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The 1st Canadian Division An Operational Mosaic ANDREW IAROCCI In May 1935 the official Canadian Army historian, Colonel A.F. Duguid, delivered a paper on Canada’s operational record in the Great War to the Canadian Historical Association. Duguid explained to his audience that Vimy Ridge was important not because it was the “hardest fought” battle, nor the most “fruitful of immediate results,” but because it was “almost exclusively” a Canadian show, one in which the Canadian Corps “was consolidated into one homogenous entity; the most powerful self-contained striking force on any battlefront.” Duguid described a corps that functioned almost flawlessly at Vimy, with keen coordination among the different branches of service and a confidence that stretched from the Corps’ commander, Sir Julian Byng, down to the ordinary privates in the firing line.1 Over seventy years later, Duguid’s interpretation of Vimy Ridge continues to dominate Canadian historical imagination. Yet to celebrate Vimy Ridge as a unifying epic for the nation does not help us to realistically understand the experiences of those who fought on the battlefield. An examination of Major-General Sir Arthur Currie’s 1st Canadian Division suggests that no single narrative can adequately describe the complexity of the battle. The 1st Division’s fight, like the broader Canadian experience, was far from uniform. A recent study of 1st Division’s complete war record portrays Vimy as a thoroughly planned operation that “incorporated the lessons of 1916,” resulting in an assault on 9 April 1917 that “was virtually textbook perfect.”2 One cannot help but wonder if the troops who advanced over the shattered ground that Easter Monday would have something to add to such a tidy statement; several of Currie’s battalions encountered serious difficulties during their respective advances, suffering casualty rates of nearly fifty percent in some cases. 9 155 156 ANDREW IAROCCI Despite careful training and planning, individual platoons, companies, battalions, batteries and brigades met with widely differing fortunes, often beyond anyone’s control. While technological innovation and new tactics and organization played important roles, there was also a great deal in common with earlier battles. The infantry at Vimy variously used mortars, machine guns and rifle grenades to capture their objectives, but they relied on the rifle and bayonet just as often. Sophisticated staff work helped situate the people and material at the right place and time, but no effort could save men and horses from a stray shell, an untouched machine gun position, or even the mud and miserable weather that marked so much of the Western Front. This chapter, tempered with an awareness that much of what transpired at Vimy was dreadfully familiar to the veterans of 1915 and 1916, highlights some of the contrasts and variations that constituted 1st Division’s experience in early April of 1917. A review of the divisional war diaries for the first week of April makes it hard to believe that a major offensive was in the offing. As 9 April approached, the daylight hours were filled with routine activities: officers and other ranks were dispatched on or returned from courses; soldiers practised battle drill behind the lines while commanders inspected their troops. At night it was a different story. Under cover of darkness, small parties of troops ventured into no-man’s-land in search of fresh intelligence on the enemy’s activities and whereabouts.3 Sometimes these forays escalated into intense skirmishes. On the night of 4-5 April a patrol from the 2nd Infantry Battalion crossed no-man’sland and found a trench unoccupied. The interlopers waited for several hours before meeting a handful of Germans. In the ensuing melee an enemy officer was wounded. He did not survive the trip back to 2nd Battalion’s lines, but his epaulettes showed that he belonged to the 3rd Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, one of three regiments in the 2nd Bavarian Reserve Brigade of the 1st Bavarian Reserve Division.4 This division, together with the 14th Bavarian and 79th Reserve, constituted I Bavarian Corps (Group Vimy), which was responsible for defending the area along the Canadian frontage between Givenchy-en-Gohelle and the Scarpe River. Raids and patrols continued until the last hours before battle, when all of Currie’s divisional formations were finally deployed to their start positions. On the right flank of the divisional frontage was BrigadierGeneral Frederick Loomis’s 2nd Infantry Brigade, with the 5th, 7th and 10th battalions in the...

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