Who won the Battle of Vimy Ridge?
The Canadian Corps won. Attacking together for the first time on 9 April 1917, its four divisions took most of the ridge on the first day, Hill 145 on 10 April and the last height, the Pimple, on 12 April. The victory cost 10,602 Canadian casualties, 3,598 of them killed, and the German Sixth Army pulled back to new lines east of the ridge.2
On Easter Monday 1917 four Canadian divisions climbed out of their trenches and tunnels in sleet and snow and attacked Vimy Ridge, a chalk escarpment in northern France that the German army had held since 1914. In four days they took it all, and Vimy became Canada's most celebrated feat of arms and, later, a national legend.
A ridge that had defeated everyone
Vimy Ridge runs for seven to nine kilometers north of Arras and looks east over the Douai plain and the coal city of Lens. German troops dug in on its heights early in the war, and French attacks to take it back failed at a cost of more than 100,000 casualties. The ground beneath it was fought over too: from 1915 French, British and German miners dug tunnels and blew mines under each other's lines, leaving the craters still visible today.3 › Second Battle of Artois, 1915
In spring 1917 the French commander Robert Nivelle planned a great offensive on the Aisne. The British were to strike first near Arras to draw German reserves north, and the Canadian Corps, on the northern flank, was given the ridge. The Corps had moved into the sector in late autumn 1916, after the Battle of the Somme.4 › Battle of Arras, 1917
The armies and their commanders
The Canadian Corps, about 100,000 strong with its British and Canadian support units, or some 170,000 counting every attached British formation, was led by a British officer, Lieutenant-General Sir Julian Byng. Its four divisions were commanded by Arthur Currie (1st), Henry Burstall (2nd), Louis Lipsett (3rd) and David Watson (4th), and a British division was placed under the Corps; its 13th Brigade attacked alongside the 2nd Canadian Division. It was the first time all four Canadian divisions went into battle together.5
Opposite them stood part of the German Sixth Army under Ludwig von Falkenhausen. The ridge itself belonged to Group Vimy, commanded by General Karl von Fasbender and some 40,000 strong by the reckoning of the historian Holger Herwig; the front facing the Canadians was held by the 16th Bavarian, 79th Reserve and 1st Bavarian Reserve divisions. They had three lines of trenches, belts of wire, concrete machine gun posts and deep dugouts, linked by communication trenches and tunnels.6
Tunnels, rehearsals and a week of shells
All winter, battalions rehearsed the attack on taped courses behind the lines, studied models and used maps drawn from aerial photographs. Infantrymen were trained as specialists, from machine gunners to grenade throwers. Underground, British tunnelling companies dug subways to bring the assault troops forward unseen: Veterans Affairs Canada counts 13 subways within more than 10 kilometers of tunnels, while the Canadian Encyclopedia describes 11 subways totalling nearly 6 kilometers.7
The guns were the key. About 1,000 field and heavy pieces supported the Corps, and in the final week they fired more than a million shells, a period the Germans called the week of suffering. Andrew McNaughton, a McGill scientist turned gunner, led the counter-battery work, using sound ranging and flash spotting to locate German guns; the Royal Canadian Artillery Museum credits that effort with knocking out 83 percent of the German guns on the ridge before the assault.8
Easter Monday, 9 April
At 5:30 a.m. on 9 April the guns opened again and the first wave, 15,000 to 20,000 men, advanced through wind driven snow and sleet. They followed a creeping barrage, a curtain of shellfire that moved ahead at a fixed pace, so that they reached German trenches before the defenders could climb out of their dugouts.9
On the right and in the center the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Canadian divisions took their objectives on schedule, and most of the ridge was in Canadian hands by the afternoon. It was not bloodless. Machine gun crews who survived the shelling fought hard, and men such as Lance-Sergeant Ellis Sifton and Private William Milne silenced guns single handed and were killed the same day. Four Canadians won the Victoria Cross at Vimy: Milne, Sifton, Captain Thain MacDowell and Private John Pattison.10
The turning point: Hill 145 and the Pimple
On the left the 4th Division faced the hardest ground: Hill 145, the highest point of the ridge, and a knoll to the north nicknamed the Pimple. The bombardment had not smashed the defenses there, and battalions that lost the barrage were cut down within minutes. Hill 145 held out through 9 April and fell only on 10 April, after renewed attacks by reserve battalions. On 12 April, in driving snow, the 4th Division stormed the Pimple, and the whole ridge was taken. By then the German command had decided, on 11 April, to pull its remaining troops back to a line some kilometers east.11
Why did the Germans lose Vimy Ridge?
