Artillery caused roughly six in ten battlefield casualties in the First World War, more than the machine gun, the flamethrower, and the tank combined. That figure comes from the British Army’s own medical and statistical history, published in 1931. It is the weapon that did the most killing in this war, and the one modern audiences can least often name.
This episode is built around five Canadian veterans, recorded decades after the war for oral history archives, describing artillery from underneath: Private Harry Routhier and Lieutenant John Percy Copp of the 46th Battalion, Private Donald Stevenson of the 217th and later the 46th, Gunner Thomas Wood of the 1st and 57th Batteries, and Private George Hatch of the 20th Battalion. Copp describes carrying an unexploded eighty pound German shell out of a dugout kitchen by hand. Hatch describes surviving a premature explosion in his own Stokes mortar crew by pure chance of timing. Wood describes the barrage at Vimy Ridge as “out of this world,” twice, from the position of an eighteen pounder crew firing behind it.
The episode also traces the technical history of the war’s deadliest weapon, from the ground up. The 1914 shrapnel doctrine, and why it failed against trenches and barbed wire. The distinction between guns and howitzers that explains why Germany, alone among the major armies, went to war already equipped for trench fighting. The 1915 Shell Crisis, when a single British battery at Neuve Chapelle was allotted thirty two shells to suppress thirty five German batteries, and how it handed Canada the largest industrial project in its history under the Imperial Munitions Board, producing more than half of all British eighteen pounder shrapnel by 1918. And the counter battery science built from 1917 onward under Andrew McNaughton, a McGill trained engineer, using sound ranging, flash spotting, and aerial photography to locate German guns that could not be seen.
Two Canadian war diaries anchor the comparison at the heart of the episode. In April 1916 at Saint Eloi, a gun brigade recruited across Alberta could not locate a single German battery across six days of fighting, while Canadian infantry died a few thousand yards away. By August 1918 at Amiens, and again in September 1918 at Canal du Nord, the same corps was opening fire at zero hour with no ranging shots at all, laid entirely by survey and mathematical calibration. The cost of that progress is also part of the story: Major Thomas Ringwood, who raised the 60th Battery at Regina in 1916, was killed by German shellfire on the third day of the greatest artillery success the Canadian Corps had ever managed.
Episode 20 of my podcast “Barnbow Lasses” featured author Antony J. Bell, whose great grandmother was a “Canary Girl”; a munitions worker in the ill-fated Barnbow Munitions Factory, outside Yorkshire, England. In December 1916, an explosion took her life, along with 34 other women working in the factory. You can visit his website and order his books at: Antony J Bell Author A Penny a Shell : Heartbreaking Story about Barnbow Secret #1 Shell filling factory
Primary sources: archival
War diary, 14th Brigade, Canadian Field Artillery, 1–31 August 1918. Library and Archives Canada, RG 9 III-D-3.
War diary, 5th Brigade, Canadian Field Artillery, April 1916. Library and Archives Canada, RG 9 III-D-3.
War diary, 49th Battalion, Canadian Infantry, August 1918. Library and Archives Canada, RG 9 III-D-3.
Diary of the 61st Battery, Canadian Field Artillery, 1916–1919.
Field Artillery Training, 1914. War Office, General Staff. His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1914.
SS139/3 Artillery Notes No. 3: Counter Battery Work. General Headquarters, February 1917.
Veteran interviews
Donald Robert Stevenson, 217th Battalion / 46th Battalion: Oppy Front and Canal du Nord accounts. Veterans Affairs Canada, Heroes Remember collection, veterans.gc.ca.
Thomas Wood, 1st Battery / 57th Battery, 15th Field Artillery Brigade: Vimy Ridge account. Veterans Affairs Canada, Heroes Remember collection, veterans.gc.ca.
Harry Routhier, 46th Battalion: whizz-bang account. Veterans Affairs Canada, Heroes Remember collection, veterans.gc.ca.
John Percy Copp, 46th Battalion: Minenwerfer account. Veterans Affairs Canada, Heroes Remember collection, veterans.gc.ca.
George Frederick Hatch, 20th Battalion: Stokes gun account. Veterans Affairs Canada, Heroes Remember collection, veterans.gc.ca.
[Individual video URLs and interview dates to be added once pulled per the RIGHTS note above.]
Published sources
G.W.L. Nicholson, Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War: Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914–1919. Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1962.
G.W.L. Nicholson, The Gunners of Canada: The History of the Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery, Volume I, 1534–1919. Toronto and Montreal: McClelland and Stewart, 1967.
Tim Cook, “The Battle of the St. Eloi Craters.” Canadian Military History, Volume 5, Number 2, Autumn 1996.
Tim Cook, “Fighting Words: Canadian Soldiers’ Slang and Swearing in the Great War.” War in History, Volume 20, Number 3, 2013.
Tim Cook, “The Gunners at Vimy,” in Geoffrey Hayes, Andrew Iarocci and Mike Bechthold, eds., Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Reassessment. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007.
Tim Cook, At the Sharp End (2007), Shock Troops (2008), and The Secret History of Soldiers (2018).
T.J. Mitchell and G.M. Smith, History of the Great War: Medical Services, Casualties and Medical Statistics of the Great War. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1931.
William Van der Kloot, “Lawrence Bragg’s Role in the Development of Sound-Ranging in World War I.” Notes and Records of the Royal Society, Volume 59, Number 3, September 2005.
Brendan Alexander Vincent Patrick Hogan, “Operational Research and the Canadian Corps, 1915–1918.” MA thesis, Royal Military College of Canada, August 2021.
John Swettenham, McNaughton, Volume 1, 1887–1939. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1968. Cited as the apparent origin of the 83 per cent Vimy claim.
Peter Chasseaud, Artillery’s Astrologers: A History of British Survey and Mapping on the Western Front, 1914–1918. Lewes: Mapbooks, 1999.
Reginald H. Roy, ed., The Journal of Private Fraser, 1914–1918, Canadian Expeditionary Force.
Online resources
Canadian War Museum, “Generals: A.G.L. McNaughton” and “The Battle of Vimy Ridge, April 9 to 12, 1917,” warmuseum.ca.
Parks Canada, national historic person designation for A.G.L. McNaughton, parks.canada.ca.
Library and Archives Canada, “Canal-du-Nord and Cambrai,” bac-lac.gc.ca.
Australian War Memorial, “8 August 1918: The Black Day of the German Army,” awm.gov.au.
Commonwealth War Graves Commission, “The Iron Harvest: a warning from history,” cwgc.org.
warhistory.org, biographical entry for Georg Bruchmüller.
Veterans Affairs Canada, Heroes Remember / Video Gallery, veterans.gc.ca.
The Royal Canadian Artillery Museum, rcamuseum.com; Royal Regiment of Canadian Artillery roll of honour, rca-arc.org.
Loyal Edmonton Regiment Military Museum chronology, lermuseum.org.
Commonwealth War Graves Commission, cwgc.org.
A note on Dr. Tim Cook
Dr. Tim Cook died in October 2025. This episode rests on his work more heavily than most this show has produced: his book chapters, his journal articles, and above all a piece he wrote in 1996, at twenty-five, arguing that the Canadians at Saint Eloi deserved better than the sterile account the official history had given them.
