I visited Vimy 2 years ago and came away terribly disappointed. We had just been at Ypres and taken a tour there with a very knowledgeable Brit, an ex-soldier with a son in Iraq. That guy knew his stuff! Our experience in Vimy was the opposite. The tour guieds were two teenage girls from New Brunswick and Ontario, part of a student program that takes University students to France to live an work. Frankly, it was disgraceful. Their knowledge was extremely limited and seemed only to be as deep as the short training they had. They had no knowledge nor apparent interest in things military, and used really inappropriate language in describing the events they. They told our group that Canadian officers "laughed and giggled" in the mess, that after the battle many men were "sad" and told us that the Black Watch had lead the attack. That last thing was interesting because most of the tour were Brits and they must have thought that their Black Watch was there, the tour guides didn't know there was another Black Watch, the Canadian Highland Regiment as opposed to the Brit Black Watch. Further, the displays in the very small building were generic and not at all useful to understanding Vimy, and the signage on site was almost nonexistent. To me, the Vimy site deserves more than summer students on a French piss up, to be blunt, and I wrote my MP as much. This site desreves professional guides with real knowledge and perhaps military experience, or at least students from the Military College and not the bimbettes chosen mostly because they are bilingual.
