Quill and Quire reports the death in Ottawa of military memoirist George Blackburn, age 90, and adds a nice tribute by his publisher, Doug Gibson. In the 1990s, in his seventies, Blackburn wrote three volumes of memoirs of the Second World War, most notably the disturbingly, movingly intense The Guns of Normandy (1996).
Speaking of moving and disturbing, Farley Mowat's war memoir of the Italian campaign And No Birds Sang has just been republished by Key Porter. My father, who also served in Italy, was both moved and infuriated when he first read that book years ago. For giving a sense of what that war was like, he thought Mowat had it dead on. But it drove him crazy that Mowat seemed to have all the details wrong. When your life had depended on the fighting effectiveness of the 33rd Armoured Brigade, say, it was maddening to see them called the 44th and then the 22nd. Well, Mowat's always said the truth is more important than the facts. But facts can be talismens; not good to fool with them.
