Good Guy Militarism

"One afternoon, four thousand men died in the water here and
five hundred more were thrashing madly as parasites might in your  
blood."

Nautical Disaster, by the Tragically Hip

I would like to take this opportunity to talk about, surprise surprise, history. In this case I'd like to examine how we learn history, and how it shapes our worldview for much of our lives. For this I am going to focus on two events in Canadian Military history, and discuss why the way we talk about these events so critically affects our understanding of contemporary military adventurism, imperialism, and all that comes along with them. This, however, is far from being a critique of those who fought, suffered and perished. Rather I am looking at how we choose to remember these events.

Spring 1917 in France was a time of preparation for a colossal offensive planned by combining the forces of the Entente. The Battle of Arras was the British/Commonwealth portion of the plan, a massive operation involving twenty-three divisions. Central to this plan was the intended seizure of Vimy Ridge by the troops of the Canadian Corps. Led by General Julien Bing, the Canadian Corps comprised four divisions of Canadian Soldiers, and at Vimy a British division ( as well, some 170,000 (approx.) men. The objective was Vimy Ridge, an escarpment that commanded a fair view over the Northern Sector of the British Army and needed to be cleared of enemy artillery. The Battle of Arras itself was a part of the larger Nivelle Offensive, named for the Commander in Chief, French General Robert Nivelle.

Dawn, April 9th, 1917. The Battle of Vimy Ridge begins. This operation would later be considered by military historians to be a masterclass in positional warfare and artillery planning. By April 12th the entire ridge was in Canadian hands, having taken the final objectives and some 4,000 prisoners. Commonwealth casualties were approximately 10,000 killed or wounded. The battle today is considered one of the single most successful operations in the history of the Canadian Army. The Germans did not counter-attack, and never retook the position. Today, 200 hectares of land at Vimy is dedicated to the Canadian monument, first built on the spot in 1936, with the memorial overlooking the entire ridge. The plaster models for the statues can be seen at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.

France, 1942: The entire territory of metropolitan France is occupied or controlled by the Nazis. The so-called "Atlantic Wall" has not yet been constructed, and the Germans, busy in their war on the Eastern Front with the Soviet Union, have pulled much of their forces away from France, leaving low quality formations behind on occupation detail. The Allies are fighting in North Africa, drawing some forces away from the Eastern Front, but not nearly enough. Despite the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, they are still in a desperate position. Stalin has been asking again and again for the Allies to attack somewhere in mainland Europe. The British Army is badly depleted already fighting in India and Africa, and having lost so many troops in France, it is unable to contribute to a second front. The Americans, having just joined the war, are still very much on the defensive in the Pacific, and are likewise trying to build up a large force in Europe. 

Given that none of the Western Allies could open a new front to fight the Germans in 1942, it was decided that a series of commando type raids would be launched in the nations of German occupied Europe. This would draw away German troops, badly needed in Russia, to the West and hopefully give the Soviets a much-needed breather. The largest of these operations would be a raid using an entire Infantry Division with tank support on the harbor town of Dieppe. The main formation involved was the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, with support from American Rangers, and several multi-national commando formations. It was decided to use the Canadians because they were available in reserve, waiting in England for assignment to the front. Facing these forces would be elements of the 302nd Static Division, the 302 (Bodenständige) Infanterie Division, and some German Navy and Air Force personnel, approximately 2,500 men.

Commanding Operation Jubilee was Lord Mountbatten, a member of the royal family famous for his ability to fail upwards. A friend of Prime Minister Churchill, Mountbatten once proposed that Canada build a fleet of unsinkable aircraft carriers out of ice. The landing on August 19th 1942, in stark contrast to Vimy, was an appalling disaster. The invasion fleet was spotted before the landings, destroying the element of surprise. The Allied air forces were unable to wrest control of the air above the beaches from the Germans, and suffered badly for their efforts. When the troops hit the beaches, they found that the bombardment from the small Royal Navy contingent was inadequate in the extreme, and that the defenses were not disrupted. The beach was totally unsuitable for the tanks of the Calgary Regiment, bogged down on the beach shale, and few were able to proceed beyond their landing points. Those that did were destroyed. Two hours into the raid none of the objectives assigned to the main force had been taken, and they were ordered to withdraw. Canadian casualties were immense; of the 6,000 that hit the beaches, 3,300 were killed, wounded or taken prisoner. By 14:00L, all forces had withdrawn or surrendered.

Vimy Ridge and Operation Jubilee are the two battles I use as examples because with the possible exception of D-Day, they feature most prominently in our history books, and our understanding of our history. The are presented very much as Canada sending our finest young men to the hell of the World Wars, where they showed the finest attributes of Canadians. Vimy is seen as a glorious moment, one in which "Canada became a nation" according to many; a sort of violent birth/coming of age. There is the famous notion in Canada that the French and British both tried and failed to take Vimy Ridge, and it was the Canadian Corps they looked to for assistance. The Dieppe Raid is seen as a brave, if futile, plan that yielded great results for the future of World War II, paving the way for the invasions of Italy and Normandy. The problem is that all of these assertions are complete nonsense. Not only are they nonsense, they are transparent propaganda that has been perpetuated by ourselves because they are comforting stories.

