Second Offensive Battle of Verdun

The Second Offensive Battle of Verdun was the French attack of August 1917 in which the French army, three months after a wave of mutinies, showed that it could once again attack effectively. At dawn on 20 August 1917, after a bombardment of more than a week from nearly three thousand guns, eight divisions of General Adolphe Guillaumat’s 2nd Army struck on both banks of the Meuse north of Verdun. The same day they recaptured the Mort-Homme with its German tunnels, the Bois d’Avocourt, the Bois des Corbeaux, Cumières, the Côte de Talou and Hill 344, over which both sides had fought for months in 1916. In the following days Samogneux and Regnéville fell, and on 24 August Hill 304. By 8 September the French had taken about 10,300 prisoners. The attack was a model example of General Philippe Pétain’s new method: a short blow with a limited objective, in which the artillery was to do as much of the infantry’s work as possible.

Name and dates

The name comes from the British chronology of the war on which our timeline is based. Following the French naming of battles, the chronology counts the fighting of 1916 as the “defensive battle of Verdun” and the First Offensive Battle (24 October to 18 December 1916), and dates the “Second Offensive Battle” from 20 August to 15 December 1917. We adopt these dates, although the frame is a convention. The main attack lasted from 20 to 26 August, and the French carried out their last major offensive actions on 7–8 September. The French Wikipedia ends the battle on 18 September, when offensive operations were halted, while English-language works, the English Wikipedia for example, write of fighting from 20 to 26 August and of further actions in September. Afterwards, until November, there was only local fighting on the right bank: German counter-attacks and French raids. The French also speak simply of the Battle of Verdun of 1917 (bataille de Verdun de 1917) or of the “relief of Verdun” (dégagement de Verdun). The end of the battle as named coincides with the departure of Guillaumat, who in mid-December 1917 took command of the Allied forces on the Salonika front.

Background

After the failure of the Nivelle Offensive and the outbreak of the mutinies in the French army, General Pétain, commander-in-chief from 15 May 1917, set aside the idea of a great breakthrough offensive. In Directive No. 1 of 19 May he ordered attacks with limited objectives, carefully prepared, with masses of heavy artillery, so as to spare the infantry. In his often-quoted words, he intended “to wait for the Americans and the tanks”. The soldiers, however, needed a victory to regain faith in their own strength, and the Allies, above all the British, who on 31 July had opened the Third Battle of Ypres, expected France to tie down German forces. Pétain therefore planned several local attacks. The first and largest was the attack at Verdun.

In the Battle of Verdun the autumn counter-offensives of 1916 had recovered Forts Douaumont and Vaux, but not all the lost ground. On the left bank of the Meuse the Germans still held the Mort-Homme and Hill 304, taken in the spring of 1916 at the cost of enormous losses, and on the right bank the Côte de Talou and Hill 344. From them they observed the French rear and the roads leading to the city. Over a year they had fortified these positions. Behind the Mort-Homme they had dug tunnels through which they safely brought up supplies and moved infantry: the Kronprinz tunnel, the Bismarck tunnel with more than a dozen exits, and the Gallwitz tunnel, named after the commander of the German 5th Army, General Max von Gallwitz. On the right bank they had built four defensive positions.

In 1917 the Germans attacked several times on the left bank, among other times in January and March. At the turn of June and July, while the French army was struggling with the mutinies, they took part of the slopes of Hill 304 and forward positions in the Bois d’Avocourt. On 17 July the French won back about a kilometre of trenches in a counter-attack, but on 1 August the Germans recovered most of that ground. The French command decided that these see-saw struggles had to end and that a single blow should take the observation points around Verdun from the Germans, pushing their artillery back from the junction of roads and railway lines at the city.

Preparations

The attack was prepared by Guillaumat’s 2nd Army, which had held the front at Verdun since December 1916, under the supervision of General Émile Fayolle, commander of the Centre Army Group. Four corps were assigned to the attack: on the left bank General Linder’s XIII Corps and General Corvisart’s XVI Corps, on the right General de Fonclare’s XV Corps and General Passaga’s XXXII Corps. Sources give the width of the attack front variously, from about 18 to about 25 km. According to the Michelin guide, eight divisions stood in the front line. Among them was the Moroccan Division with the Marching Regiment of the Foreign Legion.

