Reddit reviews The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916

That is not actually true. The defenses in the Verdun sector were effectively left to rot due to it being a quiet sector since the German 1914 offensive was stopped. The Germans amassed a huge amount of artillery tubes initially and flanked French positions on three sides. Plus the French relied on a lot of massed charges to try and retake positions, while the politicians also insisted on holding the East Bank of the Meuse, which Petain, the French commander in charge of the defenses, wanted to abandon due to how exposed it was. Then many of the forts like Douaumount fell early in the German offensive, as it was barely defended, which gave the Germans its use as a shelter, not the French, for most of the campaign. In the end, especially as artillery was concentrated with the attacker, attacking in many cases was cheaper than defending, as even during the final French offensives their super heavy artillery was able to shatter the forts that the Germans held and led to their recapture by the French.

Here are two excellent books on the battle:

http://www.cambridge.org/ht/academic/subjects/history/twentieth-century-european-history/german-strategy-and-path-verdun-erich-von-falkenhayn-and-development-attrition-18701916?format=PB

http://www.amazon.com/Price-Glory-Verdun-1916/dp/0140170413

I'm re-reading Alistair Horne's Price of Glory and bloody loving it. Horne was a military historian who had a thing for the French and wrote in the way that only boozy, right-wing ex-public schoolboys at the twilight of Empire could. This particular book is about Verdun and it's just gripping - written in that real 'blood-and-stomach-pills' style that's now faded out of fashion. In fact, I really recommend all of his works - especially as they're all completely torn by his clear love for the French vs. his very real need to crow at them. Think Alan Clark but with actual, proficient scholarship and an absence of outright lies.

If you're looking for a history of the experience of British women and civilians A Testament of Youth is a good read.

Now if you're looking for military history Alistair Horne's The Price of Glory is an incredibly detailed account of the largest battle of the great war. I can't recommend this book enough, it's also part of a three book set that deals with France and Germany's relationship over the years you're looking at.

Finally if you'd like something a little more out there The Rites of Spring is a good book.

Hrm, perhaps it is a misconception I have. What you say it true. But I remember reading in Alistair Horne's The Price of Glory that German commanders on the western front, Verdun specifically, had to be especially cautious of and sensitive to needless casualities because the French were calling in fresh troops from the colonies to fight, while Germany had no such luxury.

I've been re-listening Blueprint and I believe at least these two books have been mentioned: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2815620-now-it-can-be-told and https://www.amazon.com/Price-Glory-Verdun-1916/dp/0140170413

Sorry for lazy linking, just googled and pasted the first thing that came up :)

She gave us a year, it was The Price of Glory, Strachan's First World War and The War Walk, and managed to get us rooms at [ Toc H] (http://www.greatwar.co.uk/ypres-salient/museum-talbot-house-history.htm), a living museum, so she was forgiven.

...If you ever have the chance to go to Toc H, do. It was one of the highlights of the trip.

This book on Verdun really gave me a new appreciation for the churning hellscape so many soldiers fought and died over.

Over the course of months of fighting, literally thousands of shells landed every square meter, the earth heaved and upturned time and time again, men and bodies with it.

Men who fell in no mans land couldn't be buried, men killed by shellfire were shredded, buried and uncovered again in various stages of decomposition. Bodies were literally pulverized.

There are personal anecdotes that portray the horror that numbers convey, I read recently about a Canadian officer walking over the battlefield at Passchendaele, where every step he found himself stepping on 'corruption' meaning shredded flesh and viscera.

At the Somme, some 60,000 Commonwealth soldiers died in the first day of the offensive over an incredibly small patch of land. Most of the attacks failed, and I can't imagine what an effort it would have taken to retrieve the dead. It probably, by and large, didn't happen.

Alistair Horne's Price of Glory about the Battle of Verdun is so well-written that it reads like a thriller novel IMO.