“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” are Churchill’s words that set the 113 days of the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 apart from all others, as the greatest aerial battle in history.
As the German Luftwaffe sought to destroy the Royal Air Force, gain air superiority, and invade the British Isles, Commonwealth fighter pilots scrambled from U.K. airfields day after day and flew Hurricane and Spitfire fighter aircraft to thwart Hitler’s plan. They won, but paid dearly.
In his 22nd book of nonfiction – Battle of Britain: Canadian Airmen in Their Finest Hour – Ted Barris has assembled unknown stories of Canadian airmen, ground crew, as well as engineers, aeronautical designers, medical officers and civilians, who answered the call and turned back the very real threat of Nazi invasion. You know the outcome of the Battle of Britain, but now you’ll meet the Canadians who helped secure victory in the first last-stand of WWII. (more…)
In the 20th century’s greatest war, one battlefield held the key to victory or defeat – the North Atlantic. It took 2,074 days and nights to determine its outcome, but the Battle of the Atlantic proved the turning point of the Second World War.
This September, HarperCollins publishes Ted Barris’s 20th book – Battle of the Atlantic: Gauntlet to Victory.
Check Ted’s “Events” page to learn when and where he will bring his powerful talk/presentations to an event near you.
For five and a half years, German surface warships and submarines attempted to destroy Allied transatlantic convoys, mostly escorted by Royal Canadian Navy destroyers and corvettes, as well as aircraft of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Throwing deadly U-boat ‘wolf packs’ in the paths of Merchant Navy convoys, the German Kriegsmarine nearly strangled this vital life-line to a beleaguered Great Britain.
In 1939, Canada’s navy went to war with exactly 13 warships and about 3,500 sailors. During the desperate Atlantic crossings, the RCN grew to 400 fighting ships and over 100,000 men and women in uniform. By V-E Day in 1945, it had become the 4th largest navy in the world. The Battle of the Atlantic proved to be Canada’s longest continuous military engagement of the war. The story of Canada’s naval awakening in the bloody battle to get convoys to Britain, is a Canadian wartime saga for the ages.
Photo Sinisa Jolic / CBC Licensing
Ted Barris has published 19 non-fiction books, half of them wartime histories. His book The Great Escape: A Canadian Story won the 2014 Libris Award as Best Non-Fiction Book in Canada. His book Dam Busters: Canadian Airmen and the Secret Raid Against Nazi Germany received the 2019 NORAD Trophy from the RCAF Association. And his book Rush to Danger: Medics in the Line of Fire was listed for the 2020 Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction in Canada. Battle of the Atlantic: Gauntlet to Victory is Ted’s 20th published non-fiction book
Advance praise for Battle of the Atlantic…
“Ted Barris has a reverence for the stories of veterans. Barris’s work is hallmarked by thorough research and respect for the people whose stories he retells. This book serves to put faces and emotions on the facts and dates of the Battle of the Atlantic, the longest campaign of the Second World War. The battle was waged for nearly six years—2,074 days. In human terms, that period represents five North Atlantic winters, thousands of bleak dawns, thousands of days and nights of vigilance despite desperate fatigue, thousands of days and nights during which death might arrive unheralded. This book effectively, reverentially, and thoroughly records and passes on that story.”— Gordon Laco, RCN (Ret’d), from the Foreword to Battleof the Atlantic
“This is not the story of a few days of battle—like Vimy or D-Day. This story lasts six years. This book covers an awful lot of what we experienced. It’s detailed. And I discovered so much. I’ve read a lot of books on the Battle of the Atlantic. This is a good one!”— Norman Goodspeed, Second World War RCN (Ret’d),HMCS Saguenay
“Ted Barris puts a human face to a Goliath of a subject. Battle of the Atlantic lures you in, paying homage to the men and women who risked their lives in this epic battle. Barris effortlessly weaves a gripping narrative that provides a multitude of historical perspectives. It brings you right into the action and keeps you on edge. Essential reading for anyone wanting to gain an understanding of the war waged in the Atlantic.”— Sean E. Livingston, RCN and author
Lost in the WWII story of the Battle of the Bulge lay an account of sacrifice and survival that took historian Ted Barris nearly a lifetime to discover – the story of his own father
Throughout the winter of 1945, sergeant medic Alex Barris waged a battle night and day to save lives in the middle of the bloodiest campaign the US Army faced during the liberation of Europe. But the author’s pursuit of his father’s story revealed an even greater challenge – learning what it was that motivates military medics, surgeons, nursing sisters, stretcher-bearers, orderlies, and ambulance drivers to disregard their own well-being to save the lives of others on the battlefield.
