Mowat Farley. My Father's Son: Memories of War and Peace

Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1992. — 365 p. — ISBN: 1-55013-430-2.In the summer of 1943, a young Farley Mowat landed on the beaches of Sicily with the First Canadian Infantry division as part of the initial Allied assault on western Europe. For a year and a half his division fought its way up the Italian “boot” in a series of savage and bloody battles, driving the German army slowly northwards.
As Mowat saw his comrades killed and wounded in battle, his courage and convictions were constantly tested. His spirit was sustained, in part, by his strong relationship with his parents, especially his father. Angus Mowat, a wounded veteran of the Great War, was only able to re-enlist for home service. His many letters to his son combined idealism and his belief in the power of the written word with an enormous zest for life and instinctive irreverence for authority.
My Father's Son begins where Farley Mowat’s earlier book about his war experiences, And No Birds Sang, ended, recreating the later years of the Italian campaign with its devastating effects on the young men who bore the brunt of it. Through original letters and connecting narrative, Mowat captures the shock and despair of war and the exhilaration that followed victory. Many of the stories he relates are vintage Mowat: the short-lived visit to the front lines by a team of dentists, his day-long career as the proprietor of a bar, and his unauthorized appropriation at war’s end of hundreds of tons of German weaponry, including a V2 rocket and the world’s largest tank. The book also traces the emergence of a distinct writing voice: challenging, pugnacious, sensitive and observant.
Perhaps Farley Mowat’s most personal work to date, My Father’s Son is a remarkable evocation of innocence and hope, despair, anger and resolve, in a time of war. It is also a testament to family loyalty and affection and a record of the enduring love between a father and son.Farley Mowat grew up in Trenton, Belleville, Windsor, Saskatoon and Richmond Hill. He served in the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment in Italy and Holland during the Second World War, after which he spent two years in the Arctic before embarking on a career as a writer. His many books have sold over 14 million copies worldwide and he has been published in 52 languages. Farley Mowat lives in Port Hope, Ontario, with his wife, writer Claire Mowat.