CAPTURE OF VIMY RIDGE.

Wanganui Herald, Volume LI, Issue 15193, 13 April 1917, Page 5

CAPTURE OF VIMY RIDGE.

TREMENDOUS POSSIBILITIES INVOLYEIh Australian and N.Z. Cable Association. LONDON, April 11. A headquarters correspondent says:—The splendid success of the offensive at Vimy has created a most interesting tactical situation, fraught with tremendous possibilities. The enemy has been forced back on the pivot of his previous retreat in a manner creating a dangerously sharp salient. [The Germans have for a long time regarded "Vimy Ridge as the crucial part of their line in the West, and the Austrian military writer, Kurt Wittgenstein, described it as a point of strategically far greater importance than any part round Verdun or in the Champagne. He says: "The Vimy heights, where the Germans now seem to be firmly established, virtually dominate, in fact, the vast plain stretching from Vimy in a north-easterly direction as far as the Belgian frontier beyond Lille; that range of hills, therefore, would be of intrinsic value to the Allies in view of tbeir much advertised spring offensive." The previous Allied offensives had created a double salient in the German line, the line between the salients being, roughly speaking, a semi-circle. The apex of the northern salient was just east of the Arras-Lille road, near Loos, and of the southern salient just east of the same road, near the cluster of houses known as Petit Vimy, the road thus being a chord of the arc. On this chord is the town of Lens, important because of its being the coal centre of Prance. The German line was in a perilous situation, and they have made repeated efforts to rectify it, but without achieving any success. The really critical part of the line was not more than two miles in length, and extended from Giv-enchy-en-Gobelle to the region of Neuville St. Vaast, and this two miles has been captured in the present attack. Previous to the present attack the German line ran along the top of a wooded ridge, which extends almost without break from Givenchy to Farbus, a village just about a mile south of Vimy. Not quite half way between these points is Petit Vimy, which is directly on the main road from Arras to Lille. At the back of the line the ground descends and opens out into the great plain of Northern France, which extends to the Belgian frontier, broken only by a range of hills extending due eastward from Lens. Recognising the immense importance of this position, the Germans had fortified it by every means in their power, and Kurt Wittgenstein seems to have had good grounds for his boast that at this point the Germans were firmly established. They had constructed a great artificial marsh, and on the reverse slope of the Vimy Ridge, protected from shell fire, they had built a vast underground system of, enormous strength. They boasted that the trenches were even stronger than the famous Labyrinth, and they had erected gun positions from which attacking forces could be enfiladed.]