Army - Kicking Tires On Jltv

The French army trucked supplies and troops along the “Sacred Way”
during the Battle of Verdun.
Brig. Gen. John S. Brown, USA Ret., was chief of military history
at the U.S. Army Center of Military History from December
1998 to October 2005. He commanded the 2nd Battalion,
66th Armor, in Iraq and Kuwait during the Gulf War and returned
to Kuwait as commander of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Cavalry
Division, in 1995. Author of Kevlar Legions: The
Transformation of the U.S. Army, 1989–2005, he has a doctorate
in history from Indiana University.
Ironically, the Germans found themselves caught in the same
kind of trap they had intended to inflict on the French. They
were subject to deluges of observed artillery fire, and these
could be relieved only if they seized the high ground from
which French artillerymen were directing their fires. This led
them into recurrent attacks—under fire. German commanders
believed their viable options were to go forward or to withdraw,
not to stay put.
Falkenhayn had envisioned a lopsided battle in which the
Germans held the high ground and hammered away at the
French while the French, blinded by the topographical relief,
were ineffectual in their response. Instead, he got a messy battlefield
where both sides had high ground enough to bring
their artillery into play. Rather than admit defeat and withdraw
into less exposed positions, the Germans deluded themselves
time and again that one more push would be sufficient to dislodge
and blind the French. Attacks proved costly. The French
were not the only ones who found it psychologically impossible
to withdraw from the blood-soaked ground of Verdun.
Assailed on all three sides of the Verdun salient, the French
mustered vehicles from across France to sustain La Voie Sacree,
the “Sacred Way,” trucking in supplies and reinforcements in
a continuous stream over this perilous road. They massed artillery
and counterattacked fiercely to sustain their line. Tactical
innovations did occur. The Germans introduced flamethrowers.
The French arrayed their defenses in depth. The
Germans led attacks with infiltration parties of infantry, engineers
and other arms eventually famous as Stosstruppen. The
French perfected a system for rotating units through Verdun
from all over France.
Both sides were ever more aggressive and creative in their
use of air power. Artillery tactics became more sophisticated as
well, particularly with respect to the proliferation and integration
of chemical munitions. None of this forced a decision or
reduced the carnage. The battle bubbled on in a seemingly
endless series of attacks and counterattacks large and small.
On June 4, the Russians launched their massive Brusilov
Offensive and on June 24, the British launched a similarly
massive assault along the Somme River. These offensives also
turned out to be indecisive bloodbaths, but they did divert
German attention and resources away from Verdun. Falkenhayn
was relieved in August, replaced by Field Marshal Paul
von Hindenburg. The Germans went over to the defensive
around Verdun. The French launched a major counteroffensive
in the fall and by mid-December had regained much of
the ground they had lost.
At Verdun, the French are reported to have suffered
542,000 casualties; the Germans, 434,000. The attempt to
bleed France white bled the Germans almost as badly. Losses
were so great, artillery so prolific and fighting so chaotic that it
proved impossible to identify most of the dead. The famous
Douaumont Ossuary contains the bones of over 130,000
unidentified dead, French mingled with German. Views into
the crypt through small windows offer as graphic an image as
one can imagine of the cost of war. Remains in the ossuary are
in addition to those of more than 16,000 Frenchmen who
were identified and individually buried in the nearby Douaumont
Cemetery.
The intractable problem presented at Verdun was that no
penetration was deep enough to prove decisive. Infantry advances
reached culminating points when they outdistanced
their artillery support, which is difficult to move forward
across shattered ground. Communications failed as well. Defenses
in depth could contain shallow penetrations while reinforcements
rushed in by road and rail. Observed artillery fire
hammered away at anything that moved. Maneuver turned
into attrition.
This phenomenon repeated itself on other battlefields;
Americans experienced it during the first bloody month in the
Meuse-Argonne. The situation begged for a technological resolution
to break the impasse. This came to fruition in a later
war with combined arms teams of tanks, planes, artillery,
mechanized infantry and engineers knit together by radio communications.
Verdun was the incentive to find another way. ✭
Additional Reading
Esposito, Vincent J., The West Point Atlas of American
Wars, Volume II: 1900–1953 (New York: Frederick A.
Praeger, 1959)
Horne, Alistair, The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 (London:
Penguin Books, 1994)
Jankowski, Paul, Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great
War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)
Library of Congress
64 ARMY ■ February 2016