Fort Vaux

By Christina Holstein

The bitter fight for Fort Vaux is one of the most famous episodes in the Battle of Verdun—it has achieved almost legendary status in French military history. The heroic resistance put up by the forts commander, Major Raynal, and his small, isolated garrison in the face of repeated German assaults was remarkable at the time, and it is still seen as an outstanding example of gallantry and determination. But what really happened inside the besieged fort during the German attacks, and how can visitors to the Verdun battlefield get an insight into the extraordinary events that took place there almost a century ago? In this precise, accessible account, Christina Holstein, one of the leading authorities on the Verdun battlefield and its monuments, reconstructs the fight for the fort in graphic day-by-day detail. Readers get a vivid sense of the sequence of events, of the intense experience of the defenders and a wider understanding of the importance of Fort Vaux in the context of the German 1916 offensive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781783032358

Christina Holstein

Christina Holstein is a leading authority on the Battle of Verdun. For many years she lived close to the battlefield and has explored it in great detail. She regularly conducts tours of the battlefield for individuals or groups and, with her specialized knowledge of the terrain, has acted as consultant to a number of other historians, TV producers and TV and radio journalists. Over the years she has written four books in the Battleground Europe series on the Battle of Verdun 1916. She was the founding chairman of the Luxembourg branch of the Western Front Association.

Book preview

Chapter One

A TRAPEZIUM OF MODEST SIZE

In a comparative table of military events the German siege of Fort Vaux in June 1916 during the Battle of Verdun might not rank very highly. It lasted for only five days, did not – unlike earlier sieges in history – end in a general massacre, and the fort’s capture was not a decisive turning point in the battle. For all that, the assault by units of the German 50th Infantry Division and the desperate resistance of a French garrison cut off from the rest of the battle inside a labyrinth of dark, stinking and overcrowded rooms and tunnels, constantly building and repairing barricades, attacked by hand grenades, smoke and flamethrowers, unable to communicate with the outside world and ultimately driven to surrender by thirst, quickly caught the imagination of visitors from all over the world. Not only that, but it helped to influence French military thinking for twenty years after the First World War.

Fort Vaux was only one of the forts involved in the Battle of Verdun. In 1914 the city that gave its name to the battle was surrounded by a double ring of modern, heavily armed forts and fieldworks that stood on the high ridges surrounding the city and buttressed its traditional position as a rampart against invasion. This is a role that Verdun owes to geography, for it stands where the east – west road from Paris to Germany crosses the valley of the northward-flowing River Meuse. The city is surrounded by flat-topped hills that rise to 390 metres above sea level and provide extensive views in all directions. Over the ages the winding course of the river has cut into the hills on both sides of the valley, leaving interlocking spurs that project out from the valley floor, dominating passage from either north or south and protecting the river crossings. Streams have sliced the hills into deep ravines that concentrate communication routes into a few gateways and offer scores of concealed positions for observation and defence. The natural strength of the position was recognised from early times and rulers from the Celts to Louis XIV have sought to improve on nature by surrounding the city with the most modern fortifications of the day.

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Principal forts and fieldworks around Verdun in 1916

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The St Paul gate at Verdun. The city walls on either side of the gate were demolished after the First World War.

Tom Gudmestad

Until 1871 Verdun was not in the front line of defence against invasion by the traditional enemy, Germany, and there was no need to modernize the urban defences designed in the seventeenth century by Louis XIV’s famous military engineer, Vauban. However, that position was dramatically changed by the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 – 71. Under the terms of the subsequent peace treaty, Germany annexed a substantial part of eastern France and this brought the Franco-German border very close to Verdun. With only its seventeenth-century walls and citadel to defend it from the growing power of Germany, new defences were urgently required and the ideas adopted were those of General Raymond Séré de Rivières, a military engineer with recent experience of modern fortress building. He proposed that new forts should be built on both sides of the River Meuse using commanding heights that were sufficiently far from Verdun to protect it from bombardment. Those on the Right (east) Bank of the river would dominate passage along the Meuse valley and control road and rail communications towards the German border. Those on the Left (west) Bank would control the road to Paris, which was the main line of communication and retreat available to the French. Construction of the first forts began in 1875 but it was some years before work began on a new structure that came to be known as Fort Vaux.

1881 – 85, construction of Fort Vaux

The site chosen for this new addition to the system was a promontory standing at 345 metres above sea level roughly eight kilometres northeast of Verdun at a point where the hills drop steeply to the plain below. This plain, which was poorly drained, dotted with small lakes and crossed by few all-weather roads, stretched eastwards for approximately forty kilometres, and with the Franco-German border only twenty-five kilometres from Verdun, the military importance of the site for observation and defence was immediately clear. As early as 1874 a plan had been drawn up for a light fortification to be built there that would act as an ‘alarm bell’ in case of hostile action but the site was too important to remain undeveloped and in 1881 work began on a small fort that would cover the approaches to Verdun from the north and east. Building continued for four years and resulted in a trapezium-shaped fort of modest size comprising ammunition depots, gun batteries, shelters for the gunners and a barracks. Built of limestone blocks and protected by a thick layer of earth, the barracks offered accommodation for the garrison of 298 officers and men, as well as kitchens, latrines, storerooms, a pharmacy and a bakery. Two underground cisterns provided the water supply. The guns – eight in the fort and two outside – were mounted in the open air. The whole structure, which measured roughly 150 metres from north to south and 200 metres from east to west, was surrounded by a deep dry ditch that was protected by small loopholed bastions known as caponiers.

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The ditch at Fort Belleville, built in 1875, with a caponier on the left.

Author’s collection

However, even while Fort Vaux was under construction, developments in artillery and explosives were rendering traditional stone-built forts obsolete. First, the air-burst shrapnel shell developed in 1880 made life extremely dangerous for unprotected guns and their crews; secondly, the time fuse, which appeared in 1883, allowed a shell to penetrate into the body of a fort before exploding. Other developments included the invention of melinite (a high explosive of much greater power than the black powder previously used) and also improvements in the design of guns and shells that led to increased range and velocity, larger calibres, improved rates of fire and greater accuracy. The increased destructive power of the shells when fired from the new guns and howitzers was devastating to earth-covered forts such as Fort Vaux and new ideas had to be found to protect