My Father's Son: Memories of War and Peace - Hardcover

In the summer of 1943, a young Canadian infantry lieutenant - who would survive the war to become a world-famous writer - landed on the beaches of Sicily as part of the 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 northward. As Farley Mowat saw his comrades killed and maimed in battle, his courage and convictions were sorely tested. But his spirit was sustained, in part, by his powerful relationship with his parents, especially his father, Angus Mowat, a wounded veteran of World War I, whose hundreds of letters combined an instinctive irreverence for authority with an enormous reverence for life - and an infectious belief in the power of the written word.
This book begins where an earlier Mowat book, And No Birds Sang, left off, recreating the later years of the Italian campaign but also intimately portraying the inner life of a very young man who, ardently encouraged by his father, was preparing himself to spend the rest of his life as a writer. This book, a book he hesitated for thirty years to write, recounts the crux of his development. Through original letters and connecting narrative, Mowat captures the shock and despair of war and the giddy exhilaration that followed victory. Many of the stories he relates are vintage Mowat comedy: the short-lived visit to the front lines by a team of dentists; his one-day career as the proprietor of a bar; and his epically unauthorized appropriation, after the armistice, of hundreds of tons of German weaponry, including a V2 rocket, a one-man submarine, and the world's largest tank - all sent home to Canada as national souvenirs.
Perhaps Mowat's most personal work to date, My Father's Son wonderfully evokes innocence, hope, despair, anger, and resolve, annealed by war. Even more wonderfully, it testifies to family loyalty and affection, and it records the enduring love between a father and son.