Vimy Ridge Day

Murray Mackay Winchester was the uncle that Southampton's Jane Kramer never got to meet. He was born in Victoria British Columbia on February 3, 1896, and was ...

It was the Junior Officers that led the challenge out into No Man’s Land. The 75th was one of the first to lead the attack. It was only a mere 14 days later, on April 9th, 1917, at 05:30 that the greatest battle ever fought by a Canadian Army began. The Battalion had been formed in Toronto in early 1915 by Lieutenant Colonel Samuel G. Beckett who had been trained as a cavalry officer with the 9th Mississauga Horse. The 75th had been in Europe since arriving in England in April 1916. While training at East Sandling, close to the English Channel, Murray came down with tonsillitis on February 9, !917 and was hospitalized for 4 days. Training began in Toronto, and it was six months later on September26, 1916 that he left for England from Halifax, arriving in Liverpool on October 10th. He signed up to the “220th (York Rangers) which was a Reinforcing Battalion. He applied for and was granted an officer’s commission.

A few dozen people gathered at Borden's First World War Training Trenches. Saturday marks Vimy Ridge Day, remembering the thousands of Canadians who fought and ...

11 hr ago 11 hr ago 11 hr ago 10 hr ago 10 hr ago 11 hr ago His party, which received less than two per cent of the vote in Quebec's 2018 provincial election when it was led by Adrien Pouliot, is now regularly polling in second or third place. 1 hr ago 1 hr ago 1 hr ago 1 hr ago "Many of those Canadian soldiers that fought that battle were from here, Simcoe County," says Colonel Daniel Riviere, the Commander at CFB Borden who spoke at today's ceremony.

Ottawa is celebrating the 105th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, recognizing the achievements and sacrifices of those who served Canada in times of ...

"Even if we are far from the battlefields, we hold the memory of Vimy and those who paid the ultimate price close to our hearts," Anand said. The Germans transformed Vimy Ridge into a heavily-fortified system of tunnels and trenches in 1914, defended with an arsenal of machine guns and artillery pieces. We owe that to those who served Vimy Ridge more than a century ago." "It's our responsibility to turn toward dialogue, toward understanding and respect. "It's here, we're taking it into our lungs with every breath that we take as free people. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

This remark is attributed to a French general on April 12, 1917 after an aide rushed in with the news that Vimy Ridge had just been wrested from the Germans ...

It was at the Somme in 1916 that the Canadians started to earn the reputation as a force to be reckoned with. Serving overseas with the 4th Infantry Battalion, Sergeant Merrifield was awarded the Military Medal (MM) at Passchendaele before earning the VC for knocking out two German machine gun placements near Abancourt, France. During this engagement, he was wounded four times but survived the war and returned to his adopted home of Sault Ste. Marie. Private Pattison was killed during an attack on a power station near Lens, France several months later and was buried in a cemetery on the northwestern outskirts of Vimy. Spotting one German going into a tunnel, Captain MacDowell was able to bluff the Germans into thinking he was part of a much larger force, resulting in the surrender of two German officers and 75 German soldiers. - Private William Johnstone Milne, an ex-pat Scot resettled in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, was a member of the 16th Canadian Infantry Battalion and was killed in action on April 9, 1917. Unlike so many battles including Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine – where the troops are kept in the dark about the impending attack – each man, from private to senior officer, was given a map of the area he would be traversing. The Canadians held Vimy Ridge. This victory came at a high cost as 3,598 Canadians lost their lives, and 7,000 were wounded during the four-day battle. The battle began at 5:30am on April 9, with the first wave of around 15,000 men advancing under the creeping barrage of almost 1000 heavy guns. In order to plan the attack properly, a full-scale mock-up of Vimy Ridge had been built behind Allied lines. When the smoke of earlier battles on the ridge had cleared, there were well in excess of 150,000 British and French casualties, including about 20,000 dead. The officer found this report impossible to believe at first because British and French troops had been trying to capture this small but strategic height of land since a seasoned German force had dug in there in October 1914. British Lieutenant General Sir Julian Byng (Canada’s Governor General after the war), aided by top-notch officers like Major General Arthur Currie of Strathroy, Ontario and Lieutenant Colonel Andrew McNaughton of Moosomin, Northwest Territories (now a town in Saskatchewan), spent months drilling the men under their command for the eventual assault.