How Canadian Innovation Won Vimy Ridge

0:00When you really need care, you need 24-7 access to a care team, not a maze of paperwork from a third party. Every day, America's hospitals and health systems show up for you, navigating healthcare can feel overwhelming, but you can count on real doctors, real nurses, real people, providing quality around the clock care when you need it most. They're in your corner, in communities across America, your neighbors, your lifelines, right beside you holding your hand and helping find answers. That's what putting patients first actually means. Learn more at strengthinhealthcare.org. Brought to you by the Coalition to Strength in America's Health Care. Welcome to today's deep dive. I am, I'm just so glad you could join us today because we are looking at a stack of sources that completely shifted my entire understanding of modern history. Yeah, it really is a fascinating collection of materials we have today. It really is, so we are diving into the Battle of Vimey Ridge, which took place from April 9th to the 12th back in 1917. And, you know, if you're looking at these materials with us, you might initially think this is just another grim, muddy story about a World War I battle.

1:01Right, just one of the tragic, trench warfare scenario. Exactly, but it's not. It is an absolute masterclass in how meticulous planning, technological innovation, and just a massive radical shift in military tactics, allowed the Canadian court to capture a fortress that literally everyone else believed was completely impregnable. Okay, let's unpack this, Greg. It's a phenomenal case study, really. We're looking at a specific moment in time where the sheer scale and the creativity of the preparation fundamentally changed what was possible on a battlefield. Because the Canadian Corps, operating as part of the British First Army, they were given the subjective primarily to protect the flanks of a much larger, eras offensive, and also to draw German reserves away from a massive French offensive plan further to the south. But to really grasp why taking this ridge was considered an impossible task, we have to, we have to understand the geography. Right, let's set the scene for you. Imagine you're standing in northern France. You're looking out over the Dwight plains, which are, you know, relatively flat.

2:03And then suddenly there's this massive escarpment. It just rises right out of the landscape. Yeah, Vimey Ridge is seven kilometers long and rises 145 meters high. Now, 145 meters might not sound like Mount Everest to you, but in this specific flat landscape, it is the ultimate high ground. It offers a completely unobstructed view for tens of kilometers and all directions. What's fascinating here is how the German Sixth Army capitalized on that geography. By early 1917, they had held this ridge for two whole years. Two years is a long time to dig in. Exactly. They had spent that entire time turning it into an absolute state of the art fortress. Because the ridge is steep on the eastern side and drops off quickly, the Germans knew that if they ever lost the top, it would be incredibly difficult for them to counter attack uphill to take it back. So their strategy was just, well, never lose it. Right, never lose in the first place. They built a rigid, heavily fortified defensive structure, packed with deep concrete reinforced dugouts, multi-layered trenches,

3:04and a devastating interlocking network of machine gunnests. And the history of the Allies trying to take this ridge before 1917 is just, it's incredibly dark. The sources outlined how the French 10th Army had tried and failed multiple times to push the Germans off Vimy Ridge. In those attempts alone, the French suffered a staggering 150,000 casualties. Yeah, that number is just hard to comprehend. 150,000. Just let that number sink in. And then the British took over the sector in 1916, and they essentially got bogged down in this terrifying underground tunnel warfare. So I really want you to imagine the psychological weight of that. You are Canadian soldiers standing in the freezing mud, and you are being ordered to attack a hill where hundreds of thousands of Allied troops have already been slaughtered. How do you not just view that as a suicide mission? You would absolutely view it that way if your commanders were using the same old tactics. And that is exactly why the leadership of the Canadian Corps realized they needed a fundamental shift in doctrine. They knew the old way wasn't working.

4:06In early 1917, officers from the Canadian Corps actually went and attended lectures given by the French Army. They meticulously analyzed the French successes during the massive battle of Verdun. General Arthur Curry, commanding the First Canadian Division, really took those lessons to heart. He saw what worked and what didn't. Exactly. The major realization was that the standard First World War tactic, simply sending wave after wave of men to walk in rigid lines toward machine guns, was not just tragic, it was entirely ineffective. Wait, I want to pause on that because this is where the sources get really surprising for me. The preparation they did to fix that problem sounds almost absurd compared to standard military practices of the time. They started doing something called democratizing information. Yes, a huge paradigm shift. Because before this, in most First World War battles, only the top aristocratic officers had the maps and actually knew the overall plan. The enlisted men were just told to walk forward. The problem is, if that one officer gets killed five seconds into the charge,

