Before dawn on a snowy Easter Monday on 9th April 1917, the first wave of twenty thousand Canadians rose out of their trenches in Northern France to attack a heavily fortified escarpment held by the German Army since October 1914.

Almost 20 years later, in July 1936, after construction that took eleven years, the Canadian National Vimy Memorial was unveiled to an audience of over 100,000 people, as many people as had been there during the fierce fighting in 1917.