 75mm field guns installed in reinforced concrete "Casemates de Bourges" looking sideways, thus providing flanking fire across the intervals between the forts. However, some masonry forts built during the 1880s on the same defensive ring, but to the west and south of Verdun (e.g. Landrecourt, Marre, Haudainville), had been left virtually unimproved. The reason for this decision was that a possible German assault was most likely to come from the north and east, a speculation that later proved to be essentially correct.

[edit] Lead-up to the battle

After the Germans failed to achieve a quick victory in 1914, the war of movement gave way to trench warfare with neither side able to achieve a successful breakthrough.

In 1915, all attempts to force a breakthrough—by the Germans at Ypres, by the British at Neuve Chapelle and by the French at Champagne—had failed, resulting only in heavy casualties.

According to his post-war memoirs, the German Chief of Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, believed that although a breakthrough might no longer be possible, the French could still be defeated if they suffered a sufficient number of casualties. He explained that his motivation for the battle was to attack a position from which the French could not retreat, both for strategic reasons and for reasons of national pride, so imposing a ruinous battle of attrition on the French armies. Falkenhayn stated that the town of Verdun-sur-Meuse was chosen to "bleed the French white"^{[citation needed]}: the town, surrounded by a ring of forts, was an important stronghold that projected into the German lines and guarded the direct route to Paris. By early 1916, Verdun's much-vaunted impregnability had been seriously weakened. It had been "declassed" as a fortress the previous summer and all but a few of its guns and garrison had been removed. This was primarily the work of General Joseph Joffre, C-in-C of the French Army, who, with others, had presumed from the relatively easy fall in 1914 of the Belgian fortresses at Liege and Namur that this form of defence was redundant so far as modern warfare was concerned. Between August and October 1915, Verdun was denuded of over 50 complete batteries of guns and 128,000 rounds of ammunition. These were parcelled out to other Allied sectors where artillery was short. The stripping process was still going on at the end of January 1916, by which time the 60-odd Verdun forts possessed fewer than 300 guns with insufficient ammunition.

In choosing the battlefield, Falkenhayn looked for a location where the material circumstances favoured the Germans: Verdun was isolated on three sides and communications to the French rear were poor. Finally, a German railhead lay only twelve miles away, while French troops could only resupply from the standard-gauge railhead at Bar-le-Duc by a single road, the Voie Sacrée and, to a lesser degree, through a local pre-war narrow-gauge railway (the "Chemin de Fer Meusien" ). In a war where materiel trumped élan, Falkenhayn expected a favourable loss exchange ratio as the French would cling fanatically to a death trap.

Falkenhayn stated in his memoirs that rather than a traditional military victory, Verdun was planned as a vehicle for destroying the French Army. He quotes from a memo he says he wrote to the Kaiser:

"The string in France has reached breaking point. A mass breakthrough—which in any case is beyond our means—is unnecessary. Within our reach there are objectives for the retention of which the French General Staff would be compelled to throw in every man they have. If they do so the forces of France will bleed to death."

However, recent scholarship by Holger Afflerbach and others has questioned the veracity of this so-called "Christmas memo".^[2] No copy has ever surfaced and the only account of it appeared in Falkenhayn's post-war memoir. His army commanders at Verdun, including the German Crown Prince, denied any knowledge of a plan based on attrition. Afflerbach argues that it seems likely that Falkenhayn did not specifically design the battle to bleed the French Army, but justified ex-post-facto the motive of the Verdun offensive, despite its failure.

Current analyses follow the same trend and exclude the traditional explanation. The offensive was probably planned to overwhelm Verdun's weakened defences, thus striking a potentially fatal blow onto the French Army. Verdun's rail communications had been cut off in 1915 and the city was depending on a single narrow road to be re-supplied. This logistical bottleneck had raised German hopes that an effective French defence could not be sustained beyond a few weeks.

[edit] Before the Battle

In spite of its ring of forts, Verdun was poorly defended in early 1916 because half of the artillery in the forts had been taken away leaving only the heaviest guns that were too difficult to remove from the fort's retractable gun turrets. For instance, all the 75mm guns in the "Casemates de Bourges" had been removed. This decision had been implemented in reaction to the devastation brought by the German super heavy guns to Belgian fortifications in 1914. In February 1916, good intelligence on German preparations and a delay in the attack due to bad weather gave the French High Command time to rush two divisions of 30th Corps—the 72nd and 51st—to the area's defence. The French strength was now 34 battalions against 72 German therefore about half that of the assailant. French artillery was even more at a disadvantage: about 300 guns, mostly 75mm field guns, versus 1400 guns on the German side most of them heavy and super heavy including 14" and 16" mortars.

