Book Review: The Vimy Trap
By Debbie Grisdale July 14, 2017
From the Catalyst, Summer 2017
The Vimy Trap, or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great War
By Ian McKay and Jamie Swift
Between the Lines, 2016
Reviewed by Debbie Grisdale
April 9, 2017 marked the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge where 3,598 Canadians died and 7,000 were wounded, with an estimated 20,000 casualties on the German side.
In this timely book , MacKay and Swift focus on the evolution, over the past century, of the remembrance of WWI, and in particular the battle for Vimy. Canada has moved from seeing it as a battle in a horrific, pointless, and costly war to a romantic myth that Vimy in some way represented the “birth of our nation.”