The Germans lost Vimy Ridge because their troops were packed into forward positions on an exposed slope, under probably the heaviest bombardment of the war so far, with too little artillery ammunition, while the Sixth Army kept its reserve divisions too far back to counterattack in time. Underestimating the timing of the assault turned a defensible ridge into a trap.12
The German side
The German military historian Christian Stachelbeck argues that the new doctrine of elastic defense in depth, developed after the Somme, was applied at Vimy only half heartedly. Many generals still saw any withdrawal as defeat, so about two thirds of the front-line troops were crowded onto the forward slope or into the first 2,500 meters, and the deep dugouts became traps when the barrage lifted.13
The consequences were swift. Fritz von Lossberg, the high command's defense expert, became the Sixth Army's chief of staff on 11 April, and Falkenhausen was moved out to become governor-general of occupied Belgium. Yet the wider British offensive at Arras stalled without a breakthrough and Nivelle's offensive collapsed. The German official history called the day a severe setback, while many post-war German unit histories claimed a draw or even a victory, as the historian Andrew Godefroy has shown.14
Casualties
The Canadian Corps lost 10,602 men, 3,598 of them killed and about 7,000 wounded. German losses for Vimy alone are uncertain. The Canadian Encyclopedia estimates about 20,000 German casualties and around 4,000 prisoners, the Canadian War Museum counts more than 4,000 Germans captured, and John Rickard estimates about 2,400 Germans killed.15
Aftermath
The ridge gave the Allies a view over the Douai plain, yet no breakthrough followed and the war went on for another 19 months. Byng was promoted to command the British Third Army, and Arthur Currie became the first Canadian to command the Corps, which he led that autumn to the capture of the village of Passchendaele on 6 November 1917.16
The birth of a nation?
After the war Brigadier-General Alexander Ross said: “in those few minutes I witnessed the birth of a nation”. Men from every region had fought in one corps, and Vimy came to stand for Canada's whole war effort. Historians have pushed back. Jonathan Vance links the myth to the Easter date and to the Corps as a metaphor of the country. Jamie Swift, co-author of The Vimy Trap, argues that the legend was largely built in recent decades, and Geoffrey Hayes stresses that Vimy was one part of a British offensive. Byng and many staff officers were British, as were many of the gunners, engineers and supply troops behind the victory. Hill 70 and the 1918 victories at Amiens and Cambrai were equally impressive or more decisive, yet far less remembered.17
The battlefield today
In 1922 France granted Canada the ridge and the land around it in perpetuity. On Hill 145 Walter Allward's memorial took eleven years to build and was unveiled by King Edward VIII on 26 July 1936 before a crowd of about 100,000. Its walls carry the names of 11,285 Canadians killed in France who have no known grave. Around it, preserved trenches, mine craters and part of the Grange Subway can still be visited, the opposing observation trenches just 25 meters apart at their closest.18
Germany remembers its dead a few kilometers away at Neuville-Saint-Vaast, the largest German First World War cemetery in France, where 44,888 soldiers lie, among them men who fell at Vimy at Easter 1917. For more of the war's great clashes, see the greatest battles of the First World War.19
The Canadian Corps that took the ridge went on to lead some of the hardest attacks of the Hundred Days Offensive in 1918.
