History's Greatest Battles

The Battle of Verdun, WWI.

August 19, 2024 • Themistocles • Season 1 • Episode 11

Share episode

The unimaginable loss of life, a gruesome testament to the unyielding carnage on the Western Front during World War I, left a deep, festering wound in the French psyche, one that bled into their military and political decisions for years to come. This haunting trauma became an inescapable force, driving a fearful and defensive stance that would cripple their resolve and doom their engagement at the onset of the nightmare of World War Two.

Verdun. 21 Feb - 18 Dec 1916.
French Casualties: 542,000
German Casualties: 434,000

Additional Reading and Research:

  • Horne, Alistair. The Price of Glory: Verdun.
  • Liddell, Basil. The Real War, 1914-1918.
  • Romains, Jules. Verdun: The Prelude, The Battle.


Did we get something wrong/right? Send us a text message!

Welcome to History's Greatest Battles. Season one, episode eleven; The Battle of Verdun, World War I; 21st of February - 18th of December, 1916. 

The involved militaries had so many soldiers cycled into Verdun before they were broken by its cataclysmic meat-grinding, that its more accurate instead to give the number of deaths:

French Casualties: 542,000 soldiers killed and wounded.
German Casualties: 434,000.

The unimaginable loss of life, a gruesome testament to the unyielding carnage on the Western Front during World War I, left a deep, festering wound in the French psyche, one that bled into their military and political decisions for years to come. This haunting trauma became an inescapable force, driving a fearful and defensive stance that would cripple their resolve and doom their engagement at the onset of the nightmare of World War II.

In the initial frenzy of conflict, as armies surged across Europe, the illusion of rapid victory quickly dissolved into the grim reality of trench warfare. The fields of France became scarred by endless lines of trenches, where soldiers on both sides—Germans to the east and the Allied forces of Britain and France to the west—burrowed into the earth. These parallel lines of fortifications stretched from the forbidding peaks of the Swiss border to the wind-swept shores of the English Channel, marking the boundaries of a stalemate that would last for years.

Deprived of the possibility to outmaneuver one another, the war's combatants turned their focus to the brutal arithmetic of attrition. Each army sought to smash through the other's defenses, aiming to carve a bloody breach in the enemy's line, through which legions of soldiers could surge, ready to unleash chaos upon the vulnerable rear. The air above these trenches thickened with the roar of artillery, as both German and Allied commanders sought to obliterate the opposition through sheer firepower. Yet, for all the millions of shells that rained down, the lines held stubbornly, and the only thing that grew was the grim tally of the dead—piles of bodies where men once stood.

The Germans, marching into war with unyielding confidence, believed the French would crumble before their might. But as the months dragged on and the combined weight of French and British resistance bore down upon them, that confidence began to waver. By late 1915, the war had already claimed nearly a million lives on each side—men who were dead, wounded, or simply vanished into the hellscape of the battlefield. Faced with this sobering reality, the German high command devised a new strategy—a plan so cold in its logic and so ruthless in its intent that it would forever haunt the annals of history.

Clinging to the belief that the French army, despite its resilience, remained the weakest link, German strategists turned their gaze toward Verdun, a fortress city standing sentinel along the Meuse River. It was here they decided to strike the decisive blow. From the onset of trench warfare, Verdun had been a thorn in the German side—a salient that jutted precariously into their lines, creating a natural bulge ripe for attack. The geography of Verdun, with its twenty major and forty lesser fortifications, presented an opportunity for the Germans to unleash a three-pronged assault, encircling the city in a deadly embrace.

The Germans, with chilling clarity, resolved to turn the very spirit of the French soldier against him, exploiting the deep-seated beliefs and traditions that drove the French army. Since their bitter defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the French military had drawn a singular lesson: their downfall had come from a deficiency in offensive zeal. They believed with near-religious fervor that if their soldiers could only charge the enemy, bayonets gleaming in hand-to-hand combat, victory would be theirs. This doctrine of relentless attack had become the cornerstone of French military training. It was so ingrained in their psyche that they marched to war in 1914 almost devoid of heavy artillery, dismissing such weaponry as tools of defense—anathema to their creed of aggression.

