The Ted Barris Interview: Part II | The Miramichi Reader

May 8th, 2025 marked the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day, the end of World War II in Europe. For many Canadians the anniversary was a time of reflection and recognition of the sacrifices of servicemen and women who brought about the defeat of fascist Germany. I reached out to author Ted Barris to talk about his thoughts on the anniversary, and more generally about a long career dedicated to telling Canada its own stories, many of them stemming from World Wars I and II.

We sat down on June 3rd for an enlightening online conversation. Here is part II of my interview with Ted Barris. This interview has been edited for length and for clarity.

Christina Barber
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII. Since the lead up to the anniversary of D-Day on June 6th last year, it has been a very lively and eventful time in the lives of veterans, survivors, descendants, and maybe particularly historians. Your last five books have been about various events in WWII, you have done extensive research in the field and have made numerous trips to Europe, so I wonder, what has your experience of the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe been? And how did you commemorate the occasion?

Ted Barris
I was in the Netherlands.

Starting about 2004, at about the time I was beginning to get a little bit of traction with my military histories, I was approached by a travel agency, in Canada, a company called Merit Travel about the notion of leading tours to some of the battlefields that I had written about. So we focused on in that particular year, 2004, the 60th anniversary of D-Day because of my Juno book. Everybody wanted to go, so I told the tourist company, the travel agency, that I felt that I really should go to the locations that I was gonna be talking about because generally speaking, most Canadians don’t get to Vimy in the course of their lives or Juno Beach, Dieppe, Italy or to Hong Kong, for the siege of Hong Kong. I convinced the travel agency that it was a good idea for them to give me a bit of lead time to go and route my tours. Very grass roots, much like my books.

If you’ve read the majority of my military books, I’m not particularly interested in how politicians responded under pressure in these classic moments during the first or second war of the Korean War, nor really the generals. I’m down in the weeds. I spend most of my time digging up the stories of women and men who experienced the war. As one of them once told me, when I said, you know, tell me the strategy behind this particular battle. He said to me, forget it. He said “All I remember was the six feet of war in front of me and beside me and behind me.” So that was a really strong signal for me to make sure that when I took thirty, forty, fifty in one instance, even 130 Canadians in one tour to battle sites that I should really make sure that they got a strong sense of what it was like for the average Canadian in these situations.

So the next year, after we did the Juno Beach Tour, I did a little bit of a reconnaissance tour through the Netherlands and I found some really neat people who were old enough to have been alive during the wars as children, and I made sure that when we stopped at places like Groesbeek or into the Scheldt Estuary, Appledorn, or in the north near Holten, or through Operation Market Garden that I had people who had eyewitness testimony, the stories, the events of these historic battles, so that my guests, my travellers, my co-travellers on these tours could really get a strong sense of what it really was like. That’s been kind of the modus operandi of all of my trips and the one I just finished last month in May is no different.

I took forty-seven people, a guide, a bus driver, and a representative from the company. We were fifty of us and I went to those same places where I could have a guy, for example, in a place called Bergen op Zoom, take us to the cemetery where he’s been tending graves of Canadians for sixty years. So when you ask him why, and his son is standing next to him, and his son is in his 60s and he’s passed the torch to his son, this is a tradition happening before your very eyes.

When I took them farther along the Scheldt to a little place called Nieuwdorp, I introduced them to an old friend of mine, a guy who had a museum that began in the loft of a barn 25 years ago. I took 130 people in groups of 12 into this guy’s barn loft to show them these artefacts that he collected; his museum now has exploded across probably thirty or forty acres of land and it’s now one of the most sought after museums. It’s the Liberation Museum in Nieuwdorp.

What I’ve done is to try to make the kinds of stories I write in my books be felt by my fellow travellers, and I’ve done the same thing in France, in Belgium, in the Netherlands, in Italy, in Britain and in Eastern Europe.

Christina Barber
Canada has a history of daredevil pilots in both WWI and WWII. In Battle of Britain you feature more than a few of these courageous rogues. I think my favourite story was of Douglas Bader, who after losing both of his legs in a flight accident before the war, manages to work his way back into the service and ends up as squadron leader pushing the envelope in combat strategies.

Is there something about the Canadians in particular? Were they blessed with a certain esprit that allowed or encouraged them towards innovation?

Ted Barris
Well, let me just quickly make sure you know the Douglas Bader background; he’s not Canadian. He was British, but his was an extraordinary story, as you’ve just outlined. It brings him into the presence of Canadians because of their sad squadron, the squadron of Canadians in the RAF 242 Squadron. They were blooded in France during the Battle of France in May of 1940, they come back tattered and torn and virtually without equipment, without aircraft and literally with no clothing, no tools, nothing. And they go back to Coltishall and they would have been forgotten for the rest of the war because nobody could help them; then suddenly because Bader, who has worked his way back from having lost both his legs in 1931 to walk again, dance again, play golf again, fly again and become an ace again, he’s given his first command: to take this forlorn lost and bedraggled group of fighter pilots, coincidentally Canadians, and whip them into something of merit.

