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.
Our understanding of Verdun has long been mired in myths, false assumptions, propaganda, and distortions.
Verdun d day mod series#
These conflicts are largely unknown, even in France, owing to the obsessive secrecy of the French high command and its energetic propaganda campaign to fool the world into thinking that the war on the Western Front was a steady series of German checks and defeats.Īlthough British historians have always seen Verdun as a one-year battle designed by the German chief of staff to bleed France white, Mosier’s careful analysis of the German plans reveals a much more abstract and theoretical approach. In fact, says historian John Mosier, from the very beginning of the war until the armistice in 1918, no fewer than eight distinct battles were waged for the possession of Verdun. Yet it is also one of the most complex and misunderstood, in a war only imperfectly grasped.Ĭonventional wisdom holds that the battle began in February 1916 and lasted until December, when the victorious French wrested all the territory they had lost back from the Germans.
Verdun d day mod mod#
Mod Verdun: The Lost History of the Most Important Battle of World War I, 1914-1918Īlongside Waterloo and Gettysburg, the Battle of Verdun during the First World War stands as one of history’s greatest clashes. Malcolm Brown has produced a vivid new history of this epic clash drawing on original illustrations and eyewitness accounts he has captured the spirit of a battle that defines the hell of warfare on the Western Front. Memories of Verdun would greatly influence military and political thinking for decades to come as both sides came away with memories of bravery, futility and horror. To this day one can visit the site of ghost villages uninhabited since, but still cherished like shrines. The garrison city in north-eastern France was the focus of a massive German attack the French fought back ferociously, leading to a battle that would claim hundreds of thousands of lives and permanently scar the French psyche. The British remember the Somme, but earlier in the year the heart of the French army was ripped out by the Germans at Verdun. 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.Īnother recent book covering this battle is:ġ916 was a year of killing. 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. 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. It was a battle in which at least 700,000 men fell, along a front of fifteen miles. It would be hard to beat Alistair Horne's book on Verdun "The Price of Glory".
0 kommentar(er)
