THE UNLIKELY HERO OF VIMY
Growing up in Southwestern Ontario, farm boy Arthur Currie was no Boy Scout.
Yet, the Strathroy-schooled soldier’s personal motto during the Great War that followed could easily have been Scouting ’s signature phrase — be prepared.
As Canada marks the centennial of its First World War victory at Vimy Ridge, a stunning feat many saw as an identity-forging triumph for a young nation, it may be fitting that Currie, a man some consider the country’s greatest military mind, but who’s often overshadowed in history, is remembered for the most prosaic quality — that he knew how to make careful battlefield plans.
Currie was an unlikely hero at Vimy. He commanded one of four Canadian divisions that, fighting together for the first time, dislodged the heavily dug-in Germans from a seven-kilometre-long ridge in France. It was a victory in the trench-warfare bloodbath of the Western Front that had eluded other Allied armies, but which came at a terrible cost. More than 10,000 Canadian soldiers were injured or killed.
Currie, who began the war with no professional military experience, but who had a knack for innovation, would impress enough at Vimy that he would go on to become the first Canadian commander of all the Canadian forces in the war — the others had been British — and even be knighted, adding the honorific “Sir” to his name.
None of it was in the life script of the man born in what was then Canada’s farming frontier in 1875, just eight years after Confederation.
In an age of empire, when great commanders went to elite military academies, he had only a high school diploma and worked his way up the ranks, starting in the militia. Currie was not a great orator, either. Poor, he left Southwestern Ontario as a young man to seek his fortune in British Columbia, where he worked as a teacher.
And, while Currie thought highly of his men, he wasn’t known to be close with the soldiers serving in his command. They called him “Guts and Gaiters.” He was not, to borrow a modern turn of phrase, made of hero material. Before he made his mark in the war, he embezzled more than $10,000 in regimental funds to pay off his own debts.
None of that stopped him from rising through the ranks, however, leaving his days as an obscure, even disreputable, militia officer behind him, to become the first Canadian commander of the Canadian Corps — groomed for the job by Sir Julian Byng, his British predecessor — by the end of the First World War.
From lieutenant-general, he was promoted to general after returning to Canada after the war.
“If we were a more military country, he would be a national hero,” said Jonathan Vance, a historian and First World War specialist at Western University, two of whose ancestors fought at Vimy.
“It may have been that he was not a very interesting person,” Vance said of Currie.
Not a name that rolls off the tongue in Canadian school history classes, Currie’s name was seldom heard even on his Southwestern Ontario turf — home to prime ministers, premiers and notorious villains from the past — before the lead-up to Vimy’s centennial. There’s a statue of him outside the local museum in Strathroy, but it took until 1970 for Ontario to get around to commemorating the fact he’d gone to the high school there.
Three years ago, he wasn’t even mentioned in the First World War display — no Canadian or Australian generals were — when the Imperial War Museum in London took the wraps off a major renovation.
But the truth is, Currie had at least one big quality going for him — his imagination. He knew how to build scenarios in his mind that didn’t exist in the real world, and to anticipate how they could go sideways, once executed. Under the
always-prepared Currie, Canadians finished the war — and burnished their fighting reputation — with key victories at places like Hill 70 and Passchendaele, among others.
One of the famous quotes attributed to Currie says it all, in leaden prose: “Thorough preparation must lead to success. Neglect nothing.”
“He was very interested in preparation. He was a planner and very tactical,” said Lindsay Kernohan, the curator of Museum StrathroyCaradoc.
“He accepted and embraced the idea that you can plan for lots of eventualities,” said Vance.
“He’s one of those people with an agile mind,” echoed Tim Cook, an historian at the Canadian War Museum and author of The Madman and the Butcher, which details Currie’s decades-long struggle to maintain his hard-won reputation.
Cook warns against attributing Canada’ success at Vimy 100 years ago, on April 9, to Currie alone. The plan of attack was not his — and he was not yet the leader of the Canadian Corps. “Currie was seen as the best divisional commander. He was pegged already for having a good mind,” Cook said.
“He commanded the 1st Division, on the right (southern) flank of the Corps. As a division commander, he was responsible for the operations of his own division, as were the other three division commanders in the Corps. Currie was an able divisional commander, to be sure, but he did not play any kind of disproportionate role, as many Canadians have come to assume,” said Andrew Iarocci, one of Vance’s colleagues at Western history department.
After he is promoted to head the Canadian Corps., a string of victories at places with names like Passchendaele followed. “He got the job done incredibly successfully, ” Vance said.
“The last 100 days of the war is where Canada had a lot of its victories,” added Kernohan.
“He sort of represents the maturing idea of the Canadian Corps,” said Cook, and even the idea of Canada as a nation independent of its old colonial parent, Great Britain.
And while Currie was a successful citizen-soldier, at a time when professional British officers would have had the benefit of attending elite military academies, Kernohan notes Currie took a yearlong course in officer training once he left the Strathroy area for B.C., where he’d hoped a family connection would help him to realize his first dream of becoming a teacher. That course taught such things as military administration and topography, along with the drills and gunnery exercises he took part in during his militia years.
This may partly explain how Currie became, in Kernohan’s words, “Good at thinking on his feet and really thinking through things.” He was one of only 125 men who completed the course.
Cook says Currie was unafraid to ask for ideas from juniors. His stubborn streak also helped, Vance believes.
He gained a name as an innovator with such tactics as the creeping barrage, a mobile line of shelling across the battlefield that puts truth to another famous Currie quote: “The price of victory should be paid in shells, not lives.”
After the war, accused by the man who had been Canada’s wartime defence minister of having sacrificed soldiers’ lives in fruitless battles as the war’s end neared, Currie — the effort draining his health — fought and won a highprofile libel case, dying five years later at 57.
All of that said, is there a danger of mythologizing Currie unfairly?
“The brand of Vimy mythology that is widespread today in English-speaking Canada seems to have developed mostly over the past decade or two,” observed Iarocci.
“Canadians today appear especially focused on ‘Canadianizing’ every aspect of Vimy-Arras, probably to underscore the battle’s importance in shaping Canadian identity. So Currie’s role becomes distorted because he was a Canadian-born senior officer. The irony here is that men like Currie would likely have found these distortions of truth/fact quite distasteful if they were here to witness them.”
Would Currie have been embarrassed to know, all these years later, he is still considered — in Cook’s words — “the finest fighting general ever” — in Canadian history?
For his service, Currie’s hefty figure was immortalized in bronze, then placed in front of Kernohan’s museum in 2014. It is a tribute, she says, to “Strathroy’s greatest hometown hero.”
The mental image of Currie arching an eyebrow at the sight of the statue also seems somehow appropriate.
I am a good enough Canadian to believe ... that Canadians are best served by Canadians. SIR ARTHUR CURRIE, on his men
It was a wonderful success ... every line was captured on time, every battalion doing equally well. Truly magnificent; grandest day the Corps. has ever had. CURRIE, on the Battle of Vimy Ridge