Our Fathers' War

Sidney Allinson is Canadian news correspondent for Britain’s The Army
Quarterly and Defence. He is the author of The Bantams: The Untold Story
of World War I, Jeremy Kane, and Kruger’s Gold: A Novel of the
Anglo-Boer War.

Our Fathers’ War, a sweeping epic novel, follows the fortunes of a
large cast of 45 characters throughout World War II. Several are members
of a close group of family and friends, who are introduced to the reader
in a gathering at an Ontario lakeside cottage just as war breaks out in
September 1939. James Bacque also interweaves performances by Adolf
Hitler, Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
While its main thrust is to present actual wartime events through their
eyes, the book provides plenty of fictional personal stories as well,
including love affairs between young Canadians and Germans, an English
noblewoman, and a French resistance-fighter. The sheer number of
characters makes this a tough read at times, but the author keeps firm
control of his story threads for the most part.

Eighteen years ago, Bacque wrote a sensationalist book that claimed the
Americans and French deliberately starved to death a million German POWs
after World War II. It caused such a furor that German and American
military historians set out to thoroughly investigate his assertion and
found it was absolutely false. Regrettably, Bacque injects the same
calumny into this novel, but otherwise Our Father’s War manages to be
an entertaining saga.