VIMY RIDGE
How a terrible battle, fought 100 years ago, helped forge our nation
Unique and far-sighted military strategies helped Okanagan soldiers capture the centre part of Vimy Ridge 100 years ago today. They attacked at 5:30 a.m. on Easter Monday and, backed by a fearsome artillery barrage from giant guns, overran three lines of German trenches in just 80 minutes.
“Looking back, everywhere were great flashes of red and white flames from the leaping guns, while looking forward the fires of hell seemed to be raining on the doomed German lines,” Col. G. Chalmers Johnston, commanding officer of the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles, wrote in his personal diary.
“Our shrapnel barrage showed as a line of red hot fragments in the still dark morning, moving forward at the rate of one hundred yards every three minutes,” Johnston wrote. “Best of all, one could see by the light of the bursting shrapnel our men moving steadily forward.”
Most of those men were in their early 20s, though some were husbands and fathers well into their 40s. They were a thorough cross-section of Okanagan society — students, labourers, millwrights, ranchers, miners and farmers.
Before the war started in 1914, Ian McKenzie Cameron from Kelowna had been studying engineering. Frank Fernie McGowen of Vernon had been a banker. Leonard Victor Adams of Penticton had been an orchardist.
All three were killed during the Battle of Vimy Ridge. So were another 23 men from the Okanagan, according to research done by the Okanagan Military Museum’s historian, Keith Boehmer.
“The scale of loss was really staggering, considering how small the Okanagan’s population was back then,” Boehmer said.
When the war started in 1914, Penticton was the Valley’s biggest city, with about 3,800 people. The entire Okanagan was home to about 20,000 people.
The 26 Okanagan men killed at the Battle of Vimy Ridge would be roughly equivalent to 450 men from the Valley dying in a single battle today. There was no other battle, in either the First or Second World War, that exacted such a heavy toll on the Okanagan.
With its trench warfare, mustard gas attacks and hand-to-hand combat, the First World War was an unimaginably brutal conflict. Throughout the war’s four-year duration, 133 men from Kelowna were killed — 12 per cent of the city’s entire male population.
A century ago, it took weeks for the names of the fallen to reach home.
The Kelowna Courier reported on April 26, 1917, that “the dreaded news of casualties among Kelowna boys at the front continues to come slowly but steadily.”
These are the circumstances of death of some of the Okanagan men who died at Vimy, according to official war records:
• William Edward Lee Broad of Summerland, a 24-year-old lawyer: “Killed in Action during the attack on Vimy Ridge, this officer had just left the assembly trench when an enemy shell burst nearby, killing him instantly.”
• Ian McKenzie Cameron, a 21-year-old from Kelowna: “Killed in Action during the attack on the morning of 9th April, 1917, when, in front of the enemy support line, he was hit in the back of the head and instantly killed.”
• James Herbert Eastwood of Kelowna, who worked as a millwright before the war, survived being shot in the head near Hardelot, France, in September 1916. He returned to active duty on March 29, 1917, and was killed at Vimy Ridge 11 days later.
• Roy Albert Geer, a farmer from Mabel Lake, enlisted in February 1916, but was medically discharged a month later. He re-enlisted in the fall of that year, and was killed at Vimy Ridge.
• Frederick Amblec Heather, a 27-yearold builder from Kelowna: “Killed in Action. He was instantly killed by a high explosive shell immediately after leaving the trenches preparatory to the attack on Vimy Ridge.”
In addition to the men who were killed, hundreds of men among the 687 serving with the 2nd Canadian Mounted Rifles were wounded during the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
But the toll, terrible as it was, might have been even higher had the regiment, under Johnston’s innovative command, not adopted some unusual tactics preceding and during the battle itself.
“It wasn’t just luck that the Canadians, and the 2 CMR in particular, succeeded where the English and the French had failed in taking Vimy Ridge,” says Howard Hisdal, head of history at Okanagan College.
Johnston had all his troops rotate through the front trench at two-day intervals so they could get a good look at the land that lay ahead of them.
The soldiers rehearsed the attack using live ammunition away from the front and under different scenarios, in which all their commanding officers were killed.
Such preparations were considered so unusual that French and English officers came out to observe, Johnston recorded in his diary.
The details of the pending attack were shared down to the lowest level.
“This was very unusual for the First World War, and a security risk,” Hisdal says.
Once the attack started, all members of the 2nd CMR moved into the no-man’s land separating Canadian and German trenches.
“As a result, the German counter-barrage fell on mostly empty Canadian trenches,” Hisdal says.
By 6:50 a.m., the 2nd CMR troops had taken the third and last German trench in the middle of Vimy Ridge.
One of its members, John MacGregor, who had snowshoed to get to a recruitment centre, would go on to win 11 medals in the war. He won the most prestigious medal, the Victoria Cross, for a trench raid in which he single-handedly knocked out a German gun emplacement, killing four men and taking eight prisoners.
MacGregor was not just 2 CMR’s most highly decorated soldier, he was also the most highly decorated soldier in the entire Canadian Army.
He survived the war, returning to civilian life in B.C. as a fisherman and carpenter, but for a time was lodged in the now-closed Riverview mental institution and died in 1951.
From an Okanagan perspective, the Battle of Vimy Ridge can be seen as both triumph and tragedy.
The Valley’s soldiers acquitted themselves with honour, but the cost was high and those who survived the war were likely eager to put the experience behind them — to the extent they were able to do so.
On April 12, 1917, the day the Battle of Vimy Ridge ended, soldier Thomas Wilson of Penticton wrote to his wife: “It was the most appalling pandemonium that the mind of man can imagine.”