5:07the rest of the men are completely lost. Precisely. The rigid command structure was a fatal flaw. So for Vimey, the Canadian Corps flipped the script entirely. They printed upwards of 40,000 highly detailed topographical maps and handed them out to platoon sergeants and even section commanders. 40,000 maps. Yeah, they taught the regular soldiers the specific jobs of the men beside them and the officers above them. That way, if a leader was killed or wounded, which was virtually guaranteed in this kind of warfare, the attack wouldn't just stall out in the mud. The surviving men knew exactly what the objective was and could keep fighting for it independently. Exactly, and they didn't stop there with the preparations. No, they didn't. The notes say they took entire units to hills, safely behind the front lines, and laid out full-scale replicas of the battlefield using colored tape. They literally practiced walking the exact distances over and over. They even built a giant plasticine model, like a massive play-doh diorama at headquarters to show officers every single topographical dip,

6:09crater, and German trench. It's just mind-boggling. It was an unprecedented level of rehearsal. And alongside that knowledge, they championed small unit flexibility. Instead of just outfitting everyone with a standard rifle, they gave individual platoons specialist roles. They equipped them with hand grenades to clear dugouts and crucially, Lewis machine guns. Ulan, why was the Lewis gun such a game-changer here? Aren't machine guns what the Germans were already using to defend the ridge? They were, but standard machine guns of the era were incredibly heavy and usually required a whole team to operate from a fixed defensive position. You couldn't just run across a battlefield with one. The Lewis gun, on the other hand, was relatively lightweight and portable. So one guy could carry it forward. Right. By giving these two advancing infantry platoons, it meant the attacking troops finally had their own mobile, suppressive firepower. If a Canadian unit got pinned down by a German bunker, they didn't have to wait for artillery support. They could use their own Lewis guns to keep the Germans heads down while the grenadiers flanked the bunker and took it out.

7:11That makes total sense. Now, while all of this surface training is happening, there is something even crazier going on underground. Because the ground in the Erasmemius sector is this soft, stable chalk, it is actually perfect for digging. It's a tunnel builder's dream, relatively speaking. Yeah, the British tunneling companies of the Royal Engineers excavated an entire subterranean city. They dug 12 massive subways, sum up to 1.2 kilometers long, buried up to 10 meters deep. And we aren't just talking about dirt tunnels here. Far from it. They installed light rail lines, piped water underground hospitals and command posts. All of this was so they can move thousands of troops securely and entirely unseen right up to the front lines. The sheer engineering of it is remarkable, but we should also clarify that these tunnels weren't purely for logistics and safety. They were actively designed as offensive weapons as well. The engineers painstakingly laid 13 massive explosive mines directly under the key German surface fortifications.

8:13But even more fascinating is their use of what the source is called Wombat Charges. Yes, I was reading about these Wombat Charges and the source material. And I couldn't quite wrap my head around them. What exactly were they doing with these? So imagine pushing long, explosive-filled pipes out from the very ends of these subways, resting just beneath the surface of No Man's Land, the deadly open ground between the two armies. The idea was that the exact moment the battle started, they would detonate these Wombat Charges. What would that do? It instantly blew an elongated crater that formed a ready-made communication trench. Oh, wow. It meant attacking troops and heavily burdened supply carriers could move across the most dangerous part of the battlefield while remaining below ground level shielded from enemy fire. That is just brilliant, an instant trench across No Man's Land. So you have this massive operation underground. But the sources also focus heavily on what was happening up in the sky. They call it bloody April. The Royal Flying Corps was taking these unbelievable risks just to gain air superiority and photograph

9:14the German defenses. The air war was brutal. The reconnaissance was so incredibly dangerous that they lost 131 aircraft in just the first week of April alone. The casualty rate for those pilots was horrific, but the intelligence they gathered was the linchpin of the entire operation. They brought back vital aerial photographs, but they also engaged in cutting edge target acquisition techniques known as flash spotting and sound ranging. OK, you have to explain sound ranging to me. Because trying to isolate a specific sound in a battle where a million shells are dropping sounds literally impossible. How does that even work? It's a brilliant piece of applied physics, actually. Essentially, they set up an array of microphones at precisely known locations along the allied lines. When a hidden German artillery gun fired, the sound wave of that boom would reach each microphone at a slightly different millisecond. Because sound travels at a fixed speed. Exactly. By using specialized oscilloscopes and stopwatches, technicians could calculate the time difference

10:15it took for the sound to arrive at each post. Using that math, they could draw intersecting arcs on a map and pinpoint the exact coordinates of the German gun, even if it was hidden miles away behind a hill. Wow. So they are literally triangulating the sound of the guns to find them. And then they hand those coordinates over to the Canadian artillery, which, looking at these numbers, was absolutely massive. The scale of the artillery was unprecedented. They were allocated 1.6 million shells for this battle. Give you the listener an idea of the density here. They had one heavy gun for every 20 yards of the front and one field gun for every 10 yards. That is, three times the heavier artillery power they had at the incredibly destructive battle of the song. Firepower was staggering, but arguably just as important as the number of shells was the technology inside them, specifically the introduction of the number 106 instantaneous fuse. The number 106 fuse, the sources emphasize this heavily. Before this invention, a typical artillery shell would often plunge deep into the soft muddy ground

