Vimy, Gallipoli, and other battles

Canadian news media have been dominated for the past few days by reports about the 100th anniversary of the successful Canadian campaign to capture the German stronghold of Vimy Ridge in northern France. The main battle took place on April 10, 1917, 100 years ago. It was a bloody battle with heavy loss of life, several thousand Canadians died, mostly young men in their 20s. It is identified among other things as the battle at which Canada "came of age" as a nation. It was a strategically important battle that contributed materially to the allied victory over the German forces and their allies the following year. Its importance was recognized at once and duly commemorated not just in England and here in Canada where so much young  Canadian blood was shed achieving this victory, but throughout the British Empire. In the Adelaide Hills a conspicuous landmark on the road from Adelaide to Murray Bridge was named Vimy Ridge, to commemorate this battle. The Canadian war memorial at Vimy Ridge, an aesthetically beautiful memorial constructed in the two decades after peace was restored in 1918, is a fitting tribute to the thousands of young men who died in the battle of Vimy Ridge. Much larger numbers of young German soldiers are buried in the German war graves than in those of the Canadian and other allied soldiers. Even so, the senseless loss of young lives was orders of magnitude less than in the pointless Gallipoli campaign two years earlier. Over a quarter of a million troops from Australia, New Zealand, India and Britain were killed in the utterly irrelevant Gallipoli campaign. Even larger numbers of Turkish soldiers died in this localized episode of the Great War of 1914-1918, all to no military or strategic purpose whatsoever. I remember thinking as Wendy and I walked over the battlefields at Gallipoli in 2006, of this wastage of useful young lives -- and how fortunate I had been in escaping entanglement in the blood baths that stained the 20th century.