Canada's Hundred Days

Canada’s Hundred Days is the name given to the series of attacks made by the Canadian Corps between 8 August and 11 November 1918, during the Hundred Days Offensive of World War I. Reference to this period as Canada's Hundred Days is due to the substantial role the Canadian Corps of the British First Army played during the offensive.

During this time, the Canadian Corps fought in the Battle of Amiens, Second Battle of the Somme, Battle of the Scarpe, Battle of the Canal du Nord, Battle of Cambrai, Battle of the Selle, Battle of Valenciennes and finally at Mons, on the final day of combat before the Armistice of 11 November 1918. In terms of numbers, during those 96 days the Canadian Corps' four over-strength or 'heavy' divisions of roughly 100,000 men, engaged and defeated or put to flight elements of forty seven German divisions, which represented one quarter of the German forces faced by the Allied Powers fighting on the Western Front. However, their successes came at a heavy cost; Canadians suffered 20% of their battle-sustained casualties of the war during the same period. The Canadian Corps suffered 45,835 casualties during this offensive.

The German Spring Offensive, which began with Operation Michael in March 1918, had petered out by the Second Battle of the Marne in July 1918. By this time the German superiority of numbers on the Western Front had sunk to a negligible lead which would be reversed as more American troops arrived. German manpower was exhausted. The German High Command predicted they would need 200,000 men per month to make good the losses suffered. Returning convalescents could supply 70,000–80,000 per month but there were only 300,000 recruits available from the next annual class of eighteen-year-olds. The German failure to break through at the Second Battle of the Marne, or to destroy the Allied armies in the field, allowed Ferdinand Foch, the Allied Supreme Commander, to proceed with the planned major counteroffensive at the Battle of Soissons on 18 July 1918. By this point in time, the American Expeditionary Force was present in France in large numbers and invigorated the Allied armies. Likewise, the British Expeditionary Force had also been reinforced by large numbers of troops returned from the Sinai and Palestine Campaign and the Italian Front and replacements held back in Britain by the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. Foch agreed on a proposal by Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, to strike on the Somme, east of Amiens with the intention of forcing the Germans away from the Amiens–Paris railway.

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