During February of the second year of WWI, the French fort of Verdun protruded into the German front and presented them with an excellent opportunity to attack it from three sides. The German commander Erich Falkenhayen, also new of the symbolic value of the fort to the French people and hoped that's the attack would draw in major portions of the French army from throughout the entire front. Falkenhayen appointed the commander of the German 5th Army, Crown Prince Wilhelm, to take the French salient. Wilhelm proposed to attack from two sides along the river Meuse. This was vetoed by Falkenhayen, who cautiously ordered the attack to come from only one side of the river.
The battle opened with 1,400 German artillery pieces bombarding the French positions for 21 hours. The Germans had a force of 1 million men facing a French force of 200,000. At a rate of 100,000 shells an hour being poured into the French positions, Wilhelm hoped to greatly reduce the number of defenders before the German infantry advanced. By February 24, the Germans had managed to take the first two lines of trenches ahead of the fort and as a result the commander of the French forces, Langle de Cary, was replaced by General Henri Philippe Petain. Petain vowed to hold the fort at all costs, knowing that it would come at a severe cost in French troops, but also knowing that he would also inflict similar casualties on the Germans. Of the 330 French regiments along the Western Front, 259 would eventually fight at Verdun. The fort would eventually fall to the Germans in June and present the French with the collapse of their entire front. As a result the French pressed the British to open a diversionary attack somewhere along the front to draw the Germans away from the Verdun area. This resulted in the Battle of the Somme, which was originally scheduled to go forward on the 1st of August but was rushed up to July 1st. With the Germans sensing the immediate fall of the French front, the introduced a new and deadly weapon--Phosgene Gas.