Rush to Danger: Medics in the Line of Fire led Ted Barris into fields of fire as diverse as the US Civil War battle at Fredericksburg, where the field ambulance was invented, and to war zones of Iraq, where 21st century flight surgeons attend wounded soldiers inside Black Hawk helicopters.
Using his father’s experiences as a front-line medic in WWII, Ted Barris brings to life the stories of: Victoria Cross recipient Francis Scrimger; gas mask inventor Cluny Macpherson; Congolese nurse Augusta Chiwy in the siege of Bastogne; medics Wesley Clare and Laurence Alexander in the slaughter at Dieppe; the real story of Korean War imposter Ferdinand Demara; Vietnam War orderly Norman Malayney; and decorated Iraq War surgeons Dane Harden and Herb Ridyard.
Not a soldier, but the soldier’s storyteller, not a veteran, but recognized by vets as keeper of the flame, Ted Barris has now published 19 non-fiction books, a dozen wartime histories. For 50 years, he has worked as a broadcaster in Canada and the US. He taught journalism at Toronto’s Centennial College for 18 years.
His book The Great Escape won the 2014 Libris Award for Best Non-fiction Book of the Year. Dam Busters received the RCAF Association NORAD Trophy in 2018.
New this fall, Ted Barris releases his latest book – Dam Busters: Canadian Airmen and the Secret Raid against Nazi Germany – published by HarperCollins.
It was a night that changed the Second World War. The secret air raid against the hydroelectric dams of Germany’s Ruhr River took years to plan, involved an untried bomb, and included the best aircrewmen RAF Bomber Command could muster – many of them Canadian. The attack marked the first time the Allies tactically took the war inside Nazi Germany.
On May 16, 1943, 133 airmen took off in 19 Lancaster bombers on a night sortie, code-named Operation Chastise. Hand-picked and specially trained, the Lancaster crews flew at treetop level to the industrial heartland of the Third Reich and their targets – the Ruhr River dams – whose massive water reservoirs powered Nazi Germany’s military industrial complex.
Every one of the 133 airmen on the raid understood the odds of survival were low. Of the 19 bombers outbound, eight did not return. Operation Chastise cost the lives of 53 airmen, including 14 Canadians. Of the 16 RCAF men who survived, seven received military decorations. Dam Bustersrecounts the dramatic story of these Commonwealth bomber crews tasked with a high-risk mission against an enemy prepared to defend the Fatherland to the death.
Ted Barris is an author, journalist and broadcaster, who has hosted regularly on CBC Radio and contributed to the National Post and Legion, Air Force and Zoomer magazines; he has authored 18 published, non-fiction books.
In 2011 he received the Veterans’ Affairs Commendation and in 2012 the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal. His book The Great Escape: A Canadian Story received the 2014 Libris Best Non-Fiction Book Award.
With Canada’s sesquicentennial (the 150th anniversary of Confederation) coming in 2017, Canadians will be reflecting on how their nation was born. At the middle of the 19th century, as the fathers of Confederation cobbled together a nation of four English- and French-speaking settlements in the eastern half of North America, what would eventually become the Canadian West looked remote and unavailable. So then, what sparked Canada’s rapid expansion from coast to coast?