Although Verdun was originally outfitted with a formidable array of artillery, the demands of the wider Western Front had gradually siphoned these guns away, leaving the fortress vulnerable at the very moment it needed its defenses most. Thus, Verdun stood less fortified than it might have been, its firepower diminished and its fate hanging in the balance. The German high command, with their grim calculus, predicted one of two outcomes: either their forces would smash through the weakened defenses, seize the city, and tear open the French lines for a broader exploitation, or the French would pour their soldiers into Verdun’s defense, spreading their forces so thin that they would weaken themselves elsewhere. In either scenario, the Germans saw victory within their grasp, confident that the battle would tip the scales of war in their favor.

Determined to unleash devastation on a scale the world had never seen, the German high command gathered what may have been the most massive concentration of artillery ever assembled in one place. From mammoth 420-mm mortars to the more mobile 77-mm field guns, these weapons were intended to obliterate Verdun’s forts and trenches, leaving nothing but ashes in their wake. The attack would also debut a terrifying new weapon: the flamethrower, designed to scour the French defenders from their positions in a searing inferno. With a staggering two and a half million shells at the ready, this onslaught, codenamed Operation Gericht—'Judgment'—was calculated to reduce Verdun to dust.

The stage was set for Verdun’s annihilation on February 12, but nature itself seemed to rebel against this apocalyptic design. For ten agonizing days, the German troops, cloaked in their camouflage, huddled in the frigid cold, the bitter wind gnawing at their health and morale. Each day passed in a tense limbo, as both the Germans and the French awaited the inevitable onslaught, every dawn bringing the dread anticipation of battle, and every dusk a reprieve that was no relief. It wasn’t until February 21 that the skies finally cleared, giving the artillery spotters on the high ground and in the skies the visibility they needed. At precisely 0700, the earth-shattering bombardment began. The colossal shells thundered down upon Verdun’s fortifications and trenches, a relentless barrage that lasted until 1600. By the end, the spotters surveyed the wreckage and declared with cold certainty that nothing within that inferno could have possibly survived.

As the deafening roar of artillery finally fell silent, the German infantry surged forward across an eight-mile front, not in the rigid, unyielding waves of old, but as a swarm of shadows, slipping through the smoke and ruin. They moved like predators, darting from one piece of shattered cover to the next, sensing the vulnerability before them. The French defenses, once formidable, were now little more than a fragmented memory, shattered by the relentless bombardment. This opening thrust was intended as a mere reconnaissance in force, a calculated stab to feel out the soft spots in the French line, preparing the way for the crushing blow that would follow. But in the swirling chaos, one German corps, driven by a fierce, unbridled ambition, broke from the plan, plunging deeper into the fray. They carved out a foothold in the very marrow of the French line, an audacious and unauthorized gambit that tore open a raw, gaping wound—a breach that, if exploited, could unravel the French defenses like a tapestry of war, thread by blood-soaked thread, in the days to come.

Verdun’s defenses were the brainchild of Lieutenant Colonel Emile Diant, a man who had meticulously crafted his strategy to make the most of the terrain. His men were positioned in fortified strongpoints with interlocking fields of fire, designed to turn the landscape into a deadly gauntlet for any attacker. The forests surrounding Verdun were integral to his plan, envisioned as natural bastions of defense. But the relentless German bombardment razed these woods to the ground, and though the French had burrowed into deep bunkers, emerging from the devastation to resist, the absence of their artillery made their fields of fire far less lethal. Over the first two days, the Germans exploited these weaknesses, outflanking and encircling many of the forward redoubts.

On the battle's second day, Lieutenant Colonel Diant fell in defense of one of his strongpoints, his life ending as he had planned to protect others. His death marked a turning point, for it was then that his replacement, the indomitable Philip Petain, took command. In the brutal months that followed, Petain would rise to the status of a national hero, his name forever intertwined with the defiant spirit of Verdun.

In the first brutal phase of the assault, the Germans succeeded in capturing Fort Douaumont, a linchpin in the French defenses. However, the resistance they encountered was far fiercer than anticipated, forcing them to pause, regroup, and solidify their hold. Meanwhile, Petain was relentless, summoning reinforcements and artillery with a resolve that would not be shaken. The Germans resumed their assault on March 6, with Crown Prince Wilhelm himself directing the attack from the northwest. Once again, they achieved early gains, but Petain, with a steely determination, was adamant that no ground would be ceded for long. Every inch lost would be fought for and retaken, whatever the cost.