[edit] 21 February 1916. The German offensive begins: The fall of Fort Douaumont. Mort-Homme and Cote 304: March 1916

The German High Command aimed to launch the offensive on the 12 February; however, fog, heavy rain and high winds delayed the offensive for a week. The battle began on 21 February 1916 at 7.15 AM with a ten-hour artillery bombardment firing over 1,000,000 shells (including poison gas) by 1,200 guns, most of them heavies, on a front of 40 kilometres (25 m). This incessant pounding or " Trommelfeuer" was the heaviest and longest artillery preparation ever inflicted since the beginning of WW-1. The noise it produced was carried through the ground as a deep rumble that was still heard one hundred miles away. This massive preparation was followed by an attack by three army corps (the 3rd, 7th, and 18th). The Germans used flamethrowers for the first time to clear the French trenches. Newly introduced storm troops led the attack with rifles slung, the first time in the war, and went into battle with grenades in hand. Combined artillery and infantry shock tactics on that scale were new to the French defenders and caused them to lose much ground to the Germans at the beginning. By 22 February German shock troops had advanced three miles (5 km) capturing the Bois des Caures in the village of Flabas after two French battalions led by Colonel Émile Driant had held them up for two days, and pushed the French defenders back to Samogneux, Beaumont, and Ornes. Later that day, on the 22 February, Colonel Émile Driant was killed, rifle in hand, fighting alongside the 56th and 59th Battalion de Chasseurs a pied. Only 118 Chasseurs managed to escape. Poor communications meant that only then did the French high command realize the seriousness of the attack.

On 24 February, the French defenders of XXX Corps fell back again from their second line of defence, but were saved from disaster by the appearance of the XX Corps under General Balfourier. Intended as relief, the new arrivals were thrown into combat immediately. That evening French Army chief of staff, General de Castelnau, advised his commander-in-chief, Joseph Joffre, that the French Second Army, under General Philippe Petain, ought to be sent to man the Verdun sector. The Germans were now in possession of Beaumont, the Bois des Fosses, the Bois des Caurieres and part of the way up the Hassoule ravine which led to Douaumont. On 24 February, at 4:30PM, infantrymen from three companies of the German 24th (Brandenburg) regiment entered the centrepiece of the French fortification system: Fort Douaumont. The first German party to find an entry into the fort was led by a Sergeant Kunze. He was followed by other raiders led by Lieutenant Von Brandis, Lieutenant Radtke, and Captain Haupt. The whole German raiding party, made up of only 19 officers and 79 soldiers, promptly overwhelmed the small French garrison (68 men) and forced its surrender. Douaumont was known as the largest fort of the Verdun's defensive system. It had been built before the war to hold a garrison of 477 men and 7 commissioned officers. It also featured two retractable/rotating artillery turrets plus 4 X 75mm field guns firing from side bunkers. However, the reality of Douaumont's situation in February 1916 was quite different. Firstly a single NCO named Chenot was the highest ranking military personnel inside Douaumont and the de facto commander of the fort. Ordnance wise, only one rotating gun turret, out of the four in existence, was properly armed and manned by a crew of artillerymen. All the fort's 75mm guns in side bunkers had been removed in 1915, following orders given by general Joffre. The fort's moats were basically left undefended and preparations had been made to blow up the fort from the inside. Captain Haupt, being the senior officer in the raiding party that captured Douaumont, took command of the fort. However he was wounded the next morning and had to delegate his command to Oberleutnant von Brandis CO of 8th Kompanie. Both Von Brandis and Haupt won the highest German military decoration, Pour le Mérite, for the extraordinary courage and initiative they had shown during this successful action. Von Brandis, who spoke French fluently, had also played a key role in persuading the fort's garrison to surrender. The final re-capture of Fort Douaumont, on 24 October 1916, was estimated at a later date to have cost the French Army at least 100,000 casualties. A first French attempt to recapture Douaumont had failed in May 1916.

