1917: The Other Battles

PHOTO: CANADIAN WAR MUSEUM—O-3758

The wounded are evacuated.

Ninety years ago, the young Dominion of Canada was in the midst of one of the most significant years in its history. It was the year in which the Canadian Corps surged up Vimy Ridge in April 1917, a fortress that the Germans had defended since almost the start of the war (Without Peer: Canadians At Vimy, March/April).

After four days of fighting, the Canadians had driven the enemy back, but it was a costly victory with over 10,000 casualties. The Canadian Corps garnered glory from its allies and grudging admiration from the enemy, and the Battle of Vimy Ridge would become a defining moment for the nation.

Later in the year, from October to November 1917, the fighting reached its nadir on the Western Front. The Canadian Corps was called to the Flanders front in Belgium where it was charged with saving the morale of the British Army by capturing what was left of Passchendaele Ridge, a position that had eluded the British forces for several months and at the cost of more than 200,000 casualties.

Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief, had launched the offensive in late July, but it had bogged down almost immediately after fierce fighting. The German allies–generals Rain and Mud–were just as important in stalemating the front. Day after day it rained, and the battlefield was reduced to a bog. Soldiers sank up to their waist, and only stopped from sinking lower by standing on the bodies of the fallen who had already been engulfed in the glutinous porridge. Millions of shells shattered the landscape, leaving it honeycombed with countless slime-filled craters. Within this apocalyptic landscape, unburied bodies–both animal and human–littered the ground. “Here and there, arms and legs of dead men stick out from the mud, and awful faces appear, blackened by days and weeks under the beating sun,” wrote Private A.J. Lapointe of the 22nd Battalion. “I try to turn from these dreadful sights, but wherever I look dead bodies emerge, shapelessly, from the shroud of mud.”

The Canadians attacked Passchendaele Ridge in four limited set-piece battles from Oct. 26 to Nov. 10, slowly wading their way up the ridge until they finally captured the ruins of the town that gave the battle its name. The Canadians achieved one of the few victories of the campaign and it allowed Haig to close down the battle having achieved at least a symbolic victory. But Passchendaele remained a horror show for everyone, and a watchword for the futility of the war and the callousness of the generals who sent their men forward in fruitless attacks.

The Canadian Corps was one of the few formations to emerge from the battle with any glimmer of success, and while capturing the ridge solidified the Canadians’ reputation as shock troops, 16,000 casualties were a grim price to pay for such a moniker.

These two battles–Vimy and Passchendaele–bookend the 1917 campaign for the Canadians. They are remembered differently, even though the Battle of Vimy Ridge was by far the more costly victory if one examines the intensity of the battle over a short time: at Vimy, there was an average of 2,651 casualties per day over the four-day battle, while the misery of Passchendaele claimed in comparison 978 casualties per each day of the 16-day battle. Yet in the popular memory of the war, Vimy is the battle where Canada came of age. Sergeant Percy Willmot, who would continue fighting until wounded in the leg during the battle for Cambrai in October 1918, later dying of complications to his wound in 1919, recounted emotionally to his cousin of what Vimy meant to him and his comrades: “As the guns spoke, over the bags they went…all Canucks…. So far it was the most decisive, the most spectacular and the most important victory on this front since the Marne and Canada may well be proud of the achievement.”

No one wrote such things of Passchendaele. Tommy Adams of the 85th Bn. described the battlefield as “a complete nightmare of mud, slush and everything else. It was frightful, and if I’d been in for a week I’m sure I’d have gone mad.”

But these two bloody victories, one held up as a symbol of Canada’s coming of age, the other of the slough of despair that marked the Great War in modern memory, have overshadowed the other battles of 1917, which were also important in laying the foundation for the emerging reputation of the Canadians as an elite force, not to mention providing a series of additional forgotten victories that should be remembered for the sacrifice of ordinary Canadians at war.

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Following the Vimy victory, the Canadians continued to push across the Douai Plain over which they now had a commanding view from atop the ridge. Vimy had been a part of the Allied Arras offensive, which was still being fought. But the British forces to the south were not faring well, having been stopped by a resolute German defence that was based on a series of strongpoints around dugouts, machine-gun nests, and counter-attacking forces situated to a depth of several kilometres.

