Authors: Pierre Berton
By the time they reached Vimy, the machine gunners had become the élite of the Canadian Corps. “I would not be an infantry officer for anything now,” Claude Williams wrote home. “I now understand the superior airs of the artillery. In our brigade, we are rated senior to the artillery even. In the advance, the machine guns on both sides are perhaps the most important branch.”
This élitism was carefully fostered by the Corps command, who were intent on making machine-gun work special and distinct. All machine-gun officers, like Williams, had horses. The badges were special – crossed machine guns supporting a maple leaf. Machine gunners didn’t have to polish their buttons, which were a distinctive black. The salute was different, and so was the drill. Because of the narrow French roads, the machine gunners marched in threes rather than in fours. By March, no fewer than sixty-four machine guns were firing across No Man’s Land at the German lines by day and another sixty-four by night. This drum fire continued until the barrels wore out and the firing had to be curtailed. And after the Battle of Vimy Ridge, indirect fire, scorned for so long by the brass hats, was adopted by all Allied armies.
4
The Germans knew something was up. How could they not? How could anyone hide the bustle and the build-up behind the lines, the monstrous piles of ammunition, the quickening activity of the Royal Flying Corps? Nonetheless, Julian Byng intended to achieve surprise. Instead of the usual lengthy bombardment in the hours preceding the attack, he planned to begin with a deceptively short burst of artillery – a sudden thunderclap before the guns lifted and the troops went over the top in what Canada would call the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
To the rest of the world it would be part of the collective battles of Arras, touched off by the attack on the ridge and by the British 3rd Army’s assault on the right of the Canadians, known as the First Battle of the Scarpe. These twin attacks would be preliminaries to the much larger spring offensive being mounted farther to the south by three French armies under the new generalissimo, Robert Nivelle.
It galled Douglas Haig to be placed under French command for the newest push. He and Nivelle did not see eye to eye. Haig and Nivelle’s predecessor, General Joffre, had originally planned a continuation of the Somme offensive to begin in February, 1917. But Joffre’s incomprehensible neglect of the Verdun defences had forced his dismissal. Nivelle’s brilliant successes in the closing days of that truly ghastly battle rocketed him, as Joffre’s successor, into the post of commander-in-chief of the French armies.
Haig and Nivelle were opposites in almost every way. The impeccable British commander was aloof, stubborn and so uncommunicative that he found it difficult to get his ideas across orally, especially with politicians, whom he despised. He had about as much charisma as a carp. Nivelle, on the other hand, was eloquent, lucid, and easily understood for, thanks to his English mother, he spoke perfect, unaccented English. He was also a charmer. He even charmed Lloyd George, a considerable feat, for the pugnacious Welshman had little use for his own generals. Seduced by Nivelle’s superb confidence and
élan
, the British Prime Minister scuttled the Haig-Joffre plans and agreed that Nivelle should have the supreme command of the spring offensive.
Though Haig and Nivelle were opposites in strategy as well as in personality, they had one trait in common – which seems to have been shared by most of the Allied generals in the Great War – they did not learn from past successes and failures. Once their minds were made up, they were inflexible.
Haig, who had overplayed the role of the artillery and dismissed the machine gun as “much overrated,” found it hard to understand why determined troops needed to be held up by entanglements of barbed wire. The slaughter of thousands didn’t bother him because he rarely saw a corpse. Haig had figured that since the Allies had more men than the Germans, they could lose more in the sure knowledge that Germany would be bled white before England and France. Now he hoped to punch a hole in the German line and achieve the breakthrough that would end the war.
Nivelle was a champion of the grand breakthrough. A national hero because of his recapture of the French forts at Verdun, he proposed to use the same technique on a larger scale against the German salient-that great bulge in the line south of the Somme and north of the Aisne. Under Nivelle’s plan, the British Battle of Arras, to the north of the Somme, would be no more than a diversion to keep the Germans busy. A week after the British attack, three French armies would be unleashed against the bulge in the German line, squeezing the German defenders from both sides. In one swift blow of “violence, brutality and rapidity” they would punch a great hole in the German defences, break through, and end the war. “We have the formula,” the confident Nivelle declared; “… victory is certain.”
