Vimy Ridge is THE greatest Canadian feat of arms, bar none. Even given Berton‘s romanticized version of the battle - which is probably one of the best, most readable, histories out there among thousands of Canadian military history titles, this battle lived on in the national memory throughout the interwar period. That it does not live on is mystifying. It is our Gettysburg, our Yorktown, our Battle of Britain.
Because of Vimy, so the story goes, Canada became a nation - starting with the Statute of Westminster in the early 20s, which gave Canada the right to conduct its own foreign policy.
In WW II, we don‘t have any one cataclysmic battle on the order of Vimy, no one action in which the entire war effort was involved and changed the course of the war. We fought around the globe, and of a population of 8 million put 1 million of them into uniform. We trained Commonwealth pilots and air gunners, navigators, bomb aimers, we built more Bren Guns than the British and Australians combined, we built tanks, invented the armoured personnel carrier, and did the bulk of the escort duties on the North Atlantic Run, feeding the hungry in Britain and Russia and delivering guns, tanks and planes.
On land, Ortona stands out, as does our performance on D-Day in Normandy (we made the deepest penetrations of any of the five beaches). The Scheldt was bloody awful and yet we persevered and won glory for ourselves by opening the approaches to Antwerp - vital to shortening Allied supply lines which because of the Germans‘ tenacity in holding the channel ports (many of whom held out until May 1945) stretched hundreds of miles back to Normandy.
And yet, when it comes to WW II, we dwell on Dieppe (which accomplished nothing) and Hong Kong (which accomplished equally little).
Vimy Ridge was an anomaly - a case of the right men for the right job, but also of being in the right place at the right time. Such circumstances never presented themselves in WW II; we were simply contributing in too many theatres in too many ways. That ain‘t such a bad thing.
I would say that the simple fact of fighting through to final victory - and thereby stopping the Holocaust - was our greatest feat.
The people of Holland would also tell you that Canada‘s liberation of that country was a truly magnificent thing. Not as glorious as Vimy Ridge, no one single victory in the field to point to, but surely just as important. We fed thousands of starving Dutch in 1945, delivered them from occupation, and with our allies in the east and to the south of First Canadian Army, helped put an end to Dachau, Bergen Belsen, Saschenhausen, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka, and hundreds of other death, work and concentration camps scattered across the continent of Europe.
All of which was situated half a world away and really was none of our business. That we went anyway also says leagues.
Kudos.
