World War I

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Western Front, 1916

At the beginning of 1916, more soldiers of the British New Army became available as they finished their training. The British decided to focus on a new and mighty effort to drive through the western front. French forces were to join in the offensive, which was originally set for mid-August to give time for thorough preparation. Sir Douglas Haig replaced Sir John French as commander of British troops in France. Sir John French had been discredited by the failures of 1915.

However, Germany acted first under the direction of General Falkenhayn. Falkenhayn felt that the time had come to mount an offensive against France before more British soldiers could tip the scales of battle. Falkenhayn considered that although the Russian armies had not been beaten, Russia's power to take the offensive had been broken, and it had effectively lost its strength. For 1916 he proposed a German attack on the French fortress of Verdun, one of the historic guardian fortresses of France. Falkenhayn believed the French general staff, for moral and patriotic reasons, would “have to throw in every man they have” to retain Verdun.

He was correct in that prediction. The defense of Verdun, whose strategic significance was minimal, became a powerful symbol of the national will of the French people. The French prime minister, Aristide Briand, warned Joffre that if he surrendered Verdun, he would be dismissed immediately as French commander. Falkenhayn did not plan a headlong assault but instead planned that his troops would exert a steady pressure supported by massive artillery fire. Falkenhayn proposed to draw wave after wave of France's limited manpower into his operation over a period of weeks and months. He predicted that “the forces of France will be bled to death” in his Verdun offensive without a corresponding loss of German lives.

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Battle of Verdun

The first German attack on Verdun began on February 21, 1916. The Germans advanced several miles and captured Fort Douaumont on February 25. On that day, General Henri Philippe Pétain arrived with Joffre's order to take command of the disheartened garrison of Verdun. Under Pétain’s leadership, the French defenders recovered confidence. The Germans found that for further gains, they would have to pay the price of rising casualties.

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In April Pétain was promoted, and he handed over command of the Verdun defense to General Robert Nivelle in the beginning of May. Falkenhayn planned a new attack for early June. However, on June 4 Falkenhayn’s belief that Russia was immobilized collapsed under the impact of a sudden overwhelming Russian offensive in Galicia, a region of Austria-Hungary. More than 40 Russian divisions under General Aleksey Brusilov broke through at a weak point from which Austro-Hungarian troops had earlier been withdrawn to fight on the Italian front.

The Brusilov offensive answered the urgent pleas of French president Raymond Poincaré, who had asked the tsar for help in relieving the situation at Verdun. Brusilov gained complete surprise after a short but intense artillery bombardment. He succeeded in pushing back the Austro-Hungarian army almost 100 km (60 mi)—the most successful Russian offensive of the war. The Germans suspended their attacks at Verdun and dispatched divisions to the eastern front. Brusilov's offensive suffered by the end of September 1916 because the Russian railways were insufficient to transport enough troops and supplies in time.

On June 22 the Germans renewed the offensive at Verdun, but they made no progress. In August William II dismissed General Falkenhayn as chief of the general staff and replaced him with Hindenburg. Ludendorff became Hindenburg’s first quartermaster general. Two powerful French counterattacks in October and December recovered almost all the ground lost to the Germans and reestablished the lines of deadlock virtually where they had been in February. The total casualties of the Verdun fighting on both sides are estimated at more than 700,000 men, of which approximately 377,000 were French soldiers and an estimated 337,000 were German soldiers.

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First Battle of the Somme

The main scene of action on the western front shifted from Verdun north to the valley of the Somme River. The British had moved the date for their offensive forward to help take the pressure off the French army at Verdun. The offensive began on the morning of July 1, 1916, following seven days of massive artillery bombardment.

This was the baptism of fire for Britain's New Army, the young volunteers who were to become known to their country as the lost generation. On the first day of battle, the British suffered 60,000 casualties (including 20,000 deaths) for a gain of no more than a few yards of ground scattered along the front. The First Battle of the Somme was a repetition on a broader scale of the local offensives of 1915. It continued intermittently until mid-November. When it lapsed into resumed deadlock, the British casualties were estimated at almost 420,000 men. The much smaller French force operating on the British right flank had almost 195,000 casualties. Estimates suggest that the German casualty figures were about the same as the Allies.

