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Author: Paul Jankowski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199316910
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 976
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Book Description
At seven o'clock in the morning on February 21, 1916, the ground in northern France began to shake. For the next ten hours, twelve hundred German guns showered shells on a salient in French lines. The massive weight of explosives collapsed dugouts, obliterated trenches, severed communication wires, and drove men mad. As the barrage lifted, German troops moved forward, darting from shell crater to shell crater. The battle of Verdun had begun. In Verdun, historian Paul Jankowski provides the definitive account of the iconic battle of World War I. A leading expert on the French past, Jankowski combines the best of traditional military history-its emphasis on leaders, plans, technology, and the contingency of combat-with the newer social and cultural approach, stressing the soldier's experience, the institutional structures of the military, and the impact of war on national memory. Unusually, this book draws on deep research in French and German archives; this mastery of sources in both languages gives Verdun unprecedented authority and scope. In many ways, Jankowski writes, the battle represents a conundrum. It has an almost unique status among the battles of the Great War; and yet, he argues, it was not decisive, sparked no political changes, and was not even the bloodiest episode of the conflict. It is said that Verdun made France, he writes; but the question should be, What did France make of Verdun? Over time, it proved to be the last great victory of French arms, standing on their own. And, for France and Germany, the battle would symbolize the terror of industrialized warfare, "a technocratic Moloch devouring its children," where no advance or retreat was possible, yet national resources poured in ceaselessly, perpetuating slaughter indefinitely.
Author: Paul Jankowski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199316910
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 976
Get Book
Book Description
At seven o'clock in the morning on February 21, 1916, the ground in northern France began to shake. For the next ten hours, twelve hundred German guns showered shells on a salient in French lines. The massive weight of explosives collapsed dugouts, obliterated trenches, severed communication wires, and drove men mad. As the barrage lifted, German troops moved forward, darting from shell crater to shell crater. The battle of Verdun had begun. In Verdun, historian Paul Jankowski provides the definitive account of the iconic battle of World War I. A leading expert on the French past, Jankowski combines the best of traditional military history-its emphasis on leaders, plans, technology, and the contingency of combat-with the newer social and cultural approach, stressing the soldier's experience, the institutional structures of the military, and the impact of war on national memory. Unusually, this book draws on deep research in French and German archives; this mastery of sources in both languages gives Verdun unprecedented authority and scope. In many ways, Jankowski writes, the battle represents a conundrum. It has an almost unique status among the battles of the Great War; and yet, he argues, it was not decisive, sparked no political changes, and was not even the bloodiest episode of the conflict. It is said that Verdun made France, he writes; but the question should be, What did France make of Verdun? Over time, it proved to be the last great victory of French arms, standing on their own. And, for France and Germany, the battle would symbolize the terror of industrialized warfare, "a technocratic Moloch devouring its children," where no advance or retreat was possible, yet national resources poured in ceaselessly, perpetuating slaughter indefinitely.
Author: John Mosier
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0451414632
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
Alongside Waterloo and Gettysburg, the Battle of Verdun during the First World War stands as one of history’s greatest clashes. Perfect for military history buffs, this compelling account of one of World War I’s most important battles explains why it is also the most complex and misunderstood. Although British historians have always seen Verdun as a one-year battle designed by the German chief of staff to bleed France white, historian John Mosier’s careful analysis of the German plans reveals a much more abstract and theoretical approach. From the very beginning of the war until the armistice in 1918, no fewer than eight distinct battles were waged there. These conflicts are largely unknown, even in France, owing to the obsessive secrecy of the French high command. Our understanding of Verdun has long been mired in myths, false assumptions, propaganda, and distortions. Now, using numerous accounts of military analysts, serving officers, and eyewitnesses, including French sources that have never been translated, Mosier offers a compelling reassessment of the Great War’s most important battle.
Author: Clayton Donnell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1849084130
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 66
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Book Description
The ring of fortifications protecting the city of Verdun on the Meuse River would become critical in the infamous battle of World War I. This book examines these fortifications, including the famous forts of Douaumont and Vaux that saw some of the fiercest fighting during the battle.
Author: Robert T. Foley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521841931
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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Book Description
Almost 90 years since its conclusion, the battle of Verdun is still little understood. German Strategy and the Path to Verdun is a detailed examination of this seminal battle based on research conducted in archives long thought lost. Material returned to Germany from the former Soviet Union has allowed for a reinterpretation of Erich von Falkenhayn's overall strategy for the war and of the development of German operational and tactical concepts to fit this new strategy of attrition. By taking a long view of the development of German military ideas from the end of the Franco-German War in 1871, German Strategy and the Path to Verdun also gives much-needed context to Falkenhayn's ideas and the course of one of the greatest battles of attrition the world has ever known.
Author: Alistair Horne
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141937521
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
The battle of Verdun lasted ten months. It was a battle in which at least 700,000 men fell, along a front of fifteen miles. Its aim was less to defeat the enemy than bleed him to death and a battleground whose once fertile terrain is even now a haunted wilderness. Alistair Horne's classic work, continuously in print for over fifty years, is a profoundly moving, sympathetic study of the battle and the men who fought there. It shows that Verdun is a key to understanding the First World War to the minds of those who waged it, the traditions that bound them and the world that gave them the opportunity.