For an agonizing month, the land around Verdun was transformed into a hellish theater of war, where the brutal ebb and flow of battle played out without respite. The very earth became a grisly prize, gained and lost in a relentless cycle, each inch of ground paid for in rivers of blood. Thousands upon thousands fought and fell, their lives extinguished in the desperate struggle for control, turning the fields into a vast, unholy graveyard. The cost was staggering, a sacrifice so immense that it defied the limits of human understanding. Amidst this inferno, the French found their voice, their defiance crystallized into a battle cry that would thunder across the generations: "Ils ne passeront pas"—They shall not pass.

The initial clash of the Battle of Verdun unfolded on the east bank of the Meuse River, which cut a north-south path through the town and its blood-soaked battlefield. This eastern side, with its rugged terrain of steep ridges and shadowy ravines, offered a natural fortress for the French defenders. In stark contrast, the west bank was more open, with gentle, rolling hills that provided little cover. Dominating this side was a rise known ominously as Le Mort Homme—The Dead Man—a name whose origins were lost to history, but which would soon take on a chilling new significance in the relentless slaughter that was to come.

On March 6, 1916, the Germans, sensing opportunity, shifted their offensive from the rugged right bank to the more vulnerable left. Their target: The Dead Man, that foreboding hill whose name now seemed a grim prophecy. Securing this hill would grant the Germans the highest vantage point in the region, a perch from which they could direct their devastating artillery fire onto the French batteries to the east. The French, however, had learned from the early days of the battle. Better prepared and fiercely resolute, they were just as determined to hold The Dead Man as the Germans were to claim it.

Yet the high ground, while offering strategic advantage, also brought exposure to relentless enemy fire. Such was the grim reality on The Dead Man. Control of the hill shifted back and forth, but for those who held it, there was no respite—only a ceaseless barrage of shells and shrapnel. The carnage inflicted on that barren rise would become some of the most horrific of the entire Verdun campaign, if not of the entire war.

For those unfortunate enough to claw their way to even a sliver of that accursed hill, the nightmare was only beginning. Digging in became a grotesque dance with death—raise your shovel, and the crack of a sniper's rifle would send a bullet tearing through your skull; stay low, and you were exposed to the bone-chilling rain and snow that lashed down relentlessly, soaking the living and the dead alike in the muck of March. And even if you somehow survived the day’s onslaught, the very earth seemed to conspire against you—hardened to the consistency of iron, it defied your efforts to carve out even the shallowest of shelters. Artillery fire, pitiless and unrelenting, transformed the battlefield into a slaughterhouse, tearing men to pieces where they stood, leaving their bodies twisted and broken in the mud. Those who survived painted a picture of horror so visceral it defies comprehension: comrades and foes alike were shredded into grotesque remnants, their flesh and bones churned into the ground until they were indistinguishable from the blood-soaked earth itself.

By the end of May, after nearly three months of unrelenting combat, the Germans finally seized The Dead Man. But the price had been staggering. Despite holding the observation post, the German high command, drained by the loss of so many men, chose to redirect their efforts back to the right bank, where the crucial French forts still stood. In this, as in so many battles of the Great War, countless lives were expended for patches of ground that, once captured, proved of little worth.

The German artillery, with its devastating precision, turned every attempt to resupply or reinforce Verdun into a perilous gamble with death. One by one, the routes into the besieged city were cut off, until only a single road remained. This lifeline, vital and fraught with danger, came to be known as La Voie Sacrée—the Sacred Way. General Petain, with characteristic brilliance, orchestrated a resupply system that defied the odds. A ceaseless convoy of trucks rumbled along the Sacred Way, delivering men and munitions to the front lines. To ensure this vital artery remained open despite the relentless German shelling, teams of road crews were stationed at intervals, ready to repair any crater the moment it appeared. At the height of its efficiency, this lifeline moved with astonishing precision—every fourteen seconds, another truck would pass, carrying with it the hope of survival for those holding Verdun.