On September 15, 1916, during the First Battle of the Somme, the British gave the tank its first trial in combat. Although the German soldiers fled in panic at the sight of the strange-looking new machines, most of the tanks bogged down or came to a stop because of mechanical defects and inexperienced crews. For the next year, tanks represented a great disappointment because of their unwieldy operation. The Germans originally dismissed them as signs of weakness on the part of infantry but eventually developed their own model, which was put into operation in the spring of 1918. By that time, however, the British had worked the defects out of their machines, and the tank was to become the weapon that helped to end the trench deadlock in the last year of the war.

The enormous losses sustained at Verdun and at the Somme prompted the French command to move Joffre offstage by making him a marshal of France, the country’s highest-ranking army officer. The French command then turned to General Robert Nivelle, who had replaced Pétain as commander of the French forces at Verdun. At Verdun, Nivelle immediately launched a series of vigorous counterattacks, which eventually forced the Germans to adopt defensive tactics. Nivelle’s success at Verdun convinced him of the wisdom of massive offensives as a strategy for victory. Under Nivelle's command, Fort Douaumont and the rest of the German gains at Verdun were triumphantly recovered.

The Germans did not break through the fortress of Verdun but the cost to the defending French army was terrible. Ninety thousand men a week were sent to Verdun along the road that became known as La Voie Sacrée (the Sacred Way) because it was the only road that remained open. One of the thousands of French prisoners of war taken at Verdun was Captain Charles de Gaulle, later president of France.

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Other Events, 1916

In 1916 the war raged in areas beyond the major theaters of combat in France and Russia. A bloody series of battles were fought between Ottoman and Russian forces in Armenia, while the British also clashed with Ottoman forces in Mesopotamia. In August 1916 Romania intervened in the war on the Allied side and invaded the Austro-Hungarian region of Transylvania. Romania entered the war in hopes of gaining several provinces of Austria-Hungary that had large Romanian populations. After a vigorous counterattack by Austria-Hungary and Germany, the Central Powers controlled most of the valuable wheat- and oil-producing parts of Romania.

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Ottoman Action Against the Armenians

Once World War I developed into a “total war” that involved the mobilization of each country’s entire population and economic resources, the distinction between soldiers at the front and civilians behind the lines was erased. As terrible as the carnage on the battlefield was, noncombatants also suffered as the brutality practiced against the enemy on the battlefield was also practiced against perceived enemies at home. The most egregious example of this phenomenon was the policy of genocide that the Ottoman Empire conducted against its Armenian citizens (see Armenian Massacre).

Conflict between the Christian Armenian minority and the Muslim Turkish majority had occurred before World War I. Many Armenians looked forward to independence from the Ottoman Empire so that they could control their own government and practice their own religion without restrictions. When the war began, some Armenians supported Russia against the Ottoman Empire and clashed with Ottoman military units. The Ottoman government regarded the Armenians as a dangerous subversive force within the country that endangered the war effort. The Ottomans also felt threatened by the possibility of an Allied invasion after the Allied landing at Gallipoli and the Russian military pressure in the Caucasus Mountains. In May 1915 the Ottoman government ordered the deportation of the entire Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire.

Over the next two years, the government of the Ottoman Empire deported two-thirds or more of its Armenian citizens in eastern Anatolia (present-day Asian Turkey) to the deserts of Mesopotamia. Many Armenians died of exposure, disease, and starvation; others were killed by Ottoman soldiers and civilians. By the time World War I ended, an estimated 1 million or more Armenians had died. After receiving harrowing reports from its diplomatic representatives, the United States government issued a formal protest at this policy of genocide. But as a neutral party in the war the United States had no influence over the Ottoman government.