Military History | Canadian National Vimy Memorial — Eleven Years of Carving, and a Meaning Added Later

The Canadian Corps attacked Vimy Ridge at 5:30 on the morning of 9 April 1917, Easter Monday, with all four of its divisions in line together for the first time. German resistance on the ridge was broken by 12 April. The Canadian War Museum puts the four days' cost at 10,598 casualties, 3,598 of them killed; other accounts give 10,602. On 5 December 1922 France granted Canada the ground — a hundred hectares by one account, 107 by another — freely and without limit of time, on condition that a memorial be built here and maintained. Walter Allward won the design competition. Building took eleven years, from 1925 to 1936. Almost 6,000 tonnes of limestone came from a quarry near Seget on the Dalmatian coast, the same stone Diocletian's palace at Split was cut from. The memorial stands on Hill 145, the highest point of the ridge. Its base carries 11,285 names of Canadians who died in France with no known grave, and even that figure is approximate: en.wikipedia records that 11,169 of the men named are actually unaccounted for. Edward VIII unveiled it on 26 July 1936, with President Albert Lebrun present. Crowd estimates run from over 50,000, including 6,200 who had crossed from Canada, to more than 100,000. The reading that Canada became a nation on this ridge came afterwards. The historian Jamie Swift, who calls the pattern "Vimyism", argues the national meaning grew stronger the further it travelled from 1917, and notes that Allward himself described the monument as an argument against war rather than a victory piece. Most of the park is closed to the public because of buried munitions. Sheep graze the meadows in place of mowers. Elizabeth II rededicated the restored monument on 9 April 2007. 📸 Cover: the memorial on Hill 145 with the Canadian and French flags — Vinckie, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the wall of names — 0x010C, CC BY-SA 3.0.