Petain’s success in keeping the Sacred Way open allowed him to amass forces that could finally stand toe-to-toe with the Germans. Reinforced by fresh troops and bolstered by newly arrived artillery, the French defenses hardened. On the northwestern front, the Germans found themselves repulsed time and again. Faced with these setbacks, Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn considered abandoning the campaign, but Crown Prince Wilhelm, unwilling to let the sacrifices of his men go in vain, pressed on. In early April, the Germans launched a fierce assault on the eastern flank of the Verdun salient, and after savage fighting, they captured the vital Fort Vaux on June 7.

Buoyed by their success, the Germans renewed their efforts, pouring more men into the fray to finally take Verdun. Meanwhile, Petain, recognizing the mounting danger, urgently appealed to his superior, Chief of Staff Joseph Joffre, for diversionary offensives to alleviate the crushing pressure on Verdun. The Allies answered the call. The Russians and Italians launched their own offensives, and on July 1, the British commenced their ill-fated assault on the Somme. These new fronts drew off much-needed German troops, with fifteen divisions diverted from Verdun to counter the Russian Brusilov offensive in June 1916. The British assault on the Somme soon became the primary focus for both the Allies and the Germans in the latter half of 1916, yet the relentless slaughter at Verdun showed no sign of abating.

In June, as the Germans advanced to the commanding heights of Belleville Ridge, overlooking Verdun itself, Petain, weighed down by the enormity of the situation, sought permission to abandon the city. But Joffre, resolute and unyielding, denied any talk of retreat. Thus, Petain’s forces dug in and held their ground. On July 11, the Germans came perilously close to breaching Verdun, but were repelled in the nick of time. It was on that day, with the city still out of reach, that even Crown Prince Wilhelm had to concede that Verdun would never fall into his hands.

As the Germans soon discovered, ending a battle can be far more violently arduous than starting one. Crown Prince Wilhelm, having resigned himself to the reality that Verdun would remain unconquered, was content to hold the ground his forces had already bled to secure. But Petain had no such intentions. Although promoted and reassigned, his legacy endured through his successors, Generals Robert Nivelle and Charles Mangin. Armed with the men and materiel Petain had painstakingly gathered, they prepared to launch a counteroffensive. After a brief lull, the French unleashed a brutal barrage on October 19, which thundered on for four relentless days. Throughout November and December, they steadily clawed back nearly all the territory that had been lost. By October 24, Fort Douaumont was back in French hands, followed by Fort Vaux in early November. By December 18, their final offensive had driven them two miles beyond the original line of fortresses, nearly back to where they had started in February.

Falkenhayn’s strategy, a grim design to drain the lifeblood of the French army, came perilously close to succeeding. Yet, in doing so, he nearly brought his own forces to the brink of ruin. Petain, with his methodical mind, devised a system to rotate fresh troops from other sectors of the Western Front, ensuring Verdun was defended by men who were weary, but not yet broken. Nearly two-thirds of the entire French army would, at some point, fight in the hellish crucible of Verdun. The Germans attempted a similar rotation, but after July 1, the demands of the Somme and the relentless Russian offensives in the east made such maneuvers increasingly untenable.

Indeed, the Russian offensives of the summer of 1916 compelled Falkenhayn to withdraw forces from Verdun to bolster the beleaguered Austro-German front in the east. The constant rotation of troops in and out of Verdun makes it nearly impossible to determine precisely how many men fought in this relentless battle. The dead, however, tell a clearer story. Between February and December 1916, the French suffered 542,000 casualties—men killed or wounded—while the Germans counted 434,000 among their own fallen.

Verdun was, paradoxically, both the quintessential World War I battle and the most horrific of them all. It epitomized the relentless destructiveness of modern warfare, where not just artillery but the debut of flamethrowers and the deadly phosgene gas wrought unparalleled devastation. The Industrial Revolution had equipped World War I with weapons of unprecedented lethality, bringing about levels of death and destruction that the generals, in their pre-war imaginings, could never have foreseen, and that even during the conflict they struggled to comprehend.

