Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Reassessment

Foreword

xi Foreword The battle for Vimy Ridge in April 1917 marked the first occasion during the Great War when all four divisions of the Canadian Corps launched a simultaneous attack upon one front. This is only one of many assertions that have been made about the battle. It has also been said again and again that Vimy was a great strategic victory, the most important Canadian battle of the war and an experience which awakened a sense of Canadian nationalism. These and other claims are carefully examined in this volume. The opening essay in the collection suggests that Vimy Ridge is Aregarded in the United Kingdom as a solely Canadian affair@ largely because British school children and tourists regularly visit the Canadian Vimy memorial where they receive a Canadian perspective on the battle from Canadian student guides which British school teachers are Aill-equipped to put into wider context or point out the contribution that non-Canadians made to the battle.@ This book puts the Canadian effort into context. The activities of each of the four Canadian divisions taking part are carefully examined as is the work of the Canadian Engineers, Artillery and Medical Corps. Other chapters are devoted to the German forces who fought at Vimy, as well as the battles that followed the capture of the ridge. There is an essay on the Vimy Ridge poetry that proliferated between 1917 and 1936 which demonstrates Aa surprising degree of concordance in terms of theme@ by the poets. An essay on the significance of the Vimy memorial, and another on its fate under German occupation during the Second World War greatly enhance our understanding of Canada=s Vimy story. Without doubt the authors collectively present the most comprehensive examination of the Battle of Vimy Ridge which has so far been published. They call for more research to answer new questions that have been raised, and provide grounds for arguing that the Battle xii FOREWORD of Vimy Ridge is a Canadian epic, if not the greatest, most important or innovative Canadian action during the war. An epic, the Oxford English Dictionary reminds us, embodies Aa nation=s conception of its own past or of the events in its history which it finds most worthy of remembrance.@ But an epic also has undertones which are not universally understood. Historians frequently point out that what happened does not always match what people later say happened. Moreover, those who knew what happened, from personal experience, often never spoke of it. My grandfather=s missing right hand was endlessly fascinating when I was a small boy and even a young man. Equally fascinating was his refusal to tell me how he lost that hand at Vimy Ridge in April 1917. Those who knew what happened ninety years ago are all now long gone. But those of us still wishing to know something of what they experienced will be grateful to the authors of this volume. Surely, with the appearance of this book, it will be impossible in the twenty-first century for any reader (even a Canadian Minister of National Defence) to confuse the Battle of Vimy Ridge with the Vichy government in France during the Second World War. A.M.J. Hyatt August 2006 ...