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Douaumont
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Douaumont is a commune in the Meuse department in Lorraine in northeastern France.
The village was destroyed during World War I. Today the Douaumont ossuary, which contains the remains of thousands of soldiers killed in the Battle of Verdun, stands above the valley.
construction work for Fort de Douaumont started in 1885 and the fort was continually reinforced until 1913. The fort is situated on some of the highest ground in the area.
It has a total surface area of 30,000 square metres and is approximately 400 metres long, with two subterranean levels protected by a steel reinforced concrete roof 12 metres thick.
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Encyclopedia
Douaumont is a commune in the Meuse department in Lorraine in northeastern France.
The village was destroyed during World War I. Today the Douaumont ossuary, which contains the remains of thousands of soldiers killed in the Battle of Verdun, stands above the valley.
Douaumont Fort
The construction work for Fort de Douaumont started in 1885 and the fort was continually reinforced until 1913. The fort is situated on some of the highest ground in the area.
It has a total surface area of 30,000 square metres and is approximately 400 metres long, with two subterranean levels protected by a steel reinforced concrete roof 12 metres thick. The fort was equipped with numerous armed posts, a 155 mm gun turret, a 75 mm gun turret, several other 75 mm guns in flanking "Bourges Casemates" and numerous machinegun turrets.
The German invasion of Belgium in 1914 forced military planners to radically rethink the utility of fortification in war. Belgium's comparable forts were quickly destroyed by German artillery, and easily overrun. The decision was made in August 1915 to reduce the garrison at Douaumont and to strip the fort of virtually all its weaponry except for the 155 mm and one of the 75s.
Capture
In February 1916 the Germans, unaware of Douaumont's semi-abandoned state, launched the Verdun offensive with Douaumont as a key objective. Douaumont was manned by fewer than 30 troops, assigned to fire its two largest guns.
As elements of the German 24th Brandenburg Regiment (6 Infanterie-Division, III Armeekorps) approached on February 25, most of the garrison had gone to the lower levels of the fort to escape the incessant German shelling with large-calibre guns. A battery of very heavy 420 mm German howitzers were also pounding the fort, damaging the 75 mm gun turret.
The French occupants had been without communication with the outside world for some time. The observation cupolas were unoccupied. Only a gunnery team were at their post in the 155 mm gun turret.
About 10 combat engineers from the Brandenburg regiment, led by Pioneer-Sergeant Kunze, managed to approach the fort unopposed. Visibility was poor due to bad weather and French machine gunners in the village of Douaumont thought the Germans were French colonial troops returning from a patrol.
Kunze and his men reached the fort's moat and found that the pillboxes defending the moat were unoccupied. Kunze managed to climb inside one to open an access door. But his men refused to go inside the fortifications as they feared an ambush. The Pioneer-Sergeant, armed only with a pistol, entered alone. He wandered around the empty tunnels in Douaumont until he found the artillery team. Kunze captured them and locked them up.
By now another group from the Brandenburg regiment, led by reserve-officer Leutnant Radtke, was also entering the fort through its unoccupied defences. He then made contact with Kunze's troops. He organised them before they spread out capturing a few more french defenders and securing the fort.
Later more columns of german troops under Hauptman Haupt and Oberleutnant von Brandis arrived.
No shots were ever fired in the capture of Fort Douaumont. The only casualty was one of Kunze's men who had scraped his knee.
Despite being the last officer to enter the fort, the latecomer von Brandis was the one who dispatched the report on the capture of Douaumont to the German High Command.
A few days later, the Prussian officer was telling His Imperial Majesty the Crown Prince about its heroic seizure. No mention was made of the efforts Lt Ratke or NCO Kunze.
Instead Von Brandis became the hero of Douaumont and was awarded the Pour le Mérite, (Hauptman Haupt received it later, too). But Kunze, who broke in and locked up the garrison, and Ratke, who took command during the fort's capture, received nothing.
It was not until the 1930s after historians from the German Great War committée had time to review Fort Douaumont's capture that credit was belatedly given. Kunze, now a police officer, received a promotion and Leutenant Ratke got an autographed portrait of the, now deposed, Crown Prince.
Douaumont, designed to hold back the Germans and inflict terrible losses on its attackers, had been given up without a fight. In the words of one French divisional commander, its loss would cost the French 100,000 lives This constituted a terrible blow to French pride, and was a glaring example of the incompetence of the French General Staff under Joffre. Douaumont was an invulnerable shelter and operations base for German forces just behind the front line. The Germans came to refer to the place as "Old Uncle Douaumont".
Recapture
The French made many attempts to recapture the fort from May 1916, suffering heavy losses. The Germans stubbornly held on to the fort, as it provided shelter for troops and served as first aid station and logistics centre. Every French attack was met with blistering artillery fire and direct fire from the fort. In turn the French artillery constantly shelled the fort, turning the area into a pockmarked moonscape, traces of which are still visible today.
On the 8th May, a careless cooking fire detonated grenades and flamethrower fuel. This in turn detonated an ammunitions cache. A firestorm ripped through the fort killing hundreds of soldiers instantly, including the entire 12th Grenadiers regimental staff. Worse, some survivors attempting to escape the inferno were mistaken for attacking French infantry by their comrades outside the fort, and were mercilessly gunned down. The exact casualties are unknown, but over 600 bodies were buried in a casemate which was walled off and is now considered an official German military cemetery.
was recaptured on the 24 October 1916 by the Regiment of Colonial Infantry of Morocco after the Germans withdrew. They had been pounded for days by two super heavy 400 mm (16 inch) long range French railway guns emplaced at Baleycourt, to the southwest of Verdun. Up to that point, millions of lesser caliber shells had been fired at the fort since its capture by the Germans to little avail, and thousands of men had died in attempts to recapture it.
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