Verdun was, in a cruel twist of fate, both the quintessential battle of World War I and its darkest nightmare. It showcased the savage, unrelenting brutality of modern warfare, where the battlefield was not just pulverized by the unending barrage of artillery, but also scorched by the fiery breath of flamethrowers and poisoned by the silent, creeping death of phosgene gas. The Industrial Revolution had birthed instruments of such unprecedented savagery that they transformed the very nature of war, bringing forth a scale of death so vast, so grotesque, that the generals who had once dreamed of glory in their pre-war imaginings, could never have envisioned the horror they would unleash. Even as they directed the slaughter, they struggled to comprehend the monstrous reality—a war machine that devoured everything in its path, reducing men to ash and earth to wasteland in a relentless spiral of destruction. The visceral brutality of Verdun was a crime against life itself — simply unimaginable to any person who wasn’t witness to the emotionless mechanized gore.

Verdun also typified the cold indifference of the generals who orchestrated this war. To them, soldiers were not flesh and blood, they were not sons, husbands, big brothers, fiancés, or country-men… but mere commodities, expendable in the grand chess game of battle. In the war rooms, the word “death” was rarely spoken—instead, they spoke of "wastage," a sanitized term for the relentless slaughter. Battles were reduced to the shifting of counters on a map, with the ultimate aim being the depletion of enemy resources, rather than the lives that were lost in pursuit of that grim objective. This dehumanization, so prevalent among the war’s high command, would profoundly shape the psyche of the surviving soldiers, leaving scars that would define their generation in the years and decades to come.

Verdun stands apart as the most atrocious of battles, not just for its scale but for the sheer brutality of its conception. Falkenhayn’s plan, executed with grim determination by Crown Prince Wilhelm, was a meat grinder from the start, designed with no greater objective than the mass slaughter of men. This was not a battle for territory or strategic gain; it was a battle for death itself. As Dan Carlin states, and I paraphrase, for the first time in recent European history, a battle was not fought so that battlefield leadership could offer a sword as token of defeat, pleasantries then shared, and territories swapped. Instead, battles were engineered for the evisceration of a nations sons, and to bring about the total collapse and annihilation of the enemy nation’s government. Just as Falkenhayn had foreseen, the French poured their forces into Verdun, determined to hold the line. But what unfolded from the French perspective transcended the immediate military strategy. Verdun became the beating heart of French national pride, a symbol that would come to embody the spirit and sacrifice of an entire nation more than any other place or event in the war.


Though the eventual victory at Verdun elevated Petain to the status of a national hero and gave the French a lasting symbol of honor, the staggering cost in lives overshadowed every other memory of the battle. Verdun, once a beacon of pride, became a haunting reminder of the true cost of war. Over the course of the war, France would suffer the loss of approximately 5.5 million men—dead and wounded—from a total of nearly 8.5 million mobilized. The societal impact of such losses is beyond calculation, made all the more devastating by the fact that almost the entire Western Front ran through French soil, turning the country itself into a battleground.


The four years of relentless physical destruction compounded the already unbearable human cost. The impact of Verdun, where so many of France’s future generals and politicians had fought, would resonate throughout the military and political landscape of France in the 1920s and 1930s. Once scorned, the concept of defense became enshrined in the French military doctrine of the interwar years, epitomized by the construction of the Maginot Line—an impregnable fortress in theory, but one that would soon become another tragic symbol of French vulnerability.


Though France could claim the largest army in the world on paper by 1940, its military doctrine—anchored in the static defense of the Maginot Line and the obsolete strategies of trench warfare—was horrifically ill-prepared to face the lightning onslaught of Hitler's blitzkrieg. The French response—or more accurately, their paralyzing inaction—to Hitler’s early provocations, from the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 to the Munich Conference of 1938 that surrendered Czechoslovakia, was deeply rooted in the national trauma and staggering losses of World War I. The haunting memories of that apocalyptic conflict weighed heavily on the hearts of the French and British alike, so much so that the mere thought of another war was unthinkable—until the roar of Hitler's tanks shattered their illusions. The legacy of Verdun, once a symbol of unparalleled heroism and sacrifice, had morphed into a suffocating paralysis, a collective memory so potent that it trapped a nation in the vice-like grip of its past, unable to move forward as the specter of a new war loomed on the horizon.