This book, first published 26 years ago, successfully evokes
the picture of what it was like for a young man aged 19 to enter the service,
learn how to fly, and be shipped to the Pacific, to participate in the final
days of World War II. Hynes spent 2 years and 8 months away from his home,
going in as a scared teenager and exiting as a flier, a married man and one who
had experienced combat.
Hynes became an academic and is now retired from Princeton,
where he was the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature. (We have four of his books
on literary criticism, in addition to this memoir.) Hynes wrote “Flights of Passage” forty years after the war, but pretty well succeeds with his aim to write it from the sensibility
of the 19 year old, not from the professor’s viewpoint. It might be because of this, but it is not a “deep”
story. We can identify and root for the
young man who wants to succeed, not fail, and who also wants to fit in. When we
hear of deaths and tragedies, however, they are duly noted and passed over…sometimes
Hynes remarks on how the Japanese kamikaze attacks struck he and the others as
being alien to themselves – and how strange it was to inhabit islands where the
original inhabitants has all been transported elsewhere, so the Americans could
dig in and fight.
What stays with you is the instincts of the young,
particularly the young men, and how they settle into whatever huts or barracks
are offered, take on the routine that is set out for them, and still manage to
keep their individuality, their pranks, their anger and their simple high
spirits. You realize that the age old
tradition of the comic song was alive and well in those days, and belting out
irreverent and (sometimes) obscene lyrics was a common pastime. Details like describing the songs, and how
they were sung, help to recreate that age, before TV, when simple kids really were
simple, and even the smart alecks not that much more sophisticated.
Another nice touch throughout the book is Hyne’s description
of flying. Beautiful imagery captures
the lyricism of flight as well as the danger - from wind and clouds, from fog
and dark night. Hynes explains the
technical aspects of flying enough to give the reader an approximate
understanding of maneuvers, without overwhelming us. You can see, from his description of the
training, why everyone can’t be a flier.
Not everyone can learn to fly in darkness, over land and sea, and roll a
plane upside down and come out of it, which Hynes said at first felt like sheer
suicide.
This is a good memoir, not just for finding out what life
was like for fliers in the Pacific, but to glimpse the war from their viewpoint
- more as a necessary evil, something that got them in the air and gave them
something to fly for.
Click
here to see the book in our catalog.
