Vimy Ridge

By Alexander McKee

To the French, The Battle of Vimy Ridge was bloody slaughter. To the British, it was stalemate. But to the Canadians, it was their finest hour.

On Easter Monday 1917, in the midst of the First World War, the Battle of Vimy Ridge began at 5.30 AM with the roar of a thousand heavy guns, howitzers and mortars. Six days later, the Canadian Corps seized Vimy Ridge from Germany.

One of Canada’s most spectacular military triumphs – gaining more ground and capturing more prisoners than any British offensive on the Western Front – the victory was nonetheless bittersweet, coming at a cost of over 10,000 casualties.

Based on eyewitness accounts, Vimy Ridge is a chilling and highly personal recollection of the famous battle. Drawing on experiences in the trenches, ill-advised leadership and the true cost of First World War losses, McKee’s study is an invaluable reconstruction of both sides of the war.

Alexander McKee was selling aviation articles to flying magazines by the age of eighteen. During the Second World War he wrote for a succession of army newspapers and later became a writer/producer for the British Forces Network. Since 1956 he has been researching and writing books on all branches of naval, military and aviation history. He instigated the excavation of the Tudor ship Mary Rose in the seabed off Portsmouth, which he describes in King Henry VIII’s Mary Rose. He has authored nineteen books.