Castelnau appointed General Philippe Pétain commander of the Verdun area and ordered the French Second Army to the battle sector. Petain took over on 25 February and decided that the Verdun forts should be strongly re-garrisoned to form the principal bulwarks of a new defence. He mapped out new lines of resistance on both banks of the Meuse and gave orders for a barrage position to be established through Avoncourt, Fort de Marre, Verdun's NE outskirts and Fort du Rozellier. The line Bras-Douaumont was divided into four sectors, each sector was entrusted to fresh French troops of the 20th "Iron" Corps. Their main job was to delay the German advance with counter-attacks. On 29 February, the German attack was slowed down at the village of Douaumont by heavy snowfall and a tenacious defence by the French 33rd Infantry Regiment which had been commanded by Pétain himself in the years prior to the war. Captain Charles de Gaulle, the future Free French leader and French President, was a company commander in this regiment and was taken prisoner near Douaumont during the battle. This slowdown gave the French time to bring up 90,000 men and 23,000 tons of ammunition from the railhead at Bar-le-Duc to Verdun. This was largely accomplished by uninterrupted, night-and-day trucking along a narrow departmental road: the so-called "Voie Sacrée". The standard gauge railway line going through Verdun in peacetime had been interrupted since 1915.

As in so many previous offensives on the Western Front, the German assailants had lost effective artillery cover by advancing too fast in the early stages of the attack. With the battlefield turned into a sea of mud through continual shelling, it was more and more difficult for German artillery to follow forward in this very hilly terrain. German infantry's southward advance also brought it into range of French field artillery on the opposite side of the Meuse river. Each new advance to the south, towards the city of Verdun, became more and more costly than the previous ones as the attacking German Fifth Army units were cut down by Pétain's artillery massed on the opposite, or west bank side of the Meuse river . When the village of Douaumont was finally captured by German infantry on 2 March 1916, four German infantry regiments had been virtually destroyed.

Unable to make any further progress against Verdun frontally, the Germans turned to the flanks, attacking on the west bank, or left bank, of the Meuse river the hills of Le Mort-Homme on 6 March and Cote 304 on 20 March. The German artillery preparation and its follow up involved 800 guns, most of them heavies which fired nearly 4 million shells and transformed the two hills into volcanoes of mud and rocks. The top of Cote 304 had gone down from 304 metres to 300 metres, as measured after the war. Mort Homme Hill sheltered active batteries of French field guns, while also providing commanding views of all the left bank battlefield. After storming the Bois des Corbeaux and losing it to a determined French counter-attack, the Germans prepared another attempt on Mort Homme on 9 March and this time from the direction of Béthincourt in the NW. They seized the Bois des Corbeaux a second time, but at a crippling cost before they could finally occupy the crests of Mort Homme and Cote 304. They had also captured the destroyed villages of Cumieres and Chattancourt.

[edit] The fall of Fort Vaux: June 1916

Then German attacks shifted back to the right bank of the Meuse and found a focus on Fort Vaux which was shelled continuously by the heaviest siege guns. After a final assault initiated on June 1st by nearly 10,000 German shock troops, they occupied the top of the fort on June 2nd. However, the underground corridors of Fort Vaux still remained under French control. Then close fighting proceeded underground for 5 days, barricade by barricade, in the narrow corridors of the fort. The French garrison of Fort Vaux, led by a Major Raynal, finally surrendered on 7 June when the defenders had run out of water. Up to this point, losses had been appalling on both sides. General Pétain had attempted to spare his troops by remaining on the defensive, but he had been relieved on May 1st from his Verdun command and promoted to lead the overall Centre Army Group which still included the Verdun sector. Pétain had been replaced with the more attack-minded General Robert Nivelle an artillery man by training and by previous command experiences.

