Farley Mowat - My Fathers Son

This book is about coming of age in a world gone mad.

It is about coming to terms with life in a madhouse.

It is also about the way in which a wise and loving father counselled and sustained his son during a time of trial.

It is largely based on the letters my parents and I exchanged during the latter years of the Second World War when I was in the army overseas, and they were in Canada.

Unhappily, few of my mothers letters survived. I have, however, included some excerpts from those that did in order to convey at least a sense of her vivid and vital presence.

I have edited my fathers letters extensively, not because I wished to do so but because to publish them as they originally stood would have required two or three volumes the size of this one; something, my publishers assured me that, in this day and age, neither they nor the book-buying public could afford.

My father was one of the last and by no means the least of the great practitioners of an admirable but vanishing skill. He was a superb letter writer. If the portions of his letters printed here do not do him full justice, they at least bear witness to his excellence at a skill which is rapidly being obliterated by telephones, fax machines and other such dubious devices.

Sewing the contents of our mutual letters together to make one garment has not been easy. Because deliveries were erratic, our letters were frequently delayed for months and were sometimes altogether lost, and they seldom presented a logical sequence when and if received. Consequently, trying to arrange them in proper chronological order has proved to be impossible. The reader should bear this in mind and make allowances. It is also to be noted that official censorship had its effect on what I wrote, as did some measure of self-imposed censorship designed to spare the feelings of my parents, and especially of my mother.

Canada was governed throughout the war by the Liberal Party under the leadership of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, who was a singularly elusive and evasive character, even for a politician. Kept in power by the support of the French-Canadian vote, he pandered to the strong aversion evidenced by church and state in the province of Quebec towards what they called Englands war. Anti-war resistance was so strong that the mayor of Montreal was interned for repeatedly advising Quebecers to stay out of the Armed Forces; although it was permissible for them to accept well-paid work in war plants.

Because of the French-Canadian attitude, Mackenzie Kings government at first refused to impose conscription for military service and, when pressure to do so from the rest of Canada finally became intolerable, King introduced conscription for home service only. This meant that volunteers would risk their lives in battle, but conscripts would not. Kings policy was encapsulated in one of his more infamous evasions: Conscription if necessarybut not necessarily conscription.

Although a number of French Canadians did volunteer for active service, most conscripts (including significant numbers from the English-speaking provinces) refused. These men were held in contempt by the active-service volunteers, who called them Zombiesthe walking dead of voodoo mythology.

The volunteers held the Prime Minister and his government in almost equal contempt. As early as 1941 when King visited the Canadian Army, then in England, he was roundly booed by the men of the First Division. As will be seen, the Zombie situation and the conscription policies of the government remained a profound irritant to the fighting troops until wars end, and after.

A few words about the structure of a Canadian infantry division in the Second World War may be helpful. Essentially it consisted of three infantry brigades supported by artillery and other heavy weapons. A brigade comprised three battalions of infantry. A battalion had four rifle companies, each of which was made up of three platoons of about thirty men, commanded by a lieutenant.