April 8, 2013
How Vimy Ridge made Canada into a country of heroes
By Joe O'Connor
Vimy Ridge is our opera, a beginning for Canada the Proud. A founding national identity myth slathered in blood and guts and First World War glory
I almost felt sorry for my Canadian history teachers in high school. The Americans had a Revolution, slavery, a Civil War, the Civil Rights movement and some epic labour strikes to prattle on about.
They had all this sexy stuff while Europe, with its kings and queens and Great Crusades, and its gilded palaces and Napoleonic grandeur, and its wars to end all war, was just so big and so old that Canada - peaceful Canada - with the Charlottetown Conference, the beaver trade and a handful of Mounties roaming about the great Northwest maintaining law and order, seemed like a historical hick town in comparison, a back water where nothing BIG ever happened.
Canadian history, in a word, was boring.
But, then, there it was: Vimy Ridge. Leaping off the pages of our sleep-inducing Grade 10 history textbooks. A famous battle - a formative Canadian moment - a founding national identity myth slathered in blood and guts and First World War glory.
"Vimy, at the time, wasn't quite the flag waving, chest-beating source of national pride as it is today," says University of Calgary historian Pat Brennan.
"All that would come later. It was the birth of a nation - but something less than that - where a lot of those men may have gone up the hill sounding British and come down the other side sounding a little more Canadian, as the story goes, but they still spoke like they were from Lancashire, England and they still loved the British Empire."
Some of their Canadian descendants (judging from the hoopla over the Royal Wedding and now impending parenthood of William amd Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge) still do love the British Empire.
But for the rest of us former colonials, Vimy is our special day, or it should be - at least in English-speaking Canada. (French-Canadians weren't too keen about fighting to save France or the British, so they rioted en masse during the Conscription Crisis of 1917. But that's another history lesson.)
Today's lesson on the 96th anniversary of the battle, which began at 5:30 a.m. on April 9, 1917 and lasted for three days, begins with the story of a German stronghold - Hill 145 - in some obscure corner of France. High ground was deadly back in the 'fix bayonets and charge'-era of warfare. Nobody could push the Germans off that hill, until a group of Canadians came along and did just that.
And Vimy was a first: an entirely Canadian gig. All four Canadian divisions fought under Canadian command. Almost 4,000 Canadians were killed. The soldiers, as soldiers are, were essentially kids. Young men, such as James Thomas Kobus who, thanks to the history-obsessives at Ancestry.ca - the Web-based genealogy research site - I can now report was born in Renfrew, Ont., the fifth of 10 children, and just 20-years-old when he and two other Canadians chased a German soldier into a tunnel at Vimy.
Waiting inside were 76 additional Germans. Captain Thain MacDowell, the Canadian in charge, convinced the bad guys that there were more Canadians outside, a whole whack of them. There weren't. But, none the wiser, the Germans surrendered.
Captain MacDowell's little white war lie won him a Victoria Cross while James T. Kobus was given the British War Medal, the Victory Medal and the Distinguished Conduct Medal.
His 84-year-old nephew, also a James Thomas Kobus, tells me now that he never knew his "uncle Jimmy, because uncle Jimmy died in a car accident in the 1920s."
"I was named after him," says Mr. Kobus from Renfrew. "There was a large portrait of him with his medals in my grandmother's house. When he died there was a big write-up in the paper.
"Did you know he took 77 Germans prisoner at the battle of Vimy Ridge?"
James Kobus was a hero, the son of a railway worker, a raw recruit who went over to France expecting, well, who the hell knows what, and survived the whole great big mess only to be killed in a car accident a few years later.
And his story is our story. It is something we can grab on to. He is someone who makes all that non-sexy stuff in our high school history textbooks about the Charlottetown Conference sing, because Vimy is our opera, a beginning for Canada the Proud. The Canada we know today that goes bananas whenever we win a major international hockey game and bows its head whenever one of our soldiers serving overseas in a contemporary conflict comes home in a hearse.
National Post
VIMY RIDGE: CAN A WAR MASSACRE GIVE BIRTH TO A NATION?