Steamboats, that’s what! Or “fire canoes,” as aboriginal people called them. In large measure, the national dream of a Canada that stretched from sea to sea was realized aboard the large, Mississippi-style paddlewheel steamers that began plying western waterways on the eve of Canadian Confederation. In Fire Canoe, historian Ted Barris describes how and why this happened:
U.S. interests offered cash for first steamboat to reach Ft. Garry (Winnipeg)
Hudson’s Bay Company demanded faster water transport
Experienced First Nations pilots, stevedores & engineers offered skilled crews
The rapid military response to the Riel rebellions of 1870 & 1885
Steamboat commerce deterred U.S. political, commercial & military expansion
Winning the West meant massive immigration only possible by steamboat
Competition for business & territory sparked cutthroat steamboat races
Life on the boats attracted all manner of gamblers, speculators & remittance men
Fire Canoe brings the first-hand accounts of the steamboat packet owners, captains, stevedores, engineers, firemen, immigrants, soldiers, and carpetbaggers who travelled the inland waterways of the West between 1859 and the turn of the 19th century. The Mark Twain−like tales of their sudden arrival, the exploits of the people they carried, the impact of their regularly scheduled trips on waterways across the prairies, all come alive in Barris’s unique, you-are-there storytelling.
Critics’ praise for Fire Canoe:
“Ted Barris has done for the steamboat what Pierre Berton did for the railway…” – Globe and Mail.
“[This book] will surprise Canadians who weren’t aware that on the bald plains, riverboats once turned cities like Winnipeg, Prince Albert, and Edmonton into thriving ports.” – Toronto Sun.
“Barris’s best subjects are the personalities of the era – those adventurous and eccentric steamboat captains, traders and pioneers…” – Canadian Press.
“The book deserves a place in the library of those interested in the history and development of western Canada.” – Alberta History.
“An exciting narrative of the extension of the Canadian frontier across the prairies … with stories of over 100 steamboats that have never appeared in any other book.” – Steamboat Bill magazine.
On the night of March 24, 1944, eighty Commonwealth airmen crawled through a 400-foot-long tunnel, code-named “Harry,” and most slipped into the darkness of a pine forest beyond the wire of Stalag Luft III, a German prisoner-of-war compound near Sagan, Poland. The event became known as The Great Escape. The breakout, more than a year in the making, involved about 2,000 POWs and a battle of wits inconceivable for its time. Within days of the escape, however, all but three escapers were recaptured; subsequently, Adolf Hitler ordered fifty of them murdered, cremated, and buried in a remote corner of the same prison compound.
What most casual readers, history buffs, moviegoers, and even some who participated, don’t readily acknowledge is that The Great Escape was in many ways “made-in-Canada.” In The Great Escape: A Canadian Story, bestselling author Ted Barris recounts this nearly mythical escape operation through the voices of those involved, many of whom trained in Canada, served in RCAF bomber and fighter squadrons, were shot down over Europe, imprisoned at Stalag Luft III, and ultimately became co-conspirators in the actual Great Escape.
Based on his original interviews, research, and assembly of memoirs, letters, diaries, and personal photos, Ted Barris reveals that many of the escape’s key players – the tunnel designer, excavators, forgers, scroungers, security and intelligence personnel, custodian of the secret radio, and scores of security “stooges” and sand-dispersal “penguins” – were all Canadians.
The book reads like a Hollywood movie, but is, in fact, the true story!
Praise for Ted Barris’s The Great Escape: A Canadian Story
“A magnificent story … I spent 18 months in Stalag Luft III North Compound [as a POW, but] I was unaware of the vast work that went on. … So many of the interviews are all news to me. [This book] brings it all to life.” – Albert Wallace, Second World War RCAF officer and former POW at the Great Escape camp
“As always, Ted Barris, our best writer on Canadians at war, paints small personal stories on the broad canvas of epic conflict, and in The Great Escape, gives us the real truth on a story we thought we knew. Riveting.” – Linwood Barclay, bestselling author of Trust Your Eyes
“With new insights and a fresh perspective, Ted Barris takes us deep inside The Great Escape. In fascinating and meticulous detail, he unravels the plotting and planning, completely befuddling German prison guards, that led to one of the most daring real-life dramas in modern history.” – Lloyd Robertson, CTV News
In a new book of biographies (compiled by author Ed Brown) about Black musicians in Canada, Ted Barris was invited to write the Foreword.
The star attraction was not in the house that night. While many others – the luminaries of the Canadian jazz scene – performed on stage, perhaps the country’s best studio and jazz concert drummer of the day was absent. In fact, it was because he was absent, that all the stars came out. It was in 1967 when Toronto-born musician Archie Alleyne suffered serious injuries in a car accident. He was not able to work … at either of his jobs.
