Synopsis "The Greatest Battles in History: The Battle of Verdun"
*Includes pictures *Includes a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "On ne Passe Pas!" ("They Shall Not Pass!") - Marshal Petain "Like Auschwitz, Verdun marks a transgression of the limits of the human condition." - Antoine Prost "Humanity is mad. It must be mad to do what it is doing. What a massacre! What scenes of horror and carnage! I cannot find words to translate my impressions. Hell cannot be so terrible. Men are mad!" - French Lieutenant at Verdun The names of history's most famous battles still ring in our ears today, their influence immediately understood by all. Marathon lent its name to the world's most famous race, but it also preserved Western civilization during the First Persian War. Saratoga, won by one of the colonists' most renowned war heroes before he became his nation's most vile traitor. Hastings ensured the Normans' success in England and changed the course of British history. Waterloo, which marked the reshaping of the European continent and Napoleon's doom, has now become part of the English lexicon. In Charles River Editors' Greatest Battles in History series, readers can get caught up to speed on history's greatest battles in the time it takes to finish a commute, while learning interesting facts long forgotten or never known. It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of the Battle of Verdun. For the French, it possesses a grim significance which endures to this day - the churned, furrowed earth of the battlefield still visible a century later a stark reminder of waste of life, strategic failure and tactical inadequacy on a monumental scale. For the German people, had it not been eclipsed by the shame and horror of Nazism and the Holocaust, it would doubtless carry equal importance. Yet even to outsiders, the grim field of Verdun casts a shadow that is difficult to ignore. Quite simply, it is one of the greatest battles ever fought. In terms of ferocity of fighting, number of casualties, men and materiel committed, and prolonged duration of the conflict, only other World War I battles such as the Somme and the utter destruction visited by the Third Reich and Soviet Russia upon each other during World War II are of comparable scale. By the battle's end on December 16th (ignoring subsequent operations which took place in Verdun later on in the war), almost two and a half million French and German soldiers had borne arms at Verdun, an area of operations roughly 550 square miles in size - approximately a third of the size of Rhode Island. The battle, according to some estimates, accounted for almost a million men killed, captured, or wounded. The battle was to last for almost ten months. These figures mean that a soldier serving at Verdun, on either side, had a roughly one-in-ten chance of being killed outright, and an approximately even chance of suffering some other mishap, be it injury, illness or capture. Verdun is a classic example of the bloody stalemate that occurred at the apogee of World War I, when armies screeched to a halt in the wake of an opening stage of maneuver warfare. With defensive destructive capability vastly outweighing offensive capacity, Generals were unable to find a solution other than feeding more men into the meat-grinder in an attempt to break the deadlock. It was only after the widespread deployment of tanks, man-portable light machine guns, and aircraft that the belligerents were finally able to find an answer to the killing power of emplaced defense and achieve breakthroughs on the battlefield - something that was aided by the fact that Germany, at this point, was running out of bodies to put into uniform. The Battle of Verdun chronicles one of the deadliest battles in human history, from its origins to its deadly climax. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about Verdun like never before.
