Vimy Ridge Essay

When war is pictured the words bloodshed, violence, and struggle are a few of the most common words to come to mind, but what about unity? The many battlefields of World War I were, without a doubt, places of mass destruction, but the experiences also created deeply rooted bonds and perhaps even friendships. The battle of Vimy Ridge could be considered one of the most noteworthy battles fought by Canadians because it's results spurred on a flood of new found respect from countries in the western alliance and for the first time during the war, Canada felt united as a nation. Canadian troops were triumphant where far more powerful nations had failed so the key question is, why were the Canadians successful at Vimy? How did an almost insignificant

After having looked at these sources, it is evident that the Canadians were successful at the battle of Vimy Ridge because of the quality of their planning, the effective use of counter battery fire before the assault, and the creeping barrage during the

Armies back then used flash spotting, sound ranging with triangulation, hot air balloons, planes, and gunners who understood the science behind direction finding to located targets. Hayes, Iarocci, and Bechthold convey the effectiveness of counter battery fire in the following quote, “Several weeks of pre-battle fire annihilated the enemy defences, cleared barbed wire, and forced defenders to their protective dugouts.”8 Destroying the barbed wire and enemy defences allowed the Canadian troops to reach the ridge faster with less casualties and a decent number of men compared to the previous attempts by France and the United States of America. The course of the counter battery fire was a twenty-day bombardment with variations in duration and intensity which gave the Canadians an element of surprise when they attacked because the Germans had learned to expect an infantry attack soon after artillery attacks. “Artillery units,...pummelled the German lines with a thundering barrage of more than 800,000 shells."9 The blitz destroyed eighty-three percent of German artillery and barbed wire rendering them helpless against the upcoming attack. As a result, destroying the barbed wire and enemy weaponry allowed the Canadians to take over the