Canada's epic battle you may never have heard of

 In the foreground, a German machine gunner killed by the Canadians as they captured the French city of Valenciennes in early November, 1918.

 

Canadian memories of the First World War generally stick to Vimy Ridge. Vimy Ridge is the site of Canada’s official First World War memorial, and it’s the only battlefield that’s made its way onto our currency and passports.
But while Vimy may have represented a rare victory in the war’s darkest depths, historians, military commanders and First World War veterans themselves were more inclined to believe that Canada’s greatest triumph would come at the war’s end.

Below, a quick primer on the Last Hundred Days, the epic Canada-dominated finale to the Great War.
The Last Hundred Days began on August 8, 1918 with an all-out attack on German positions in Amiens. By day’s end, Canadian soldiers had obliterated German defenses and advanced an incredible 13 kilometers. It was the most jaw-dropping allied victory ever seen in the First World War up to that point. For context, it had taken months of fighting and 500,000 dead to gain only eight kilometers of ground at Passchendaele. Up until this point, many First World War battles had followed a predictable pattern: A lengthy artillery barrage followed by fixed-bayonet human wave attacks across no-man’s-land.

At Amiens, Canada rolled out a strategy that prioritized speed and unpredictability above all else: Tanks, motorized machine guns, cavalry, storm troopers and intricately timed artillery barrages all thrown at the enemy in a dizzying tidal wave of force. Erich Ludendorff, who by this time had become the effective military dictator of Germany, referred to August 8 as the “black day” of the German army. As the Canadian breakout continued relentlessly into the autumn, Canadian Corps commander Arthur Currie would estimate that one quarter of all Germans on the Western Front were being shot at by Canadians. When German troops would sweep back into France in 1940, their new strategy of Blitzkrieg would be an eerily close carbon copy of the tactics that Canadians had used to evict them from France 21 years earlier.

The Germans may have explicitly avoided fighting Canadians until the very end. In the spring of 1918 Germany launched a last-ditch series of assaults designed to capture Paris and win the war before the United States army could show up in force. They devastated British lines to the Canadians’ north and French lines to the Canadians’ south, but the Canadians themselves eked out the offensive relatively untouched. This may have been intentional: Canadian soldiers were so fanatically committed to killing Germans. The British and French may have shared bread and chocolates with German troops during the famous Christmas Truce of 1914, but as soon as Canadian troops joined the war in 1915 they pursued Germany with “a vendetta which did not end until the war ended,” wrote the British war correspondent Philip Gibbs.

Instead of winning the war, Germany’s “Spring Offensive” had cost them tens of thousands of their best troops and had the unintended consequence of leaving Canada as one of the strongest armies left standing on the Western Front.

Library and Archives Canada A tank used in the Battle of Amiens, the opening engagement of the Last Hundred Days. 

 

The Canadian Corps at the end of the First World War is still the deadliest fighting force ever fielded by Canada
As historian Jack Granatstein said in a recent lecture about the Last Hundred Days, the Canadian Corps in World War One’s final months “played the greatest role that any Canadian army has ever accomplished in any war we have participated in.” For one, Canada showed up to the Last Hundred Days with more of everything: More tanks, more artillery, more machine guns and more men. Even as hundreds of Canadians were claimed daily by machine guns or shellfire, they were able to constantly keep the ranks filled with fresh conscripts. Canadians also brought more poison gas. After the war, Arthur Currie estimated that at one point 90 per cent of all the poison gas deployed on the Western Front was being used by Canadians. By mid-1918, Canadians were also expertly seasoned by four years of war, something that gave them a notable advantage over allied armies just joining the war. In the war’s final months Canada would defeat 47 German divisions to the Americans’ 46, despite suffering less than half the casualties.

 

 

 

Library and Archives Canada Canadians and Germans at a wound dressing station in the Battle of Amiens. 

 

The cost in lives was worse than anything yet seen
The standard image of the First World War is of men leaping out of a muddy trench to seize the muddy trenches of the enemy. And this was indeed the general gist of World War One for most of its duration. But the Last Hundred Days looked more like the Second World War: Troops moving over open French countryside to seize towns, bridges and canals. The stalemate was over, but open warfare was far deadlier than trench warfare.
In the Last Hundred Days Canada suffered 45,835 killed, wounded or taken prisoner. It was equivalent to one fifth of Canada’s total casualties for the war, more than the 10,602 casualties suffered to take Vimy Ridge. More Canadians would be killed in the Last Hundred Days than in Korea or in the Second World War Canadian army from D-Day to VE Day. On September 1, 1918 alone, nearly 1,000 Canadians were killed in action. And these were coming from a largely agrarian country of eight million: 1000 casualties could represent an entire prairie city’s worth of young men.

A poetic symmetry overlay the end of the First World War. For one, the war ended at the easily remembered 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. And for Canadian soldiers, that war would end by retaking Mons, the Belgian town at which British forces had first encountered German troops in 1914. But both symbols would come at a terrible cost: Even with Canadian commanders knowing that the armistice was signed, troops would continue to be thrown into battle right up into 11 a.m.

And while the Canadians’ victory parade through Mons would provide stirring fodder for war artists, it did indeed kill men who would have otherwise returned home if the Canadian Corps had simply taken the morning off. The most notable was Saskatchewan conscript George Price, who was fatally hit by a German sniper at 10:58 a.m., becoming the last British Empire soldier to be killed in combat. “Hell of a note to think that would happen right when the war ended,” wrote his company commander.
We are forever grateful for their service and sacrifice to protect us and keep us safe and free.

 

 
Canadians in the center of Mons on the morning of November 11, 1918.