Verdun - this is to the French as the Somme is to us Brits..

Incredible day exploring Verdun, the town and the hills around it that have such a powerful story to tell about the French experience in WW1. I knew a bit about it before I came but nothing prepared me for the actual sights and stories associated with this dramatic struggle.

Quick bit of history for context and I'll post the usual Wiki link for more in-depth review.

Verdun is another Vauban-style fortress town (originally). It became much more of a frontier town after the 1870-1 Franco-Prussian war when the French had to cede Alsace and Lorraine to the victorious Prussians. Now Verdun would only be 30km from the German border and the classic invasion route into France.

The town lies on Meuse and is surrounded by hills intersected with deep ravines and gullies. The French decided to put lots (and I mean lots) of forts on top of these hills. I believe there are over 30 in the overall defensive scheme. These forts were upgraded leading up to 1914 to improve resistance to shell-fire. The French were also very emotionally attached to Verdun - there was a kind of 'they shall not pass' mentality associated with the place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdun

The problem with forts is rather obvious - they don't move. The French high command saw what happened to Belgian forts when the Germans invaded in 1914 - they were ignored basically until really, really big guns could be brought up to reduce them to rubble. I'll pick this up in a later post about my random German gun emplacement!

As the war became more static the French still believed the Germans would not attack these type of forts directly and dangerously weakened them - pulling troops and guns out to beef up other bits of the line.

Fast forward to 1916 - the Germans have a plan to use the French attachment to Verdun to attack it, draw in lot's of defenders and slowly bleed France to death by destroying the men faster than they could kill Germans in reply. It worked to start with - the French were taken by surprise (one of the Forts was almost walked into by the Germans), reacted furiously and in a savage onslaught took back most of the land and forts lost. This is what the Germans wanted up to a point. For the next 10 months the two sides slogged it out on the hillsides around Verdun. Whole villages disappeared. Fighting took place inside the forts with one side holding the top floor but the other resisting below. The landscape became the usual 'lunar' scape with forests blasted to nothing and craters everywhere.

Gas, flamethrowers, trench mortars, grenades - anything that could be used was. There was an almost unbelievable logistics operation to keep the French troops supplied. The 'Voie Sacree' or sacred way. There was only one road in or out of Verdun so all the troops and supplies went up that way and all the wounded came out. The dead stayed where they were.

The national cemetery, Douaumont, 15,000 known graves

The losses were staggering. Over 540,000 French and 430,000 German. The French asked Haig, the British leader for help in diverting attention from Verdun. The result was the Somme.

The Douaumont Ossuary, 130,000 bones of French and German soldiers collected from the battlefield.