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Vimy Ridge Battle unites a Country.

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  • #16
    Originally posted by Officer of Engineers View Post
    Ben, ok, this maybe a simple question to you but it has some very complicated answers, so bear with me.

    1) During WWI when the Canadians came over, Kitchener wanted to chop the Canadians up and split them amongst his British Forces. Sam Hughes refused and demanded the Canadians stay together as the Canadian Army. Had Vimy Ridge went badly, the Canadians would most likely had been chopped up and spread amongst the British. But since that was a victory, the Canadians got to manage their own tactical picture.

    This right to field your own army under your own officers was restricted to the Dominions. The British Indian Army came under the command of London and not Dehli for example.

    2) The disaster at Dunkirk meant the British had very little equipment left but there were still two fully equipped divisions in Great Britain, these were Canadian and they were the only force capable of launching offensive action at the time, resulting in the Dieppe disaster.

    3) Canada kept Great Britain alive. The Battle of the Atlantic was a Canadian victory.

    4) As a result, the immediate re-armament and re-enforcement of the British Army after Dunkirk came from Canada. The Canadians were the ones who could punched through the German screens the fastest.

    What this all meant is that London could not p!ss off Ottawa. Canadian blood, sweat, and tears kept Great Britain from falling. Just Canadian wheat alone was the difference between starvation and continued fighting.

    Thus, it is no surprise that came D-Day, the Canadians were given a beach.
    Okay, I had to do some research, Kitchener, Sam Hughes, read up on Vimy Ridge, Dunkirk (Thank god for Wikiepdia). I pretty much get the picture you're drawing and I understand why the Canadians had to be given a beach. A question though, a lot of British Naval ships were involved in convoys to Russia, right? Were they considered for trans-Atlantic voyages?

    Originally posted by Officer of Engineers View Post
    I've noticed a big difference in you, Ben. Gone were your younger years stating that Israel was a superpower. You know what the IsDF can do and what they cannot do. I'm just sorry about the way you had to go about learning that.
    Well, before my prolonged hiatus I was in the army, and being in the army has a strange way of maturing people (Not too much, thankfully). Before I left I was a teenaged punk. Now I know better. I'm still learning though, which is why as a general rule I ask lots of questions. Wikipedia is good, but WAB is also a great source of information and is a lot more hands on and dynamic, especially if you don't understand something.

    To be completely honest, though, I'm not sorry about the way I had to learn some of life's lessons. In order to build yourself up you need to tear yourself down first, and being in a war is something not many people can claim, and something that definitely has shaded my outlook on life. It is a shame people had to die, but again, that's life in the service, no?

    I don't remember who said it, but there's something along the lines of "When I was 17, my parents were by god the two dumbest people on the face of God's earth. They didn't know a damn thing. By the time I turned 22 it surprised me how much they managed to learn in 5 years". Oscar Wilde also said it: "I'm not young enough to know everything"

    Thanks for the tutelage, Colonel, and everyone else, as well.
    Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

    Abusing Yellow is meant to be a labor of love, not something you sell to the highest bidder.

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    • #17
      Originally posted by bigross86 View Post
      Basically, the Brits should call everybody but the Brits themselves? ;)
      In fairness the British Army has probably been consistently amongst the most professional, if not the most professional, army in the world throughout its long history. Unfortunately in WW1 they were cursed with senior officers who just didn't have a clue about the changing nature of war, piled on top of the fact that they had to conscript young boys and old men to make up the numbers.

      The reason that the Australian Army did well was because our troops were volenteers and because being a less class segregated society, a militia officer of German Jewish decent - John Monash - was able to make it to bring his revolutionary ideas to the top and turn the Australian Corp into a crack outfit. I suspect that the history of the Canadian Corp might tell a similar story. Lets not forget though that as well as the Colonials did in specific operations, it was the Tommys who were made to fight on the Western Front who were the backbone of the British Empire's effort there.
      "There is no such thing as society" - Margaret Thatcher

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