Canada in World War I: Part 5 - Tactics, Restructuring, and Post-Somme Recovery

Yes, I understand I'm jumping back into the war after a long hiatus (part four was written in February) but it's for a good reason. The books I'm reading on the subject are long. It's not so much that it took me ten months to read it, but it's taken me ten months to summon the will to take up the second volume.  So, let's recap, since it's been a while.

Artillery fire would be pretty if it wasn't abjectly horrifying.

The Canadian army was a rag-tag fighting force that was called in to support the British, thought to be full of cowboy-style ruffians and undisciplined soldiers. However, after a few key battles and hard fought victories, we began to earn our reputation as a small but elite army of troops. We fought from Ypres, to Mount Sorrel, to the Somme, fighting and dying and typically succeeding, but the lattermost was the most devastating - and not just to the Canadians, but pretty well everyone. The Somme had over a million casualties on each side, and once the battle was over the Canadian forces took a step back to lick their wounds and regroup.

Meanwhile, back home, a regrouping took place as well. Sam Hughes, the conservative military minister, had ruled with an iron first up until this point. This helped the early stages of the war as having one singular overseer of the situation was helpful considering the massive degree of chaos that came with organizing a previously non-existent, untrained military force into something worthwhile. As they settled down, Hughes' use wore off, and complaints rose about his erratic, prone to anger personality, his many scandals and mistakes, and appointments of friends and political allies that were far from hidden. Prime Minister Borden, as a result, removed Hughes from power and replaced his role with two people; one to run things at home, and a new office, a minister strictly for oversees military forces.

Sam Hughes, angry with Canada
for ousting him from his position
of power, later became
vice-president Mike Pence.

Leading the men in Europe was Julian Byng, the well-respected general of the Canadian forces of 80-100,000, who spoke with the French and the British to share and learn tactics after the Somme. 

Over the past few years the Canadians developed a system. The artillery would bombard the defences of the Germans about ninety metres ahead of their infantry every three minutes, allowing the soldiers just enough time to storm through and clear out the trenches and continue going forward in what was called a "creeping barrage." The problem was the Germans were getting wise to the plan, starting to predict when it was coming and bombarding the troops as they crossed no-man's-land towards the trenches. The new plan was to focus on taking out the big guns so that couldn't happen, but that was a difficult task. A number of solutions were utilized to varying effectiveness; using observation planes to give the friendly guns something to shoot at (critical, but thankless work), using advance spotters to look for the flash of the guns and hopefully triangulate the distance (through either math, science or magic), and using sound-waves to measure the speed and trajectory of the artillery shells to guess where they came from (again, math, science, or magic). 

Another key part of strategy was raiding, and the Canadians were experts. It was here they would learn how to fight effectively, swiftly, and hopefully capture a few prisoners to gather intelligence about the enemy. The whole idea was to have a raid completed, start to finish, in just fourty-five minutes with as much damage done as possible and to return before the defenders had even figured out what hit them. The most important aspect was the element of surprise, hitting during the night when soldiers weren't at the ready, and retreating under the cover of darkness. However, that began to die down as raiding became far more common as the war pressed on, especially for Canadians who saw it as a means of earning their reputation, pride, and rewards. Larger, more audacious raids were planned as every unit wanted to have the greatest success. 

In February 1917, the Canadians set their sights on raiding the first lines of Vimy Ridge. Vimy was a fortress; seven kilometres of defences, uphill, littered with barbed wire, trenches, defensible positions and a heck of a lot of Germans. Both the French and the British had tried to take Vimy previously and failed miserably, taking many casualties in the process. The Germans held the territory for a full two years. But this wasn't a full-scale assault yet; they just wanted a raid.

Respirators, while life-saving in a gas attack, made it
incredibly difficult to breath. Which... sounds kind of
counter-intuitive.

The plan was to use the weapon that many still saw as almost mythical: gas warfare. The more experienced front-line commanders argued heavily against its use, as it was uphill (the gas was heavier than air, and would therefore fall down towards them), the Germans and Canadians both had respirators they could use against it, and wind was, of course, rather fickle. Ignoring the pleas of the men at the front the command went ahead with the plan anyways, that at this point had lost all semblance of a surprise attack as it had been delayed for days due to a lack of wind. The chemical assault did essentially nothing to damage the defences, and in the first five minutes of going over the trenches and rushing, Canada took 190 casualties, a number that would rise to 687 by the end of the day. 

The Canadians learned an important lesson that day: preparation was everything, and poor planning leads to many lost lives. They would attack Vimy again in the months to come, but only after months of preparation.