11:16before detonating. It would explode like a geyser throwing mud everywhere, but it did almost nothing to destroy the thick belts of barbed wire sitting on the surface. How did the 106 change that? Well, the number 106 was designed with a highly sensitive contact mechanism. The absolute millisecond, it brushed against anything, even a single strand of barbed wire, it detonated laterally above the ground. So it didn't dig in at all? No, instead of blowing a hole in the dirt, it acted like a giant explosive pair of scissors. It completely shredded the German barbed wire and cleared a physical path for the infantry to walk through. And the effect this artillery had on the German defenders was completely catastrophic. The preliminary bombardment started on March 20th, and then the second phase utilizing every single gun they had began on April 2nd. If we look at this entirely and partially, just from the German perspective, their own sources refer to this terrifying period as the week of suffering. An incredibly apt name for what they endured. The bombardment was so intense and so unrelenting

12:17that their trenches were basically leveled. But more importantly, the shelling was so heavy that German ration parties couldn't even make it up to the front lines. The defenders were trapped under ground in those deep bunkers, exhausted, starving, and enduring the profound psychological torment of 11 straight days of earth shattering noise. Which sets the stage perfectly for the main assault. Eastern Monday, April 9th, 1917. At exactly five, three year in the morning, the operation commences. The coordination of this moment is just incredible to visualize. The mines detonated in the German lines. 1,000 guns opened fire at the exact same second. And then there is this massive, unpredictable stroke of luck. A northwest storm blows in, sending freezing sleet and snow directly into the faces of the defending German troops. With that weather, while absolutely miserable for the Canadian troops advancing through the mud, provided a massive tactical advantage by blinding the defenders. But the real key to the advance was a highly choreographed tactic called the Creeping Barrage. The field guns laid down a continuous curtain

13:20of explosive fire that advanced forward roughly 100 yards every three minutes. But wait, advancing 100 yards every three minutes? That means the soldiers are walking almost directly inside their own artillery fire. That requires a terrifying amount of trust. It did. It was incredibly dangerous, but it was necessary. The infantry was trained to walk just yards behind this moving wall of explosions. So they're just hugging the barrage? Yes. The logic was that the barrage forces the Germans to stay huddled deep inside their concrete dugouts. By hugging the barrage closely, the Canadians would arrive at the lip of the German trench the very second the artillery lifted, giving the defenders absolute no time to climb up the stairs and man their machine guns. And to make sure the men didn't just collapse from exhaustion while doing this, they used a leapfrogging tactic. The planners had drawn out four colored objective lines on those thousands of maps we talked about earlier. The black, red, blue, and brown lines. Instead of one group trying to run the entire chaotic distance to the top of the ridge,

14:20the initial wave would fight to the black line and immediately stop to consolidate and defend it. They'd lock that position down. Right. Then a completely fresh unit behind them would physically leapfrog pass them to attack the red line and so on. It kept the momentum relentlessly fresh. Exactly. And for the first, second, and third Canadian divisions, this plan was executed almost flawlessly. They hit their objective lines right on schedule. The speed of the Canadian advance was so rapid that even though the German commanders in the rear could communicate with their front lines, they simply didn't have the time to react or move their reserve troops forward before their positions were completely overrun. But looking at the sources to make sure we give you a fully balanced view of this, it wasn't a perfect operation everywhere. The fourth Canadian division, which was tasked with taking the extreme northern portion of the advance faced an absolute nightmare. They had the toughest assignment. They were attacking the highest point of the ridge, a place called Hill 145. And there's this one detail in the sources

15:21that just stopped me in my tracks. A commanding officer of one of the assaulting battalions actually asked the artillery to leave a specific portion of the German trench completely undamaged. Why on earth would he request that? It was intended to preserve the trench so that his own men could use it for cover once they captured it. But tactically, it was a fatal miscalculation. A massive mistake. When the infantry advanced, the surviving machine gun nests in that deliberately undamaged section of the trench immediately opened fire. They completely devastated the advancing Canadian troops on the right flank. That is just heartbreaking. And to make matters worse, while they were pinned down, their left flank was taking heavy harassing fire from another fortified knoll known as the Pimple. The fourth division's advance collapsed almost immediately. It took persistent, desperate and bloody attacks by reserve units later in the day to finally force the Germans off the southwestern portion of Hill 145. And the fighting didn't end on the 9th. It wasn't until days later, on April 12,

16:22fighting through a literal snowstorm that they finally managed to take that last northern objective, the Pimple. By nightfall on April 12, the entire length of Vimy Ridge was firmly in Canadian hands, which brings us to the grim reality of the aftermath. By the time the ridge was finally secured, the Canadian Corps had suffered 10,602 casualties with nearly 300,600 of those men killed. On the German side, later historical sources estimate they suffered around 20,000 casualties with roughly 4,000 men taken prisoner. The strategic fallout for the German command was immediate and severe. The German Supreme Army command was furious at the loss of such a vital position. Field Marshal von Hindenburg launched a formal court of inquiry and ended up firing the sixth Army commander, General von Falkenhhausen. The source mentions he was fired specifically for failing to use a new doctrine called defense in depth. What actually is that? Defense in depth or elastic defense was a new strategy where you don't put all your men in the very front trench to be slaughtered by artillery.

