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On Easter Monday, 1917, the four divisions that made up Canada's military contribution to the First World War attacked and captured Vimy Ridge, the supposedly impregnable German stronghold in northern France.

The French had thrown 20 divisions against the ridge in three massive attacks that failed at a cost of 150,000 casualties. The British followed suit with no better success. The Canadian Corps, fighting together for the first time, did the job in less than eight hours.

This was the first major Allied victory in the Great War — a bright spot in an otherwise disappointing battle of Arras. How did the Canadians succeed when much larger forces had been thwarted?

First, they were a band of brothers. The Canadians were fighting under the command of the British who kept breaking up the Corps, moving units about like chess pieces, but the Canadian high command resisted, insisting the four divisions be brought together.

They were fortunate, too, in that the British officer chosen to lead them was a veteran of the South African Light Horse whose personality had been tempered in the freewheeling atmosphere of the Boer War a decade earlier. Under Major-General Julian Byng, the social gap that separated enlisted men in the British Army from their officers did not exist. In the Canadian Corps, the lowliest infantry soldier was treated as an adult so that each one knew his job. If an officer was struck down, his men could replace him.

One of Byng's first moves was to send Canada's Arthur Currie, then commander of the First Division, to the bloody battlefield of the Somme to analyze why that campaign had failed. The result was a return to tactics that had been abandoned during the long static war. Currie had each platoon organized into a self-contained fighting unit — a tightly knit group of cronies, all interchangeable in the event of casualties.

Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew McNaughton, as counter-battery officer, was instructed to pinpoint all the German guns on Vimy Ridge and dispose of them before the attack. This was considered tactical nonsense by old-time British gunners. And when Harold Hemming, a young McGill graduate, made a major breakthrough in “flash spotting,” an experimental method of locating a gun's position by triangulating its muzzle flashes, the British scoffed. “You take all the fun out of war,” he was told.

But McNaughton not only adopted Hemming's technique, he sought the help of an impressive trio of scientists considered dangerous radicals by the British army. All had become experts in the new science of sound ranging — a method of identifying enemy artillery positions by recording sound waves.

Because of these modern techniques, every German gun on the ridge was knocked out before the assault, save for those the enemy had purposely kept silent until the final hour.

Another key to the Vimy victory was Lieutenant-Colonel Raymond Brutinel, a French-born businessman who had made his fortune in the West and, when the war broke out, been instrumental in establishing the Canadian Machine Gun Corps. As well as commanding the force, he was an innovator who had developed a radical theory based on using “indirect” fire (a theory pooh-poohed by the British and French high commands, to whom the weapon was just a fancy rifle).

“Indirect fire” meant that, instead of firing directly at the enemy, the machine gun could be used to fire over the heads of assaulting troops, harassing road crossings, thwarting carrying parties, and sweeping the front to prevent the Germans from repairing wire.

Brutinel was given his lead by Currie. In almost every trench raid, machine-gun fire was used to intensify the box barrage that held the Germans in a cage of exploding steel. After Vimy, indirect fire, scorned so long by the brass hats, was adopted by all Allied armies.

The thoroughness and scope of the intensive training that preceded the attack was entirely new to the British army. Miles of white and coloured tapes were used to mark out full-scale replicas of the German trench system. By April, every infantry soldier from bottle washer to general officer knew the kind of ground he would have to cover — every fold, every pimple, every depression, every shell hole. Enemy trenches were outlined with tape, while strongholds, pillboxes, even barbed-wire entanglements were marked and labelled.

Entire divisions were put through manoeuvres. Because the troops would have to advance behind a “creeping barrage” — a curtain of exploding steel — that advance had to be choreographed to the second; men's lives depended on it. Officers on horseback carried flags to represent the advancing screen of shrapnel. Over and over again, the troops practised the “Vimy Glide,” walking at the rate of 100 yards every three minutes while instructors checked their watches.

At the First Army's headquarters, a Plasticine model of the Vimy sector showed the German trench system in detail, with all the topographical features. Byng himself often turned up to explain and to guide. “Make sure every man knows his task,” he would say to the sergeants and brigadiers who rubbed shoulders as they examined the model. “Explain it to him again and again. Encourage him to ask questions.”

In no previous British-led offensive had so little been left to chance. The knowledge that nothing had been overlooked seeped down to the newest private soldier and contributed to the high morale of the Canadian Corps.

That high morale produced a victory that helped to turn the tide in the war. The stunning success led to promotions — Byng took command of the entire British Third Army, and was succeeded by Currie, the first Canadian to lead the Canadian Corps.

But it also gave Canada what it needed most: a mythology to help in its transformation from a colonial backwater to a confident and increasingly independent nation.

This article by Pierre Berton appeared in The Globe and Mail on Oct. 30, 2004. Mr. Berton died on Nov. 30, 2004.