While the British were fighting hard, the French allies further south were in even more terrible turmoil. The Nivelle offensive–named after their charismatic, if incompetent commander–had been shattered. The French forces suffered more than 117,000 casualties in the first eight days of fighting, and soon were in mutiny. The French high command eventually regained control, but Haig felt the need to keep attacking as the French could not be counted on as a fighting force.

The Canadian Corps was involved in two battles in late April and early May. The attack at Arleux and Fresnoy remain almost entirely absent from Canadian history books. The first battle was against Arleux, about five kilometres to the east of Vimy Ridge. It was a brigade level assault set for April 28, 1917. The Canadians could gather little intelligence on the position, but it was known that the German defenders had reinforced the cellars and that the units were, according to one document, “holding the front with an unusually large number of machine-guns.”

A devastating artillery barrage from 108 field and siege guns, augmented by tens of thousands of bullets from 46 heavy Vickers machine-guns, tore up the ground and suppressed enemy fire. The 2nd Brigade attacked with three battalions up and crashed through the enemy lines, which were situated in depth around the once quiet village. But the trouble was not in capturing the enemy positions, but in keeping them. The German doctrine of immediate counter-attack had driven the British back in similar offensives all along the front. However, the Canadians planned for these attacks, both with dedicated artillery fire to fall on expected areas of ground over which the enemy would attack, and by pushing forward heavy Vickers machine-guns and lighter Lewis guns.

After capturing the enemy positions by the early morning on the 28th, several enemy attacks were destroyed in a hail of fire. The Germans were shaken and retreated back to Fresnoy, about a kilometre to the east. While the operation cost 1,255 Canadian casualties, it was one of the few successful battles of the larger British campaign.

The Canadians launched a second attack a week later on May 3 to correspond with another British push to the south. Five Canadian battalions advanced through the enemy strongpoints behind a creeping barrage in the early morning hours of the 3rd, and–like a week earlier–captured the position. This time, the Germans counter-attacked all along the front and there was fierce fighting, often pitting men against men in hand-to-hand combat.

Through bravery and endurance, the Canadians held their ground, even as some units were cut off and surrounded. Pte. Deward Barnes, experiencing his first battle, recounted the chaotic situation. At one point, with German troops firing at their dug-in position, and enemy troops infiltrating past them into the rear, Barnes’s officer told them: “Boys, we are done, do your duty and fight to the finish.” It was a terrible fight, but the ever-dwindling outpost survived long enough to be relieved in a Canadian counter-attack. Despite sustained enemy assaults, the Canadians held their ground, even at the cost of 1,200 casualties.

These two Canadian battles revealed an efficient attack doctrine that was building upon the success of Vimy. While the Canadians did not have the luxury of preparing for battle over several months as they had with the Vimy operation, thorough planning and attention to detail were essential. Intense training of the infantry eased some of the friction inherent on the battlefield. Infantry and artillery co-operation were essential, both in the “bite” and in the “hold” stage. Small unit leadership and bravery on the battlefield were other intangibles that turned the tide. There were no easy victories on the Western Front, but the Canadians proved after Vimy that they could again win limited set-piece battles.

After these two victories, especially in the face of British defeats along the line, the Canadians were proving that Vimy was no aberration.

The tempo of battle dropped after the early May fighting, with much of the next three months spent in raiding the enemy and in holding the front-line trenches that snaked along the Western Front. Canadian Corps commander Sir Julian Byng’s success at Vimy, Arleux, and Fresnoy marked him for a promotion to army command, and he was replaced in early June by his hand-picked successor, Arthur Currie. Careful and battle-tested, Currie had shown through two years of war that he had an analytical mind for tackling the unique problems of trench warfare, and that he had the moral courage to stand up to his superiors when it was required.

His first major battle would be to capture the French mining city of Lens, which had been in German hands since almost the start of the war. Almost three years of fortification had turned almost every cellar into a dugout, and almost every street was protected by machine-guns and snipers. Any attack on the town would require Currie’s force to engage in urban warfare, something completely foreign to the Canadians.

