February 21, 1916: The Battle of Verdun

The Douaumont Ossuary, at the Verdun Battlefield

February 21, 1916: The Battle of Verdun begins, in what had been the village of Douaumont, 5 miles northeast of Verdun, and 168 miles east of central Paris. It turns into the longest battle of World War I.

The German 5th Army, under the command of General Konstantin Schmidt von Knobelsdorf, attacked the French Second Army, under the command of Marshal Philippe Pétain. For 3 days, they made significant progress. But their advance slowed, and by March 6, French reinforcements had arrived. The battle became typical of the war: A stalemate between France and Germany.

Philippe Pétain

No British troops were in this battle. They would be involved at The Somme, a battle which began on July 1, and forced the transfer of some troops from France and Germany. Finally, on December 18, the French recovered Fort Douaumont and Fort Vaux, and the battle was over. France claimed that 143,000 of their troops had been killed; Germany, 163,000 -- for, essentially, nothing. Again, typical of this war.

Schmidt von Knobelsdorf retired from the German Army after the war, and died in 1936. Although he did not actually say, "Ils ne passeront pas!" ("They shall not pass!" -- that was his second-in-command, Robert Nivelle -- Pétain become known as "The Lion of Verdun," and was one of the great heroes of the war, and a symbol of French patriotism.

Thinking they could use this, the Nazis enticed him to be Chief of the French State under their control in World War II, then convicted of treason thereafter, his sentence commuted to life due to his age. He died in 1951, and Charles de Gaulle called his life "successively banal, then glorious, then deplorable, but never mediocre."

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February 21, 1916 was a Monday. Baseball and football were out of season. Professional basketball barely existed. There was not yet an NHL. There was an NHA, a National Hockey Association, but it had no games scheduled for that day. There was also a Pacific Coast Hockey Association, but they had no games that day, either. So there were no scores on this historic day.