So it begins

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We start today on our story of the greatest naval battle of the war, it was an action that took place on the North sea on May the 30th and into the next morning. It involved 150 British ships and 100 German vessels. It would be both the biggest and the last purely surface encounter of primary fleets in naval history. Its result would be somewhat ambiguous with discussions even to this day on who was in fact the winner. The battle would be called Jutland by the British and Skaggerak by the Germans.

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Verdun, is over.

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After a long hard fought offensive the Germans were finally stopped by the end of July and now it was time for the French to start pushing them back, it is these actions that we will discuss today.

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This episode represents our third to last episode on the events of the battle of Verdun. In the months of June and July the Germans would launch another set of attacks, this time aiming for Fort Souville. This goal could have represented the final goal of the campaign, but we will never know. The effort of these attacks, coupled with the Brusilov Offensive in June and the British attack on the Somme in July, meant that this would also be the end of the German attacks at Verdun. Finally, we will discuss a bit about a change in the German high command where Falkenhayn is forced to resign in favor of Hindenburg and Ludendorff. 

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This week we move forward to May and the attacks launched by both sides during the month. In the ned May would be catastrophically deadly for all involved. After covering the events of May we will then cover one of the most harrowing events of the entire campaign, the fall of Fort Vaux which occurred in June. It is an important event for sure, but it is more than that because of the events that occurred and the resistance of the French soldiers inside the fort well beyond the normal limits of resistance. There was an endless mountain of suffering at Verdun, but even in that mountain Vaux still stands out as an extreme case. 

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Last week the Germans failed in their attacks on the West Bank at Verdun in March 1916. April would mark the beginning of what I am calling The Long Grind by which I mean a series of attacks and counter attacks against the same targets for the next several months. 

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This week we will ask the question that the German leaders were also beginning to look around and ask themselves "what next." After the offensive finally came to a halt on the east bank on the 28th of February Falkenhayn, the Crown Prince, and Knobelsdorf would meet to determine the answer to that question, an answer that would eventually become an attack on the West Bank.

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Into this situation there would be one man who was given command over Verdun and would forever be associated with the rest of the battle, than man was General Henri Phillipe Petain. Soon he would become the savior of Verdun, then the Savior of France, and then the man who led France to Victory. Through that process Petain would, more than any other single person on either side, become associated with Verdun. Today we will look at how Petain became involved with the fighting before talking about some of the decisions that he quickly made to stabilize the situation at the front.

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Today we will look at the third and fourth days of fighting before looking at one incident that happened on the fifth day.

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