The French assembled artillery on a scale not seen before. According to English-language works there were about 1,280 field guns, 1,520 heavy guns and 80 super-heavy guns, about 2,880 barrels in all. XVI Corps alone, attacking on a front about 4 km wide, had according to French accounts 610 guns, one for every 7 metres of front, plus super-heavy guns and two 400 mm howitzers which were to smash the tunnels under the Mort-Homme. More than 30 km of roads were rebuilt and widened to 6 metres for bringing up ammunition, new stretches of narrow-gauge railway were laid, and thousands of bunks were prepared in shelters. Sixteen fighter squadrons operated over the battlefield, covering reconnaissance aircraft and observation balloons. Airmen took thousands of photographs of the German positions, from which panoramas were made and handed out to the regiments. Behind the lines, on ground laid out to resemble the battlefield, the infantry practised marching close behind the barrage, which was marked with little flags.

Strategic surprise could not be achieved. The Germans saw the preparations and strengthened their defences: according to French intelligence the number of their batteries rose from 150 to about 400, and on the eve of the attack there were four German divisions on the left bank, five on the right and another five in reserve. The Germans frequently shelled the French positions with a new war gas, mustard gas, and carried out attacks intended to disrupt the preparations. The French opened counter-battery fire on 11 August and the destructive bombardment two days later. The attack was set for 17 August but, because of bad weather that prevented aerial observation, it was postponed to 20 August. On 17 and 19 August the whole artillery twice simulated the fire that was to accompany the attack, in order to deceive the Germans. According to the French general and historian Guy François, the attack consumed about 4 million shells in seven days, some 120,000 tonnes of steel, at a cost of about 700 million francs of the time.

Course

20 August

On the night of 19–20 August the French artillery drenched the German batteries with gas shells, and the Germans replied by shelling the French lines, roads and ravines with gas shells. The assault troops went up to their jumping-off positions in masks, groping their way through a thick cloud. At 4.40 a.m., at dawn, the infantry went into the attack behind a creeping barrage. The Germans, stunned by the night bombardment, in many places did not manage to get out of their shelters, and their defensive barrage, according to French accounts, opened too late.

On the left bank, on the extreme left wing, the 25th Division of XIII Corps passed through the Bois d’Avocourt and, according to the Michelin guide, took about 750 prisoners. The neighbouring 26th Division, however, was held up in front of Hill 304: its 121st Infantry Regiment, raked by machine-gun fire from the hill, was thrown back to its starting positions by a counter-attack. XIII Corps took about 1,200 prisoners that day, but itself lost, according to a French account, 86 officers and 3,050 men, a large proportion of them lightly wounded and gassed. XVI Corps did much better. The 31st Division took the summit of the Mort-Homme at the first bound and seized the exits of the Kronprinz tunnel. General Degoutte’s Moroccan Division took the Bois des Corbeaux and Cumières, which the Foreign Legion under Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Rollet captured, as the Michelin guide relates, singing the popular song “La Madelon”. In the Gallwitz tunnel a detachment of about 600 Germans held out for another day. In the afternoon the Legion, going far beyond its assigned objectives, attacked the Côte de l’Oie (Goose Hill) above the Meuse. On 20 August XVI Corps took more than 3,800 prisoners, several dozen guns and 120 machine guns.

On the right bank the 126th Division of XV Corps took the Côte de Talou, for half of 1916 no man’s land between the lines, and the villages of Champneuville, Neuville and Champ. The attack on Samogneux was put off to the next day, because the artillery preparation seemed too weak. The 123rd Division recaptured Hill 344, although its 412th Regiment suffered heavy losses in front of the trenches above Hill 326. Further east the 42nd and 165th Divisions of XXXII Corps took part of the Bois des Fosses, the Bois de Chaume and the Ferme Mormont before noon. German counter-attacks from the direction of the Bois des Caures were broken up by the defensive barrage. During the night German aircraft bombed French field hospitals at Vadelaincourt and Les Monthairons, killing and wounding several dozen people.

