A rchive Date
[ 04-05-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ France ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/margolis_may4.html
The French won't fight?
Hundreds of thousands of war dead expose the lie
By ERIC MARGOLIS - Contributing Foreign Editor
May 4, 2003
VERDUN, France - Something keeps drawing me back to this most evil and sinister battlefield on Earth, a mere 18 x 10 km, where during 10 hellish months of 1916, 1.4 million French and German soldiers were killed or gravely wounded.
Each year, it is my custom to greet spring in France's exquisite countryside, exploring battlefields and forts of the two world wars. But this, my sixth journey to Verdun, holds particular personal meaning.
Decades of travel, covering many wars, reading the history of man's folly, have made me a cosmopolitan who detests borders and earnestly believes mankind's worst evils are nationalism and religious fanaticism. Still, there are four countries I hold particularly dear and to which I feel respectful (as opposed to hormonal) patriotism, respect, and loyalty - Canada, France, Switzerland and the United States (in alphabetical, not emotional order).
Quixotic as it may sound, while at Verdun, as a U.S. Army veteran, I apologized to France's fallen soldiers for the slander and disgraceful lies hurled at their memory by American know-nothings and pro-Israel neo-con pundits who poured venom on the French for not agreeing to President George Bush's imperial oil war against Iraq.
Insults such as "defeat monkeys" ... "surrender specialists" ... "never won a war" ... "always saved by Americans"... "in war, like an accordion, useless and noisy" ... "cowards ..." were hurled at France by American commentators. The Internet overflowed with anti-French jokes and lists of French military defeats.
I invite all those flag-waving, fire-breathing American couch patriots who called the French cowards to visit Verdun. The air here still stinks of death and only deformed, stunted bushes grow on its poisoned soil. In the towering grey stone ossuary repose bone pieces of 135,000 men.
Titanic bombardment
In 1916, the Germans sought to win a decisive battle on the strategic heights above Verdun, where they planned to bleed France's army to death with their massed artillery. On the first day of battle alone, French positions were inundated by one million heavy shells. The titanic bombardment went on for 10 months; explosives against human flesh. Trenches and dugouts were pulverized. Entire French regiments were destroyed in hours.
The French commander, Gen. Nivelle, ordered his 2nd Army defending Verdun: "No surrender; no retreat, not even an inch: die where you stand." And so they did.
On June 4-5, the Germans poured 100,000 poison gas shells - chlorine, phosgene, and cyanide - onto only 4 km of French-held front, then launched divisional assaults against the position. French soldiers had no gas masks. Thousands died in hideous agony, or were blinded. Yet they somehow held.
Shells churned the battlefield into a gigantic quagmire of mud, rotting corpses, body parts, dead horses, overhung by a toxic miasma of chlorine and mustard gas. Troops went days without food; they drank from shell craters filled with bodies, and often drowned in them. German flamethrowers inflicted frightful casualties. Shells rained down round the clock. Every tiny elevation, every fort, became a little Thermopylae.
At the height of the German attack on Fort Vaux, over 2,000 heavy shells an hour, some 405-mm 1,000-kg monsters, were exploding on its roof and glacis. When we today talk about combat stress, think of the heroic garrison of Vaux, burned, gassed, poisoned by toxic smoke, dying of thirst, fearing they would be buried alive at any moment, yet fighting on. The French suffered 100,000 casualties trying to retake another fort, Douaumont.
Three-quarters of the French Army, and an entire generation of France's men, passed through the inferno of Verdun. Units stayed in line until they had suffered 60% casualties. Every town and village in France bears a war memorial with names of its sons fallen at Verdun. The heights above the Meuse River became France's Calvary; "They shall not pass" the army's and the nation's credo.
The attacking Germans fought, as always, like lions, losing 400,000 dead. They almost broke through, but were finally held at the last line of French defences, at fearsome sacrifice. French soldiers fought with their legendary fury and elan: over 430,000 died at Verdun; 800,000 were gassed or crippled for life.
Bones are still unearthed here today, 87 years later, and Paris metros only recently ended reserved seating for mutilies de guerre. After the war, there were not enough young Frenchmen to farm the fields or produce children.
In the end, the French held Verdun. In this battle alone, France lost almost 1.5 times total U.S. losses in all of World War II, and 20% of its nearly two million dead from 1914-1918.
To the northwest of here is Sedan. In May, 1940, the German XIX Panzer Corps negotiated the dense Ardennes Forest and fought across the Meuse, dividing, then shattering the French Army. Italy attacked in the south.
The French did not simply surrender, as some Americans say. Their army fought valiantly, but was overwhelmed and torn apart by Germany's high-tech military machine, just as Iraq's outdated forces were recently obliterated by high-tech U.S. forces.
The French government wanted to fight on from Brittany, but there were no army divisions left intact. France lost 210,000 dead in 1940 fighting Germany and Italy; America lost 292,000 men during the entire war.
Eric can be reached by e-mail at margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com. Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com or visit his home page.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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