A desperate Field Marshal Haig ordered the Canadians to attack the city in a frontal assault in order to draw off reserves from the Passchendaele offensive to the north. Currie studied the enemy lines and concluded that such an attack would be a waste of lives. Instead, he went to his superiors and argued forcefully to attack Hill 70, which overlooked Lens to the north. If he could convince the Germans that the main assault would fall on the city, draw their reserves to that front, and then snatch Hill 70, he would have a commanding position over the enemy lines. Haig liked the plan but warned Currie that the Germans would fight him hard for it. Currie knew that and planned accordingly.

In the weeks leading up to the Aug. 15 offensive, Currie’s infantry practiced and planned their assault. Maps and models were studied; reconnaissance teams and aerial observers gathered information; complicated fire plans were established. The key to victory would be to capture the hill and hold it against counter-attack. To defend the hill, Currie would rush forward an astonishing 172 machine-gunners. These gun teams, along with the artillery, would plan to lay down a storm of steel. It was brilliant, if brutal.

Currie’s forces attacked on the morning of the 15th. A diversionary attack against Lens focused the enemy’s attention there, while 15 first and second-line battalions advanced against the hill and the low-lying parts of Lens. To put this into perspective, this was a larger attacking infantry force than that which was launched by the Canadians at Dieppe on Aug. 19, 1942, or at Juno Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944.

On Hill 70, the creeping barrage had torn up many of the defenders, but many obstinate defenders had to be cleared trench by trench. Sgt. J.E. Laplante of the 21st Bn. described the fierce fighting: “We advanced towards each other, neither side flinching when the collision came…fierce hand-to-hand fighting occurred, no quarter was asked, none was given.” By noon, most of Hill 70 was in Canadian hands. The Germans almost immediately counter-attacked as Currie hoped. Their forces were torn asunder. But they kept coming: a total of 17 counter-attacks over three days.

The operation had been a success. From the 15th to the 18th, the Germans were destroyed in a hail of shot and shell. After their fruitless attacks over open ground were broken up, the Germans resorted to bombing the Canadian lines and deluging them in mustard gas. But even chemical burns could not stop the Canadians.

Unfortunately, Currie–perhaps betraying his inexperience–was impatient for greater success. Although his forces won the battle of attrition in tearing up the enemy, the Germans had not yet evacuated Lens, even though the Canadians were subjecting it to heavy shellfire.

Currie and David Watson, the commander of the 4th Division, organized two probing attacks into Lens on the 21st and 23rd of August. Neither was successful, as the Canadians struggled in the urban warfare environment. The Germans, dug in and with prepared killing grounds, made the Canadian infantry pay for its advance. The fighting ended on the 25th, with the Canadians still holding Hill 70 and the outer perimeter of Lens to the west. However, the Germans did not evacuate the city, despite the terrible bloodletting they had suffered.

By the end of the battle, some 25,000 Germans were killed or wounded, in return for about 9,000 Canadian casualties. It was one of the few times on the Western Front that attackers were able to inflict more losses on the defenders, but this was entirely due to Currie’s innovative, if lethal plan. “The fighting at Lens cost us, once again, the expenditure of considerable numbers of troops who had to be replaced,” wrote German General Hermann von Kuhl. “The whole previously worked out plan for relieving the fought-out troops in Flanders had been wrecked.” Seven German divisions had been mauled.

Hill 70 was a resounding success by the standards of the Western Front, but the question remains as to why it has been forgotten? It was an almost entirely Canadian battle: orchestrated by Currie, supported by his gunners, and carried out by his infantry. The Canadians had been ably backed by the 1st Army, but it was truly a Canadian battle at its core, even more so than Vimy, which had relied heavily on Allied gunners, logistical lines, and even a brigade of infantry in the centre of the attacking forces. Perhaps Hill 70 has been ignored by historians and memory-makers because it does not fit nicely into the two major strands of memory surrounding the war. Vimy represents Canada’s enormous sacrifice and success. Passchendaele, on the other hand, encompasses the horror and futility of the war.

Despite the appeal of nicely packaging Vimy and Passchendaele to signify the two major themes of the war, there were other battles that helped to deliver victory. The fierce reputation of the Canadian Corps as elite troops–a reputation that allowed Canadian politicians to garner greater independence for the country during and after the war–was forged at Vimy and Passchendaele, but also at places like Arleux, Fresnoy, and Hill 70. We need to remember all of these battles, and the terrible sacrifices of Canadians, to better understand why those who survived the Great War hoped fervently that it would be the “war to end all wars.”