Vimy a breakthrough battle for Canada

Vimy a breakthrough battle for Canada
Used new fighting techniques that worked, and helped Allies defeat Germany

Lorne Gunter, The Edmonton Journal
Published: Sunday, April 08, 2007

The weather was with the Canadian corps at Vimy Ridge in northern France on Easter Monday, April 9, 1917.

At least it wasn't against them. Much.

The winter of 1916-17 had been an especially bitter one in the trenches.

Frostbite claimed hundreds of thousands of fingers, toes, earlobes, cheeks and nose-tips. Troops claimed hot stew often froze in tin mess cups before it could be eaten.

The great historian of the Canadian military, Jack Granatstein, said that while troops typically detested kitchen duty, there was no shortage of volunteers that winter. Peeling potatoes and washing dishes was at least warm work.

Still, it was probably a good thing the miserable winter hung on into early April.

The Canadians had been commanded to take a long crest of hills that marked the northern end of the allied front in France. Fog and cloud concealed their movements from the German observers opposite in the predawn hours of April 9. And cold temperatures keep the ground frozen.

Otherwise, their progress towards the German lines would have been very much slower and they would have arrived cold, damp and sodden with mud.

Even the howling wind whipped up from the northwest worked to Canada's advantage. To be sure, it chilled our soldiers to the bone, but it drove snow and ice pellets into the Germans' faces.

The Germans were fighting from higher ground and were well dug in. They had spent months fortifying Vimy, too. Their positions were an elaborate network of trenches, supply tunnels, concrete machine-gun pillboxes and barbed wire. Phone and signal lines were shielded against being severed by an artillery barrage and there was even a light-rail train system to bring food and ammunition quickly to the front lines.

What's more, by Easter 1917, the German army's new commander, Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg had better concentrated his troops to counter their numeric inferiority.

But since the war began in 1914, Canadian units had changed. At the war's outbreak, the first volunteers had been disproportionately British immigrants signing up to return for the defence of the mother country, whereas by the conflict's later years most of the Canadians enlisting were native-born.

And these Canucks (as well as their commanders) were self-made men, less likely to defer to the superior social standing of their British commanders when such class deference was so obviously facilitating strategic incompetence. In other words, by the time of the Vimy campaign, a new breed of Canadian-born soldier was unprepared to die a futile death just because some baron or earl or duke thought another headlong rush against German trenches was a good idea.

The four Canadian divisions in France were attacking together as a single unit for the first time, too, rather than as units attached to British armies. They were still to be commanded by a Brit, Gen. Julian Byng, but he was a practical career soldier who believed in supplying, training and practising his men as well as possible before sending them into battle.

Moreover, Byng recognized the senior Canadian officer, Maj.-Gen. Arthur Currie, as a clever tactician. Byng set Currie the task of finding new ways to attack a dug-in enemy. He recognized the futility of sending wave after wave of young men running into heavy machine-gun fire and hoped Currie might discover a smarter way.

Currie, a former teacher and businessman from Victoria, who had risen from a private in the militia, argued for letting Canadian infantrymen attack in platoons -- smaller units that could move quicker and were more difficult to target. He wanted them to overrun German positions, too, then break the enemy's resistance by hitting his fortifications from the flank or even from behind, where they were more vulnerable.

Even though Currie also successfully suggested setting objectives that were easy for soldiers to spot even in the confusion of battle -- hilltops, spires, groves -- rather than giving them map reference points, Granatstein also says Currie insisted that aerial photographs and maps be given to front-line troops, rather than being reserved only for commanders at the rear. As a result, for the first time in the war, at Vimy the attacking Canadians knew the precise location of nearly every German artillery gun and machine-gun emplacement.

That knowledge helped them avoid slaughter.

Byng, for his part, then insisted the attack be delayed until all his Canadian charges had practised their tasks in the assault several times behind the line and were well-fed and rested.

Canadians won Vimy Ridge at a frightful price -- more than 3,000 dead and 7,000 wounded -- but they gained most of it in a matter of hours, and at a casualty rate less than half of most failed assaults of the Great War.

In the process, they showed the rest of the Allies fighting techniques that worked and eventually helped defeat Germany.

They also forged a country. Canada defeated Germany's army at Vimy Ridge, not merely Canadians fighting as part of British units.

July 1, 1867, might have been our official birthday, but April 9, 1917, was our coming of age.

That's why, 90 years later, such a fuss is being made of the Vimy anniversary.

Brave men who fought hard and well.

Failure to follow on success at Vimy was due to a lack of reliable portable wireless technology.

But I digress....

Too bad nobody in the West has the stomach to repeat this performace at the gates of Tehran.

At dawn on Easter Monday, April 9, the 27,000-man Canadian Corps attacked. The first wave of about 15,000 Canadian troops attacked positions defended by roughly 5,000 Germans, followed by the second wave of 12,000 Canadians to meet 3,000 German reserves. Nearly 100,000 men in total were to take and hold the ridge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vimy_Ridge

Vimy marked Canada's independence certificate - a decade before it was formally acknowledged in the Statute Of Westminster. Canada's independence had been bought and paid for with the sacrifice of her sons.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

I think the Maple Leaf honors Canada's distinctiveness as well as the red and white colors - Canada's national colors proclaimed In Council by King George V in 1921. But its also important to recall Canada's ties to the Mother Country in the form of the Canadian Red Ensign. Flying both flags at Vimy is appropriate to the solemnity of the occasion.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wN-NIHbfJ1k

For The Fallen

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children, England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill;
Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young, Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England’s foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;
As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,

Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness, To the end, to the end, they remain.

Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)

Personally, I would have preferred the originally proposed so-called "Pearson Pennant"

with either the 3 leaves - for the founding Anglo, Franco & Aboriginal peoples - or the eventual current single (national unity) leaf.
The blue end bars (the Atlantic & Pacific Oceans) offended both anti-Americans (red, white & blue) as well as those wanting a clean break from the Union Jack's like colors.
Diefenbaker - often a fool on many issues - essentially opened the door for the present flag by stubbornly insisting on the Red Ensign when then public sentiment overwhelmingly favored a new, distinctive design.

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