In Living and Learning in Retirement’s 50th year, Ted Barris continues his Friday lectures this winter at Glendon College’s Centre for Excellence. His series, “Missing in Action: Untold Stories of Canadians’ Participation in Historic Moments,” features famous periods of world history, in which Canadians played vital roles.

Lecture No. 5, “No. Steve McQueen did not lead the Great Escape.” On the night of March 24, 1944, 80 Allied 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. Hollywood made a blockbuster movie about in 1963, and while they got a lot of the technical story right, they missed the fact that Canadians designed and dug the tunnels, organized security and diversions, led the creation of forged documents, “disappeared” the sand and paid as high a price in the murderous outcome of the escape as any. We’ll set the record straight.

Ted Barris has published 20 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 2018 NORAD Trophy from the RCAF Association. And his book, Rush to Danger: Medics in the Line of Fire, was long-listed for the 2020 Charles Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction in Canada. In December 2022, Ted Barris was appointed Member of the Order of Canada.