Ted Barris

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Every Challenge Head On

In November 2010, Jeff Jeffery, a former Halifax bomber pilot with 432 Sqn RCAF, Distinguished Flying Cross winner, and founding director/president of the Halifax Aircraft Association, died after a brief illness in Toronto. In his tribute, author and broadcaster Ted Barris reflects on the life of a one-of-a-kind Canadian.

The very last time his hands gripped the controls of a Halifax bomber overseas, his aerial combat days were well behind him. It was mid-September 1995. A long lost Halifax bomber – ditched in Lake Mjosa, Norway, more than a half-century before – began to emerge from its watery grave. A salvage team and its undersea equipment had successfully raised the sunken warbird for RCAF veteran Jeff Jeffery to witness.

“The first thing I saw was her wingtip, then her ailerons, then the tip of the outer starboard engine propeller … rising up out of the lake,” Jeffery recalled during an interview in 1997.

For the full story, click here.

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Author Ted Barris

Remembrance and revision

Canada’s wartime history was rewritten 13 years ago this autumn.

Not a lot of it. But three Canadian air crewmen listed as missing in action became war dead with names and a story Sept. 6, 1997. at day, an o -duty airline pilot led a salvage expedition at the crash site of a Second World War bomber, near Geraardsbergen, Belgium. Shot down the night of May 9, 1944, Halifax bomber LW682 took all eight crewmen to their deaths. German troops quickly removed ve of the bodies before the Halifax vanished into the mud, it seemed, forever.

For the full story, click here.

Photography courtesy Neville Palmer

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Author Ted Barris

Keeping pace

The 90-minute hockey scrimmage at our local arena was over. In the dressing room, everybody peeled off skates, pads and sweaty long johns, baring egos and scars. We forwards called the goaltenders sieves, while they took verbal shots at us forwards for not backchecking. But one defenceman really had it in for me. “I’d ask for your money back, Ted,” he said. “That new pacemaker doesn’t have any goals in it.”

For the full story, click here.

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Author Ted Barris

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