You bring together this spit and polish, Douglas Bader, British RAF officer who’s done everything, you know, defying all the rules to become a star, an ace and a bunch of Canadians who are pretty damn suspicious of a guy who doesn’t have any legs, because he’s working with artificial limbs. The magic of the confluence of those two forces: the Canadians who aren’t too crazy about this guy who hasn’t got any legs, and this guy who wants to make a name for himself and prove how great a flyer he is, and we can whip this 242 squadron into something special. Well, it’s a marriage made in heaven. Perfect. It allows me to bring in this British story into the middle of my book and everybody knows the Douglas Bader story.

What they don’t know is the Canadians he whipped into shape became one of the hottest squadrons of the battle and many of the men were the guys you just talked about. They were the daredevils back in Canada. They were the guys who desperately wanted to fly. And when the RAF in the 1930s dangled a carrot in front of Commonwealth private pilots, saying, you know, if you bring your private pilot’s license on your own passage to England and you pass our tests, medically, aerobatically, all those things, and qualify as an RAF pilot, we will give you a Short Service Commission, in other words, you become not just a flyer in the RAF, but an officer in the RAF. And 118 Canadians jumped at the chance over the course of the 30s to get into that role, and the only hitch was that Short Service Commission required that over the six years you were in the service, you had to give back your time to the RAF operations.

Well, if you arrived there in 1935, as many of these guys did, suddenly you’re a frontline fighter pilot in the Battle of Britain. That’s why there were so many Canadians. That’s why we were the second largest contingent of fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain, and most people always think it’s a British story.

We had nearly 300 Canadians in the Battle of Britain, 105 to 110 pilots and the rest ground crew, and they all participated in the Battle of Britain and kept those planes, all those incredible stories of victory happening through those 113 days.

Christina Barber
As Canadians, we are blessed with dedicated military historians, who share and elevate our stories. American and British recapitulations of WWII especially in popular media, be they fiction or non- tend to privilege to an overwhelming degree their narrative, with the contributions of other Allied countries playing at best a secondary role or disappearing altogether in the telling. I’m thinking of The Great Escape, about which you wrote, being a notable example, and other films like The Longest Day or Greyhound which do little to recognise and relate our stories through film to the extent that both Canadians and others are astonished when we are mentioned or receive a cameo. While Hollywood and British Film don’t have a responsibility to tell Canadians their own stories, it does make your role as historian and author that much more important.

Knowing the importance of sharing our history through non-fiction, the realities of publishing have changed significantly over the last 10-20 years. What challenges do you face in publishing non-fiction works?

How do you think the industry can improve its ability to give voice to more authors across a broader spectrum of topics important to Canadians?

Ted Barris
The ranks are a little thinner than they should be because publishers are being gobbled up by larger publishers. The big houses, principally with head offices in the states, are gobbling up smaller publishing houses. That’s why I went with Sutherland House on the Battle of Britain. It’s a Canadian, only non-fiction publishing house. Ken White is the publisher and editor in chief.

It can be tough and I get calls without exaggeration, a handful every week from writers who are aspiring to do what I do.

And here’s the big difference between Canadian nonfiction writing and writers, and nonfiction writing and writers in America and in Britain. If you write nonfiction, military history in Britain or in America, it’s a cutthroat business. I know from experience that British military historians hate each other’s guts, and they’re always looking for ways to pull the other guy down. In the States, I don’t know that it’s quite that way, but it’s a huge marketplace, as you can imagine. It’s harder to get to a level of respect, attention, and traction as in Canada. We share our success, we share our knowledge, we share what we’ve gathered and I share my research with other nonfiction writers if they need it.

I got a call from an American author about three or four years ago. He was doing a new book on D-Day and he wanted to include Canadians. He was including Americans, Poles, Brits, and he knew the Canadian role and he knew that I’d done a full book called Juno on the D-Day experience. He asked if there was anything that I could offer. I said. “Are you kidding? I got hundreds of interviews for that. Name what you want.”

And he said, well, I’d like a paratrooper and I’d like a guy who was involved in the Navy and a fighter pilot and a bomber pilot, and a tanker. So, I pulled them from my archives. Transcripts of all my interviews in each of those categories, and I sent them to him and he was absolutely blown away. He couldn’t believe that I would do that because he said nobody in the States was doing that for him or rarely. And I said, “Well, why wouldn’t we share it?”

One of my dearest friends in aviation military history is a guy named Hugh Halliday. He lives and works in Ottawa. And every time I call him and I say Hal, is there a chance I could get such and such from you? He says, “Sure, absolutely, I’m here to share.”

For us in this country, because we’re second class citizens to the rest of the world when it comes to these things. And we’re not boastful. We’re not. I mean, one of the things I sense from all of those I’ve interviewed, probably 6000 veterans over the years is they’re not boastful. They’re not capital P proud. They’re not capital C Canadian.They are modest. They are concerned about our image and our reputation, but to quote one of them, “We don’t stand on the bodies of our dead comrades and crow.” We are a modest and caring population, but we are willing to share when it should be share, and I really believe that a lot of Canadian historians do that and that’s maybe why Berton said all those years ago, we have to publish this book (Prairie Fire – see Interview with Ted Barris, part 1), you know, and that was in 1972 or 73, when I was still a kid at writing and it was my first book. My first book was published in ’77 and I was 28 years old then.

