In the fall of 1917, three years into the First World War, the front was a ruined and shattered battlefield of endless craters and mud that trapped both the living and the dead. The Canadian Corps was thrust into this menacing warscape to help Britain, France and Belgium achieve a long-sought goal to destroy the enemy’s will to fight. That did not happen, but the battle of Passchendaele was Canada’s third major victory of 1917.
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How is this a victory? A meat grinder of a battle in a war that solved nothing, meant nothing and ended, as Field Marshal Foch said, “In a twenty year armistice.” This a war not fought for the defense of Canada or the rights and freedoms of Canadians and has been called by historians, “The seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century”, from which flowed Stalinism, fascism and another horrific blood bath.