Canada's Disproportionate Contribution to Victory

Canadians Over the Top at Amiens by Alfred Bastien

On one of my battlefield tours that was focused on the 1917 battles in Flanders, I took the group to a place called Frezenberg Ridge east of Ypres. I was describing an action involving one of the Scottish divisions when I spotted some Canadian flags and military personnel. Naturally, I stopped the bus to discover what was going on, and I found the Canadian Army major who was in charge. I learned that he and his men were there to support the re-dedication of a memorial to their unit, Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, for an action in 1915. We had a nice chat and parted. Two days later, we ran into the major and his troops again at Vimy Ridge. At that point, I said something like, "You Canadians get all over the place, don't you." He replied that was exactly the way the Canadians were in World War One and they always ended up in the middle of things.

During the last phase of the Great War, miscounted but universally remembered as the "100 Days," the cutting edge—the most effective assault units—of the British Army were its Australian and Canadian Corps. The substantial Australian contribution to victory will be dealt with elsewhere, here in this issue of Roads we are focusing on Canada. By July 1918, the holding of the line at the first gas attack at Ypres, Vimy Ridge, Hill 70, and the capture of Passchendaele Ridge were legendary—all battles that had been impossible to win until the Canadians moved to the front. The Canadian Corps, led post-Vimy by Lt. General Sir Arthur Currie, had proven to be unstoppable. In fact, the enemy had named the Canadians "stormtroopers."

Canadian Operations, 1915-1918

After the war, British prime minister Lloyd George wrote of the Canadians “Whenever the Germans found the Canadian Corps coming into the line, they prepared for the worst.” The Canadian Corps' performance during the 100 Days campaign lived up to their reputation. Alongside the Australian Corps, the Canadians spearheaded the Amiens assault of 8 August, forced the Canal du Nord, took Bourlon Wood, Cambrai, and Valenciennes, and—on the last day of the war—found itself in Mons, where the British Army had started its war over four years before.

From the beginning, the politicians and future generals of the CEF knew they had a major learning curve to follow and that their men needed demanding and repeated exercises before they were ready to deploy. In Europe, they prepared the men for missions like the capture of Vimy Ridge with specific and authentic training exercises before launching an assault.

August 1917: Canadians Occupying a Trench on Hill 70

In the area of leadership, the CEF could not have been luckier than to fall under the command of General Julian Byng, who fostered the best instincts of his Canadians and also spotted the most capable and innovative general of the Canadians, Arthur Currie, and saw to it that Currie succeeded him as leader of the Canadian Corps.

Regarding the undeniable "grit" of the Canadian soldiers, this is a quality that's observable but difficult to analyze. Maybe war correspondent Philip Gibbs had a sense of it when he wrote, “The Canadians fought the Germans with a long, enduring, terrible, skillful patience.”