The Battle of Verdun
By 1916 the German commander, Erich von Falkenhayn, recognized that this war heavily favored the defensive and that working for a breakthrough was not likely to succeed. Consequently, he decided upon a new strategy. Rather than trying to break the enemy lines he wanted to simply inflict so many casualties that Britain and France would no longer want to continue fighting. He reportedly said that he saw his new objective to be to “bleed France white.” To achieve this, though, he would need to provoke the British and French into attacking him at a prepared position.
Falkenhayn decided that if he could capture Verdun, a fortress city with psychological and symbolic significance to the French, then they would have no choice but to try to retake it, giving him his opportunity to bleed the French. So in February 1916 he massed his troops in front of Verdun and prepared for the attack. Falkenhayn opened his offensive with the largest artillery barrage that the world had ever seen, lobbing a million shells into the city in ten hours.
When the bombardment subsided, the Germans sent in their infantry, led by the crack German shock troops. It was also at the Battle of Verdun that the Germans would debut a new weapon, the flame thrower, which they hoped would allow them to easily clear the bunkers of the French fortresses. Despite the intensity of the opening attack, most of the French defenders of Verdun had survived and they still held the city.
After Falkenhayn’s plan to quickly take Verdun with overwhelming force and to defend it against counterattack had failed, the Battle of Verdun would stretch into the longest battle of the war. The French were indeed bled white, but the Germans suffered the same fate. The ten-month slog at Verdun would result in nearly a million casualties on all sides and drive home the point that this was now a war of attrition in which the objective was not just to break the enemy militarily but also to break their will to continue fighting.