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Private Notes
Historian, Norm Christie, examines the old battlefields, visiting the cemeteries and memorials that hold the secrets to the legacy and sacrifices of the Canadians in the Battles of Mount Sorrel and Hill 70. These two battles (not covered in For King & Empire) cost Canada 5,000 dead, but few remember what their names. They were two vital battles that contributed to the ongoing development of the Canadian Corps. The first, Mount Sorrel, was fought near the Belgian city of Ypres in June 1916. Initially it was a catastrophic defeat and an embarrassment for the Canadians who were driven from their positions with staggering loses. But under a new General, Julian Byng, and with proper organization and execution the Canadians are able to win back their positions with a stunning night attack, and redeem their tarnished reputation, and learn, if they do it right, they can beat anyone. The second part of the show covers the Battle of Hill 70, just north of Lens. It is the first battle with the Canadian, Arthur Currie in charge. Really Hill 70 was a diversionary attack, meant to draw German troops down from Ypres, but Currie thought it was an opportunity to inflict terrible losses on the Germans, who he knew would counter-attack to win back Hill 70, which dominated the coal mines of Lens. Currie orchestrated a brilliant set-piece battle that cost the Germans an estimated 30,000 casualties. It was a brilliant victory for the new General.
Fresh off the boat, Canada's amateur soldiers march straight to the most dangerous sector on the Western Front: the "bulge" in the Allied line around the Belgian city of Ypres. Germany launches the first mass poison gas attack in history.
On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 60,000 British soldiers fall before Canadian troops are ordered in. Tanks are used in battle for the first time.
On Easter Monday, Canadians sweep to victory in a brilliantly planned attack on Germany's formidable fortress on Vimy Ridge. Their reputation as elite troops is confirmed, but at the cost of 21,000 dead, wounded and missing.
n midsummer, British commander Sir Douglas Haig launches a disastrous three-month offensive from the city of Ypres, resulting in a quarter of a million of his soldiers killed, wounded, or drowned in mud. To turn a failure into a "great victory," he orders the Canadians to take the ridge and village of Passchendaele.
A great German offensive in France and Belgium In the spring of 1918 puts an Allied victory at risk. In August, the Allies strike back, spearheaded by the Canadian Corps, which wins seemingly impossible victories at Arras, the Canal du Nord, and Cambrai, driving the Germans out of France over a period of 100 days.
In the 1920s along the old Western Front, men turn to the gruesome task of exhuming and reburying hundreds of thousands of bodies. While Canadians argue over the cost of memorials to their soldiers, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis plunge the world back into war. Many of the men who fought the First World War live to see their sons die in the Second.
