Vimy (22 page)

Once the hidden guns were located, the trick was to hit them, blow them up, force the enemy to repair or move them, hit them again and again, and during the final assault, to make things so hot that the enemy gunners couldn’t operate. This all required stunning accuracy-the same accuracy that would be essential when the troops moved forward under a canopy of flying steel, exploding only a few yards ahead. If the range was slightly off or the shells faulty, men could die at the hands of their own gunners. All generals in the Great War expected a certain number of casualties from friendly fire; it was the artillery’s job to keep these to a minimum. The French, it was reckoned, lost fifty thousand men killed by their own shells, the result of faulty arithmetic. Discarding obsolete methods, the Canadians brought science to bear on the art of gunnery.

Though they did not look it, these huge artillery pieces were sensitive weapons. The old hands didn’t treat them that way. Corrections for wind, weather, and barrel wear were primitive. As McNaughton later put it, anybody who tried to develop greater accuracy in shooting “was looked on as somebody who ought to have his head read-this wasn’t war at all, this was some sort of fandango going on.”

But McNaughton persisted. To a layman, his meticulous experiments are breathtaking. One example is his investigation into the problems of barrel wear. As a gun barrel wears from constant use, its muzzle velocity drops and the shells start falling short. This can mean in the case of an 18-pounder, firing at a range of eight thousand yards, a loss of three hundred yards during a gun’s life-enough to kill all the troops moving behind the curtain of shells. Yet that is only an
average
barrel; some wear out faster than others. For this reason the tables showing gun corrections are not meticulously accurate.

Here McNaughton’s scientific background came into play. He was familiar with a device known as a Boulengé electrical chronograph with which he could measure the time it took a shell to pass through two electrically charged wire screens. That knowledge enabled him to figure out the actual muzzle velocity of each weapon. As a result, every key gun in the Vimy battle would be individually calibrated.

The old rules of thumb were no longer good enough. At the outset of the war the British field gunners had laughed at the idea of making any allowance for weather. Even as late as 1915, when the Royal Flying Corps offered to pass on the details of wind velocities each morning to the heavy artillery, the staff reply was: “We cannot make use of this information.” Astonishingly, the Somme was the first battle in which the artillery took weather reports into account.

Yet a falling barometer could make a difference of three hundred yards on a five-thousand-yard shoot, while a strong wind could push a big shell fifteen yards off target. McNaughton and his counter-battery staff changed all that, adjusting the range tables to correct for weather and revising the dangerously inaccurate French maps. This was another reason why air observation was so essential to the artillery.

Outworn ideas had almost deprived the army of its quintessential weapon, the 18-pound field gun. Before the war, many British gunners, looking back to the days of fire and movement, had wanted to standardize production on the lighter and more mobile 13-pounder, the choice of the nearly obsolete horse artillery. Only by the closest of votes-a tie broken by the British Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour – was the 18-pounder saved. In the siege warfare that followed it became the workhorse of the artillery. Sited close to the front, with its direct and wicked range, it could be fired like a peashooter to demoralize the enemy. It far outshone its lighter and more mobile cousin: for every shot fired by the 13- pounder, the Canadians fired seventy from the heavier gun.

Its companion was the 4.2-inch howitzer, absolutely essential for trench warfare because of its high, looping trajectory. Its barrel slanted upward at a 45-degree angle, and its thirty-five-pound shell dropped into a trench or onto a parapet could create terrifying havoc.

A heavier model, the 6-inch howitzer, placed farther back, weighed more than a ton. Firing from its wheeled carriage, it hurled its hundred-pound high-explosive shells for more than six miles into the German rear areas where McNaughton’s wizards had pinpointed targets that nobody but an airman could see.

There were also heavier howitzers, set even farther back. The 8-inch lobbed a shell weighing 180 pounds, so heavy that only the strongest gunner could manhandle it in two lifts-one to the knees, a second chest high. The largest piece of ordnance in the Canadian Corps (the bigger howitzers and naval guns were under Army command by the British) was the gigantic 9.2-inch howitzer, so large that it travelled in three sections, each weighing four and a half tons and hauled by tractors. This gun, which took twelve hours to assemble, hurled a 290-pound shell that smashed pill boxes, gun emplacements, dugouts, and batteries into rubble.