Le Quebecois Libre ^| April 13, 2002 | Martin Masse
On April 9, the 85th anniversary of the battle of Vimy Ridge was marked again in Canada. This offensive by Canadian troops against key German positions that commanded the surrounding countryside took place on Easter Monday, 1917. The ridge had been held by Germans since the beginning of the war and British and French attempts to retake it had cost 200,000 casualties.
For the first time in the Great War, 35,000 troops consisting of the four divisions of the Canadian Corps stood and fought as a national unit instead of being parcelled out to support and reinforce British divisions: 3,600 were killed and 7,000 wounded, but the result was a clear victory. As British historian John Keegan writes in The First World War, "The success of the Canadians was sensational. In a single bound the awful bare, broken slopes of Vimy Ridge, on which the French had bled to death in thousands in 1915, was taken, the summit gained and, down the precipitous eastern reverse slope, the whole Douai plain, crammed with German artillery and reserve, laid open to the victor's gaze."
In other countries, this small breakthrough is remembered, if at all, as just one in an endless series of battles during the long years of the war. Keegan calls it simply "the first day of the battle of Arras." But here, and specifically in English-speaking Canada, this battle has taken on the character of a national myth.
Two days before the anniversary, the Montreal English daily The Gazette had the usual report of students and veterans visiting the site of the battle, and the minister making his predictable speech about "remembering our rich military history and heritage," under the title "The birth of a nation." The day after the anniversary, there it was again in the same paper: "Vimy veteran recalls battle that made us a real nation." These platitudes about a nation being born while thousands of young men were killing each other in ferocious combat come from the famous quote of Brigadier-General Alexander Ross, who commanded the 28th battalion at Vimy and is reported to have said: "It was Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific on parade. I thought then, and I think today, that in those few minutes I witnessed the birth of a nation."
This is collectivist nonsense in its purest form, a combination of nationalist mythology and militaristic propaganda.
Nationalist mythology
Somebody who doesn't know the history of WW1 and who reads about the battle as described by Canadian commentators might get the impression the tide was turned for the Allies when Canadian troops reached the crest of Vimy Ridge. We learn that it "marked the first major Allied victory in more than two and a half years of fighting. The war was on it's way to being over thanks to the valiant efforts of Canada."
The reality is of course a bit different. One reason why the Germans suffered such a setback at Vimy was not so much the superhuman quality and endurance of Canadian flesh as, in the words of Keegan again, "an absolute deficiency in divisions on the Vimy-Arras sector. The compensation for that was to be felt by the French at the Chemin des Dames, where fifteen German counterattack divisions had been assembled behind the twenty-one in line. If the Germans had been surprised at Vimy-Arras, it was to be the other way about on the Aisne [...]." On that other front where battle took place on the following days, 29,000 Frenchmen were killed, a defeat which finally broke the spirit of the French army and led to the so-called mutinies of the summer of 1917.
The history of this war is an endless, mind-boggling and profoundly disheartening series of massive assaults where tens of thousands of men get killed, sometimes in a matter of hours, most of the time with no discernable results. All in all, ten million people, soldiers and civilians, died during WW1. Despite this, many believed then, and still believe today, that participating in this massacre brought about "the birth of our nation."
The historical logic behind this idea mostly makes sense for English-Canadians who conceive of their country as growing and developing as a part of the British Empire, and finally coming of age as a full-fledged and for all practical purposes independent nation after WW1. Canada was an autonomous Dominion in the early 20th century and as soon as the mother country went to war, the colonies also were immediately at war and were expected to contribute to the Empire's war effort. But then Canada earned the right to a separate seat at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and became a respected voice on the international stage. It was also given a seat at the League of Nations. It finally became totally independent in 1931. Vimy Ridge was considered the catalyst for this transformation. Here are a few gems of Canadian nationalist mythology one can find on the web:"Vimy came exactly 50 years after Confederation. But until then, Canadians always fought as British. This time they went in as Canadians." "For the first time, Canadians from coast to coast stood shoulder to shoulder commanded by Canadian officers in every rank save the highest." "For the Canadian troops who fought at Vimy, it was one of those rare moments of truth – for the first time they recognized who they were. They went up the ridge regionals and came down nationals." "Its effects on Canadian nationalism can be attested by the thousands of Canadians who fought the bitter battle and in those bleak days understood for the first time the concept of Canadian nationhood as opposed to British colonialism."
