Originally posted by GRUNHERZ
So now yoiu say Vimy didnt have a week long artillery barrage to start?
Or is Vimy no longer central tro your theory? I forget which version of the tale you are spinning now...
You are enttled to your own opinions, but not your own set of facts...
Grun if I am wrong in a fact show me where.
Sinced you asked. Vimy was attacked by the allies before the Canadians attacked it and each attack was the same. Weeks of artillery followed by a mass attack where the British or French were all slaughtered.
The Canadians got it and were expected to fail as well but they did not only take the ridge but lost relatively few men in the process. The key reason is they did things differently. The week long artillary barrage was not a random attack on the positions they were going to attack but was directed at wipeing out the German artillery, something that suprisingly had not be done before. The Canadians had maped each German gun before the battle and they had ranged all of their guns so they could zero in on each German gun.
They also did not pound no mans land but tried to keep it intact for the battle so their troops would not get bogged down in the mud.
They also cut the wire by hand and did not expect the artillery to destroy it so they were not funnelled into the machine gun killing zones.
They did other things as well but by now you should get my point that Vimy was full of innovative concepts all applied together to achieve victory where others failed miserably.
As to how Vimy fits into my theory Vimy showed that different tactics could have dramatically different results from the stalemate slaughters the British were so good at organizing. However after the Canadians took Vimy there was no followup plan. They did not know what to do once they were on the ridge as no one in the British high command expected them to take it. What the Canadians learned from this was what they did in the last 100 days and that is what the Blitzkrieg was based on.
The rest of the battle of Arras that was part of the Vimy campaign sputtered to the halt and the British predictably failed to achieve their objectives which were against much easier targets than what the Canadians were given.