17:25Instead, you keep your best reserve divisions further back, out of artillery range, ready to rush forward and counterattack the enemy exactly when they're most exhausted and disorganized from taking the front line. Let them tire themselves out and then hit them. Precisely. But Falkenhhausen completely failed to do this. He kept his reserve divisions up to 15 miles away from the battlefield, far too distant to launch any kind of timely counterattack against the rapid Canadian advance. Because of this failure, the Germans had no choice but to retreat eastward to a completely new defensive line employing a scorched earth policy as they went. So they just destroyed everything as they pulled back? Yes. If we connect this to the bigger picture, the legacy of this battle is huge. The sources point out that tactically, Vimy was just one piece of the much larger era's offensive. But historically and culturally, its significance took on a life of its own. It became something much larger than just a battle. That's a crucial distinction. In terms of the First World War, it was a localized tactical victory.

18:26But symbolically, it represents the very first time that all four Canadian divisions, meaning men from every region across the country, fought together side by side as a single unified force. In historical narratives that developed in the decades following the war, Vimy Ridge is frequently cited as the exact moment Canada came of age as a nation. It is widely viewed as the point where Canada stepped out from the shadow of the British Empire for its own distinct, confident national identity. So what does this all mean for you? Well, the legacy of Vimy Ridge isn't just something trapped in textbooks. It is physically carved in stone. Following the war, France actually granted Canada perpetual use of a massive section of the land at Vimy to create a battlefield park. Today, the Canadian National Vimy Memorial sits right on the highest point of the ridge, Hill 145. And the grounds of that memorial serve as a very stark, very literal reminder of the battle. The 250 acre park is still so incredibly honeycombed with collapsed tunnels, massive artillery creators

19:27and unexploded munitions that large portions of the surrounding forest remain permanently closed to the public for safety reasons. Even over a century later, the earth itself hasn't recovered. When the memorial was finally unveiled in 1936, it was a massive event. It took 11 years to build and cost millions. It drew a crowd of over 50,000 people, including over 6,000 Canadian veterans. King Edward VIII was there to unveil it. The sources note that the Canadian Prime Minister actually skipped the event due to some bitter domestic political disputes back home regarding veterans. But regardless, the unveiling was a monumental moment. But as we wrap up, I want to leave you with a final provocative thought to mullover. The memorial's architect, a man named Walter C. Moore Allward, created this breathtaking towering limestone structure, but he didn't actually design it to celebrate a brilliant military victory. No, he had a very different vision for it. He explicitly described his masterpiece as a sermon against the futility of war. This race is an incredibly important question for anyone studying military history. How do you reconcile those two deeply conflicting ideas?

20:30On one hand, you have a young nation's proudest military triumph, a masterclass in modern tactical innovation, bravery, and absolute resilience. And on the other hand, the very monument built to honor that triumph stands as a permanent sermon against the violent nature of war itself. It forces us to ask, does even the most brilliantly executed, technologically advanced tactical masterpiece ultimately just underscore the sheer unfathomable tragedy of the 10,000 casualties it costs to achieve it? It really makes you pause and think about the true lasting cost of these historic breakthroughs. That is all the time we have for today. Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive. My name's McKenzie, and I started to go fund me for the adoptive mother of a nonverbal, autistic child. The mother had lost her job because she wasn't able to find adequate care for this autistic child. So she really needed some help with living expenses, paying some back bills. So I launched a GoFundMe to help support them

21:31during this crisis. And we raised about $10,000 within just a couple of months. I think that the surprising thing was by telling a clear story and just like really being very clear about what we needed, we had some really generous donations from people who were really moved by the situation that this family was struggling with. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform trusted by over 200 million people. Start your GoFundMe today at GoFundMe.com. That's GoFundMe.com GoFundMe.com. This podcast is supported by GoFundMe. You're listening to a podcast right now, driving, working out, walking the dog. If you're in a podcast, chances are you have something to say too. With rss.com, starting your own podcast is free and easy. Upload an episode and we distribute it to Apple podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and more. Track your listeners, see where they're from, and start earning from ads just like this. If you've been thinking about starting a podcast, this is your sign.

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