[edit] Fort Souville. The beginning of the end: July 1916

The Germans' next objective continued to be on the right bank of the Meuse river, beyond Fort Vaux and very close to the city of Verdun. As a preliminary, on 21 June and 23 June German assault troops (60,000 men) took the redoubt of Thiaumont and the destroyed village of Fleury. The next step was to capture Fort Souville, a second line fortification whose upper levels had already been reduced to rubble by German heavy shells, sparing only the fort's deepest underground corridors. As a preliminary, on 10 July 1916 German artillery attempted to incapacitate French artillery with over 60,000 diphosgene gas shells (the so-called "Green Cross Gas"). Then German heavy guns hammered Fort Souville and its approaches with more than 300,000 shells including some 500 X 14" shells and larger on the fort itself. However the German infantry's assault corridor leading to Fort Souville had narrowed down too much and became too tightly packed with assault troops in the open which were then devastated by French artillery barrages. What was left of the German assault troops (Bavarians and Alpen Korps) was further thinned out by French machine gunners who had emerged from the fort's ruins and taken positions on its superstructure. Fewer than a hundred German infantrymen managed somehow to escape their fire and made it to the top of the fort on 12 July. From that position, they could actually see the roofs of the city of Verdun and the spire of its cathedral. But being decimated by a 75mm artillery barrage, they had to retreat to their starting lines or chose to surrender. Thus Fort Souville, on 12 July 1916 in the morning, became the historic high mark of the unsuccessful German offensive against Verdun. Fort Souville whose deeply cratered superstructures can be partially seen today, at one's own risk, in spite of a dense cover of vegetation is one of the most horrifying sights of the Verdun battlefield.

In the meantime, while Souville was under assault, the opening of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, had forced the Germans to withdraw some of their artillery from Verdun to counter the combined Anglo-French offensive to the north. The battle of the Somme was launched in part by the allies to try to take some of the pressure off the French at Verdun.

By late 1916, the German troops were exhausted and Falkenhayn had been replaced as Chief of the General Staff by Paul von Hindenburg. Hindenburg's deputy, Chief Quartermaster-General Erich Ludendorff, soon acquired almost dictatorial power in Germany.

[edit] French counter-offensives. The end game: October and December 1916

The French launched a counter-offensive on 24 October 1916. Its architect was General Nivelle. It combined a swift infantry assault accompanied by a continuously rolling forward artillery barrage that kept the enemy machine gunners down. To soften up Douaumont, two heavy French railway guns had inflicted crushing blows on the fort with high penetration 400mm (16") shells. At least 20 of those 16 inch shells hit the fort, 6 of them penetrating down to the lowest levels. The Germans partly evacuated Douaumont which was then re-captured on the 24 October by French marine infantry and colonials. On 2 November the Germans also evacuated Fort Vaux which had also come under the fire of those same 400mm railway guns. A final offensive, planned and executed by general Nivelle, begun on the 11 December and drove the Germans back to their February 1916 starting lines. The extremely costly Franco-German military confrontation at Verdun had finally ended as a draw.

In August 1917, a limited French offensive planned by general Petain's staff, and well prepared with the latest heavy artillery support, rapidly recaptured the Mort-Homme Hill as well as Hill 304 on the left bank of the Meuse river. However the Verdun Sector remained a very deadly and always active battle zone where the two adversaries never ceased to confront each other in local actions. Those consumed more human lives for no reason other than to maintain the front line's status quo.

[edit] Casualties

It was important that the Central Powers which were still waging war on two fronts in 1916, in Russia and on the Western Front, inflicted more casualties on their adversaries than they themselves suffered. The German Army had achieved this goal in Russia which finally collapsed in 1917. In the meantime, it had to inflict casualties onto the French Army that would also weaken it to the point of collapse. In order to achieve this goal, the French Army had to be attracted in a situation from which it could not escape for strategic and national pride reasons. The German general staff hesitated between Belfort and Verdun and chose the latter for three reasons: 1) it had become poorly linked to the French railway network since 1914, 2) German intelligence had been informed by spies that the Verdun forts had been partially disarmed in 1915 and were not sufficiently manned and 3) they believed that success would be achieved by exceptionally massive heavy artillery preparations. German infantry would then move forward and occupy the ground with a minimum of casualties.

This German goal was not achieved beyond the first two weeks after the beginning of the battle. Furthermore,the French Army's losses at Verdun were high but only slightly higher than the German losses. General (later Marshal) Philippe Pétain was sparing of his troops and had them regularly rotated out after only 2-3 weeks in the front lines. At any one time, there were about 11 French divisions (over 100,000 men) engaged on the battlefield at Verdun. As a result of this rotation system 70% of the French Army went through "the wringer of Verdun", as opposed to only 25% of the German forces which were engaged in action. Furthermore, general Pétain was a strong proponent of firepower, namely artillery. His pre-war dictum: "le feu tue" or "firepower kills" was the centrepiece of his strategy at Verdun. By June 1916, French artillery at Verdun was 2,708 guns strong, including 1,138 X 75mm field guns. Pétain's first question in his morning staff meetings invariably was: "What is the artillery doing ?"