To put any of these guns into action and keep them firing required a complicated infrastructure. Two hundred men were needed to handle one battery of four 18-pounders; these included mechanics, saddlers, blacksmiths, drivers, and cooks as well as gunners. Fifty men were always on duty at the guns. Caisson drivers came up at night, halting several hundred yards from the gun positions in order to leave no revealing tracks for the German air observers. Though it was safer to be a gunner than an infantry man, the work was hard. It took stamina and training to manhandle a three-hundred-pound shell and fling it into the breach with shrapnel bursting all around. In battle the emphasis is usually on the infantry; but at Vimy it was the gunners, stripped to the waist, sweating despite the wind and the sleet, labouring hour after hour without rest or let up, who were the real victors in the battle to seize the ridge.

3

Completing the arsenal of howitzers, guns, and mortars was the deadliest weapon of all – the one that had transformed warfare. The heavy, water-cooled Vickers machine gun and the more portable Lewis, with its cylindrical feed drum, spewing out bullets at rates that could exceed five hundred rounds a minute, had mechanized the science of killing. They dominated the battlefield. The firepower of each weapon exceeded that of a platoon of riflemen. Until the tank was invented nothing could stand up to machine-gun fire. Men were torn in two by its hail of bullets. Entire sections dropped like grain before the scythe. But it took a long time for the High Command to understand this truth.

The British thought of the machine gun as a kind of super rifle. It took the Canadians to demonstrate at Vimy that it could also be employed as light artillery. The man behind this innovation was another adopted Canadian, whose unorthodox views and keen mind had been honed on the frontier of the Canadian North West.

Raymond Brutinel, a twenty-three-year-old reservist in the French Army, had emigrated to Edmonton in 1905. For several years he roamed the West from Pembina to Fort Macleod, from the Skeena to the Peace. He was an explorer, a prospector, a land developer during the great boom, and, on occasion, a newspaper editor. In that yeasty era, Brutinel amassed a fortune. By 1914, still in his early thirties, he was living the life of a millionaire businessman in Montreal.

In his photograph, Brutinel looks as if Central Casting had sent him into the lines to play a comic Frenchman. With his neat little moustache, his pince-nez, his snapping eyes, and his smallish but definitely Cyranoesque nose, he is a caricature of an officer. In reality, he was a dedicated and dynamic figure who saw in the machine gun possibilities that others had overlooked.

One of the remarkable features of the 1st Canadian Motor Machine Gun Brigade, which Brutinel commanded, was that it was raised and underwritten largely by private money. Some of Canada’s biggest industrialists footed the bill. It’s significant that all were self-made millionaires, that most had had frontier experience, and that none had had a previous military background. They included Herbert Holt, the former CPR mountain contractor, J.R. Booth, the Ottawa lumberman, Clifford Sifton, the Western politician, J.W. McConnell, the Montreal broker, and, later, John Craig Eaton, the Toronto merchant, and “Klondike Joe” Boyle, the Yukon mining magnate. Boyle, for instance, raised an entire battalion of Klondikers, paid for it himself, and brought it out of the Yukon at his own expense. The least Sam Hughes could do was to make him an honorary colonel. Boyle, who went on to further adventures in Russia and Rumania, had his maple leaf lapel badges fashioned out of pure Klondike gold.

As a result of this remarkable demonstration of faith in the new weapon, and thanks to Brutinel’s importuning, Canada entered the war with a machine-gun arsenal stronger than that of the British. In England, however, Brutinel met with incredible resistance. The machine gunner’s enthusiasm was temporarily dashed by Kitchener himself, who announced that too many machine guns would throw the divisional fire power out of balance! Lieutenant-General Alderson, then in charge of the Canadians, tended to agree with Kitchener, but by the summer of 1915, when the machine-gun brigade joined the 1st Division in France, Brutinel was able to change Alderson’s mind. The Second Battle of Ypres and the brutal engagements that followed had opened the commander’s eyes to the possibilities of the new weapon.

