Vimy Ridge Revisited - HistoryTales

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Imagine standing on a low ridge in northern France, able to see tens of kilometres across open country in every direction — and knowing that whoever controls that view controls the battlefield beneath it. That was Vimy Ridge: an escarpment barely 7 km long and 145 metres high, yet valuable enough that French forces had already lost roughly 150,000 men trying to take it before a single Canadian soldier arrived. When the Canadian Corps finally seized it in April 1917, the victory owed less to raw courage than to planning, rehearsal, and an extraordinary amount of digging done out of sight.

A Ridge Soaked in Failure

Vimy Ridge fell into German hands in October 1914, during the desperate maneuvering known as the Race to the Sea. The French Tenth Army spent the next year trying to win it back. In May 1915, during the Second Battle of Artois, the French 1st Moroccan Division actually reached the top of the ridge — briefly. Without reinforcements, they couldn’t hold it. A second attempt that September, the Third Battle of Artois, managed only to capture the village of Souchez at the ridge’s base. After that, the sector went quiet, with both sides settling into an uneasy live-and-let-live routine.

That quiet was deceptive. When British forces relieved the exhausted French in February 1916, they discovered the Germans had used the lull to dig an extensive network of tunnels and deep mines beneath French positions, designed to detonate explosive charges from underground. The Royal Engineers rushed specialist tunnelling companies to the ridge to counter the threat. By May, German artillery and trench mortar fire had intensified, and on 21 May the Germans launched Unternehmen Schleswig Holstein — a deliberate push to eject the British from their positions along the ridge, opened by shelling from eighty hidden batteries on the ridge’s reverse slope. British counter-attacks on 22 May failed to reverse the German gains. The Canadian Corps took over this contested, tunnel-riddled ground in October 1916.

Learning From Verdun

Command of the Canadian Corps passed to Lieutenant-General Sir Julian Byng in May 1916. Planning for a spring offensive near Arras began that November, and by March 1917 the Canadians had their objective: Vimy Ridge. This would be the first time all four Canadian divisions fought side by side, and the task was large enough that the Corps needed help — the British 5th Division plus extra artillery, engineer, and labour units were attached, swelling the force to roughly 170,000 men, of whom about 97,000 were Canadian.

The planning drew directly on recent French experience. In January 1917, three Canadian Corps officers attended French Army lectures on the Battle of Verdun, where General Robert Nivelle’s counter-offensive had seen eight French divisions, heavily rehearsed and backed by powerful artillery, claw back lost ground and batter five German divisions. The Canadian officers returned and distilled what they’d heard into lectures at every level of command, hammering home the primacy of artillery and the need for flexibility down to the level of individual companies and platoons. Arthur Currie, commanding the 1st Canadian Division, wrote a report specifically identifying what the Corps should borrow from the French approach. General Henry Horne, commanding the First Army, approved the resulting plan on 5 March 1917.

That plan broke the advance into four colour-coded objective lines — Black, Red, Blue, and Brown — spread across a 7,000-yard front centred on the village of Vimy. The Black Line was the German front position; the Red Line, the furthest objective for the northern divisions, took in the ridge’s highest point, a fortified knoll called the Pimple, along with la Folie Farm and a stretch of German intermediate defences. The two southern divisions had further to go, pushing on to the Blue Line around Thélus and finally the Brown Line, which included a stretch of German trench nicknamed Zwölfer-Graben, or Twelve Trench.

Guns, Tunnels, and Timing

The attack’s engine was artillery, deployed on a scale the Corps had never commanded before. The British supplied twenty-four brigade groups of guns — 480 18-pounder field guns, 138 howitzers, mortars of various calibres, and 245 siege guns — reinforcing the Corps’s own eight field artillery brigades and two heavy groups. Ten more heavy artillery groups from neighbouring corps joined in, some positioned specifically to enfilade German gun positions behind the ridge. The resulting density, one heavy gun per 20 yards of front and one field gun per 10 yards, represented roughly three times the heavy-gun concentration used at the Somme the previous year.

Brigadier-General Edward Morrison turned this firepower into a detailed script: a 35-page fire support plan governing the barrage phase by phase. Infantry would advance tight behind a creeping barrage, moving forward in 100-yard increments as the guns crept ahead of them, while heavier howitzers hit standing targets further out. Units were trained to leapfrog one another as the advance progressed, so fresh troops kept pushing forward while the barrage paused just long enough for reserves to catch up. Done correctly, the choreography would deny German defenders the chance to climb out of their deep dugouts before Canadian infantry was on top of them. If the schedule held, the plan predicted the Corps could advance 4,000 yards and hold most of the ridge by one o’clock on the first afternoon.

The German side, meanwhile, was caught between doctrines. Erich Ludendorff had issued new guidance in December 1916 calling for deeper, more flexible defensive zones rather than rigid trench lines — a lesson drawn from the Somme. But at Vimy, two years of fixed fortification work, including the tangled trench-and-tunnel complex south of Neuville St Vaast known as “The Labyrinth,” couldn’t easily be converted. The terrain made it impractical. The ridge itself was only 700 metres wide at its narrowest, dropping steeply on the eastern side — a feature that would make German counterattacks nearly impossible once the crest was lost. German defenders knew their position was fragile and leaned heavily on machine-gun firepower to compensate, while keeping reserve divisions some 15 miles back rather than close behind the front line, as defence-in-depth theory actually called for. Seven German infantry regiments, nominally strong but worn down — a full-strength rifle company of 264 men had shrunk to about 150 at Vimy — would face Canadian battalions attacking in pairs, each a thousand strong.

Four Days on the Ridge

When the assault opened on 9 April 1917, as part of the wider Battle of Arras and the opening move of the Nivelle Offensive, the plan’s preparation showed. Behind the creeping barrage, the Canadian Corps took most of the ridge on the first day. Thélus fell on the second day, along with the crest itself, after Canadian troops overran a stubborn German salient. The last objective, the fortified knoll outside Givenchy-en-Gohelle, didn’t fall until 12 April. With the ridge lost, the German 6th Army pulled back to a new defensive line, the Oppy–Méricourt line.

What we still don’t know

Wikipedia’s account credits the victory to a combination of factors — technical and tactical innovation, meticulous planning, heavy artillery, extensive training, and the German army’s failure to properly implement its own new defensive doctrine on ground that didn’t suit it. But it doesn’t offer a single, uncontested weighting of these causes; it presents them as a list historians point to collectively, not a resolved debate about which mattered most. The precise tactical picture of the fighting for the salient near the crest on the second day, described only as encountering “considerable German resistance,” is also left comparatively thin. What’s clear is the outcome and its symbolic weight: the first time all four Canadian divisions fought as one force, and a battle that became, as the record states plainly, a symbol of Canadian national achievement and sacrifice.

Sources

– This article is a synthesis of the Wikipedia article on Battle of Vimy Ridge (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vimy_Ridge), which itself cites the underlying scholarship. Readers wanting primary sources should follow that article’s reference list.