Brave Battalion by Mark Zuehlke

Author:Mark Zuehlke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2010-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

chapter eight

Vimy

- OCTOBER 12, 1916-MAY 4, 1917 -

Canadian Corps suffered 1,364 casualties in the October 8 attack with 344, or roughly twenty-five percent, of this total coming from 16th Battalion. Eight of the battalion’s 13 officer casualties died while 131 other ranks were killed. This was a staggeringly high percentage of men killed, slightly more than a third.1

Overall, Canadian Corps casualties in the Somme led to its full withdrawal from that sector on October 11 with 4th Canadian Infantry Division fed into the line on October 11 under command of Reserve Army’s II Corps. This Canadian division would be bloodied in successive attempts to seize Regina Trench, a goal that would not be won until November 11. Seventeen days later the last Canadian division on the Somme would depart for integration into Canadian Corps. By then the Battle of the Somme, after five devastatingly bloody months, was considered closed.

Canadian battle casualties totalled 24,029—a mere fraction of the 623,907 Allied dead and wounded. The Germans reported 465,525 casualties, but this figure did not take into account a quarter of their wounded who were treated just back of the front and returned to duty. British statisticians reworked the German numbers for a tally of about 670,000. Tellingly, Gen. Erich Ludendorff, commander of the German 8th Army engaged on the Somme, considered it “had been fought to a standstill and was now utterly worn out.”2 He was determined to “save the men from a second Somme battle.”3

Field Marshal Douglas Haig declared his objectives won and that therefore the Somme was a victory. Verdun had been relieved, the Germans subjected to heavy attrition. But if the German Army could ill afford the losses of another Somme, neither could the Allies. Attrition rates equal to those inflicted on the Germans would leave France and the British Empire so weakened of troop strength that neither would ever recover. Haig’s tactics had raised war’s horror and butchery to new heights, but the Germans struck back with equal ferocity and endured.

There had been no seminal change. The long, winding trenches of the Western Front divided by the killing ground of No Man’s Land remained. Nobody knew how to break the stalemate. The Western Front, as Captain Hugh Urquhart wrote, had become the “Sphinx with the unsolved riddles. Each attempt to untie the Gordian knot met with further problems.” While the “violence of the Somme had shaken the enemy, it was equally true” that it had traumatized the British Empire. “Thereafter there was a gradual weakening of the will to conquer. The drain of blood, the disappointment at the lack of definite results had imposed too great a strain on the vitality of the nation; its main line of resistance had been broken into. For German and British Empires alike, the winter and spring of 1916-17 was a turning point of the war.”4

As winter descended, the weather only imposed greater misery on the weary troops. Each return to trench duty plunged them back into a place that seemed a portent of what hell must be like.

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