Remembering Vimy Ridge

Tim Cook describes the preparation and the actual battle of Vimy Ridge:

Vimy is often portrayed as an artillery battle, with the guns shredding the enemy defences as the infantry simply advanced to victory. The counter-battery fire was equally devastating: Of the 89 enemy guns, only 17 remained active at the end of April 9. The artillery shellfire was, without a doubt, essential in allowing the infantry to advance. Indeed, as William Antliff of the No. 9 Canadian Field Ambulance put it, "The boys can't praise our barrage too much and every inch of the ground is chewed up." One Canadian infantry staff officer even went so far as to write in his diary, "It is no wonder the Germans couldn't hold us, for our artillery work had been terrible, everything smashed to pieces. We had broken their hearts first and there was no fight left in them."

While this was true along parts of the front, and more than 4,000 prisoners were captured, the battle the Canadians faced at the sharp end was in most sectors nothing short of brutal, and there was a lot of fight left in the defenders. Though success could not have been achieved without the guns, the firepower did not translate to victory on its own. German troops survived the barrage in every sector of the front. It fell to the Canadian infantry to pin the enemy down with machine-gun fire, snipe him with rifles, tear him apart with grenades, and spear him with bayonets.

The Canadians' intense training and pre-battle preparation had paid dividends. Driver Cyril Brown, from Port Hope, Ont., felt that the prebattle training had so well prepared him for the front that he felt he knew every trench and crater he might encounter, as well as "a lot of rats by their first names".

Co-incidentally, I just finished reading the author's At the Sharp End, the first of two volumes on the Canadian Expeditionary Force (the Canadian Corps) on the Western Front in 1914-1918. Highly recommended . . . I'm looking forward to Shock Troops, the second volume.