Flights of Passage

In World War II Sam Hynes was a young Marine bomber pilot. He flew more than a hundred missions against the Japanese at Okinawa and Ulithi. But now, some forty years after those dramatic combat experiences, it is not the mechanics of flying and war-making that remain uppermost in this pilot's memory. What Hynes remembers best and describes so eloquently in this memoir are the sensations he experienced in his rites of passage from untrained cadet to war-weary aviator, from youthful innocence to manhood.
Hynes tells the story of his training and fighting, and of the growing up that went with it, by re-creating the world of the 1940s as he knew it. A midwestern boy reared on Norman Rockwell images, he was just eighteen when he left home to learn to fly and turned twenty-one at the war's end. In the decades since, Hynes has become an established author and respected scholar who recounts this tale with talents developed over a lifetime of study. His lucid, deceptively simple style immediately engages the reader in his exploration of the mysteries of coming of age in wartime.
With humour and compassion Hynes presents unforgettable portraits of his fellow aviators. Neither judgmental nor sentimental, his disciplined understatement communicates an acute sense of the spectacular madness of war - the exhilaration and tedium; the admiration for a pilot's prowess, even when that pilot is an enemy; the impenetrable absurdity of the death of friends. At the same time, he gives us a sense of the wondrous feeling of flying - that exquisite harmony which exists between a pilot and his machine aloft in the insubstantial air.
These images of a young aviator's war rank with the very best literature to come out of the Second World War.


by Samuel Hynes
Published by Bloomsbury 1988 1st edition. 270pp 16x24 very good, in slightly worn d/j.






Note:
"Long" descriptions, where shown, may have been taken from the book's dust jacket notes, and as such are relevant to the date of publication (e.g. any references to "new edition" "previously unpublished photographs" etc.) and not the present.

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