Germany didn't attack Verdun to capture it — they attacked to drain France of soldiers. For 10 months, it worked, consuming 714,000 casualties and barely moving the line.
The Battle of Verdun was deliberately designed as a killing machine. German Chief of Staff Erich von Falkenhayn chose Verdun because France would never abandon it — the city had too much symbolic and emotional weight. His plan: force France into a battle of attrition that would 'bleed France white,' regardless of whether Germany captured an inch of ground.
Germany opened the battle February 21, 1916, with the most intense artillery bombardment in history to that point — over 1,200 guns firing more than a million shells in the first day alone. The bombardment churned the landscape into a lunar surface of overlapping craters, and the battle would continue in this hellscape for ten months.
France rotated nearly its entire army through Verdun. Of 94 French divisions, 70 served there at some point — cycling units through before they were destroyed, pulling them out to recover, sending in fresh ones. This system ensured that almost every Frenchman who survived the war had been to Verdun.
General Philippe Petain reorganized French supply lines around a single road — La Voie Sacree, the Sacred Way — keeping 6,000 trucks running day and night. His rallying cry 'Ils ne passeront pas' (They shall not pass) became France's declaration of defiance, and Verdun became Petain's defining moment of the war.
Fort Douaumont, the cornerstone of Verdun's defenses and supposedly impregnable, fell to a handful of German soldiers in just three days in February. The French retook it in October after months of brutal counterattacks. The fort changed hands several times, each assault consuming thousands of lives for a few acres of concrete and mud.
When fighting finally wound down in December 1916, both sides had suffered roughly 714,000 casualties — and the front lines had barely moved. Survivors described the battlefield as unlike anything on earth: no trees, no buildings, just craters within craters for miles. The ground around Verdun remains so contaminated with unexploded shells and chemical agents that parts of it are still off-limits to the public today.