The battlefields of WWI and WWII

The plan had been to head to Dieppe, but as dad looked at the map from the navigator's seat, we decided to take a little detour up to Vimy Ridge. Vimy is the site of one of Canada's great military battles where our troops were able to take a very strategic point from the German forces in WWI. Our troops suffered significant losses, but were successful in taking the ridge, which arguably broke the stalemate pushing the Germans back. I had seen the memorial many times on tv, particularly on Remembrance Day, but it was much more than I expected. It is surrounded by land that is still heavily marked by the craters left from the artillery and mortars. It's is now covered in grass, kept short by a herd of sheep, but it's not hard to imagine the muddy hell that once lay on these grounds.

From Vimy, we got back on route and made our way to Dieppe. It was a war memorial kind of day. Dieppe was the site of one of Canada's greatest defeats of WWII. The Canadian Battalion was sent to Dieppe to attempt a sea based attack on heavily armed German held territory in Normandy. The  results were catastrophic - and in seeing the beach, it's hard to believe that anybody thought any other result was possible. We stopped at the Canadian cemetery, which is an interesting place as many of the soldiers buried here were actually buried by German forces. Walking through the cemetery and reading the inscriptions on the headstones makes your heart hurt. The love from families, parents, wive, children and siblings. And then the headstones where the soldier's name is unknown. The weather in Dieppe was kinda what I expected, cold, rainy and windy, fitting for the visit.