The Germans simply hid in their deep and reinforced dugouts until the barrage ended, emerging largely The Somme offensive opened with a massive artillery bombardment, which lasted five days and did little to knock out enemy troops and artillery guns. It was hoped the assault on a 25 km section of theįront would not only break the stalemate, but relieve pressure on beleaguered French forces defending against the long-running German assault further south, at Verdun. 1 July 1916Īfter two years of stalemate in the vast trench works held by the Allied and German armies on the Western Front, the British launched a massive offensive in the Somme River valley in northern France. The battle at Verdun continued to December – ironically after the Somme conflict was considered to have ended.Canadian soldiers returning from the Battle of the Somme in France, November 1916. By the end of October 1916, the French had re-captured the two forts at Vaux and Douaumont but the surrounding land where the battle had been fought since February was a wasteland. On June 24th, the bombardment on the Somme could be heard at Verdun and with days, the battle at the Somme was to dominate military planners on the Western Front. By June 23rd, they got within 2.5 miles from Verdun itself – but this attack faltered as the German army itself had given all that it had and it could give no more. On June 1st, Germany launched a massive attack at Verdun. The rumblings of discontent in the French army could be heard in the summer of 1916 – in 1917 it was to mutiny. A French factory worker earned sixty times the pay of a French soldier over the course of a week.
French soldiers found their pay did not go far in Paris. Theatres were open and few – due to a government clampdown on the truth – talked knowingly about what was really going on just 150 miles away. Food was plentiful and the one day in the week that was meant to be meat-free was not kept by the majority. Here, those French soldiers lucky enough to get leave from Verdun found an alien world. Just 150 miles away, life in the French capital went on as ‘normal’. “To die from a bullet seems to be nothing parts of our being remain intact but to be dismembered, torn to pieces, reduced to pulp, this is the fear that flesh cannot support and which is fundamentally the great suffering of the bombardment.” “I saw a man drinking avidly from a green scum-covered marsh, where lay, his black face downward in the water, a dead man lying on his stomach and swollen as if he had not stopped filling himself with water for days.”
Humanity is mad it must be mad to do what it is doing.” “An artery of French blood was spilt on February 21st and it flows incessantly in large spurts.” Senior officers at the fort complex around Verdun complained to Joffre about the state of the defences in the area. Also the trenches dug for defence had not been completed. In fact, all the forts around the area had been weakened as the French High Command had moved ammunition out of the forts to other areas on the Western Front. However, Falkenhayn’s plan also had one major weakness – it assumed that the French would be an easy opponent and that it would be the French who would take massive casualties – and not the Germans. The forts were very much part of the French psyche and they would fight ferociously to keep the Germans out of the area. If they do so the forces of France will bleed to death.” Falkenhayn to Kaiser William IIįalkenhayn’s plan had credibility. 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. A mass break-through – which in any case is beyond our means – is unnecessary. “The string in France has reached breaking point.
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