You could learn a lot about Canada's national psyche from the country's enduring fascination with the battle of Vimy Ridge, fought 95 years ago this past week.
Canadians fought dozens of major battles during the First World War. Yes, Vimy was the most tactically spectacular: one of the best-planned, best-executed Allied operations of the whole war. Vimy fully deserves the honour it carries in the national memory.
But the exclusive attention to Vimy obscures other Canadian achievements even more deserving of honour.
Who remembers now the Battle of Amiens in August, 1918? Yet it was this battle that broke the spirit of the German army in the West. German troops broke and ran before a Canadian and Australian-led assault: the first German rout of the war. Between August and November, Canadians spearheaded a sequence of attacks that destroyed the German army's will to fight.
Those battles -- collectively known as the Hundred Days -- have been brilliantly summarized in a short book that, if it were up to me, would be assigned to every high school student in Canada: Shane Schreiber's Shock Army of the British Empire.
By Schreiber's tally, the 100,000 Canadians who fought in the Hundred Days met almost one quarter of the entire remaining German army on the West: 47 German divisions against four Canadians. The Canadian forces fought alongside an Australian/New Zealand contingent. The three Dominions together engaged some 40 per cent of the German army.
Over those three months, the Canadians suffered more than 45,000 casualties, killed and wounded -- or about as many as in the whole year from D-Day to VE Day in World War II.
Being a Canadian, of course, Schreiber underscores his point with a final statistical comparison to the U.S. forces in the Meuse-Argonne region on the southern portion of the Western front.
Troops engaged:
Americans: 650,000
Canadians: 105,000
Duration of Operations:
Americans: 47 days
Canadians: 100 days
Maximum Distance Advanced:
Americans: 34 miles
Canadians: 86 miles
German Divisions Defeated:
(Out of a total of 200)
Americans: 46
Canadians: 47
Average Number of Casualties Suffered per German Division Defeated:
Americans: 2,170
Canadians: 975
Total Casualties:
Americans: 100,000
Canadians: 45,830
"The ultimate conclusion that must be drawn," Schreiber sums up, "is that ... the Canadian Corps was able to make a highly significant contribution to the defeat of the German army on the battlefield at precisely half the cost in terms of life and limb as the American army."
Unlike Vimy, the Hundred Days was a strategic as well as tactical victory.
And while few would dissent from John Moore's verdict in yesterday's National Post that the First World War should never have been fought, it's also true that once fought, it was vital that the Western democracies win. A German victory would have locked an exploitative military dictatorship in control of the whole continent of Europe -- a point now agreed on by German historians fully as much as non-Germans. Canada's indispensable contribution to that victory ought to be a matter of national pride, to be celebrated gloriously in the now-impending centennial of the First World War.
But how? Not with more wreath-laying. The last veterans of the First World War are long gone, and will be longer gone in August 2014. What we owe them now is not only sympathy for their sacrifices, but remembrance of their military achievements: a national commitment to remembrance that should carry on through the whole period of the anniversary, and culminate -- not in April 2017 -- but on November 11, 2018, the centennial of the day that Canadian troops liberated the Belgian town of Mons, firing what is often described as the last shot of the First World War.
This anniversary offers an opportunity to rediscover Canada's heritage as a war-fighting and war-winning nation -- in wars that, because won, made possible the free, democratic and peaceful Europe of the 21st century.
This article is cross-posted at the National Post
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There are many thousands of damaged men and women walking or wheeling the streets of America at this moment because of wars contrived and promoted by Mr. Frum and the like.
Come you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks.
Where do YOU fit Mr. Frum
So shame on you Mr. Frum. You show no real respect for those that fought secure PEACE all those years ago.
As should we all be as a people.
Harper can't goad us by saying our military "punches above its weight". That is nothing to be proud of these days. Since the Second War it has all been about manufacturing "the enemy",power, dominance and oil. Shameful.
As a cheerleader for the Iraq Invasion (which Canada did not participate in), a leader in the American Republican party and as a Canadian who has chosen (as is his right) to reside in the US, I take his construed accounting of Canada and "war" with a huge grain of salt.
First of all, although we were tied to British foreign policy in 1914, that was NOT so in 1939. By that time we were independent of British wishes.
Secondly, yes, there was conscription in both wars. In World War One, conscription was brought into effect until 1917, and due to massive resistance in Quebec, only about 25,000 draftees made it to the front just as the war was ending. No conscripts served at Vimy.
In World War Two, the problem repeated itself. There was conscription, and an uproar.....to the point that only 2463 conscripts ever reached the front lines in Europe. Out of 44,000 Canadian dead in WWII, 79 were conscripts.
Both wars were overwhelmingly fought by volunteers.
Ask anyone that served beside Canadian combat soldiers in any war, and they will tell you Canadians are some of the very best killers on earth, when it becomes necessary.
Ask anyone that served alongside Canadian troops in Afghanistan.
And the Taliban are freedom fighters.
:)
You conservatives lie like junkies. You literally cannot stop lying -- lying about Liberals, lying about your own, very well-documented history -- because at the end of ever righteous criticism which you level at the Gorgons that are destroying this country comes the same, damning question:
Where were you when it counted?
http://driftglass.blogspot.ca/2012/03/even-police-began-to-sit-up-and-take.html