Posted on 03/08/2003 5:41:11 AM PST by Clive
Charles Reaper, who died in Winnipeg a week ago today, aged 103, was the last of the 20,000 young Canadians who "went over the top" at dawn on April 9, 1917 to attack Vimy Ridge, and by lunchtime had given the young nation its first grip on a fragile national identity.
According to Department of National Defence historian Steve Harris, Reaper's death underscores the fact that the First World War "is now Great Granddad's war; it's gone into the past, like the American Civil War."
He's right. Events truly become history when there is no one left to talk about them firsthand, and that murderous assault up the long slope to Vimy Ridge is falling into that category. It ought to be no small matter for Canadians, since no single event has had more impact on the way Canadians see themselves.
Over the past 86 years the impact of Vimy has become as blurred as the memories of those now departed young men who fought the battle. Our current minister of national defence, an economist with an excellent education, reached middle age and the federal cabinet without ever becoming aware of it. 'Nuff said.
For the last year I've been putting together a book on Canada in the first three decades of the 20th century, and if I were forced to pick one event that most reverberates down the years since then, it would not be the turn-of-the-century boom or Clifford Sifton's promotion of the Last Best West. For a brief spell they combined to make Canada a magnet for immigrants, but it was the Great War and Vimy which began the process of turning the young country into a nation.
Vimy was the first time Canadians had been given the central role in a battle - and they were supposed to fail. Not that the Allied high command wanted a failure, but they didn't expect the colonials to succeed where superior French and British forces had failed.
Why they succeeded says much about the differences between life in the Old World and the New. The Canadians saw Vimy as a problem to be solved, by a combination of strategy and science - and with hopefully limited losses among the attackers. It was an approach met with some derision by the British and French "professional" officer class.
The Canadian in charge of planning the attack, Arthur Currie, was an overweight, rather nerdy former realtor and school teacher from B.C. He also turned out to be a tactical genius and the most successful general of the war. Currie insisted on weeks of preparation. Through a bitterly cold winter the Canadians practiced their assault on a replica of the Vimy battlefield built behind Allied lines.
They would attack in small groups rather than the usual massed ranks of infantry. They demanded new fuses for artillery shells so that they would explode on contact and actually destroy the German razor wire. They developed something called "close artillery support," which allowed the shells to keep falling until moments before the infantry arrived on top of enemy positions.
They attacked the ridge at daybreak on April 9 and by 11:15 a.m. Charlie Reaper and his buddies were on top of the ridge. The savage battle continued for four days, but the Canadians captured more ground at Vimy than British forces had taken in the previous two and a half years. British, French and American newspapers hailed the battle as a triumph for Canada - and it was. In that dreadful conflict it stands as a rare example of an operation marked by intelligence and organization.
The Canadians would go on to become the most innovative and effective allied army, but more importantly it allowed the country to take something positive away from that awful war. The Canadians hadn't simply proved they were the equal of Europeans - they could be better. It was a revelation! The war also brought together, for the first time, Canadians from all walks of life and all regions of the country. The 650,000 in uniform, like Charlie Reaper, came to see their country differently. They went to war Scottish, Polish, Ukrainian, Irish - and came home Canadian.
You don't have to be a warmonger to appreciate the impact of Vimy. If nationality is anything, it is shared history, common experiences. Charlie Reaper and his buddies may be fading into history, but we would be foolish indeed to let their accomplishments fade with them.
Pilot Officer John G. Magee, Jr.
High Flight was composed by Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Jr., an American serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force. He was born in Shanghai, China in 1922, the son of missionary parents, Reverend and Mrs. John Gillespie Magee; his father was an American and his mother was originally a British citizen.
He came to the U.S. in 1939 and earned a scholarship to Yale, but in September 1940 he enlisted in the RCAF and was graduated as a pilot. He was sent to England for combat duty in July 1941.
In August or September 1941, Pilot Officer Magee composed High Flight and sent a copy to his parents. Several months later, on December 11, 1941 his Spitfire collided with another plane over England and Magee, only 19 years of age, crashed to his death.
His remains are buried in the churchyard cemetery at Scopwick, Lincolnshire.
"High Flight"
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The name of John McCrae (1872-1918) may seem out of place in the distinguished company of World War I poets, but he is remembered for what is probably the single best-known and popular poem from the war, "In Flanders Fields." He was a Canadian physician and fought on the Western Front in 1914, but was then transferred to the medical corps and assigned to a hospital in France. He died of pneumonia while on active duty in 1918. His volume of poetry, In Flanders Fields and Other Poems, was published in 1919.
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