Vimy Ridge is being remembered this week as it’s exactly 100 years since the Ridge was taken from the Germans.
Early in the morning of April 9, 1917, 20,000 soldiers attacked in the first wave of fighting. The victory of the battle of Vimy Ridge did not come without cost: Canadian casualties reached 10,602, of which 3,598 were killed. The opposing German force sustained a further 20,000 casualties. The main combatants were the Canadian Corps, of four divisions, against three divisions of the German Sixth Army.
I visited Vimy Ridge in 1982. In April of 1982 I was with a group of Western Canadian grain farmers (United Grain Growers) on a three-week guided European tour of agricultural areas in England, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Switzerland. We also visited many of the major tourist attractions and travelled down the Rhine River and up in the high mountains of Switzerland.
We were on the last leg of our tour of Paris, having spent a morning at the fabulous Palace of Versailles, and we had a few hours to ourselves before heading to Calais.
Our tour guide suggested we make a little detour to see Vimy Ridge. We were all anxious to see this famous World War 1 battlefield. But finding it was not easy for our Dutch bus driver. There were no road signs pointing the way to the high plateau, or better known as a ridge, which juts up 60-metres high over the low-lying flat agricultural fields near the Belgian border.
Vimy Ridge is a strategic 14-kilometre long escarpment that overlooks the Douai plains of France. German occupying troops controlled the limestone ridge during WW1 using a network of trenches that snaked along the crest and down into the valley, connecting with another network of natural caves. One hundred and fifty thousand French and British soldiers had died trying to take it back. Allied commanders believed the ridge to be impregnable.
On April of 1917, four divisions of Canadian soldiers went up the Ridge –100,000 men fought one of the biggest battles of the First World War — defeated the Germans, taking Vimy Ridge.
At Vimy Ridge, our group (two buses) stood in silence at first and looked down at the peaceful quiet green landscape below us. It was hard to image that this very soil we were standing on was once a bloody battlefield of mud, trenches, barbed wire, tunnels, artillery fire, and blood and death.
We walked around the huge 70 metre-high Canadian War Memorial that is made of marble and concrete. The monument, which took 11 years to build, is in memory of the soldiers who died at Vimy Ridge. The twin stone pillars list the names of the 11,285 Canadian soldiers who died in France and whose remains were never found. We glanced over some of the names to see if we could see familiar ones.
To the right and behind the memorial is a huge cemetery of many rows of neat, straight tombstones where some of the Canadian soldiers are buried. We walked up and down the rows again reading the names.
Not far from the tombstones is an ugly reminder of the war still in the landscape. Hundreds of craters — shell-holes and mine craters — some huge, some small, where exploding shells had landed and blown the ground skyward, were made into neat landscaped areas.
I’ll never forget walking around those First World War craters on Vimy Ridge.