It did not occur to the cocky Frenchman that the Germans had learned something from Verdun; he simply assumed they would act the way he planned. They didn’t. The French security was abysmal. The Germans, who knew all about the expected attack on the bulge, simply got rid of the bulge. They pulled back, leaving a desert of scorched earth, a belt of destruction from twenty to fifty miles wide in which every tree, every house and barn, every field, every road, was ravaged and flattened. Having straightened their line by some twenty-five miles and thus reduced their committed divisions by ten, they proceeded to construct a formidable defence in depth, which they called the Siegfried Line and the Allies later called the Hindenburg Line.
Nivelle was made aware of this German pullback in March, but, as in the Canadian gas raid, events had by then taken on a momentum of their own. Not by a jot or a tittle did the stubborn Frenchman change his now obsolete plan. Thus were sown the seeds of the disaster that followed. The assault troops would find that they were attacking a vacuum. By the time they reached the main German defences, the attack had run out of steam.
But the Germans did not pull back from Vimy Ridge; clearly they considered it too important a vantage point to give up. Nivelle and Haig did not agree on its significance. Haig wanted to seize the ridge at the outset of the Battle of Arras. Nivelle opposed him. He didn’t believe the Canadian Corps could take the ridge, and his staff officers were almost contemptuous in their rejection of the Canadian plan. Once the breakthrough was achieved, so Nivelle believed, the Germans would have to vacate the ridge anyway. But Haig didn’t expect the enemy to give it up so easily. As long as they dominated those ravaged heights, his entire left flank was in peril. Reluctantly, Nivelle gave in. As it turned out, the capture of Vimy Ridge would be the sole successful operation not only in the Battle of Arras but also in the entire spring offensive of the soon to be discredited Robert-Georges Nivelle.
The Germans had no illusions about the Canadians’ abilities as fighting men. “The Canadians are known to be good troops and are, therefore, well suited to assaulting,” a captured document signed by General von Backmeister reported. “There are no deserters to be found among the Canadians.” But Colonel-General von Falkenhausen, the Bavarian commander of the Sixth Army at Vimy, was just as stubborn as his Allied counterparts. At seventy-three, he was not about to change the habits of a lifetime. What had worked at the Somme would work north of Arras, of that he was confident. His reserves were well to the rear, but the aged general was convinced there would be plenty of time to bring them up. He expected the battle to drag on for several days, probably for weeks. In vain, the ruthless Bavarian infantry commander, Karl von Fasbender, clamoured for more troops to help stem the attack that he believed would be launched on April 10. In vain did von Falkenhausen’s commander, Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, as well as the German quartermaster general, the coldly brilliant Ludendorff, urge the recalcitrant general to move up his reserves. The general insisted that there was no room for them in the forward areas. Besides, he declared, the attack would not come before April 15; better to send for them when they were needed.
But the Canadians planned to attack on April 9 and they intended to take the ridge not in a matter of days or weeks but in a matter of hours. The plan was simple. For the first time (and, as it turned out, the last) all four Canadian divisions would surge forward simultaneously to seize the crest by lunch hour under the curtain of the greatest artillery bombardment of the war.
They would do it in a series of carefully timed stages, the objective of each stage marked on the map by a coloured reporting line. At each stage the forward troops would consolidate, reporting their arrival to low-flying aircraft, while fresh troops leap-frogged through to the next objective.
The times allowed for these forward bounds were remarkably short. The troops had exactly thirty-five minutes to push right through von Falkenhausen’s forward defensive belt, seven hundred yards deep. This the planners marked on the map as the Black Line. They were given forty minutes to dig in before the barrage lifted and the next wave moved through.
The 3rd and 4th Divisions on the left of the line had the shortest distances to travel. They were expected to be over the top of the ridge and into the woods at the bottom of the rear slope past the Germans’ second defence line-the Red Line on the planners’ maps-in twenty minutes. It was a tall order. For here was a vast and carefully constructed trench barrier, supported by more parallel trenches, wire entanglements, concrete forts, and machine-gun nests. To reach it, one division-the 4th-would have to leap across Hill 145, enduring flanking fire from the Pimple, which was not scheduled to be taken until the following day.
