THE MAKING OF A NATION
Author examines role and importance of Vimy Ridge in Canadian culture
Vimy: The Battle and the Legend Tim Cook Allen Lane
April 9 marks the 100th anniversary of the Canadian Corps’ costly and successful early morning attack on Vimy Ridge in northern France, a place so marked by death and destruction that by war’s end the French deemed it good for nothing but regrowth forest, with no trespassing.
Instead, in 1922, the 100-hectare ridge was passed to Canada “freely and for all time” and upon it was built the most impressive of all the First World War memorials.
How the Canadian National Vimy Memorial came to be and its continued role as a beacon of Canada — at least in the English part — is at the heart of Tim Cook’s new book, Vimy: The Battle and the Legend.
Cook begins by looking at the Canadian Corps’ formation and key battles before the four-day Vimy assault.
The battle details are unbelievably inhumane. The goal of the attack, while thoroughly thought out and rehearsed, was to concuss or tear apart as many Germans as possible, then push any survivors over the back of the ridge and down to the Douai Plain. Four Canadian divisions and one British division were involved in the battle that left 3,600 Canadians dead and 7,000 seriously hurt.
Cook then takes you down the weaving path that created the legend of Vimy Ridge, and explains what it means to Canada now.
Immediately after the war, there was little appetite for commemoration, with the former Canadian Corps commander, Gen. Sir Arthur Currie, criticized for the 66,000 Canadian lives lost (6,000 died of wounds postwar).
Currie became Corps commander after Vimy and led the Canadians to Hill 70 that summer, then Passchendaele in the fall of 1917 (where he accurately predicted 16,000 casualties), the Battle of Amiens in August 1918 and through several battles in the last 100 days of the war leading to the capture of Mons, Belgium, on Nov. 11. The strongest charge against Currie was that he ordered his men into Mons for political reasons when he knew an armistice was at hand. The British army had lost the town during its first action in August 1914, so its recapture had significance. At least one Canadian died in action on Nov. 11 — George Lawrence Price, a conscript — and several were hurt.
In the 1930s, there was renewed interest in Canada’s First World War efforts, culminating in 1936 when 6,000 pilgrims attended the opening of the Vimy memorial, where the soon-to-abdicate King Edward VIII gave a powerful speech. Cook explores the politics behind the choice of location and style of memorial — it doesn’t have any soldiers on it or reflect militarism, instead relying on the power of grief to present its message.
By 1967, Canada’s 100th birthday, many veterans had died and there was again interest in the war. A service was planned, but neither prime minister Lester Pearson nor French president Charles de Gaulle were there because of a spat. The Queen’s husband, Prince Philip, addressed the 72 veterans and 20,000 French citizens. Despite not attending, in Ottawa Pearson did refer to the battle as “the birth of the nation.”
For the next two decades, Cook says interest in the First World War “sank into historical oblivion,” until in 1986 Canadian literary legend Pierre Berton published Vimy, the most detailed account of the minutiae of the battle to date.
In 1992, for the 75th anniversary of the battle, both French president Francois Mitterrand and PM Brian Mulroney attended a memorial service, and four years later the Vimy Interpretation Centre was built.
In 2007, there was another pilgrimage to the memorial for the battle’s 90th anniversary, where prime minister Stephen Harper and thousands of Canadian teens attended as Queen Elizabeth II rededicated the site.
Ultimately, the importance of Vimy Ridge to the Canadian psyche is a mix of fact, timing and the physical impact of the memorial itself.
The facts are the attack was the first where all of Canada’s four divisions fought side by side, it highlighted new tactics, it was a success in a failed larger offensive and the ridge was held until war’s end.
As far as timing, the battle occurred on Easter Monday, in the 50th year of Canada’s formation, when more than half the 100,000 men in the area on April 9 were Canadians not born in the country.
And the memorial itself is a stunning work, set in a shellpocked field that overlooks Lens and the old German-occupied areas.
Through this book, Cook — who has now written nine Canadian military tomes — cements himself as the nation’s premier military historian.