“I didn’t have a car, so I had to carry my drum kit on streetcars and the subway,” he told my father, Alex Barris, back then. “I’d play from 9 at night to 1 a.m., get home with my drums by 3 a.m. and be up four hours later to go to my day job.” (more…)
Politicians called it a “police action.” The Canadian working volunteers who went to Korea to fight the Communists remember it as a bitter, grinding shooting war.
In the summer of 1950, thousands of Canadians – some veterans of the Second World War and regular army servicemen as well as adventure-seekers, unemployed and even some in trouble with the law – eagerly signed on for a UN-sponsored mission to stop the Communist foray into South Korea. They joined a forty-eight-nation, U.S.-led expeditionary force that quickly found itself embroiled not in a “police action,” but a full-scale hot war.
Ted Barris interviewed hundreds of Korean War veterans to then retell their stories of heroism and survival, tragedy and absurdity, successful operations and total snafus.
The Korean War was the first explosion in cold war between the USSR and the US after 1945. Canadian air force, naval and infantry volunteers were among the first to join the defence of South Korea. They etched locations such as Chinnampo, Kap’yong, Chail-li and Kowang-san onto the list of notable Canadian battlegrounds. Then, after twelve months that saw U.N. troops fighting up and down the Korean peninsula and drew Communist China into the conflict, the war settled into a bloody stalemate in the mud and cold around the 38th parallel.
Deadlock in Korea tells the stories of the men who fought in Korea, giving this war – that cost Canada more than a thousand casualties and was virtually ignored back home – its rightful place in Canadian history.
The book was a national best-seller on both the Maclean’s magazine and National Post top-ten lists in 1999-2000; and it has been officially recognized as the official history of Canadians at war in Korea by the Korea Veterans Association of Canada (Barris was made an honourary member of the KVA).
Breaking the Silence: Veterans’ Untold Stories from the Great War to Afghanistan
Thomas Allen Publishers
October 3, 2009
ISBN-10: 0-88762-465-0
“Never talked about it.”
That’s what most people say when they’re asked if the veteran in the family ever shared wartime experiences. Describing combat, imprisonment or lost comrades from the World Wars, the Korea War, or even Afghanistan is reserved for Remembrance Day or the Legion lounge. Nobody was ever supposed to see them get emotional, show their vulnerability. Nobody was ever to know the hell of their war.
About 25 years ago, Ted Barris began breaking through the silence. Because of his unique interviewing skills, he found that veterans would talk to him, set the record straight and put a face on the service and sacrifice of men and women in uniform. As a result of his work on 15 previous books, Barris has earned a reputation of trust among Canada’s veterans. Indeed, over the years, nearly 3,000 of them have shared their memories, all offering original material for his books.
Among other revelations in Breaking the Silence, veterans of the Great War reflect on an extraordinary first Armistice in 1918; decorated Second World War fighter pilots talk about their thirst for blood in the sky; Canadian POWs explain how they survived Chinese attempts to brainwash them during the Korean War; and soldiers with the Afghanistan mission talk about the horrors of the “friendly fire” incident near Kandahar.
Breaking the Silence is a ground-breaking book that goes to the heart of veterans’ war-time experiences.
Victory at Vimy, Canada Comes of Age: April 9-12, 1917
Thomas Allen Publishers January 26, 2007
ISBN-10: 0-88762-253-4
From the author of JUNO: Canadians at D-Day, June 6, 1944, comes a new book about the Famous Canadian Victory at Vimy Ridge.
At the height of the First World War, on Easter Monday April 9, 1917, in early morning sleet, forty-nine battalions of the Canadian Corps rose along a nine-mile line of trenches in northern France against the occupying Germans. All four Canadian divisions advanced in a line behind a well-rehearsed creeping barrage of artillery fire. By nightfall, the Germans had suffered a major setback. The Ridge, which other Allied troops had assaulted previously and failed to take, was firmly in Canadian hands.
It was the first time Canadians had fought as a distinct national army, and in many ways it was a coming of age for the nation. Based on first-hand accounts, like JUNO: Canadians at D-Day, Ted Barris paints a compelling and surprising human picture of what it was like to have stormed and taken Vimy Ridge.
Breaking the Silence: Veterans’ Untold Stories from the Great War to Afghanistan