Farley Mowat was born in Ontario on 12 May 1921. Despite being encouraged by his father, Angus, a veteran of the Great War, to join the Army, Farley was set on joining the Royal Canadian Air Force and learning to fly. Unfortunately for him (but perhaps fortunately for us) the RCAF was not as keen on him as he was on them. Therefore, falling back on his father's advice, young Farley enlisted with the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment, known as the Hasty P and by 10 July 1943, he was a subaltern in command of a rifle platoon and found himself participating in the initial landings of Operation Husky, the Allied invasion of Sicily. In his book, 'My Father's Son', Mowat remarks that in its initial stages the campaign in Sicily was an "exhilarating if exhausting experience for those that escaped death or mutilation". But as the action moved into Italy and there began a long and bitter struggle, the experience became more exhausting that anything else. Following a particularly stressful period during the Moro River campaign at the tail end of 1943, Mowat departed the front line and was appointed to the staff at Brigade HQ. Although the aforementioned My Father's Son provides a very good account of Mowat's service in Italy, we must fast-forward to April 1945 when the now Captain Mowat, based at Eindhoven in the Netherlands was serving as a Technical Intelligence Officer. His task was, as he puts it: "to scour the battlefields and beyond for examples of new military horrors being deployed by the Jerries against our lads."
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