At dawn on Easter Monday, 9 April, 1917, 27,000 soldiers of the Canadian Expeditionary Force attacked the entrenched German position on Vimy Ridge, just north of the town of Arras in the Pas de Calais.
Fighting together as a corps for the first time, at 5:30 in the morning, 15,000 Canadians begin their advance toward the German lines under a creeping barrage of artillery. The Germans took Vimy Ridge in their initial sweep into France in 1914 and spent the next three years fortifying the ridge with networks of trenches, tunnels and concrete machine gun posts, strung together with tens of thousands of metres of barbed wire. An attempt to take the ridge in 1915 ended in failure, costing French forces more than 150,000 casualties. A year later, the British were similarly repulsed. There is a sense that the British High Command believes the Canadian Expeditionary Force will fair no better. But General Arthur Currie, first Canadian to be promoted General in the course of the war, is determined not to repeat the mistakes of previous battles.
Currie is Chief of Staff to General Byng, the British commander of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, and planning the attack on Vimy falls to him. Foremost in Currie's mind is the bloodbath of the Somme. The battle, which raged throughout the summer and fall of the previous year, cost the Allies more than 600,000 men before ending in stalemate. The four Canadian divisions alone lost 25,000 men killed and wounded. But many units suffered even greater losses. On the first day of the Somme, 1 July, 1916, the Royal Newfoundland Regiment lost 710 of 800 men and all their officers killed. Currie is determined to do better for Canada at Vimy.
General Currie prepares tirelessly for the battle. The early months of the 1917 are spent planning the assault and preparing and training the men. Then, on 2 April, 1917, the Canadian and British artillery unleash the largest artillery barrage in history to date, shelling the German positions on the ridge for a week. The Allies fire more than a million shells and the noise from the shelling in loud enough to be heard in Southern England, 100 miles away. The Germans troops entrenched on the ridge refer to this bombardment as "The Week of Suffering."
Then, at 5:30 a.m. on 9 April, 1917, the Canadian attack begins. The first wave of 15,000 men goes over the top, advancing along a six kilometre front under the cover of a "creeping barrage" of artillery fire - a moving bombardment targeted just ahead of the Canadians, covering their advance across No Man's Land. The Germans respond with withering machine gun fire but Currie's men are prepared with countering fire that pins the Germans down in their trenches. Three of the four Canadian divisions achieve their objectives in two hours. The fourth division takes the highest point of the ridge, Hill 145, by the end of the day.
Over the next five days, the Canadians, reinforced by a second wave of 12,000 men, sweep the Germans from the ridge. By the time the battle is over, 14 April, 1917, the Canadians will have taken "more ground, more guns and more prisoners than any previous British offensive." Canadian casualties at Vimy Ridge total 10,602 with 3,598 killed.
Hearing of the victory, a French soldier declared that it was impossible. When he was told that it was the Canadians who took the hill, it is said he cried "
ah, les Canadiens, c'est possible!" At Ypres and the Somme, fighting with British units under British commanders, the Canadians had gained a reputation as tough fighters. Fighting together as a corps for the first time at Vimy Ridge, the Canadians proved themselves the finest troops on the western front. During the final 100 days of the war, the four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, eventually numbering 100,000 men, would go on to defeat or force into retreat 47 German divisions.
From a country of eight million souls, eventually 500,000 Canadians would serve overseas during World War I. As a British Dominion, Canada automatically was at war when Great Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August, 1914. But it was a nation to which her veterans returned in 1918, a nation forged in the crucible of battle on Flanders Felds and in French trenches where Canadian men fought and died together as a Canadian army for Canadian officers for the first time in our history. From their sacrifice was born the spirit of our sovereign Canada.
90 years later, we remember. Then, those who fought it called World War I "the war to end all wars." 21 years late, the nations of Europe were again at war and Canadians crossed the oceans to fight the blind ideologies of hatred and intolerance, to fight those that would victimize the innocent and persecute the helpless. And today, 62 years after the last World War, Canadian soldiers are fighting and dying in a foreign land once again.
On Easter Sunday,
six Canadian soldiers were
killed in Afghanistan. Tens of thousands of men who fell in the fields of France and Belgium never came home again and the bodies of thousands more were never found, sucked down into mud like tidal pools. And for some, found but laid to rest without a name to mark their passing. Today, we can count our losses in the dozens and each man and woman is brought home again, with an efficiency that grows more cruelly routine with each repetition. But the sacrifice and the loss remains the same, for one fallen soldier as for one thousand:
They shall not grow 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.
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