Flights of Passage

"There are probably hundreds of World War II flight-related memoirs. This is certainly one of the best written. Hynes enlisted in 1945, so he’s part of the last wave of young men. When he gets his training he’s sent out to the Pacific, but by that time the momentous Battle of Okinawa is over. Most of Okinawa is in allied American hands – the Japanese cause is all but dead. Although the war will rage on very bloodily for another six to eight months, there were very few Japanese planes left aloft. Hynes wrote this book 40 years after the war, as a tenured professor of literature at Princeton. So it’s very literary but grounded in an experience he shared with thousands of other young men. Hynes writes wonderfully sensitively about what it was like to leave your hometown, which for him was one of the Twin Cities, as a young guy and go to a base and be exposed to alcohol, promiscuous women and fast living and to end up in strange places in great danger. The book is wonderful in capturing the way death in the air could come so quickly, from the stupidity of hijinks by guys, who weren’t much more than kids, flying 10 tonne machines at 200-plus miles an hour. Even though he was in a war zone, there was virtually no one getting shot down by the Japanese. But Hynes lost a number of buddies to these silly escapades. So it’s a bittersweet memoir that records one dimension of the tragedy of war and yet it’s got some good flight stuff in it. Hynes was flying one of the worst aircraft that the military provided in the period, the Grumman TBF Avenger. Pilots called it the turkey because it was very cumbersome. This was the same plane that the future President George HW Bush got shot down in over the Pacific. Hynes doesn’t get shot down but he did wreck one plane while showing off too close to the ground. His commander sentenced him to work on its restoration for two weeks so he got the idea that it was time to grow up. The war made it clear that aviation was a major force in the economy and in the culture. So many Americans experienced their first flight during the war – not just people like Hynes, who actually flew while in the military, but also guys like my father who was in the infantry but took his first flight going from one camp to the other in the States before he was shipped overseas. The military would fly people just to speed things up. The Women’s Air Service Pilots, the WASPs, relieved men from having to do a lot of stateside flying, by flying planes from where they were built – maybe by Boeing in Washington or by Lockheed in California – to the various bases where they would either get on ships and be carried across oceans or in the case of bombers be flown across by military pilots. So even over here, airplanes were in the sky everywhere. Everyone saw airplanes or knew people who knew a pilot. New aircraft emerged as a result of technological developments during the war. Air travel started to become common. In the early fifties the surplus military aircraft were bought by entrepreneurs and used for charter flights. Many of my generation – I graduated from college in 1960 – had their first flight abroad on a charter airplane. By the end of the sixties flight was something accessible pretty much across classes in the United States. That’s another strong impact of the war. Then there’s “the jet age”. We have to link that to the war because jet technology was first devised as part of the war effort. The first US military jet fighter went into service as the war ended. A decade later, passenger planes got jet engines. Jet planes are a much more efficient and lower cost and safer means of travel than the old piston engines. So the move towards mass air travel is helped by the wartime development of the jet."