Verdun - Judgment on the Meuse

Battles of the First World War Podcast

Mike Cunha

History

4.8 • 812 Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2018

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode we’ll cover the first two days of the battle, from the barrage on the 21st through the defense of the Boise des Caures by LTC Emile Driant and his 56th and 59th Chasseurs a Pied.

On February 21st, 1916, nine days past schedule, the Germans opened their attack on Verdun on World War I’s Western Front with a massive artillery barrage of 1,200 guns. The bombardment pounded French Army positions within the Verdun Salient for eight hours before Crown Prince Wilhelm’s 5th Army launched its infantry attack on the Right Bank. Operation “Gericht”, and the Battle of Verdun, had begun.

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Any questions, comments or concerns please contact me through the website, www.firstworldwarpodcast.com or the Battles of the First World War Podcast page on FaceBook. We're also on Twitter! Follow us at @WW1podcast. Not into social media? Email me directly at [email protected]. Please consider reviewing the Battles of the consider reviewing the Battles of the First World War Podcast on iTunes. Thank you so much for taking the time to listen.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I await the cyclone.
0:04.0	Finally, if this is the hour, and I am called, I will respond, present, like all the others.
0:13.0	Excert from a letter written by Lieutenant Colonel Emil Drillon, Bois d'Corps, Verdun podcast, Episode 2, Judgment on the Murs.
0:52.6	Getting right into episode 2, I need to start off with a correction pointed out by listener
0:58.7	and Mon Bonhomme, Ghana from Boston, who knows his French.
1:05.7	In the last episode, I pronounced the town as Charleroi, but it is actually pronounced Charlewa.
1:14.6	So let me pronounce that again to make sure that we have it right.
1:19.6	Charlewa.
1:21.6	Charlewa.
1:23.6	Charlewa.
1:24.6	Charley.
1:25.6	All right, I'll stop.
1:37.6	When we left off at the end of episode one, we had covered the first two years of bloody and stale-mated fighting on the Western Front of the First World War.
1:48.0	The opening battles of 1914 had led to an exhausted stalemate that neither the Allies nor the central powers could break anywhere in the world through 1915. This was particularly true on the Western Front in France and Belgium, where all of the battles saw territorial gains measured in hundreds of meters or in single-digit kilometer shifts in the front lines, while casualties ran into the hundreds of thousands.
2:05.6	In 1915, Imperial Germany's chief of staff, General Eric von Falkenheim, conspired to break the deadlock in France by drawing the French army into a battle that would be focused
2:18.6	solely on killing Frenchmen. The designated target for this attack was the Verdun
2:24.4	Salient, which French soldiers had held around their sacred city since the autumn of 1914.
2:31.2	Through the autumn of 1915, the German 5th Army, on the other side of the bulge, built
2:37.1	up massive quantities of artillery and men with which to shatter and then assault the French
2:43.3	positions in anticipation of Operation Gerich, or judgment. A map of the Verdun Salian is readily available on this podcast accompanying website,
2:54.6	Battle of Verdun Podcast.com.
2:57.5	In January, the buildup continued at an ever greater pace on the German side.
	...

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