It is ludicrous of course to pretend that Canada was born at Vimy. French settlers, the first European occupants of the territory we today call Canada, arrived three centuries earlier, which is one good reason why this Vimy mythology never caught on among French Quebecers. One could say that Canada was officially born when Confederation came into effect in 1867. But why use the dates when states get founded or refounded? The people and the parasitic states that feed on them are not the same thing. Nations are not born all of a sudden when politicians sign some document, they are born and grow everyday when people work together, exchange goods and services, create a culture and develop common references, in short, build their lives and their communities peacefully.
What was born in April 1917 was not in fact the Canadian nation, but simply modern Canadian nationalism as an ideology, that ideology which has led to a growing centralization in Ottawa and growing interventionism of the federal state in the decades that followed, culminating in the Trudeau era. We would be better off today if that ideology had been still-born at Vimy.
Militaristic propaganda
Whatever one may think of this debate about the importance of the battle of Vimy Ridge and its role in the crystallisation of Canadian identity, there is another more important reason why giving so much importance to a battle, and in particular a battle in this war, is plain wrong. Canadians should not have been there in the first place.
The country was bitterly divided over the appropriate level of participation in the war. In the Boer War of 1899, most French Canadians were strongly opposed to becoming involved in what they saw as England's nasty little imperialistic wars of conquest on other continents. In 1914, there was more sympathy for the plight of France, Belgium and England, but still very little support for sending troops. Many thought Canada should limit its participation to supplying food and ammunition. And in the conscription crisis of 1917, just as in the conscription crisis that would come again during WW2, French Canadians were overwhelmingly opposed, while English speakers were overwhelming in favour. The French being the minority (only about a third of the population), the pro-conscription forces carried the day.
There is a kind of taboo today around this question of the lack of enthusiasm of French Canadians for participating in foreign wars. The consensus seems to be that we should be ashamed of this, that it shows how strong were for example the anti-semite and pro-fascist sentiments during WW2. But in 1917, most French Canadians simply did not see what they had to gain in sending thousands of their sons to become cannon fodder at the whims of British generals, in units where they were being ordered to in English. They did not see how the interests of Canada, which was not directly threatened by the enemy, were served by sending more troops in this conflict. They had the instinctive reaction of a small people who do not want to get involved in the dangerous games of the big countries and the empires.
And they were right. It's something you will not find in the official history books of course, but noninterventionism in foreign conflicts, when applied consistently, is the best way to avoid major conflagrations and foster peace. And if only Canada and, much more crucially, the United States, had decided not to intervene in this silly European war, the world would be an infinitely better place today. Here is how Hans-Hermann Hoppe summarizes their revisionist perspective on this:
If the United States had followed a strict noninterventionist foreign policy, it is likely that the intra-European conflict would have ended in late 1916 or early 1917 as the result of several peace initiatives, most notably by the Austrian Emperor Charles 1. Moreover, the war would have been concluded with a mutually acceptable and face-saving compromise peace rather that the actual dictate. Consequently, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia would have remained traditional monarchies instead of being turned into short-lived democratic republics. With a Russian Czar and a German and Austrian Kaiser in place, it would have been almost impossible for the Bolsheviks to seize power in Russia, and in reaction to a growing communist threat in Western Europe, for the Fascists and National Socialists to do the same in Italy and Germany. Millions of victims of communism, national socialism, and World War II would have been saved. The extent of government interference with and control of the private economy in the United States and in Western Europe would never have reached the heights seen today. And rather than Central and Eastern Europe (and consequently half of the globe) falling into communist hands and for more than forty years being plundered, devastated, and forcibly insulated from Western markets, all of Europe (and the entire globe) would have remained integrated economically (as in the nineteenth century) in a world-wide system of division of labor and cooperation. World living standards would have grown immensely higher than they actually have.(Democracy: The God That Failed, p. xiii-xiv)
So, Canada was "born," say the nationalist ideologues and neoconservative hawks of English Canada, when our boys mowed down other boys in the war that was responsible for making the 20th century the most bloody and destructive in human history. Thank God two thirds of Canadians, according to a recent poll, are so ignorant of history that they cannot even identify Vimy as Canada's most famous victory in the Great War. Ignorance is indeed sometimes bliss.