GERMANS SAW VIMY AS CLEAR CANADIAN VICTORY

Re: Scott Taylor’s Myths surrounding Vimy Ridge, April 9.

The French had lost over 160,000 men in 1915 trying to get their high ground back. They knew the Germans were mining France’s huge coal fields in the valley on the northern side of the ridge.

The British had lost 96,000 men in 1916 trying to take that ridge. It controlled the whole region and all the Douai valley, where 60 per cent of France’s coal reserves were located.

Germany was mining those reserves in the captured territory. Once the ridge was in Allied hands, Germany’s looting of France’s resources stopped.

It was the first battle that forced serious financial consequences for the Germans, cutting them off from metallurgical-grade coal. (With the loss of the French coal, Germany’s steel production fell by over 50 per cent in 1918.)

Vimy Ridge was the first battle in the European theatre that had a serious financial bite that the Germans never recovered from.

Further, in March 1918, when the Germans’ grand offensive swept back almost all the Allied gains, the ridge, though surrounded, didn’t fall and cost the Germans almost 40,000 of their elite stormtroopers in the four attempts to seize it from the undermanned Canadian and Australian units in rest and recreation camps holding its uplands, By June 1918, the Germans were forced to pull back once they saw that the ridge threatened their supply lines for the advance on Paris.

The German historians summed it up best: before Vimy, it was the German army that chose the ground it fought from; after the Canadians, the Germans had to fight on the ground of their enemies’ choosing.

To the Germans, it was not a British victory, it was a clear Canadian victory. America and France noticed that achievement, and it was apparent at Versailles. After such an achievement, of course, a politician could grandstand on its shoulders. Even Adolf Hitler did that.

Larry A. Riteman, Bedford