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Note: The original draft of this post misspelled Masumi Mitsui’s name. The National Post regrets the error.

What did it accomplish?

This photo shows Vimy Ridge one year after the battle, when it was being used as a military farm. Vimy Ridge was the greatest single success of the wider Battle of Arras, but the clash was no Juno Beach. Like so many First World War battles, immense human cost was expended to capture a small stretch of shell-blasted ground — and then the front simply reverted to stalemate a few kilometres to the east. Despite their mistakes, the Germans would soon be portraying the battle as a victory. They had, after all, prevented an Allied “breakthrough” of German lines. “The fierce battle over Vimy Ridge was fought to a standstill. To be able to call oneself a Vimy fighter, was from then on a high honour!” wrote one German writer. Vimy Ridge certainly thinned the ranks of the Kaiser’s army by a few thousand (the precise casualty lists were destroyed during Second World War air raids), but historians still aren’t sure whether the war would have any ended sooner than November 11, 1918 if the Allies had simply spent the rest of the war staring at a German-occupied Vimy Ridge. As the Canadian military historian J.L. Granatstein wrote, “Vimy did not change the course of the war.”

Afraid of Canadians

These are German prisoners of war captured at Vimy Ridge. Their smiles are no accident; the captured soldiers of Vimy Ridge were described as unusually cheerful. In the spring of 1917, Germany had just suffered through the “turnip winter,” a period of such profound food shortages that adults were living on as little as 1200 calories a day. Meanwhile, these particular soldiers had just suffered through weeks of nighttime trench raids by the Canadians. A member of the Kaiser’s Army could not go to sleep without the fear that they’d be woken up by Canadian with a blackened face holding a knife to their throat. These men were also lucky to have been able to surrender safely. All along the Western Front, Canadian troops had a grisly reputation for failing to take prisoners. At the outset of Battle of Vimy Ridge, one platoon officer told his men, “remember, no prisoners. They will just eat your rations.”