What happened in France when the Canadian Corps was taking Vimy Ridge? At first, the Battle of Arras was a success for the British Army, taking a significant chunk of real estate by World War I standards. However, as with other battles in that conflict, it soon bogged down into a bloody slugging fest, with heavy casualties and little gained. This pales in the face of the catastrophe that was befalling the French Army. The Neville Offensive was a fiasco, suffering massive casualties and taking little ground despite the major use of tanks by the French. The French Army's morale collapsed and they mutinied. By May many French Army formations were refusing to take part in offensives until better leadership was introduced. The mutinies were suppressed by the summer of 1917 but the French Army would remain brittle, incapable of major offensive action until 1918. In the Spring of 1918, the German Army launched a massive offensive with the objective of destroying the Entente armies before the arrival of major American support. It nearly succeeded, but losses were high and the attack ran out of steam. The Germans never tried to retake Vimy Ridge, the objective having become useless after its loss in 1917.

What's my point you ask, having just been subjected for my perpetually bleak historical analysis? I have just written a very simple, hopefully unbiased analysis of these battles, so now we need to contrast this to what we understand to be the significance of them. In the entire description of the Battle of Vimy Ridge we saw that Canadian soldiers fought and died in a very limited tactical objective to support an operation that was, within a month, cancelled. The ridge itself was not considered a significant enough objective by the enemy to even attempt to retake it. The Battle itself, far from being the decisive victory we seem to think it was, was one of a very few bright spots in a war that was going very much against the Entente. The Russians were in the middle of political turmoil and revolution, the French Army was in mutiny, and the British were exhausted from three years of fighting. The Entente needed a victory to tell the world about, and Vimy was that victory. We have a folklore surrounding Vimy now that, frankly, does not bear out in reality. As I stated before, the notion that the Canadian Corps were the only ones who could take the position is asinine; the Canadian Corps was the largest formation committed to such an effort, and the only one afforded significant preparation time. I was told in school that General Arthur Currie, the great Canadian General, was in charge of this all-Canadian operation, and that they used tactics not previously seen in the war like the creeping barrage. However, Currie was not the overall commander and the creeping barrage was invented by the French the year before.

What can be said about Dieppe? There is an argument that was promoted by Lord Mountbatten himself, that the Dieppe raid provided irreplaceable experience and knowledge for the later landings in the war. This is an absurd attempt to deflect blame from himself and holds no water. The lessons learned at Dieppe involved: perform reconnaissance before committing 10,000 men to an amphibious landing; make sure the tanks won't sink in the sand; make sure to have the element of surprise; and make sure to have air superiority. Far from being hard-won lessons from the battlefield, these are observations a child playing with GI Joes could figure out. In no way could they excuse or mitigate the abhorrent stupidity in this operation, and a decent staff officer should have figured this all out without standing up from his desk. As to the other justification provided: it was a cover to seize an Enigma Machine, the famous mechanical encryption tool. It might well have been, and the operation that did so, launched by one of the Commando Groups (No. 30) did indeed achieve some success in snatching classified information. However, this hypothesis is based entirely on the assumption that one Enigma Machine seized from the German Army or Air Force would help the decryption of Enigma Codes. These branches used different codes, several of which were already being read by this time. The near-impossible to break four-rotor Enigma Machine was the one used by the German Navy specifically, and I find it unlikely that a low quality German Army Division, or an Air Force radar station, would possess such a device. 

The lessons "learned" at Dieppe have been used to give ourselves something of a more grandiose image of our contribution to the war than befits the efforts. While the Dieppe Raid was underway, the Battle of Rzhev in Russia was underway. This battle cost the Soviet Union approximately 300,000 casualties. Dieppe was used as a justification for our (Allied) inaction then and it remains so now. It was a political operation launched by nations feeling the pressure from their co-belligerent to step up. It was designed at the time to strike fear into the hearts of the German occupiers, to show Stalin the Allies were contributing, and to give morale at home a welcome boost. Instead, it was a catastrophe of the first order, poorly led, and irredeemable in the decision-making process.  No amount of heroism (and there was plenty on Dieppe Beach) can paper over the abject failure of this operation.

Both of these military events, contrasting in most respects as they do, are used for the same purpose in our education and our upbringing: they reinforce a myth that we are righteous and brave, we saved the world before and we can save it again. It places us at the center of events that were not about us in most respects. It creates an air of hero worship, a sort of righteousness, that we are the best fighters when we fight for a good cause and that it is always worth it. It replaces coherent thought and objectiveness with pride. These myths are exactly that, myths, but they are treated as fact by us because they are comfortable. They seem harmless though, right?

The myths that arise from this kind of education gives us a varnished, clean view of war that it simply doesn't deserve. These myths seem like victimless tributes to the brave men and some women who fought in our wars. In reality, however, they are in fact masking these events, making them look righteous and clean, justified and downright wholesome. If you spend your days talking about how great the Canadian Corps was at Vimy, then you do not talk about the ground truth that is war. This glorious victory looked great in newspapers, and it sure looks great in a history text book. I bet the seventeen-year-old Canadian soldier, mortally wounded with his guts torn out by shrapnel, doesn't agree with you or much care though. Neither does a wounded Canadian Rifleman drowning in the surf at Dieppe care about what lessons would be learned two years later (if any).

These glorification of those terrible conflicts does a lot to varnish and clean up the image of those battles. It also cleans up what we see now in war. If we were always the brave and righteous, with the cause always pure and sacrifices worth it, then this same attitude will continue. If we can swallow the notion that an irredeemable massacre on a French beach can be justified, then we can justify any sort of terrible event as long as it seems like it was worth it in hindsight to people who weren't there. If we were to talk about these battles as they were, then maybe, just maybe, we would be reluctant to do it all over again.

Ian, April 12th 2021