21–26 August

On 21 August at 5 a.m. the 126th Division attacked Samogneux and took the village after two hours, and the Foreign Legion took Regnéville. Some works give a different date for the capture of Samogneux, but French accounts and the Michelin guide speak of 21 August. On 23 August a detachment of the 165th Division took the Nassau strongpoint, which had resisted the attack on the first day. On the left bank the artillery of XIII Corps shelled Hill 304 for three days and three nights. On 24 August at 4.50 a.m. the 26th Division advanced and within two hours took the hill, from which most of the Germans had withdrawn, leaving only rearguards. In the evening the French went further, took the old Palavas and Lorraine works and reached the Forges stream, more than 2 km from their starting positions. The French Wikipedia, in its article on the hill itself, states that it was recovered on 20 August, but the accounts of French units, the Michelin guide and most works speak of 24 August. On 26 August XXXII Corps, attacking from the Ferme Mormont to the Bois de Chaume, reached the southern edge of the village of Beaumont. From 20 to 26 August the French took, according to the Michelin guide, 9,500 prisoners, 30 guns, 100 trench mortars and 242 machine guns.

September–December

The left bank was now secure, and the French front line stood above the Forges stream. On the right bank the situation was more difficult. The units of XXXII Corps stood too close to the German trenches and under the eyes of German observers on the heights between Bezonvaux and Ornes, and the Germans counter-attacked again and again. According to the American historian Robert Doughty, holding the ground won in August proved more costly than winning it. On 7 September an attack by XV Corps failed, but on 8 September two divisions of XXXII Corps took the Bois des Fosses and the Caurières ridge at the cost of heavy losses. On 9 September several German divisions attacked with orders to retake Hill 344 at any price. According to the Michelin guide, the 14th Division, which had been defending the hill since the end of August, repulsed this attack. According to other accounts, the Germans briefly took the hill, but a French counter-attack restored the old line. Guillaumat and Passaga wanted to go further, to take from the Germans the last points from which they could see Verdun, but Pétain and Fayolle did not want a new battle of attrition and, according to the French Wikipedia, offensive operations were halted on 18 September. The Germans renewed their attacks on the right bank, among others on 2 and 10 October, and from the end of October to the beginning of November near the Ferme des Chambrettes and in the Bois des Fosses. On 25 November, after a five-hour hurricane bombardment, two French divisions carried out a large raid on a sector about 4 km wide, destroyed a line of German bunkers and returned to their positions.

Losses

According to the historian Elizabeth Greenhalgh, in the August attack the French took about 11,000 prisoners and themselves lost about 14,000 men, including 4,470 killed and missing. The French Wikipedia gives 4,730 killed and missing and 9,630 wounded for the period from 20 to 27 August. Many of the wounded had been gassed. By 8 September, according to French returns, 10,300 Germans had been taken prisoner, and the French had captured 30 guns and about 250 machine guns. We have not been able to find complete figures for German losses. The fighting in September and the later German counter-attacks cost both sides thousands more men.

Significance

The attack took from the Germans almost everything they still held of the ground won in 1916. The Mort-Homme and Hill 304, symbols of the bloodiest fighting on the left bank, returned to French hands, and the French front line moved, according to French accounts, to about 11 km north of the city. Of the ground they had taken in February 1916 the Germans now held only a strip on the right bank, with the ruins of Beaumont and the heights around Ornes.

The success itself, however, mattered more. It was the first major attack by the French army since the April defeat and the mutinies. It succeeded at moderate cost and confirmed that Pétain’s method worked: a limited objective, overwhelming artillery superiority, careful aerial reconnaissance and a meticulously rehearsed attack. Erich Ludendorff wrote in his memoirs that the French army had quickly recovered from its depression. Pétain’s critics pointed out that such attacks consumed enormous quantities of ammunition and money and could not in the long run decide the war. The August attack at Verdun nevertheless remained, together with the capture of the Fort de la Malmaison on the Chemin des Dames in October 1917, the best-known example of the French limited-objective attacks of that year. In recognition of its services the Marching Regiment of the Foreign Legion received the cross of the Legion of Honour on its colour, and the names “Verdun 1917” and “Mort-Homme 1917” were inscribed on the colours of the regiments that had distinguished themselves.