The Significance of Vimy

Vincent J. Curtis

6 Apr 2017

With the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge upon us, it was odd to read the discordant history of Vimy offered by historian Ian McKay.

The Battle of Vimy Ridge opened on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917.  It was the first time that all four Canadian divisions went into battle together.  Except for the Corps Commander, all command positions were held by Canadians.  It concluded on 14 April as an unmistakable tactical victory.  Vimy was the first offensive tactical victory on the Western Front after three dark years of war, and it was the only one of that spring.  Yes, there was Verdun and the Somme, hard and bloody slogs, but Vimy was gained with remarkably few casualties.  That Vimy was quick, decisive, and relatively low in cost was due to the innovative artillery tactics and preparation of the Canadian commanders.  This success was not lost on the Canadian public.

In his work, The World Crisis, written in 1922, Winston Churchill referred to the “brilliant preliminary operation by which the British Army at the Battle of Arras captured the whole of the Vimy Ridge.”  Churchill invoked Vimy Ridge for favorable effect in his speech to the Canadian parliament of 30 Dec 1941, at a turning point of another war.

Because the Canadian victory was so completely unexpected by higher command, no preparations had been made to exploit the opening created in the German line.  Had a couple of corps of cavalry been waiting in reserve, their pouring through the gap opened at Vimy would have caused a large part of the German defenses to collapse.  Alas, it was a wasted opportunity, but a portent of what was to come.

After Vimy, the Canadian Corps, along with the Australians, came to be seen as the spear-point of the British military effort.  During the Hundred Days campaign, which opened on 8 August 1918, the Canadian Corps led the fight that drove the German army out of its defenses in the Hindenburg Line and all the way back to Mons, Belgium, where the war began, and recaptured it on Nov 10^th.  The defeats of the German army led the Kaiser to abdicate, the old German government to fall, and the new one to sue for peace.

Although Canada entered World War I with the declaration of war by the British government, Canada took its own seat at the Versailles Conference afterwards and was a separate signatory of the Treaty.  Canada was now a fully independent country, the senior dominion of the Crown, with her own foreign policy.  The Westminster Conference of 1931 granted Canada her formal independence from Britain.

All this started at Vimy.

Perhaps it is a bit much to lay all these developments of nationhood and of the spectacular growth of Canadian self-confidence on one victory, but Vimy is where it began, and so that victory has come to symbolize all that came after it.

World War I represented a useless slaughter of an entire generation of the youth of Europe.  It was seen as a near cultural suicide, to say nothing of the repugnance at the mud and filth and rats and the lice and the unburied dead and the disease that followed and the generals who wouldn’t visit the front.  Of course, those that experienced it and the attitude of the time were averse to that war, the war to end all wars they promised themselves.  Nothing can glorify war to those who have seen it.

The remembrance of Vimy as the rise of Canadian consciousness and the rise of an independent nation is not a glorification of war, or of that war, or of that battle.  It is simply a recognition of facts.  The fact is that in the crucible of war Canadians succeeded where the British and the French failed.  Canadian amateurs innovated and succeeded where the highly schooled, highly credentialed and hidebound British and French commanders had failed.  They even failed to exploit our success.  At the end of the day, what did these highly regarded Europeans have over rustic Canadian colonials in the most demanding of tests that mankind puts himself through?  Not much where it mattered, it seemed.

This quite pragmatic decision was reached in Canada and imposed itself on the British government, if not on the British military command.

A celebration of the victory at Vimy Ridge is not a glorification of war.  It is a recognition that the blood and the death and the suffering and sacrifices made at Vimy and elsewhere by Canadians in that war led to the recognition of Canada as a modern state.

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