ON THE MAP
The chart instrumental to Canada’s victory at Vimy Ridge
Exploring cartography
In the grey early morning light of April 9, 1917, 20,000 Canadian soldiers poured out of their trenches into No Man’s Land. Above them, shells from 1,030 artillery guns tore through the sleet, their explosions marking the soldiers’ target: Vimy Ridge. Having occupied the long escarpment (shown on this map, which was created during the First World War) since late 1914, the Germans had made it a fortress. In their deep bunkers they could wait out shelling, then hurry to their machine guns on the surface before attackers had crossed No Man’s Land. The result was a slaughter of Allied troops. By spring 1917, 150,000 soldiers had died trying to take Vimy. The task of capturing the ridge eventually fell to the four divisions of the Canadian Corps, under the command of British general Sir Julian Byng and his right-hand man, Canadian general Arthur Currie, leader of the Canadian Corps’s 1st Division. For the assault, “Byng’s boys,” as the Canadian Corps was called, used a technique known as a creeping barrage. Timing was crucial to this plan, and the “rungs” on this map, perpendicular to the direction of attack (indicated by the long brown arrows running across Vimy Ridge), provided incremental targeting information for the artillery. Every three minutes, the soldiers would move 90 metres across No Man’s Land while their artillery bombarded the ground ahead of them; the cascading shells served as both their weapon and their shield. If the soldiers moved too quickly, they risked being blasted by their own shells; too slowly, and the Germans would have the opportunity to marshal their defences and decimate the attackers, who would be caught in the open. The Canadians’ first objective was to capture the forward German defences marked by the heavy black line. The final objective was the red line, which encompasses the highest point on the ridge — the heavily fortified Hill 145. The blue line marks the town of Thelus and the woods outside Vimy, and the brown line marks the Zwölfer-graben trench and the German second line. The creeping infantry and artillery attack began only after an extended barrage of more than one million shells, dubbed “the week of suffering” by the Germans. It was “clockwork warfare” according to Canadian air ace Billy Bishop, who flew over the battlefield. By April 12, the Canadian Corps had succeeded where no other Allies had, thanks, in no small part, to this map.