Vimy realities

Jack Granatstein assesses the importance of the battle in the development of both the Canadian Corps and Canadian national identity. Note its effect on the troops born in the UK--more than half the Canadian strength.

Vimy Ridge was the Corps's first great victory, a perfect set-piece battle that seized the ridge that looked out over a large swath of German-occupied northern France. The four divisions of the Corps, fighting together for the first time, drove the Germans down the ridge and back to their new lines to the east.

The victory was hailed in Allied capitals, and in Canada the population saw it as an indication that a great new nation had been born in battle. It may even have been true, though French Canada, unhappy with the war and fearful of conscription, tended not to share in the celebratory mood.

To the soldiers at the front, the victory was hugely important. Letters home make this very clear -- everyone understood that they had participated in a major event. The planning had been well-nigh perfect, each infantryman and sapper seeing the maps and hearing the briefings, and the rolling artillery barrage had led the advancing infantry in measured bounds.

The enemy guns had been pounded into submission by a counter-battery campaign, and the German trenches had been flattened by a long pounding from massed artillery. It was a grand achievement, a triumph of Canadian arms, the stuff of myth.

And myths there were and are. The first is that Vimy was an all-Canadian show. It wasn't -- the attack was part, a small part, of a bigger, less successful British battle of Arras. Then, the Canadian Corps itself was not an independent and all-Canadian formation. British heavy artillery played a major part in the Vimy operation, the Canadian Corps's leader was Lt.-Gen. Sir Julian Byng, a British officer and Canada's governor general from 1921-1926, and almost all the senior general staff officers who planned the battle were British regulars.

Canada had almost no staff-trained officers in August 1914 when war began, and it took time to bring civilians and militiamen to the requisite standard.

Even more striking, a substantial majority of the soldiers of the Canadian Corps on that April 9, 1917 had been born in Britain, and those proportions would not finally be altered until the very end of the war when the Military Service Act put conscripts into uniform.

The British-born had personal ties to home, to Britain and its cause, and those others whose families had been in Canada for generations required persuasion to enlist. Francophones were hardest to persuade, but then neither did the English-speaking automatically have the impulse to serve. Nor, though many were recent immigrants, did Germans, Jews and Ukrainians. Many had fled Europe to escape autocracy, conscription and war and had no desire to return.

Nonetheless, the Vimy victory had a huge nationalizing impact at the front. The British-born soldiers, just as the Canadian-born, shared in the sense of accomplishment. They had captured the ridge that had defeated the French and British armies; they had done it, Canada had done it, the Canadian Corps had triumphed. There was no great breakthrough, however, no cavalry squadrons surging through the hole torn in the enemy lines, and the more than 10,000 killed and wounded made it a costly victory.

Certainly, Vimy did not mean that the war was won, and the struggle went on for 19 months more. But the Canadian Corps had become something special in its own soldiers' minds and in the minds of senior Allied commanders. It was now a corps d'elite of shock troops, and when the enemy saw the Canadians coming into the line, it prepared for the worst. Soon under command of Sir Arthur Currie, this nation's greatest soldier, the Corps won its battles at Hill 70 and Passchendaele.

In August 1918 and in the great campaigns of "The Hundred Days" that brought the First World War to its end, Currie's men established an imperishable record, even if it is one that most Canadians have forgotten. The victory at Vimy must be remembered because it began the Canadian Corps's months of unending triumphs...

More on Vimy here and here.