The unsung victor at Vimy
It was one of the Great War’s most vital battles and thought a Canadian triumph. Until now. Lord Ironside tells Joe Shute how his British father’s diaries reveal a different story
This afternoon, the Prince of Wales, Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry will walk across the former killing fields of northern France, to remember one of the shortest and most brutal battles of the Great War.
Following a 21-gun salute, the younger princes will lay ceramic poppies at the foot of the gleaming white limestone towers of the Vimy Memorial in honour of the thousands killed a century ago. Prince Charles will deliver an address before laying a commemorative wreath.
The Battle of Vimy Ridge was unlike the protracted stalemates that came to define the First World War. At 5.30am on April 9, all four divisions of the Canadian Corps, numbering some 15,000 infantry, stormed forward to capture the heavily fortified seven-kilometre ridge that held a commanding view over the Allied lines.
By April 12, 3,598 Canadians had been killed and a further 7,000 injured. In spite of those losses, the battle instantly went down as one of the most daring tactical successes of the war. According to the Canadian War Museum, it marked a defining moment when the country “emerged from under the shadow of Britain and felt capable of greatness”.
But what has never been revealed is the extent to which a British officer orchestrated proceedings. The key role played by the then 36-year-old Lieutenant Colonel William Edmund Ironside (who rose to the rank of Field Marshal before retiring in the Second World War) at Vimy Ridge has only emerged through the work of his son, Lord Ironside, who has written a book based on his father’s 75 volumes of previously unseen diaries. His memoirs reveal that he organised training and battle tactics for his superior officers, and transformed the Canadians from a “kind of gallant, unorthodox and undisciplined mass” into an elite fighting machine.
The 92-year-old’s book, Ironside, to be published by History Press this year, casts new light over one of the most important battles of the Great War, including how it was nearly called off, but for the quick thinking of his father.
And, Lord Ironside says, it has helped him to understand the man to whom he always had a distant relationship. “I didn’t see much of him growing up, because he was away so much and he never used to talk to me very greatly,” says Lord Ironside, a Second World War veteran and retired naval lieutenant who, during civilian life, ended up in charge of defence procurement for Rolls-Royce.
“Reading his diaries, I have been able to grasp a great deal more about what was in his head. This whole process has brought me a lot closer to him.”
Perhaps the distance Edmund Ironside kept from his son can be explained by the fact that he never knew his own father. Born in Scotland in 1880, his father, an officer in the Royal Horse Artillery Medical Service, died a year later from pneumonia.
After being sent to board at Tonbridge School, Ironside joined the Army as a field artilleryman. Photographs collected by Lord Ironside show an imposing figure: 6ft 4in and with broad shoulders, he was jokingly nicknamed “Tiny” by his comrades.
He was also a linguist and during the Boer War served as an intelligence officer alongside John Buchan, who later used Ironside as the inspiration for the character Richard Hannay in his 1915 book The 39 Steps.
When the First World War broke out, he was posted as a staff officer to the Western Front. In 1915, he was granted a short leave of absence to marry his young fiancée, Mariot, at Jesus College Chapel in Cambridge. The family still have a silver salver signed by numerous British generals, which was a wedding gift.
Lord Ironside has spent the past 15 years poring over his father’s diaries, which prior to his death in 1959 were kept in an imposing study, into which his son was never allowed. As well as detailed description of the minutiae of trench life, they also reveal a single-minded determination to advance his own career.
“All the time he was looking forward to ensure he had the job he wanted,” Lord Ironside says. “He didn’t want to have anything to do with back office support. Being in command was the one thing he was good at.”
When the call came to join the Canadian 4th Division in advance of the Vimy offensive, Ironside admits to being unimpressed by his superiors. He was posted along with his bulldog, Gibby, to support Dave Watson, a reservist who had been managing editor of a conservative Quebec newspaper. Ironside gives a fascinating insight into the extent to which he helped mould battle tactics. “He knew nothing about training, but accepted the papers I drew up for him,” he wrote. “He was able to understand what I was trying to do and I could make it appear as if it came from him.”
Ironside also describes concerns about the weapons the Canadian troops received. Each man was given a Ross .303 rifle, which proved so unreliable that he noted his troops heading out over No Man’s Land to gather up all the British Lee Enfield rifles they could. Their shooting, he writes, was eventually brought up to the “highest level of efficiency”.
The bombardment of Vimy Ridge began in March, with Canadian and British artillery pounding enemy lines. Ironside also praises the skill of the Canadian engineers mining under the ridge. “We never gave the Germans a moment’s rest,” he said.
Despite the initial gains made in April, the final offensive on one of two high points of the ridge named “The Pimple” was almost abandoned when victory was within grasp.
On April 12, “a hurricane of snow” was swirling in and Ironside learnt of an order to the brigadier in charge from the divisional commander ordering him to call off the attack if the foul weather persisted.
Ironside went to speak to the brigadier, but found he had “gone off to enjoy a little rum… and was now lying unconscious on the bed”. Knowing that the gale-force wind was blowing directly in the face of the Germans, he decided to push ahead. “I told them that all was well and the attack must go on,” he wrote.
There is little in his diaries that captures the horrors of the Western Front, although on occasion he describes encountering a sea of broken wagons, dead horses and dying men. He also mentions seeing two soldiers brewing tea around a fire. It was only when he stepped closer that he realised they had both been killed by a recent shell blast and were frozen in a horrifying tableau.
Perhaps as a result of those experiences, he never forgot Vimy Ridge. When the memorial was unveiled in 1936, Ironside drove to France in his Daimler to pay his respects to the men who fell there.
He is buried in a simple soldier’s grave marked by a single stone slab at the family’s former home in Higham, Norfolk. When Lord Ironside’s wife Audrey died last year, she was laid to rest in the same plot and he hopes to be buried there, too.
Lord Ironside shakes his head resolutely when I ask whether his father would have minded not receiving any of the credit for Vimy Ridge, despite the stellar career that followed. “It was always about duty, rather than glory,” he says. “And victory at all costs.”
‘The brigadier had gone off to enjoy a little rum and was lying unconscious’