French military casualties at Verdun in 1916 are listed as: 371,000 men including 60,000 killed, 101,000 missing and 210,000 wounded. Total German casualties at Verdun, between February and December 1916,are officially listed as 337,000 men. The statistics also confirm that at least 70% of the Verdun casualties on both sides were the result of artillery fire. The consumption of artillery shells by the French between 21 February and 30 September at Verdun totalled 23.5 million rounds. Most of them (16 million shells) from the French 75 batteries which always lined up about 1000 guns on the Verdun battlefield. German sources document that their own artillery, mostly heavy and super heavy, fired off over 21 million shells from February to September 1916. Period photographs and current visitors to the Verdun battlefield testify to the huge numbers of shell craters that overlap each other endlessly over several hundred square miles. Forests planted in the 1930s have grown up and thus hide most of the hideous fields of the "Zone Rouge" (the "Red Zone") where so many men lost their lives or limbs. The battlefield is, actually, a vast graveyard since the mortal remains of over 100,000 missing combatants are still dispersed underground wherever they fell. They are still being discovered, to this day, by the French Forestry Service which turns them over to the Douaumont ossuary where they find a final resting place.

[edit] Significance

The Battle of Verdun — also known as the Mincing Machine of Verdun or Meuse Mill — became a symbol of French determination to hold the ground and then roll back the enemy at any human cost. It was essentially a battle of materiel, however, where artillery played the dominant role. A significant factor that helped even out the odds in favor of the French Army was their uninterrupted use of night-and-day trucking to keep fresh troops and artillery supplies coming onto the front lines. Furthermore, during the summer of 1916, a relief standard gauge railway line (Nettancourt-Dugny) was completed and took over most of the traffic on the "Voie Sacree". All this had not been anticipated by the German military planners. One of the reasons they had selected Verdun is that, out of the two standard gauge railway lines leading into the city and its forts, one line was permanently interrupted at Saint Mihiel while the other one, leading to Paris, was under their direct artillery fire. Thus, at the outset, the German planners saw Verdun for what it was: a salient that was cut off on three sides, a cul-de-sac onto which they could strike the fatal blow against the French Army. What they did not anticipate was that, once the initial surprise had worn out, French logistics would steadily improve with time and rob them of their initial advantage.

The perceived success of the fixed fortification system led to the adoption of the Maginot Line as the preferred method of defense along the Franco-German border during the inter-war years. In reality, French field artillery emplaced in the open on the Verdun battlefield outnumbered turreted artillery in the forts by a factor of fifty to one and inflicted most of the casualties suffered by the German assailants.

[edit] See also

• Émile Driant
• French villages destroyed in the First World War which were ruined during the Battle of Verdun, and six of which have not subsequently been rebuilt
• Douaumont ossuary
• Verdun Memorial
• Voie Sacrée
• Rue Verdun, Beirut, Lebanon.

[edit] Further reading

• Brown, Malcolm Verdun 1916 Tempus Publishing, 1999, ISBN 0-7524-1774-6
• Clayton, Anthony. Paths of Glory - The French Army 1914-18., ISBN 0-304-36652-8
• Denizot, Alain, 1996, Verdun.1914-1918. Nouvelles Editions Latines.Paris. ISBN 2.7233-0514-7. The most detailed and most complete facts and figures drawn from the original military archives covering the Battle of Verdun are found in this volume (in French).
• Foley, Robert. German Strategy and the Path to Verdun., Cambridge University Press 2004. ISBN 0-521-84193-3
• Horne, Alistair. The Price of Glory., ISBN 0-14-017041-3
• Keegan, John. The First World War., ISBN 0-375-70045-5
• Le Halle,Guy, 1998,Verdun.Les Forts de la Victoire,CITEDIS,Paris. ISBN 2-911920-10-4
• Martin, William. Verdun 1916. London: Osprey Publishing, 2001. ISBN 1-85532-993-X
• Mosier, John. The Myth of the Great War., ISBN 0-06-008433-2
• Ousby, Ian. The Road to Verdun. ISBN 0-385-50393-8

