Welcome to this custom deep dive. So when you
read the translated journals of the French polio
or you analyze the after action reports from
the German frontline officers from 1916, there's
this one word that just continually surfaces.
Yeah, and it isn't battle. It's furnace. Furnace,
exactly. And today we are analyzing the mechanics
of that furnace. We've synthesized a massive
stack of primary source materials for you military
dossiers, translated diaries, modern strategic
analyses. All to explore a conflict so staggering,
so relentless that it lasted for 302 uninterrupted
days. Right, 302 days. We are talking about an
event that fundamentally shifted how the world
views human resilience and honestly, industrial
scale destruction. It really remains one of the
most sobering military engagements in recorded
history. Today's Deep Dive centers on the Battle
of Verdun, which is the longest single sustained
battle of the First World War. Running from February
21st to December 18th, 1916. Right. And the sheer
density of the violence compressed into such
a narrow geographical space, it forces historians
to constantly reevaluate our understanding of
tactical endurance. Yeah, and our mission today
is to take you directly into the tactical and
psychological heart of this conflict. We're going
to uncover how a calculated strategy of pure
attrition turned a comparatively quiet sector
of the Western Front into a total nightmare of
mud and artillery. And we'll examine why this
specific theater of war remains such a potent
symbol today of both tragedy and ultimately reconciliation.
OK, let's unpack this. To comprehend the horrific
logic of Verdun, we have to establish the strategic
reality of Europe in early 1916. Right, because
by the dawn of 1916, the rapid war of movement
was dead. It completely stagnated. The opposing
armies had literally dug into the earth. Just
a continuous network of trenches from the Swiss
border to the North Sea. Exactly. So both sides
are trapped in this strategic gridlock, suffering
severe casualties for, I mean, territorial gains
measured in yards. Both sides were looking for
a way to break the stalemate, but the chief of
the German general staff, Erich von Falkenhayn.
He had a chillingly different idea. He deliberately
abandoned the idea of a decisive breakthrough,
didn't he? He wasn't looking to punch a hole
in the lines and march on Paris. No, not at all.
What's fascinating here is that Falkenhayn literally
aimed to bleed the forces of France to death.
He didn't necessarily want to capture territory.
His goal was demographic. This is the attrition
strategy, right? The armatang strategy. Yes,
the strategy of attrition. He wanted to force
the French to commit all their reserves to a
place they couldn't bear to lose so the German
artillery could just systematically destroy them.
And the bait he chose for this trap was Verdun.
But why Verdun specifically? Well, it was a historic
fortified region, the RFE. It was surrounded
by this massive double ring of 28 concrete forts.
It projected this aura of total French invulnerability.
Falkenhayn calculated that the French would accept
total annihilation before letting Verdun fall.
But there is a huge, almost haunting irony here
when you look at the sources regarding those
forts. All of the logistical decisions by the
French High Command. Yeah. General Joffre, the
French commander -in -chief, he actually thought
static forts were obsolete after seeing the Belgian
fortresses crushed by German siege mortars in
1914. So he quietly just dismantled his own defenses.
Completely in secret, he had been systematically
stripping Verdun's forts. They removed 54 artillery
batteries. And 128 ,000 rounds of ammunition.
Just gone. They reduced the garrisons to skeleton
maintenance crews. They even placed 11 ,000 pounds
of explosives inside Fort Dumas, the biggest
fort in the ring, just to blow it up so the enemy
couldn't use it. Which is just staggering when
you think about it. Right. I mean, I want you
to just imagine the sheer panic of the frontline
French officers. The Germans are planning the
biggest artillery assault in history against
what they think is an impenetrable fortress,
but the French high command has basically left
the back door wide open. And that storm finally
broke on the morning of February... 21st, 1916.
Operation Judgment. Yes. After a delay caused
by winter storms, which must have been agonizing
for the defenders waiting in the trenches, a
10 -hour preliminary bombardment begins. From
808 heavy guns. Dropping roughly one million
shells. A million shells in 10 hours. The intensity
birthed the term Trommelführ, or drum fire. The
explosions were so rapid they merged into a single
continuous rumble. They said you could hear it
99 miles away. Seismic stations were picking
it up like an earthquake. And then the ground
assault begins, and the Germans used terrifying
new tactics. They didn't just walk in a line.
They used highly trained Sto -Struppen storm
troopers led by Captain Willie Rohr, bypassing
strong points, infiltrating the shattered lines,
and armed with a horrifying new weapon, flamethrowers.
They were clearing dugouts with targeted fire.
The initial thrust was devastating. They shattered
the forward trench networks in days. But the
defining event of this early phase involved the
fort we mentioned earlier, Dolman. Oh, man. Here's
where it gets really interesting because you
have to hear the unbelievable story of how Fort
Dolman actually fell on February 25th. It's one
of the most astonishing tactical anomalies of
the war. Remember, Joffrey stripped this crown
jewel of its guns and men. So a small German
party, about 100 men, are wandering up to the
fort in the falling snow and fading twilight.