In Arthur Currie, Brutinel had an ally. With Currie’s approval in 1916, he began to explore and test his ideas about indirect fire power. The supposedly inflexible Germans were also exploring this theory, but the British and French machine-gun schools discouraged the idea. “Indirect” means just that: instead of firing directly at the enemy, Brutinel believed the machine gun could also be used to fire over the heads of the assaulting troops, thickening the barrages of larger shells; that it could be used to harass road crossings, preventing enemy carrying parties from using overland routes; that it could fill in gaps left by artillery fire; and that by sweeping the forward lines of the enemy, it could prevent the Germans from repairing the wire destroyed by the 18-pounders.

In the Canadian West, tramping through the snow-covered forests of British Columbia, Brutinel had learned to act on his own. In the opening days of June 1916, in the battle of Sanctuary Wood in the Ypres salient, this experience paid off. The machine-gun brigade had, for the first time, been withdrawn from the line for rest. Brutinel was about to go on leave. But the situation made him uneasy, and he decided one morning to go forward to Corps headquarters. Suddenly at eight o’clock the Germans launched a four-hour barrage, which Brutinel miraculously survived. He went at once to the nearest headquarters, and there Brigadier-General L.J. Lipsett, then the commander of the 2nd Brigade, gave him the worst possible news: the 3rd Division on his left had suffered a devastating blow; its commander was dead; several brigadiers were either dead or captured; the front-line trenches had been blasted to rubble; entire units had been destroyed; communications were knocked out. Worst of all, the opening of a six-hundred-yard gap offered the Germans a breakthrough that could take them all the way to Ypres.

Brutinel offered at once to put his weary machine gunners back into the line to secure the flank of Lipsett’s brigade and close the gap. By four the next morning they were in place. The gap was scarcely plugged when Brutinel received orders from Corps to withdraw at once. Had he done so, the Germans could burst through. He ignored the order. The next day a second order came through. Again Brutinel ignored it; the situation was still too critical to move his brigade back. On the third day a different kind of order came: Brutinel was to report personally to the new Corps commander who had taken over from Alderson – General Byng. Back he went, full of misgivings.

Byng was icy cold:

“Here is a map of the front. Please explain the present position as far as you know it.”

Brutinel talked while the new commander listened.

Finally Byng spoke: “Now explain why you failed to obey my orders. A battle is in progress, and the only reserves I had were engaged without my knowledge.”

Brutinel explained why he felt he had no other course but to stay and hold the line. When Brutinel had finished, Byng rose, laid a hand on the young colonel’s shoulder, and declared, “Had you not done as you did, I would have had you court-martialled.”

Byng agreed that the machine-gun brigade should stay with the infantry until the situation in the field was resolved.

“It’s a good way to spend my leave,” Brutinel remarked.

“Leave!” cried Byng. “What sort of fools have we got here? Officers with leave warrants in their pockets staying instead to fight battles!”

Brutinel explained that he did not feel this was at all unusual.

“I think we’ve struck it rich,” said Byng, turning to his chief of staff.

It is doubtful that any other army would have given a junior officer his head in the way Raymond Brutinel was given his at Vimy. But in spite of critics within and outside the Canadian Corps, who worried about the expenditure of so much ammunition, his tactics were adopted. In almost every raid directed at the enemy lines, machine-gun fire was used to intensify the box barrages that held the Germans in a cage of exploding steel.

Soon the French became curious. Their chief of staff visited Byng at his headquarters and asked to be informed about the new technique. Byng by now was on familiar terms with his junior: “You’ll have to make a full report, Bruty, for our French friends.”

To which Colonel Brutinel replied: “A report from me would be of little value. The report should be made by the Germans themselves. They, and they alone, can give first hand information on the subject from the business end of it.”

Brutinel had a questionnaire prepared for intelligence officers to use on captured Germans. The results were sent to the French without comment. The prisoners reported that indirect fire had made it difficult to repair at night trenches that had been destroyed by the big guns during the day. The machine guns hampered the delivery of supplies to the German lines. In the last days before the attack, they made it impossible. Moreover, when the machine guns were firing, no German could man a parapet or evacuate the wounded men.