By Kevin Ma
St. Albert army cadets will march before the lieutenant governor this weekend to commemorate one of the most important battles in Canadian history.
About 25 members of the 3069 1 Field Ambulance Royal Canadian Army Cadet Corps of St. Albert will join some 225 other cadets from across Alberta at the Edmonton Garrison Sunday to commemorate the 99th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge.
That four-day conflict started on April 9, 1917, and cost thousands of Canadians their lives, including one resident of St. Albert.
This Sunday's event, during which cadets will parade past Lt.-Gov. Lois Mitchell, is sort of a preview of a bigger march down Jasper Avenue the cadets plan to do next year for the 100th anniversary, said Ken Usher, vice-president for Alberta with the Army Cadet League of Canada.
The battle at Vimy Ridge was the first time that all four Canadian divisions fought alongside each other, and is a significant milestone in Canada's history, Usher said.
"This was the awakening of Canada's army."
Vimy Ridge was part of a series of battles around the city of Arras, France, in the First World War, said Rory Cory, senior curator at the Military Museums of Calgary.
"By 1917, the Russians were mostly on the ropes," he explains, and they wanted their European allies to make a push against the Germans and give them some breathing room. The Allies, meanwhile, were looking for a breakthrough on the western front.
Vimy Ridge overlooked much of the Arras region, making it a strategic spot for artillery. British and French forces had both tried to take the location, only to be repelled by heavy German defences.
The Canadians spent all winter preparing for this battle, digging bunkers, raiding trenches, and planting huge explosives underneath the German lines, reports Veteran Affairs Canada. They also dropped over a million shells on German positions in the week leading up to the battle.
About 20,000 Canadians took part in the initial assault at 5:30 a.m., Veteran Affairs reports.
Cory said one of the keys to their success was the use of the creeping barrage – a relatively new tactic where troops would advance very close behind artillery fire so as to not give their opponents time to recover from it. Troops also used a lot of light machine guns for mobile fire support, and used captured German weapons to secure their positions once they claimed them.
Of the 100,000 Canadians involved in the battle, some 11,000 were wounded and some 3,600 killed, Veteran Affairs reports.
An enormous monument now stands atop the ridge engraved with the names of some 11,285 Canadian soldiers who were declared missing, presumed dead, in France, said Roy Toomey, a historian with the Musée Héritage Museum who visited the site in 2013.
"It's holy ground, really."
The names of five St. Albert-area residents are on the monument, including Sgt. John Hugh Kennedy, who died in the battle for the ridge itself.
"The Kennedy family was a family that's been in St. Albert a very, very long time," Toomey said, having emigrated from Ireland. John's brother, Daniel, is also on the monument.
Vimy Ridge lit a fire under the Canadian identity and won us international respect, said Ian Cusack, one of the St. Albert cadets participating in Sunday's ceremony.
"We weren't just people from different colonies together. We were one thing, just Canadian."
The soldiers in this battle wanted so badly to help others and struggled tremendously for their efforts, he continued.
"It's pretty awful to just forget about them and write it off as just history."
Sunday's parade starts at the garrison's Lecture Training Facility at 2 p.m.
