The Great war was a war that would end all wars because it was so terrible, but in reality it was because they lacked imagination. It could be worse. But it was a war where people innovated greatly. It was a war where the old ideas died, and where new ideas found a place. The war started with troops charging across battlefields with cavalry support, except the soldiers were going against machine guns. The entire idea of how warfare was waged changed. The first tank, the first war plane the first time chemical weapons were used, all that from one war. The first time that Canada went to war as a nation. The first time that Canadian soldiers were commanded by their own leader, was one hundred years ago. It was for the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
The was a lot of things that people forget about that place. Like that there were many battles there, the French and the British and the Germans all fought there and they died in the hundreds and in the thousands. That is something that people forget about battles in the first world war, millions of soldiers died. Modern warfare only a few hundred soldiers day on our side, but back then because the power of the combatants was relatively equal the casualties were high on both sides. To be clear, the losing side in modern conflicts can suffer a lot of casualties too, but back then it was normal.
Back then if you wanted to take a position you had to take it away from the opposite and that meant marching troops there, while today it means obliterating it with missiles and bombs, tanks and rocket propelled grenades and then sending armored personnel carriers in and troops. It all changed starting with Vimy Ridge though. Before that the Canadian troops were getting a relationship for a stubbornness that outlasted the other armies. When the first chemical weapons were used, the German soldiers overran all opposing lines, because the mustard gas was so terrible that Allied soldiers abandoned their positions, but not so where the canadians were. They marched across No-Man's Land and found soldiers in the gas filled trenches that were ready to fight.
Whether because of their stubbornness or because they were better troops than the rest, the Canadian troops were given more respect from their enemies and were more feared. This may be nationalistic propaganda, but there was some truth that many of the soldiers were from farms across Canada and they were familiar with rife before they joined the army. The sniper with the greatest number of kills was Canadian, as was the best allied pilot.
One reason why Canadian leadership of our own troops may have been so effective could have been that they were not lords, separated from the common man by birth, but raised through the ranks, maybe. But one thing that was true for sure was the other battles for Vimy Ridge were lost, because the generals through their troops at the hill. The opposition held the top and they had built many tunnels and many fortified locations with machine guns that were meant to keep the hill in their hands. Charging that hill would have had the same result as every other attempt to charge the hill; death.
The Canadians were determined to succeed. They built their own network of tunnels at the base of the hill. They built small railways to hundreds of heavy gun positions and they sent thousands of tonnes of ordinance and then they pounded the hill for three days and nights. The sound was said to be deafening. The opposing troops were not permitted time to sleep and then when the shelling stopped, the Canadian troops had already started up the hill. When they got to the top the German troops were tired and their fortifications were smashed, there was little opposition and the Canadians suffered few casualties. Decades later and that is how battles are fought. The battlefield is saturated with artillery and bombs from jets, and missiles fire. Then when everything is done, troops go in and take control.
But that kind of strategy was not what won that war. When World War Two broke out, the British did not want thousands of crack troops to help fight the war. They did accept troops, but what they wanted was the thing that won the last war; they wanted Canada to turn into a war factory and churn out hundreds of war planes and billions of weapons. The last year of World War One, Canada had produced over 20 billion shells, four years before only a few million. They new that the key to winning World War Two was factories and not people.
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