End of the Second Offensive Battle of Verdun

15 December 1917 is the date that the British chronology of the war, following French battle nomenclature, gives as the end of the “Second Offensive Battle of Verdun”. No major action was fought at Verdun that day. The date closes the period that began with the attack of 20 August, when the French Second Army retook the Mort-Homme, Hill 304, the Côte du Talou and Hill 344 within a few days. From the autumn the fighting here was only to hold and improve the positions won, mainly on the right bank of the Meuse. In mid-December the commander who had prepared the August attack also left Verdun: General Adolphe Guillaumat was appointed to succeed General Sarrail at the head of the Allied forces on the Salonika front.

Autumn on the right bank

On the left bank of the Meuse, after the capture of Hill 304, the front quietened down. On the right bank the French held slopes that were still overlooked by German positions around the ruined villages of Beaumont and Ornes. General Max von Gallwitz’s German Fifth Army tried to recover part of the lost ground. According to French communiqués, on 14 September the Germans broke into the French trenches north of the Bois des Caurières on a front of about 500 metres, but were driven out the next day. On 2 and 10 October they renewed their attacks on the same sector, without success. From 25 October to 6 November there was fighting for the Les Chambrettes farm, the Bois des Fosses and the area around Beaumont, where the French regiments repulsed a strong German counter-attack with difficulty. French accounts saw in this persistence proof of how valuable the August gains had been.

On 25 November the French struck themselves. After a five-hour hurricane bombardment two divisions, the 128th and the 37th, supported by several dozen groups of field, heavy and trench artillery, attacked in dreadful weather on a front about 4 km wide, from near Samogneux to the Ferme d’Anglemont near Beaumont. The communiqués of the time, repeated by the Allied press, spoke of the capture of the first and second lines of German trenches with deep dugouts and of holding them the next day despite counter-attacks. The British historian Elizabeth Greenhalgh describes this action as a large raid: the infantry destroyed a line of German bunkers and returned to its starting positions. In the first days of December the French also repulsed German attacks in the Bois des Fosses and towards Bezonvaux. Then winter set in and the front at Verdun froze.

The balance

The operation as a whole, counting from August, was the French army’s greatest success of 1917. The French recovered almost all the ground the Germans had taken on the left bank in 1916 and pushed the front back from the city. In the August attack alone they took more than 10,000 prisoners, losing, according to Greenhalgh, about 14,000 killed, wounded and missing. The following weeks of fighting on the right bank cost both sides thousands more men. Most important, however, was the effect on morale: a few months after the mutinies the French army was again attacking successfully. The attack at Verdun and the capture of the fort of La Malmaison in October confirmed the method of General Philippe Pétain: a limited objective, overwhelming artillery superiority and careful preparation that spared the infantry.

For the time being the method went no further. At the end of 1917 Pétain expected that after Russia left the war the Germans would move dozens of divisions to the west, and he was preparing the army for defence. For most of 1918 there were only raids and skirmishes at Verdun. The last German positions north of the city fell only in the autumn of 1918, in the great American and French offensive between the Argonne and the Meuse.