In brief, by 7:05 Monday morning, just one hour and thirty-five minutes after the opening of the barrage at dawn, the two divisions on the left were expected to be dug in on the far side of Vimy Ridge.
The 1st and 2nd Divisions on the right had much farther to go. For them there were four reporting lines-Black, Red, Blue and Brown. Fresh troops would jump through the forward battalions consolidating on the Red Line to advance over the ridge, seizing the villages of Thélus and Farbus, both strongly fortified by the Germans. A British brigade, attached to the 2nd Division, would thicken that final advance. The last objective, marked as the Brown Line on the maps, ran along the eastern base of the ridge. The troops of Currie’s 1st and Burstall’s 2nd Division were expected to be there, digging in, at exactly 1:18 that afternoon.
In short, the Canadians were given less than eight hours to capture all of Vimy Ridge except the Pimple. All things considered, the French might be pardoned for scoffing.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Final Days
1
In late March, the Royal Marine Artillery began to move its 15-inch howitzers into the rear of the Canadian positions-a sure sign that an attack was coming. These gigantic guns each weighed twenty tons and hurled a fifteen-hundred-pound projectile at enemy strong points and dugouts. It took nine tractors, each pulling one or two trailers, to haul the various parts of the weapons to the gun pits. Crawling forward at a sluggish eight miles an hour, they tore up roads and snarled traffic behind the lines.
The guns came up in pieces and were put together like a Chinese puzzle, bolted to an iron latticework in a pit twenty feet square. The assembling could occupy four days, the gunners working with only two fifteen-minute breaks each day, for dinner (bully beef soup) and for tea (bread and jam). They were all strong, powerful men, none under five feet ten inches, most well over six feet, and they slept on the ground beside their weapons.
Night after night, the ammunition trucks streamed along the main roads, piling up thousands of shells, like so many potatoes, in pits covered with earth and straw. At night, the shouts and curses of the mule-skinners turned the air blue. When the first phase of the artillery plan went into effect, forty-two thousand tons of ammunition lay piled up behind the lines. An additional twenty-five hundred tons poured in daily to feed the hungry cannon.
On a sunny afternoon at the end of March, Ed Russenholt, a Lewis gun sergeant from Winnipeg, climbed a small hill overlooking the Vimy sector to watch the guns firing below. The view was spectacular. The shoot, which had begun on March 20, would continue until April 2, by which time no fewer than 275,000 shells would have been hurled at the Germans. Yet only half the guns were allowed to fire at this early stage in order to conceal from the enemy the true strength of the artillery. Sergeant Russenholt sat with his back against the corner of a stone wall and began counting the seconds between a gun’s muzzle flash and the explosion of its shell on the ridge beyond. He soon had to give up; there were too many guns, and they never stopped. Five hundred guns were firing that day – guns of every size, shape, and trajectory – a line of flame stretching from the Scarpe to the Souchez. The field batteries alone were under orders to fire five hundred rounds per day and the total statistics, as Russenholt shortly discovered, were staggering. He walked over to the 10th Brigade machine-gun battery where he was told the gunners were firing as many as three hundred thousand rounds per night per gun, changing barrels constantly and covering every enemy road junction.
The gunners lived more comfortably than the infantry, but they also lived in fear of premature bursts. A bad batch of 18-pounder ammunition had arrived in these last days before the battle. Ernest Black, a law student from Toronto, and his fellow field gunners feared it more than they feared the enemy cannon. Many of the time fuses were defective, the shells exploding as they left the muzzle. Black and his comrades, testing their ammunition, found two prematures in six rounds fired; one fell short and killed an officer and a sergeant on the Arras-Souchez Road.
By this time there were so many guns firing that Black found himself in a perilous position. His battery was in the front row of seven rows of guns, each of them firing a percentage of prematures. When such a defective shell burst it flung a pint of steel marbles directly in front of it, all travelling at top speed in a narrow cone twenty-five feet wide and one hundred feet deep. In this hail of small projectiles were two whirling chunks of brass, both lethal-the fuse that hadn’t worked and the shell case that had blown off. All night and all day Black and the others were treated to the nerve-racking whine of these shrapnel bullets and the accompanying howl of the fuses and shell cases hurtling at them. Only a thick wall of sandbags at their backs provided any protection.