DailyCelestialChallenge-Wednesday-Structures
My dear friends Steemians, I present to you today the challenge of the @ sirknight contest, where it is appropriate to present important structures of history; Canadian National Memorial of Vimy.
Canadian National Memorial of Vimy
Located in the vicinity of the town of the same name in the area of the Pass of Calais, and in the center of the current park of the battlefield of the Hill of Vimy. In her they faced, between the 9 and the 12 of April of 1917, the four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force against three divisions of the Sixth German Army, that finally, before the Canadian push they had to retire delivering the hill.
The 100 hectares of the Vimy memorial were ceded by the French state to Canada in perpetuity in 1922. The place is still riddled with tunnels, trenches, craters and unexploded ammunition, so most of it is closed to the public, although they can be Visit some of the trenches.
The monument was designed by the Canadian sculptor Walter Seymour Allward, who described it as a sermon against the futility of wars. It took 11 years to complete, opening on July 26, 1936.
It consists of a great wall of more than 7 meters high that represents an impenetrable defensive wall, to whose sides there are two groups of human figures. On it two large pillars of 30 meters high represent Canada and France. In the monument are inscribed the names of the 11,285 Canadian soldiers who died in the First World War and have no known grave.
On June 2, 1940 Hitler visited the monument and toured the trenches, assigning special units of the Waffen SS for protection from the possible destruction and vandalism of the regular troops of the Wehrmacht, who were not prevented from razing other French war monuments . According to the historian Serge Durflinger, Hitler admired the monument because it did not show any message of triumph over Germany, and that is why the Germans respected it throughout the Second World War.