The marketplace, overall, is shrinking because publishers are not as populous or as brave. And you can bet that the American tariffs are not helping the industry at all because the cross-border work between head offices in Canada has been limited by some of this, and a lot of publishers and booksellers are scared to take on the high risk of buying a lot of stock or investing in untried authors. It’s very scary for them.

Christina Barber
During King Charles III’s recent throne speech, he remarked that “I have always had the greatest admiration for Canada’s unique identity, which is recognised across the world for bravery and sacrifice in defence of national values, and for the diversity and kindness of Canadians.” He continued to say, “This year, we mark the 80th anniversary of V-E Day and V-J Day. On Juno Beach, at Dieppe, on the Somme, at Beaumont-Hamel, at Ypres, and on Vimy Ridge. At those places, and many others, forever etched into our memories, Canadians fought and died alongside our closest allies.”

Why do you think that these battles of WWI and WWII still serve as symbols of the Canadian identity more than 80 and 110 years on? Particularly for the large number of Canadians who do not have any direct connection to those battles or necessarily to the wars themselves?

Ted Barris
Well, I think they have staying power because there are some history teachers that care to bring those stories to their students. They are etched in our memories because some of the books that have been written about them have discovered new information about their essence. I’m thinking of David O’Keefe’s book One Day in August (The Untold Story Behind Canada’s Tragedy at Dieppe), which revisits the Dieppe story and turns it on its head.

We all think that the Dieppe story was an attempt by the Canadians largely to test the fortified seaport that the Germans had developed there, when in fact it was to pinch a four-wheeled enigma in a hotel in downtown Dieppe. They had a three-wheeled enigma, but they didn’t have a four-wheel enigma and they needed that. That was the target that day. And most of the men who died on that beach or survived prison in the war camps the rest of the war and lived to be old men and always wondered about the stupidity of that operation, died without realizing that it did have a purpose.

So, historians are still working. I suggest to you that the kind of work we’re doing, and that I’ve done through twenty-two books, most of them or many of the military has largely come from the voices of people who were there, the memories of people who were there, and when you begin to put it down to their level and into their court, you suddenly realize how different the story really is from what we’ve been teaching in school and some of the stories we’ve taken for granted.

I battled with Tim Cook over the notion that to a certain extent, that Vimy was the coming of age of a nation. Well, when people still argue with me about that, if you read their [veterans’] letters, which I did, their correspondence and their Diaries, which were illegal but many of them survived [the war], they talk about this thing called Canada as part of what they were there for.

And it’s in no less than Gregory Clark, who was a Toronto Star reporter who gets dragged into becoming a volunteer. He ends up going up Vimy Ridge with the Mounted Rifles and he talks about the Canadians, to the right of them, and the Canadians to the left of them, and that night on Vimy Ridge, on the 9th of April, 1917, he said, “I had my first full taste of nationhood.”

Harold Innis, one of this country’s great political economists, was a batteryman at Vimy, who said up until Vimy, he had nothing in common with his battery mates. So, this guy was an intellectual. He raced from McMaster, graduated, dashed off to become a soldier in the First war, becomes part of this battery, and he’s with a bunch of louts. Guys who have no education beyond maybe public school, but suddenly pulled together to attack, to achieve a task at Vimy, they are pulled together using all their strengths as intelligent, strong, capable men to achieve a task; they managed to pull off the creeping barrage perfectly.

This is a magical moment and Innis says, “We weren’t fighting for King and empire anymore; we were fighting for Canada.” Well, when you read their letters and their diaries, it says they discovered something more than just king and country and empire and battle. They discovered each other.

You know that suddenly, with one coming from the Prairies and another coming from Nova Scotia or one coming from Yukon, another one from downtown Toronto suddenly realized they had something more in common than just that they were wearing the same uniforms.

And so that aspect of our teaching, our writing, our reading, the more we keep that front and centre in front of young people and others who maybe have a jaded view of Canadian history, the more we’ll recognise that boy, we’re a pretty powerful force when it comes to living it, saving it, preserving it and retelling it.

Ted Barris is an accomplished author, journalist and broadcaster. As well as hosting stints on CBC Radio and regular contributions to The Globe and Mail, the National Post, and various national magazines, he is a full-time professor of journalism at Centennial College in Toronto. Barris has authored 17 non-fiction books, including the national bestsellers Victory at Vimy and Juno. He currently lives in Toronto.

Publisher: Sutherland House Books (September 3, 2024)
Hardcover 9″ x 6″ | 424 pages
ISBN: 9781990823930

Christina Barber

Christina Barber is a writer and educator who lives in Vancouver. An avid reader, she shares her passion for Canadian history and literature through her reviews on Instagram @cb_reads_reviews. She has most recently been committed to writing and staging formally innovative single and multi-act plays.