What if Germany had won at Verdun in 1916?
For ten months from February 1916 France and Germany suffered nearly 700,000 casualties at Verdun, yet the front barely moved. Had Verdun fallen, how would the Great War have ended?
What actually happened
By the end of 1915 the Western Front had set into trenches from Switzerland to the North Sea. The German Chief of Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, decided to strike at Verdun, a fortress city jutting out on the Meuse in Lorraine. On 21 February 1916 the offensive began with a bombardment by more than a thousand guns. On 25 February Fort Douaumont, the largest of Verdun's forts, fell almost without a fight to a small German party, because after its guns had been moved to other fronts only a few dozen men were left in the garrison.
France did not break. Philippe Pétain took command, and along a single narrow road from Bar-le-Duc to Verdun lorries carried men and shells night and day; the writer Maurice Barrès called it the “Sacred Way”. The French army rotated its divisions, and most of the army passed through Verdun at one time or another. On 7 June Fort Vaux, out of water, surrendered, and in June and July the Germans pushed as far as Fleury and Fort Souville, with the city a few kilometres ahead.
But the Russian Brusilov offensive in June and the Anglo-French offensive on the Somme from 1 July drained German strength. At the end of August Falkenhayn was replaced by Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and the French retook Douaumont on 24 October and Vaux on 2 November. When the fighting ended in December, the two sides had suffered about 700,000 casualties between them, nearly 300,000 of them dead. The front was almost where it had been in February.
The turning point
The most dangerous moment was early in the offensive. On 24–25 February, when Douaumont fell, there were voices in the French high command for abandoning the right bank of the Meuse and falling back, but Joffre's chief of staff Castelnau decided to hold the right bank. The criticism that the Germans erred in attacking only the east bank at first came even from the side of the German Crown Prince, who led the offensive. Had the Sacred Way been cut, Verdun's garrison could not have held out long.
Whether losing Verdun would have broken France is another question. In memoirs written after the war Falkenhayn claimed his aim from the start had been not to take the city but to bleed France white, but the original of the “Christmas memorandum” he cited as proof has never been found. Historians such as Robert Foley and Holger Afflerbach debate his real intentions. The British army was growing and the naval blockade was squeezing Germany, and France could well have fought on even after losing Verdun. Still, the mutinies that broke out across the French army in spring 1917, when soldiers refused orders to attack after the failure of the Nivelle offensive, show that France's limits were not far off.
The world that might have been
In Crown & Plough the alternative reads: in February 1916, after Fort Douaumont fell, shellfire cut the French supply route, the “Sacred Way”. In April the French fell back west of the Meuse and Verdun fell. The government in Paris wavered, and talk began to spread among the soldiers that they would attack no more. In the game the French army is greatly reduced and the German army grows, and the British offensive on the Somme in July stalls in its first week because of a half-empty French flank.
In the game's altered world, in spring 1917 the French soldiers who lost Verdun refuse orders to attack, and the French government asks for an armistice. In summer Britain too sits down at the conference table in Brussels. By the Peace of Brussels Germany takes the iron-ore fields of Lorraine and makes Belgium a protectorate, and the United States never enters the war. In 1918 Russia's Bolshevik government signs a peace at Brest, and Germany sets up a regency kingdom in Poland and puts the Baltic coast under military government. The Treaty of Versailles is never signed.
Beyond the game, a Europe in which Germany won in 1917 is one in which the German Empire and Austria-Hungary survive intact. In real history Germany did actively pursue plans in 1917–1918 to set up regency kingdoms and protectorates in its eastern conquests. The Weimar Republic, the resentment over Versailles, and the political movement that fed on that resentment would not have appeared in the same form in this world. Instead, the reparations and thirst for revenge of a defeated France might have become Europe's new spark.
Ripples through time
Verdun is the last turning point in the game, and it occurs only in a world where the July Crisis of 1914 led to war as it really did. In a world where diplomacy defused the crisis there is no Great War and no Verdun. The odds of the July Crisis in turn depend on the outcomes of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the Crimean War.
In real history Verdun became, for the French, the name that stands for the whole Great War. The Douaumont Ossuary on the battlefield holds the remains of some 130,000 unidentified men, and in 1984 President Mitterrand and Chancellor Kohl joined hands there. Pétain, who held Verdun, became a national hero, and after the defeat of 1940 head of the Vichy regime.
Play this turning point
Choose the scenario The Guns of August, which begins in 1914 as the Blue Rider painter Franz Marc. In 1915's “Camouflage tarpaulins”, painting the tarpaulins that cover the battery with patterns invisible from above raises the odds of the Verdun offensive succeeding, and teaching other batteries how to paint them raises them a lot. Franz Marc really did paint camouflage tarpaulins, and he was killed on the Verdun front in March 1916.
If you started the Victorian Era in another position, in 1915 a German or Austrian character can help the offensive by working in a shell factory or on the railways or by buying war bonds, while a French character can defend Verdun by driving lorries on the Sacred Way, working on the road or buying national defence bonds. The odds are set by weighing the strength of Germany and Austria against France and Britain. The turning point does not open if the Great War never broke out or if the player rules Germany or France.
Play this turning point → Start the scenario “The Guns of August” →
Questions and answers
How many died at the Battle of Verdun?
Estimates vary, but from February to December 1916 the French suffered about 370,000 casualties and the Germans about 330,000, so that some 700,000 men in all were killed, wounded or missing; of these, nearly 300,000 are thought to have died.
Who said “They shall not pass”?
It is known from an order of the day by General Robert Nivelle, in command at Verdun, in June 1916, and is also often attributed to Pétain. The phrase then became a symbol of French defence.
Did Falkenhayn really mean to “bleed France white”?
He claimed so in his 1920 memoirs, but the original of the memorandum of around Christmas 1915 that he cited as evidence does not survive. Whether attrition was the aim from the start or an explanation added after the offensive failed is still debated among historians.
Sources and further reading
Erich von Falkenhayn, General Headquarters 1914–1916; Philippe Pétain, Verdun. Modern accounts: Alistair Horne, The Price of Glory; Robert Foley, German Strategy and the Path to Verdun; Paul Jankowski, Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great War.