Verdun

Paul Jankowski “Vedun: The Longest Battle of the Great War” Oxford Univ. Press, 2013, 264 pps  

The battle of Verdun began on February 21, 1916 when twelve hundred German guns opened up on French lines and continued the barrage for the next ten hours.  This would continue for 300 days—the longest single battle of WWI and the last great battle the French would win on their own up to the present.

Jankowski’s book dwells on the terror of industrialized warfare that both sides experienced in WWI, using Verdun as the focus for this discussion.  I heard about Verdun while in High School and it has always held my attention.  I took my wife there in 1998 on our honey-moon, stopping off at the Normandy beaches first!  This is a book for historians and those with a peculiar interest in Verdun—like myself.

My Notes:

Pg. 60:  Each side, the Germans and the French, pronounced the prestige of the other at stake in the battle of Verdun.  It made no difference that this area was of little tactical or strategic value to either side considering the weapons available in WWI.

Pg. 120:  In its slow sapping of life, Verdun resembled no other battle that France had fought.  If 2.4 million Frenchmen had taken part at Verdun from February 21 until December 31, 1916, many of them more than once, and if 378,000 of these had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, the effective loss rate there came to about 16 percent.  (The German losses were about the same).

Pg. 156:  For a century resistance to military service had declined dramatically: in the French army desertion rates had fallen from over 50 percent during the Consulate and the Empire to about one percent at the turn of the century.  The war, so far, had done nothing to reverse the trend.  And Verdun was no exception.  This low rate of desertion would change for the French in 1917 and the Germans in 1918.