They were actually just looking for shelter from
their own heavy artillery, which was firing too
short. Right. So they climbed down into the massive
moat. They find the heavy drawbridge is jammed
in the down position. The machine gun bunkers
that are supposed to sweep the moat, totally
unmanned. So they just walk right in. They literally
climb through a bunker window, walk down the
corridor and capture the skeleton maintenance
crew, warrant officer Shana and about 25 guys
without a major fight. The greatest fortress
in France just handed over. The psychological
shock of that loss forced a massive French reaction.
General Philippe Pétain takes over command of
the second army. He realizes it's a battle of
logistical endurance now. Exactly. He implements
the Norea system. It was a rapid, continuous
rotation of troops to keep the army from psychologically
and physically breaking. They would cycle units
into the meat grinder for a short time, then
pull them out. Ultimately, something like 78
% of all French infantry battalions would rotate
through Verdun. If we connect this to the bigger
picture, Falkenhayn's master plan actually backfired
terribly here because of geography. Because of
the west bank of the river, right? Yes. The Germans
only attacked the east bank of the Meuse River
initially. But French artillery on the elevated
west bank started pouring devastating flanking
fire right into the advancing Germans. They were
shredding them. So the strategy to bleed the
French was suddenly heavily bleeding the Germans.
To stop this flanking fire, the Germans were
forced to expand their attacks across the river
to places like Mordholm Dead Man's Hill and Coat
304. Taking massive casualties themselves just
to secure those hills and right around this compounding
slaughter, General Robert Nivelle takes over
the Second Army and issues his famous defiant
order. You will not let them pass. That became
the rallying cry for the whole nation as they
headed into the summer of horrors. And it truly
was a horror. The battle devolved into brutal,
localized extremes. Take the siege of Fort Vaux
in June. That was entirely underground, wasn't
it? Yes. The Germans breached the top and the
fighting went into the pitch -black corridors.
It was grenades and bayonets in tunnels barely
wide enough for two men. And the French water
cisterns ruptured. The 574 French survivors resorted
to drinking condensation from the walls. They
only surrendered when they were physically dying
of dehydration. Above ground wasn't any better.
The village of Fleury changed hands a staggering
16 times between June and August. The Germans
unleashed Defazgine gas, Green Cross, to silence
the French artillery. The landscape was utterly
obliterated. Ten million shells were fired over
the course of the battle. That is 1 .35 million
tons of steel raining down on a few square miles.
Eventually, the relentless pressure of Verdun
had to wane, largely due to global pressures
elsewhere. Verdun didn't happen in a vacuum.
Right, because by July, the British launched
the Battle of the Somme to the north. And the
Russians launched the Brusilov Offensive in the
east. The Germans were suddenly fighting massive
crises on multiple fronts. They had to pull artillery
and troops away from Verdun. Falkenhayn's whole
attrition theory collapsed. He was sacked, replaced
by Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and that's when
the French counteroffenses began in the auto.
utilizing highly coordinated creeping barrages.
A moving wall of explosions walking just ahead
of the advancing French infantry. Plus, they
brought up massive railway guns. We're talking
16 inch guns firing one ton armor piercing shells
to shatter the German hold fasts. They recaptured
Dumont in October and Vaux shortly after. By
December 1916, the French had pushed the Germans
back almost exactly to their starting lines from
February. So what does this all mean when the
guns finally stop in December? What is the sheer
human cost of this? The math of this attrition
is just horrifying. Over 302 days, there were
roughly 714 ,000 casualties. That's killed, wounded,
missing. Yes, about 377 ,000 French and 337 ,000
German casualties. That averages out to 70 ,000
casualties a month. And look at the ratio. It
was nearly one to one. Falkenhayn's arrogant
prediction to the Kaiser was that he could kill
five Frenchmen for every two Germans. And he
completely failed. Entirely disapproved. He permanently
degraded his own army, trying to bleed France
white. Not to mention the psychological toll.
The battle caused severe shell shock, and French
troops even experienced mutinous collective indiscipline,
which the military called défiance. The human
mind simply reached its breaking point. The massive
psychological scars left on the soldiers were
mirrored by the physical scars left on the land
itself Yeah, if you visit the area today, you'll
find the zone rouge the red zone Six completely
destroyed villages like Beaumont and Fleury were
never rebuilt. They exist today only as uninhabited
memorials. The Zone Rouge remains this vast,
toxic graveyard. It's just a forest of overlapping
shell craters planted with pine trees to hide
the damage. But out of that incredible destruction,
there's a really poignant shift in Verdun's legacy.
By 1984, it actually became a symbol of Franco
-German reconciliation. Oh, that archival footage
is incredibly powerful. German Chancellor Helmut
Kohl and French President Francois Mitterrand
standing together at the Dumas Cemetery. Holding
hands in the driving rain. Two nations that used
every tool of the industrial age to annihilate
each other on that exact soil, publicly forging
a lasting peace. It's a beautiful image to contrast
against such a dark history. It is. And this
raises an important question. When a military
strategy is designed purely around attrition,
where the entire goal is simply to endure more
suffering and death than the person across from
you, how does the society subsequently define
the line between victory and defeat? Can anyone
truly be said to have won a battle that was designed
to be a mutual slaughterhouse? That is something
you really have to mull over when you think about
the true cost of warfare. Thank you for joining
us on this deep dive into the Battle of Verdun.
We hope we gave you a new perspective on the
staggering reality of 1916. Keep exploring, keep
questioning, and keep learning.