Author: Christina Holstein
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1783032359
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
The bitter fight for Fort Vaux is one of the most famous episodes in the Battle of Verdun—it has achieved almost legendary status in French military history. The heroic resistance put up by the forts commander, Major Raynal, and his small, isolated garrison in the face of repeated German assaults was remarkable at the time, and it is still seen as an outstanding example of gallantry and determination. But what really happened inside the besieged fort during the German attacks, and how can visitors to the Verdun battlefield get an insight into the extraordinary events that took place there almost a century ago? In this precise, accessible account, Christina Holstein, one of the leading authorities on the Verdun battlefield and its monuments, reconstructs the fight for the fort in graphic day-by-day detail. Readers get a vivid sense of the sequence of events, of the intense experience of the defenders and a wider understanding of the importance of Fort Vaux in the context of the German 1916 offensive.
Author: Johnathan Bracken
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1526710315
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 437
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Book Description
This book on French soldiers during WWI is “a first-class narrative with an abundance of personal testimony from the officers and men of the regiment” (The Great War Magazine, Editor’s Choice). Although the French fielded the largest number of Allied troops on the Western Front in the First World War, the story of their soldiers is little known to English readers. The immense size of the French armies, the number of battles they fought, and the enormous losses they incurred, make it difficult for us to comprehend their experience. But we can gain a genuine insight by focusing on one of the defining battles of that war, at Verdun in 1916, and by looking at it through the eyes of a small group of soldiers who served there. That is what Johnathan Bracken does in this meticulously researched, detailed and vivid account. The French 151st Infantry Regiment spent fifty days under fire at Verdun in 1916 and another thirty-five in 1917 and lost 3,200 soldiers killed or wounded. Yet their ordeal was no different from that of hundreds of other infantry units that fought and endured in this meat-grinder of a battle. Their diaries and memoirs tell their story in the most compelling way, and through their words the larger human story of the French soldier during the war comes to life. “The book recounts the horror of intense artillery bombardments and men mown down in great waves. None of this is particularly pretty and the accounts do much to scatter notions of war as a glorious, thrilling experience. It was vicious and brutal utterly cruel.”—War History Online
Author: David Campbell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472838165
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 81
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Book Description
On 21 February 1916, the German Army launched a major attack on the French fortress of Verdun. The Germans were confident that the ensuing battle would compel France to expend its strategic reserves in a savage attritional battle, thereby wearing down Allied fighting power on the Western Front. However, initial German success in capturing a key early objective, Fort Douaumont, was swiftly stemmed by the French defences, despite heavy French casualties. The Germans then switched objectives, but made slow progress towards their goals; by July, the battle had become a stalemate. During the protracted struggle for Verdun, the two sides' infantrymen faced appalling battlefield conditions; their training, equipment and doctrine would be tested to the limit and beyond. New technologies, including flamethrowers, hand grenades, trench mortars and more mobile machine guns, would play a key role in the hands of infantry specialists thrown into the developing battle, and innovations in combat communications were employed to overcome the confusion of the battlefield. This study outlines the two sides' wider approach to the evolving battle, before assessing the preparations and combat record of the French and German fighting men who fought one another during three pivotal moments of the 101⁄2-month struggle for Verdun.
Author: Christina Holstein
Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
ISBN: 1526717107
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 447
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Book Description
A tour of the historic French battlefield that goes beyond the usual dates and places, and reveals the full story of the fighting after the fighting. Despite the popular view, the French army did not cease offensive operations after the disastrous Nivelle Offensive of spring 1917 and the subsequent mutinies. Nor did the fighting at Verdun come to an end in 1916. The successful French counteroffensives at the end of that year led to preliminary planning for a two Army operation in 1917 to break out of the Verdun salient and recapture the strategically very significant Briey coal basin. The French Army mutinies of May and June 1917 led to a more limited version of the plan being implemented, with the aim of establishing new lines for a breakout in 1918. The need to rebuild morale in the French army meant that nothing was left to chance. The immense logistical effort of this late summer 1917 campaign and the detailed planning and careful training at all levels brought success to an army weary of war but determined to win. The industrial nature of the preparations, the spectacular numbers of guns, and the first appearance of the Americans at Verdun presage the campaigns of 1918 and the final Allied victory. Christina Holstein, Britain’s premier expert in the battlefields around Verdun, leads the reader around the various vital points of this largely unknown battle of 1917, one which was crucial for the rebuilding of a French army that played such a notable part in the victorious Allied campaign of 1918. Like all the books in the Battleground Europe series, it is profusely illustrated and mapped using contemporary and modern material, with clear maps to support each of the tours.
Author: Nick Dybek
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501191780
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Across a continent still reeling from World War I, a “ravishingly beautiful” (Paula McClain) story about a love affair between two Americans and the lie that changes everything. France, 1921—Tom, a young American orphaned in World War I, is helping comfort the grieving families who travel through Verdun, seeking answers about their loved ones. But nothing in his past—not his rough Chicago childhood nor his experiences driving ambulances across French battlefields—can prepare Tom for the arrival of Sarah Hagen. From the moment he meets her, a disarmingly magnetic woman looking for news of her missing husband, he knows he will help her in any way he can—even if that means crossing an unforgivable line. As their affair takes them across a fractured Europe careening toward World War 2, Tom and Sarah learn how love can be both a cure for—and a distraction from—the realities of a world turned upside down. But they can only hide from the truth for so long. When news of an amnesiac soldier in Bologna reaches Tom in Paris, he sets off as a journalist to uncover the story, only to find Sarah at the soldier’s bedside, hopeful as ever. Both are surprised to encounter an Austrian journalist named Paul with his own interest in the amnesiac. As they confront the past, Tom’s actions come back to haunt him, and each is forced to make a choice that will change their lives forever. A deeply transporting novel about love and identity, truth and consequences, The Verdun Affair is a page-turning and vividly imagined “literary romance… [that] unravels a love triangle and its players’ secrets” (Los Angeles Times).
