Friday afternoons in the mid-1960s had a special rhythm for me. While most of my high-school pals gathered in the corridors to plot their party plans for the weekend, I left class early to catch the Sheppard Avenue bus west from Agincourt. With my trumpet case in hand, about 5 o’clock I caught the southbound Yonge Street bus, then the subway from Eglinton to Bloor. And then I walked west on Yorkville Avenue into what everybody called “the Village.” There, just before Avenue Road, I climbed up a back-alley fire-scape staircase to a third-floor rehearsal studio.
“Hi, Donny,” I’d call out to my trumpet teacher Don Johnson.
“Come on in and warm up that horn,” he’d tell me.
It took me a few visits in 1965 to discover I had climbed to the top of a Yorkville landmark, and an even more important music mecca. (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
Canada’s 10th Father of Confederation, Joseph R. Smallwood. Historica.
He was the only source I’ve ever interviewed who intimidated me. And it wasn’t his personality or his manner that scared me. In fact, he proved to be among the most gracious, easy-going people I’ve ever interviewed. We met over the telephone back in the winter of 1976, and I began our conversation very formally, addressing him as “Mister.” And he immediately broke the ice with his first response.
“Please. Call me Joey,” he said. “Everybody does.”
“Thank you, Joey,” I responded, and I began my first and only interview with a Father of Confederation, the then recently retired premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, Joseph R. Smallwood. (more…)
A few weeks after the storm, amid our yard debris, I found the tattered remains of the Canadian flag that had hung over the entrance to our house for a number of years. The state of the cloth – shredded and torn by the fury of the storm – inspired me to buy a new Red Maple Leaf (albeit a smaller one than usual) and hang it outside our home. One of my neighbours noticed that the replacement flag looked a bit different.
“Your other one was a lot bigger,” he pointed out. “Why a smaller Maple Leaf?”
I shrugged and said, “For the moment, that was the only size I could find.” But what I didn’t say to my neighbour at the time was that these days I’m a bit conflicted about displaying national emblems, and in particular the Canadian flag in anything that looks like a grandiose statement. (more…)
He saved my father. Then, he saved me. In fact, he saved both of us multiple times. The first instance occurred 80 years ago this December. Just before Christmas of 1942, both Tony Mellaci and my father, Alex Barris, arrived at Camp Phillips – a U.S. Army training facility in Kansas. The army had posted them there to train as medics in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. Then, something happened Christmas Eve.
“They told me to go to the headquarters barracks and pick up a soldier who was sick, and deliver him to the hospital. So, I and another ambulance driver picked up your father (although I didn’t know him at the time) and we took him to the hospital,” Mellaci told me. “But we never saw the sick soldier. We stayed in the cab while other medics loaded him into the ambulance.” (more…)
Tool hooks salvaged from May 21 tornado that hit Uxbridge.
In our quest for some normalcy around the house, my wife and I are still trying to sort and reorganize stuff after the windstorm on May 21. As a consequence, our back porch (whose screened-in space we normally enjoy on summer evenings) has become a repository for salvage from the garage, tool shed and dishevelled yard. The other day, for example, I came across a bunch of short 2X4s with tool holders attached. They’d bounced loose when the garage was crushed. So, I began prying the holders from the wood.
“If I salvage the tool holders now, I won’t have to track them down when we restore the garage at some point,” I thought. “Who knows whether they’ll even be available down the road?” (more…)
What is now wreckage was once a garage of tools, nuts and bolts and sports gear.
It’s funny what the eye never sees or what’s in plain sight, but not noticed. A week or so into the aftermath of the derecho – that’s now part of our weather history – I attempted some clean-up around our yard. A piece of chrome in the grass caught my eye. When I brushed off the dirt and shingle debris it’d been hidden under, I realized it was a tightly coiled spring. It was so clean and shiny, it could’ve come right out of a hardware store bin. Then (as I’ve found myself doing a lot the last couple of weeks) I put the spring in my pocket and asked myself:
“Where did that come from?”
I don’t think I’m alone when I suggest Uxbridge residents have experienced scenes like those we’ve watched for years on CNN of Americans in tornado alley sifting through the debris of their decimated homes after the twister went through. They were trying to salvage something of what was, a morsel of the normalcy from just hours before. (more…)
Cobby Engelberg training in Canada as a wireless radio/air gunner (WAG) in 1943 at approximately age 23. A year later he survived a Nazi attack and plane crash during the D-Day invasions — the story of which his son has been tracing for decades. Photo: Courtesy of Harvey Engelberg
The mere mention of “June 6” triggers images of Allied troops storming the iconic beaches of Normandy during D-Day, the greatest invasion gamble of the Second World War. And with all those years of research, analysis and interviewing of the battle’s veterans since 1944, it seems impossible that any stories remain unfound or untold. Freelance contributor and military historian Ted Barris contends there will always be new D-Day stories unearthed — such as this one, in which a son is gifted physical remnants of his father’s harrowing survival following a Nazi attack.
One day in April, almost 78 years to the anniversary of D-Day, at a farm kitchen table in Basseneville, France, Harvey Engelberg came face-to-face with his father’s June 6, 1944, war story. There, on a red-and-white plaid tablecloth, Thérèse Férey and her husband Ghyslaine opened a towel to reveal 42 pieces of wartime-era aluminum. The Féreys had recently salvaged the Second World War artifacts from a forgotten corner of their farm. The jagged bits were all that remained of a DC-3 transport aircraft that had carried RCAF wireless radio operator Cobby Engelberg and a plane-full of paratroops into the middle of the greatest amphibious invasion in military history — Operation Overlord.
“Here,” Madame Férey said to Engelberg, now 69, at that first-ever meeting of the two. “We found these, but they belong to you.”
Aluminum fragments of the DC-3 transport aircraft that carried RCAF wireless radio operator Cobby Engelberg and his fellow soldiers, which was shot down on the night of June 5, 1944 and recovered from a farm field in Normandy 78 years later. Photo: Courtesy of Harvey Engelberg
Spruces, pines, basswoods and maples were Ronnie’s sentry trees on our street.
I remember a sultry afternoon in the 1990s, a few years after my wife and I and our two daughters had arrived and put down roots here in Uxbridge. I was sitting on our neighbour’s porch. The July sunshine beat down on Balsam Street North with all the intensity of a mid-summer heat wave. My neighbour, Ronnie Egan, had invited me to sit for a few minutes’ rest from cutting grass. We were both enjoying the shady respite, when she pointed to the Manitoba maple trees that deflected the intense rays of the afternoon sun from both her house and mine.
“Sentries,” she said. “They’re like sentries up and down our street.”
I noted her military terminology referring to the trees – she being a Second World War veteran of the Women’s Royal Canadian Naval Service – and wondered why she’d chosen that word to describe the mature trees along our street. (more…)
Victoria Day weekend storm came right up my street in Uxbridge.
About midday on Sunday, nearly 24 hours after the storm that hit south-central Ontario, a cluster of people came walking down Balsam Street North toward us. My wife and I were piling a wall of tree debris in front of our home. We must’ve looked like zombies dragging branches and brush to and fro. We suddenly realized the cluster of people was our three grandsons, our daughter and son-in-law from a few blocks away in Uxbridge. My grandson ran up and embraced me.
“Just wanted to hug you,” he said.
“Me too,” I said and for the first time in hours I felt human again. (more…)
