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Battle of Vimy Ridge pitted Canadian planning against German fortress
John Ward, Canadian Press
Published: Saturday, April 07, 2007
(CP) - On a blustery Easter Monday morning 90 years ago, thousands of young Canadians poured out of trenches and underground bunkers and tunnels and swarmed up a gently sloping hillside in northern France, a place called Vimy Ridge.
The ridge was a German fortress, studded with concrete machine-gun nests, draped in kilometres of barbed wire and zeroed in by hundreds of guns and mortars. But by evening, most of the ridge was in Canadian hands. In the next couple of days, they seized the rest.
Today, a soaring white monument at the top of the slope marks one of Canada's greatest military triumphs, a victory which many say was the anvil on which the country's identity as a nation was forged.
The tall twin spires of the memorial are set in a plot of land granted to Canada by France in 1922, their shadows stretching along the shallow escarpment.
On Monday, the Queen and Prime Minister Stephen Harper will formally reopen the monument after several years of refurbishing.
In the spring of 1917, the First World War was 2 1/2 years old. The casualty lists on both sides ran into the millions. Europe was split by a line of trenches that meandered from the Swiss border to the North Sea.
In those trenches, hundreds of thousands of Canadians, Britons, Belgians, Frenchmen, Australians and Germans lived lives of cold, wet misery punctuated by moments of wrenching terror.
Horror was commonplace and slaughter mundane.
In battle after battle, thousands died for gains measured in metres. On the Somme, on July 1, 1916, the British army suffered the single worst day in its long and bellicose history, losing 60,000 men killed, wounded and missing. Most fell in the first hours of a massive frontal attack that saw men climb out of their trenches and march, shoulder-to-shoulder, into the sights of rattling machine-guns which cut them down like mown grass.
By the time the Somme battle petered out more than four months later, the total casualties on both sides amounted to an estimated 1.3 million, including 24,000 Canadians.
The problem was that trench lines were essentially impregnable to the technology and tactics of the time. There were no tanks to cross the trenches, no portable radios to co-ordinate attacks, no artillery suitable for cutting barbed wire and smashing strong points and no way to move guns, ammunition and supplies across the shell-torn battlefield except by horse and manpower.
Trenches were studded with machine-guns ready to sweep the open ground between the lines and chop attacking forces to pieces. Artillery behind them was pre-sighted to drop bombardments on the advancing enemy.
Barbed wire slowed attacks to a crawl, or channelled them into killing grounds under the machine-gun muzzles. Men were chopped up by bullets, shredded by exploding shells, suffocated by gas, incinerated by flame throwers, smothered in caved-in trenches.
More here:
http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/n ... =29633&p=1
And here:
http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/n ... 76ab68&p=1
John Ward, Canadian Press
Published: Saturday, April 07, 2007
(CP) - On a blustery Easter Monday morning 90 years ago, thousands of young Canadians poured out of trenches and underground bunkers and tunnels and swarmed up a gently sloping hillside in northern France, a place called Vimy Ridge.
The ridge was a German fortress, studded with concrete machine-gun nests, draped in kilometres of barbed wire and zeroed in by hundreds of guns and mortars. But by evening, most of the ridge was in Canadian hands. In the next couple of days, they seized the rest.
Today, a soaring white monument at the top of the slope marks one of Canada's greatest military triumphs, a victory which many say was the anvil on which the country's identity as a nation was forged.
The tall twin spires of the memorial are set in a plot of land granted to Canada by France in 1922, their shadows stretching along the shallow escarpment.
On Monday, the Queen and Prime Minister Stephen Harper will formally reopen the monument after several years of refurbishing.
In the spring of 1917, the First World War was 2 1/2 years old. The casualty lists on both sides ran into the millions. Europe was split by a line of trenches that meandered from the Swiss border to the North Sea.
In those trenches, hundreds of thousands of Canadians, Britons, Belgians, Frenchmen, Australians and Germans lived lives of cold, wet misery punctuated by moments of wrenching terror.
Horror was commonplace and slaughter mundane.
In battle after battle, thousands died for gains measured in metres. On the Somme, on July 1, 1916, the British army suffered the single worst day in its long and bellicose history, losing 60,000 men killed, wounded and missing. Most fell in the first hours of a massive frontal attack that saw men climb out of their trenches and march, shoulder-to-shoulder, into the sights of rattling machine-guns which cut them down like mown grass.
By the time the Somme battle petered out more than four months later, the total casualties on both sides amounted to an estimated 1.3 million, including 24,000 Canadians.
The problem was that trench lines were essentially impregnable to the technology and tactics of the time. There were no tanks to cross the trenches, no portable radios to co-ordinate attacks, no artillery suitable for cutting barbed wire and smashing strong points and no way to move guns, ammunition and supplies across the shell-torn battlefield except by horse and manpower.
Trenches were studded with machine-guns ready to sweep the open ground between the lines and chop attacking forces to pieces. Artillery behind them was pre-sighted to drop bombardments on the advancing enemy.
Barbed wire slowed attacks to a crawl, or channelled them into killing grounds under the machine-gun muzzles. Men were chopped up by bullets, shredded by exploding shells, suffocated by gas, incinerated by flame throwers, smothered in caved-in trenches.
More here:
http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/n ... =29633&p=1
And here:
http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/n ... 76ab68&p=1