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Category:Battle of Verdun

• http://www.battleofverdun.nl Website in English language about the battle
• http://forum.battleofverdun.nl The Verdun-Forum (English)
• Verdun Page - English+German
• Info from firstworldwar.com
• Verdun book excerpt
• "Verdun - A Battle of the Great war".

v • d • e World War I European theatre: (Balkans – Western Front – Eastern Front – Italian Front) Middle Eastern theatre: (Caucasus – Mesopotamia – Sinai and Palestine – Gallipoli – Persia) African theatre: (South-West Africa – West Africa – East Africa) Asian and Pacific theatre: (Siege of Tsingtao) Atlantic Ocean · Mediterranean Major participants (People) Entente Powers Russian Empire · French Empire: France, Vietnam · British Empire: United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Newfoundland, South Africa · Italy · Romania · United States · Serbia · Portugal · China · Japan · Belgium · Montenegro · Greece · Armenia Central Powers Germany · Austria–Hungary · Ottoman Empire · Bulgaria Timeline Pre-conflicts Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) · Italo-Turkish War (1911–1912) · First Balkan War (1912–1913) · Second Balkan War (1913) Prelude Origins · Sarajevo assassination · July Ultimatum 1914 Battle of the Frontiers · First Battle of the Marne · Battle of Tannenberg · Battle of Galicia · Battle of the Masurian Lakes · Battle of Kolubara · Battle of Sarıkamış 1915 Second Battle of Ypres · Battle of Gallipoli · Battles of the Isonzo · Great Retreat · Conquest of Serbia · Siege of Kut 1916 Erzerum Campaign · Battle of Verdun · Lake Naroch Offensive · Battle of Asiago · Battle of Jutland · Battle of the Somme · Brusilov Offensive · Conquest of Romania 1917 Capture of Baghdad · Second Battle of Arras · Kerensky Offensive · Battle of Passchendaele · Battle of Caporetto · Battle of Cambrai 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk · Spring Offensive · Hundred Days Offensive · Meuse-Argonne Offensive · Battle of Vittorio Veneto · Armistice with Germany · Armistice with Ottoman Empire Other conflicts Maritz Rebellion (1914–1915) · Indo-German Conspiracy (1914–1919) · Easter Rising (1916) · Russian Revolution (1917) · Finnish Civil War (1918) Post-conflicts Russian Civil War (1917–1921) · Armenian–Azerbaijani War (1918–1920) · German Revolution (1918–1919) · Hungarian-Romanian War (1918–1919) · Wielkopolska Uprising (1918–1919) · Estonian War of Independence (1918–1920) · Latvian War of Independence (1918–1920) · Lithuanian Wars of Independence (1918–1920) · Ukrainian War of Independence(1917–1921) · Polish–Soviet War (1919–1921) · Polish–Lithuanian War (1920) · Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) · Turkish War of Independence including the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1923) · Invasion of Georgia (1921) · Irish Civil War (1922–1923) Aspects Warfare Military engagements · Naval warfare · Air warfare · Cryptography · Poison gas · Railways · Technology · Trench warfare · Total war · Surviving veterans Civilian impact / atrocities Casualties · Spanish flu · Rape of Belgium · Ottoman People: (Armenian Genocide · Assyrian Genocide · Pontic Greek Genocide · Kurdish Genocide) · Female roles · Literature Agreements / Treaties Partitioning of the Ottoman Empire · London • Sykes-Picot • St.-Jean-de-Maurienne • French-Armenian • Damascus • Paris Peace Conference · Treaty of Brest-Litovsk · Treaty of Lausanne · Treaty of Neuilly · Treaty of St. Germain · Treaty of Sèvres · Treaty of Trianon · Treaty of Versailles Consequences Aftermath · "Fourteen Points" · League of Nations Category · Portal World War I from Wiktionary WWI Textbooks from Wikibooks WWI Quotations from Wikiquote WWI Source texts from Wikisource WWI Images & media from Commons WWI News stories from Wikinews

Coordinates: 49°21′31.54″N 5°36′17.88″E / 49.3587611, 5.6049667