After advancing only 3. Givenchy-en-Gohelle, Pas de Calais, France. The Memorial bears the names of those who died in France with no known grave.
Auchonvillers, Somme, France. It is located at the site of the Battle of the Somme. Zonnebeke, Belgium. Ottawa, Ontario. Honours the contributions of all Indigenous people in war and peace support operations from the First World War to today. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier honours the more than , Canadians who sacrificed their lives in the cause of peace and freedom. The National War Memorial symbolizes the sacrifice of all Canadian Armed Forces personnel who have served Canada in the cause of peace and freedom.
All through the night the Canadian troops fought to close the gap. In addition they mounted a counter-attack to drive the enemy out of Kitcheners' Wood, an oak plantation near St. In the morning two more disastrous attacks were made against enemy positions. Little ground was gained and casualties were extremely heavy, but these attacks bought some precious time to close the flank. The fierce battle of St. Julien lay ahead.
On April 24, the Germans attacked in an attempt to obliterate the Salient once and for all. Another violent bombardment was followed by another gas attack in the same pattern as before. This time the target was the Canadian line. Here, through terrible fighting, withered with shrapnel and machine-gun fire, hampered by their issued Ross rifles which jammed, violently sick and gasping for air through soaked and muddy handkerchiefs, they held on until reinforcements arrived.
Thus, in their first major appearance on a European battlefield, the Canadians established a reputation as a formidable fighting force. The battle took place on the Ypres salient on the Western Front, in Belgium, outside the city of Ypres now known by its Flemish name, Ieper.
The untested Canadians distinguished themselves as a determined fighting force, resisting the horror of the first large-scale poison gas attack in modern history. Canadian troops held a strategically critical section of the frontline until reinforcements could be brought in. More than 6, Canadians were killed, wounded or captured in the Second Battle of Ypres.
The men of the First Canadian Division — farmers, lumberjacks , lawyers, factory workers, business owners, teachers and doctors — were among the first Canadians to volunteer for service in the war. More than 31, men travelled to England as part of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in October , and after a training period in England, arrived in France in February By this time, the fighting on the Western Front had stabilized into a war of attrition between the great armies of Germany on one side and France, Britain and its empire on the other — dug into a vast system of opposing trenches, running from the North Sea to Switzerland.
In April , after a short taste of trench life in a relatively quiet sector of the front, the First Canadian Division was ordered into the Ypres salient — a bulge in the front lines on the Flanders plain, east of the ancient Belgian city of Ypres. The Allies wanted to protect Ypres partly because it offered rail and road links to ports on the coast that the Allies were determined to keep out of German hands. The salient was a dangerous place for Allied defenders. It was surrounded on three sides by enemy soldiers and artillery.
The trench works the Canadians moved into in April were also woefully inadequate — shallow, poorly constructed, and littered with human excrement, pools of water, and the unburied corpses of soldiers killed in previous fighting. Chemical weapons had been outlawed by international treaties before the First World War. In the spring of , however, Germany decided to test a new weapon — chlorine gas — on the Ypres salient.
On 22 April , the Germans released more than tonnes of the gas from thousands of canisters arranged along German lines. The heaviest part of the gas cloud hit the Algerians, the chlorine burning their throats and causing their lungs to fill with foam and mucus, effectively drowning the men in their own fluids. As German forces moved from behind the drifting gas cloud toward the now-empty Algerian trenches, Canadian and British battalions — including soldiers suffering from the gas — moved to plug the hole.
During hours of desperate fighting that day, with help from isolated groups of French and Algerians, they managed to stop the enemy from encircling the First Canadian Division inside the salient, and from marching on the city of Ypres. On 24 April , a second gas attack hit the Canadians head-on. None of the troops carried gas masks at this point in the war.
Some Canadians fled, and many sought refuge by lying face-down in the crevices of their trenches, where the green, hazy gas cloud, heavier than air, found and killed them. But many others survived by holding urine-soaked cloths and handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses — after being instructed to do so by medical officers who had identified the gas as chlorine.
There were about one million gas casualties during the First World War — 12, of them Canadian. Suffering in later years from chemically-induced illnesses and disabilities, they would sometimes fight unsuccessfully to have medical claims approved, having failed to document their injuries at the time.
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