Hill 70

Thursday, February 22, 2024

When we were done at Vimy Ridge we continued on to Ypres. Ypres was near one of the areas where I served on my mission and I just can’t say the name of the city in English. It will always be Ieper to me. When I was here on my mission Ieper was actually spelled Ijper. In old Dutch they used to have a letter which looked like a y with two dots over it. Once typewriters came along they didn’t have that letter so they decided to type it using an ij together which kind of looks like a y with two dots over it. For the city of Ieper, the English decided to just go with a y to get Ypres and the Flemish decided to just go with Ieper since that is how it is pronounced in Dutch anyway.

On our way to Ieper (I’m going with the modern Flemish spelling) we stopped at hill 70. This was James second battle. After the Canadians success (but a loss for the greater battle) in the battle of Vimy ridge, Arthur Currie was put in charge of the Canadian Army. Arthur was the guy in charge of the first Canadian division. While he didn’t have a ton of battle experience, he was a brilliant man and not scared of saying what he believed.

The biggest difference he made was he kept the Canadians together. With the loss of so many troops, the British wanted to split the Canadians up and use them to strengthen other battalions, but Arthur would have none of it. He figured that his men had now fought together and had formed a bond between the men that can’t be forged in any other way. He also argued that they knew how each other fought and that also gave them extra strength. As the war progressed, he was proven correct, and the reputation of the Canadians as a superior army continued to grow.

For those (like me) who don’t know what a salient is, it is when a line surrounds an area on three sides.

At Ieper, the allied forces had pushed back the German lines enough to form what they now referred to as the Ieper Salient. The Germans were trying hard to close the salient and the Allies were doing their best to take advantage of it.

Hill 70 was just south of the Ieper salient, so the Canadians were told to go take hill 70 to draw German troops away from Ieper. Actually, the Canadians were told to take the city of Lens but Arthur told them that would be a waste of time. Hill 70 was a high point and as long as the Germans controlled it, they could control anything nearby. He finally convinced them to let him take Hill 70 instead of Lens.

The battle of hill 70 was taken by the Canadians without the help of any other forces. It was a success that they shared with nobody else.

The Canadians attacked hill 70 on August 15, 1917 with 100,000 troops and then held off twenty-one German counter attacks. They lost 9,000 soldiers (1,556 died) but took out 25,000 Germans. That means that he had a 1.6% chance of dying in this offensive.

If we’re keeping track (and I am), James had a 3.6% chance of dying a Vimy Ridge and 1.6% of dying here so at this point in his career as a soldier he had a 5.1% chance of dying.

If we’re talking about being wounded, he had a 7.4% chance of being wounded on Hill 70 and a 7.0% chance of being wounded at Vimy Ridge so overall he had a 13.9% chance of being wounded. Adding it all up, the odds of him still standing at this point were 82%. That’s crazy, he had a 1 in 5 chance of being dead or wounded after only two battles. If he had five friends, one of them was gone.

The monument at Hill 70 was very simple but quite nice. I thought it was very well done for such a small town. This is what they had on top of the hill.