The French recapture Fort Vaux

At about three in the morning of 3 November 1916 a French company entered the empty Fort Vaux at Verdun, which the Germans had taken in June after five days of fighting in its corridors. This time there was neither an assault nor a capitulation. The Germans simply abandoned the fort, cut off and pounded by French heavy artillery. According to German sources, the decision was taken on 1 November. Erich Ludendorff wrote in his memoirs that on that day the Germans “had to evacuate Fort Vaux as well”. The garrison left the fort on 2 November, and German sappers then blew up part of the works. This is the day given as the date of the fort’s recapture by Pétain and by the post-war Michelin guide to the battlefield, while the British chronology of the war, on which our timeline is based, records it under 1 November. The French, however, entered the fort only during the night of 2/3 November, once they had made sure it was empty.

The fort not taken on 24 October

When on 24 October the French recaptured Fort Douaumont, the attack on Fort Vaux stalled. The fort was less damaged by shelling, and its machine guns stopped the 74th Division. Over the following week the French, first from this division and then from General Andlauer’s 63rd Division, approached the fort several times but could not hold on to it. It rained, the trenches turned to mud, and supplying the front line was almost impossible. The war diary of the 299th Infantry Regiment, which from 27 October to 2 November held trenches about 400 metres from the fort, recorded that of the regiment’s 31 officers, 19 had been killed, wounded or gone missing. The regiment did not take the fort, but its fire prevented the Germans from approaching it by day from the south and east.

The French command decided that the fort was not worth storming head-on and resolved to cut it off and destroy it by fire. The garrison was now supplied only by a single communication trench and an underground passage. The roles were reversed compared with June, when it had been Major Raynal’s Frenchmen who held out in the cut-off fort. According to the German Wikipedia, based on a monograph published on behalf of the German Reich Archives (Reichsarchiv), the last German garrison of the fort was again made up of soldiers of the 39th Fusilier Regiment and the 158th Infantry Regiment, the same regiments that had taken it in June.

Explosion and evacuation

On 2 November at about 11 a.m., according to the artillery diary of the 74th Division, a French 220 mm mortar shell caused a powerful explosion in the fort. The German command concluded that the fort could no longer be defended. Its commandant, Lieutenant-Colonel Bellmann, led the garrison out, and German sappers blew up part of the works. At about 3 p.m. the French intercepted a German wireless message announcing the abandonment of the fort. The New York monthly Current History wrote at the end of 1916 that the French command learned of it from a dispatch sent from Berlin to the wireless station at Sayville in the United States, and that the French artillery went on shelling the empty ruins for some time.

At 11 p.m. a reconnaissance party was sent out to check. During the night of 2/3 November two patrols of the 118th Infantry Regiment from Quimper in Brittany reached the fort’s ditches unhindered. According to an account based on the regimental war diaries, Captain Fouache, who was going round the top of the fort, fell from its edge and was badly bruised, while Lieutenant Mathelier found a way in: an opening by the gate at the rear of the fort, blocked with sandbags. At about three in the morning the 3rd Company of the 118th Regiment, with forty grenadiers of the 298th Regiment and a detachment of sappers, entered the empty fort. On 4 November General Andlauer appointed Captain Peyron of the 298th Regiment temporary commandant. Even without a fight, the occupation of the fort was not without casualties, as the German artillery was still shelling the area. According to its diary, the 118th Regiment alone lost 20 killed and 49 wounded on 2 and 3 November.

Back to the February line

In the following days the French occupied the ruins of the villages of Vaux-devant-Damloup and Damloup. As the Michelin guide noted, together with Fort Vaux they had in practice recovered the positions they had held on 24 February, the fourth day of the Battle of Verdun. Within ten days the Germans had lost both forts that symbolised their gains from the whole battle. Ludendorff admitted that the loss of Fort Vaux was painful, but that even more painful was the “quite unexpected” rout of several German divisions on 24 October. Even so, the Supreme Army Command did not transfer any larger forces to Verdun, because it needed them for the campaign against Romania.

For the French, the recovery of the fort in which Raynal had surrendered five months earlier was above all symbolic. The victory strengthened the position of Generals Robert Nivelle, commander of the Second Army, and Charles Mangin, who had led the attack. The Germans, however, still held the heights north of Douaumont, from which they observed the French rear, and Mangin began preparing the next blow.