Verdun and the Somme, 1916
1916: The Year of Attrition
By the end of 1915 the Western Front had become a 450-mile line of trenches stretching from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. Neither side had broken the deadlock through manoeuvre, so both turned to attrition — trying to grind the other side into surrender by inflicting heavier losses than they could replace. 1916 produced the two most infamous battles of attrition in modern history: Verdun, fought by the French and Germans from February to December, and the Somme, fought largely by the British from July to November.
The Battle of Verdun opened on 21 February 1916. German Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn aimed to ‘bleed France white’ by attacking a fortress city the French would have to defend at any cost. The battle ran for ten months and produced roughly 700,000 combined casualties.
Verdun: To Bleed France White
Falkenhayn picked Verdun for symbolic, not strategic, reasons. The city was ringed by French forts, sat on the River Meuse, and represented a century of French military pride. He believed that France would defend it whatever the cost, and that this stubbornness would allow German artillery to chew up French divisions one by one. The German bombardment on 21 February 1916 fired around one million shells in ten hours along an eight-mile front. Fort Douaumont, the largest of the surrounding forts, fell within four days.
General Philippe Pétain took command of the French defence. He rotated divisions through Verdun on a system known as the noria, so that no unit was destroyed completely — eventually around three quarters of the entire French army served at Verdun. He kept the city supplied via a single road, the Voie Sacrée (‘Sacred Way’), along which 6,000 lorries a day moved men, food and shells. The defiant order ‘Ils ne passeront pas’ (‘They shall not pass’) became a French national slogan.
The bleeding plan assumed German losses would stay low while French losses climbed. In practice the maths went both ways. By December 1916 the French had suffered around 377,000 casualties and the Germans 337,000 — the ratio was nearly even. The launch of the Somme offensive in July forced Germany to thin out the Verdun assault to send divisions north. French counter-attacks retook Fort Douaumont on 24 October and Fort Vaux on 2 November. Falkenhayn was sacked in August 1916 and replaced by Hindenburg and Ludendorff.
The Somme: Britain’s First Mass Offensive
The Somme was originally planned as a joint Anglo-French offensive on a quiet sector to break through the German line. After Verdun began, the French contribution shrank from 40 divisions to 16 and the burden fell on Britain. The new British army — Pals battalions raised by Lord Kitchener and largely untested in major battle — would carry the attack.
A week-long preliminary bombardment fired 1.5 million shells along the German line, intended to destroy the wire and bury the defenders. It did neither effectively. Many British shells were duds, the wire was uncut in many places, and the German front line was protected by deep concrete dugouts up to 12 metres underground.
On 1 July 1916 — the first day of the Somme — the British army suffered around 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 dead. It remains the bloodiest day in British military history. The battle ran on for another 140 days and finally ended in mid-November.
Why the First Day Went So Wrong
Several errors compounded one another. The bombardment failed to cut the wire or destroy the German dugouts. The infantry were ordered to advance at walking pace in extended lines, weighed down with around 30 kilograms of equipment, on the assumption that resistance would be minimal. As the bombardment lifted, German machine-gunners climbed out of their dugouts and opened fire across no man’s land. The principle of creeping barrage, where shells lift forward in time with the infantry, was used in places but inconsistently coordinated.
On 15 September 1916 at Flers-Courcelette, Haig deployed the new British Mark I tank for the first time. Of the 49 sent into action only 32 made it to the start line, and most broke down or got stuck in shell craters. Even so, the few that worked drove infantry forward in places and signalled a tactical answer to the trench problem. Haig was criticised for committing the weapon early in small numbers; revisionist historians argue it was a sensible learning exercise.
Significance for 1916
By the end of November the British and French had advanced about six miles at the Somme. Total casualties were enormous: around 420,000 British, 200,000 French and 465,000 German. Yet the picture is not one of pure futility. The Somme drew German divisions away from Verdun and helped force Falkenhayn’s removal. It taught the British army hard lessons about artillery coordination, infantry tactics and air-ground cooperation that would matter in 1917 and 1918. For Germany, it accelerated the shift to a defensive strategy: in early 1917 they fell back to the heavily-fortified Hindenburg Line. The combined experience of Verdun and the Somme convinced both sides that breakthrough by infantry alone was impossible — future progress would have to come from technology, tactics and combined arms.