AWARENESS OF OUR PAST
Vimy key to Canadians
The hype surrounding Canada’s 150th birthday has shone a spotlight on the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
Three-quarters of Canadians say they believe that the centennial anniversary of Vimy Ridge should be one of the most important celebrations during Canada’s 150th birthday, according to the poll released by Ipsos Reid for the Vimy Foundation.
The poll presents a stark contrast to one released by the foundation a year ago, which showed that more than half of Canadians didn’t know in which war Vimy was fought — in fact, nine per cent of people thought it was a Canadian mountain range.
The two polls asked different questions — how important the centennial should be and which war Vimy was part of — but Vimy Foundation director Jeremy Diamond says that all fingers point to an increased awareness in the battle’s importance, particularly as it gets closer to 2017.
“I think a lot of Canadians are starting to think about Canada 150 now,” Diamond says. “It’s only two years away, so people hear about it more. There’s more commercials now, more things online trying to mobilize people and communities. So people are connecting Vimy 100 to Canada’s 150th.”
The Battle of Vimy Ridge, which took place during First World War from April 9 to 12, 1917, saw 3,600 Canadians killed. An additional 10,600 were wounded. It was one of Canada’s first great military victories, and some historians call it our country’s “coming of age.” Canada shares its 150th birthday year with the centennial anniversary of the battle.
Mark Humphries, director at the Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, says that many Canadians recognize Vimy as an important symbol in our history, though they may not know exactly why that is. This could explain why more people believe its centennial should be celebrated than know which war it was a part of, he says.
Though Vimy was not a strategic victory in the war — it was a part of a larger series of battles — it was important for the soldiers who fought there.
Humphries says he has walked through tunnels at Vimy that hadn’t been opened since the war ended. He saw soldiers’ names and hometowns, carved into the walls. “In one place there was a little, tiny maple leaf,” he says.
Those soldiers, he says, felt they were part of something big. And that’s the message they brought back with them.
“It’s something that has been passed down, in some cases, through grandfathers and greatgrandfathers who fought. And in other cases, it’s something that’s been taught through the citizenship guide, for newcomers to Canada,” Diamond says.
The Vimy Foundation has a number of campaigns to educate people about Vimy. One of their biggest is the annual trip to Vimy for high school students. The foundation tries to make the education personal. Students are encouraged to visit their local war memorial, pick out a soldier’s name and learn about that soldier’s life. If the students are able to go on one of the trips to the battlefield, they’ll get to find the soldier’s grave.
“It’s important to speak to a generation that may not realize that something that happened a hundred years ago is relevant to their lives.” Diamond says.
Humphries says the effects of the Great War on Canada still resonate.
“It forced Canadians to ask some very difficult questions about what Canada was and what it was going to be,” he says. He says we’re still asking those same questions today.
The poll is considered accurate within plus-or-minus 3.5 per cent, 95 per cent of the time.
Vimy, Vimy, Vimy. It echoes through our cold, grey land in April like a mystical chant.
This year, like every other year, we solemnly observe the anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, which began on April 9, 1917.
Beyond the usual commemorations at home and abroad, there are fundraisers this spring organized by the Vimy Foundation, which wants to build an “education centre” near the battlefield in France.
The purpose of the centre is to tell the story of Vimy and Canada’s role in the First World War. That’s fine — if, in fact, it tells the whole story of Vimy, with the artless, anguished honesty those who fought there deserve. For the most part, it has not.
What Canadians hear from the foundation, the government and earnest propagandists is a hoary tale cloaked in hyperbole and embroidered in legend. Ninetyeight years after the battle, we suffer from an enduring misperception.
“For the first time, Canadian soldiers fought as one unit, under the command of Canadian officers and employing tactics developed by Canadians,” according to an article in the National Post in 2013.
“And we won, trouncing the Germans where our allies had failed and congratulating ourselves ever since.”
As J.L. Granatstein argues, that view “is almost completely wrong. Almost. All that it gets right is that Canadians have congratulated themselves ever since.”
Granatstein, the highly decorated military historian who chaired the advisory board of the Vimy Foundation until 2014, is not belittling the foundation or Canada’s role in the Allied offensive that spring. Nor am I.
But, as he points out in his provocative new book, The Greatest Victory: Canada’s One Hundred Days, 1918, we have come to believe a more comforting mythology. His persuasive point is that our decisive impact came in the last three months of the war, that those were our greatest battles.
At Vimy, Granatstein writes, the Canadian Corps was not commanded by a Canadian but by British Lieutenant General Sir Julian Byng. The planners were not Canadians, as widely thought, but Britons. Seven of nine of the Heavy Artillery Groups that put Canadians on Vimy Ridge were from the Royal Artillery. And the supplies, weapons and ammunition were largely from Britain, he says.
While thousands of the soldiers at Vimy were born in Canada, most were recent British immigrants to Canada. (Indeed, we had no citizenship then.)
Most important — and hardest for us to accept — is that Vimy changed little. Yes, we took the ridge with courage, daring and innovation, a magnificent victory. But the Germans retreated a few miles east into new trenches, suffering a “tactical” more than a strategic defeat.
“Vimy regrettably did not win the war or even substantially change its course,” concludes Granatstein.
Yet that is not what Canadians know about Vimy. More likely, they hear that it “began our evolution from dominion to independent nation.” Or, more breathlessly, it marked “the birth of a nation.”
It helped that the battle opened under gunmetal skies on Easter Sunday, fostering a poetic sense of resurrection. That some 10,300 were killed or wounded, that they fought through snow and sleet, that it was our greatest victory in the war up to then — all contributed to a national mythology.
But the birth of a nation? Lord, we had been here for 300 years, and organized as a country since 1867. To say that we fell from the heavens in 1917 denies centuries of achievement and sacrifice. That we began to emerge in the world afterward because we went to the Versailles Conference is an empty boast; in reality, we had little international influence until the Second World War.
All this may be useful to those who crave a comforting narrative. A century ago, as an adolescent people, we needed one.
Today we should remember Vimy. But we should also ask what we were doing there, and in the slaughterhouse of the Great War itself, and what the war did to us. That’s what a mature, selfconfident people does.
Vimy is a myth. It’s time to move beyond it.