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Fighting the Night: Iwo Jima, World War II, and a Flyer's Life - Softcover

Hendrickson, Paul

 
9780593466421: Fighting the Night: Iwo Jima, World War II, and a Flyer's Life
Softcover
ISBN 10: 059346642X ISBN 13: 9780593466421
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

From the acclaimed and best-selling author of Hemingway’s Boat, the profoundly moving story of his father’s wartime service as a night fighter pilot, and the prices he and his fellow soldiers paid for their acts of selfless, patriotic sacrifice

In the fall of 1944, Joe Paul Hendrickson, the author’s father, kissed his twenty-one-year-old wife and two baby children goodbye. The twenty-five-year-old first lieutenant, pilot of a famed P-61 Black Widow, was leaving for the war. He and his night fighter squadron were sent to Iwo Jima, where, for the last five and a half months of World War II, he flew approximately seventy-five missions, largely in pitch-black conditions. His wife would wait out the war at the home of her small-town Ohio parents, one of the countless numbers of American family members shouldering the burden of being left behind.

Joe Paul, the son of a Depression-poor Kentucky sharecropper, was fresh out of high school in 1937 when he enlisted in mechanic school in the peacetime Army Air Corps. Eventually, he was able to qualify for flight school. After marriage, and with the war on, the young officer and his bride crisscrossed the country, airfield to airfield, base to base: Santa Ana, Yuma, Kissimmee, Bakersfield, Orlando, La Junta, Fresno. He volunteered for night fighters and the newly arrived and almost mythic Black Widow. A world away, the carnage continued. As Paul Hendrickson tracks his parents’ journey, together and separate, both stateside and overseas, he creates a vivid portrait of a hard-to-know father whose time in the war, he comes to understand, was something truly heroic, but never without its hidden and unhidden psychic costs.

Bringing to life an iconic moment of American history, and the tragedy of all wars, Fighting the Night is an intense and powerful story of violence and love, forgiveness and loss. And it is a tribute to those who got plunged into service, in the best years of their lives, and the sacrifices they and their loved ones made, then and thereafter.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

PAUL HENDRICKSON is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a winner in 2003 for his book Sons of Mississippi. The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War was a 1996 finalist for the National Book Award. Hemingway’s Boat was a New York Times best seller and also a best seller in the UK. He has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Since 1998, he has been on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, and for two decades before that, he was a staff writer at The Washington Post. He lives with his wife, Cecilia, a retired nurse, outside Philadelphia and in Washington, DC.

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Part OneBeginningsSundays too my father got up earlyand put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,then with cracked hands that achedfrom labor in the weekday weather madebanked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.―Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”It’s one of the things that moves me most about his life―the leap my father seemed to make through time and space from a Depression farm boy sitting on wagon tongues in baking Kentucky hayfields, dreaming of airplanes, to someone who, not even two decades later, was piloting airliners out of what was commonly called, when we were kids growing up ourselves, “The World’s Busiest Airport.”The title of world’s busiest belonged first to Midway on the southwest side of Chicago, when, as I’ve already noted, my dad had started out, after the war, in mid-1946, for $225 a month as a copilot for Eastern Air Lines in those old workhorse and tail-dragging DC-3s. And then, in the late fifties and early sixties, when the high-whined turboprops and first generation of jets came in, the title got passed to O’Hare International on the northwest side of the city. We’d moved up closer to the city by then. He’d made captain by then. I think my father flew something like ten different aircraft for Eastern, from the prop age to the jet age, from Martin 404s to DC-7s to Lockheed Electras to Super Connies to the 727 Whisperjet, before his thirty-year commercial aviation career was over. Before he couldn’t pass the company physicals anymore because of his weakening heart. And for almost all of that time, he worked out of either Midway or O’Hare as his home base.Which, somehow, he always referred to as “the field.” They were all fields to him, whether a weedy single strip of macadam or some vast complex of crosshatched runways. That was his Kentucky past calling. The taking-off place and the landing place was the field. I remember him saying that when we were small, my older brother, Marty, and my younger brother Ric and I, lining up to tell him goodbye as he was leaving on a “trip” (all he ever called it) with a two- or three-night layover―maybe down to Miami, with plenty of stops along the way, and then working back through some of those same stops, maybe Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham, Charley West (what he always called Charleston, West Virginia), Louisville, Indianapolis, home.As I wrote elsewhere: “Sometimes he had to leave in the middle of the night, and then I would hear him moving at the front of the house, talking to my mother, his voice waving through my sleep as though through water. Other times he left after supper, or on Sunday after church, or before Marty and I got home from school.”Say the leaving was in the daytime, after school, late afternoon, just when other fifties fathers might have been arriving home from work. Out in the driveway, with our family’s green Oldsmobile 88 idling beside him, he’d be in his captain’s hat, with the beautiful medallion of a red falcon on the brim, and the scrambled egg on the visor, and in his starched dress shirt with the epaulets on the shoulders, and in his dark blue woolen uniform with the gold buttons on the jacket and the raised gold stripes on the sleeve. He smelled of talc and Old Spice. He’d be holding his thick and beat-up old black leather satchel case stuffed with manuals―his “brain bag,” he called it. He’d set it in the trunk, along with his metallic silver suitcase. The emperor of the air was going off. Which often enough was an incredible relief. It was as if the house―our lives―could slump again. The fact that he was going away for the next two or three days created in me a queer feeling of both loneliness and euphoria. This was the two-edged sword we lived by: terrified something bad might happen to him on a winter night up there in the high and the mighty, and the simultaneous joy of being free for the moment of his often explosive and arbitrary-seeming temper. Two-edged because of course we loved him, craved his approvals. Two-edged because of course there were plenty of times when he seemed the best dad in the world.“Well, honey, I’d better head for the field,” he’d say. He and my mom would kiss goodbye. Marty and Ric and I would shake his strong hand. I don’t remember ever once trying to kiss him. It was impossible to do that. Sometimes there might be a semi-hug.That other kind of field: I remember him telling me not too long before he died, when I was more overtly trying to get him to speak about flying and the past, and specifically about Kentucky, of how he was once sitting on the tongue of a wagon in a sweltering Union County hayfield when overhead came this terrible roar, and then this huge shadow darkening the earth all around him. His voice grew soft, as if recounting a gauzy dream.“It was a Ford Trimotor, Paul. It was silver. It flew right over top of me. I was out there all alone. I would have gotten the strap for sitting on that tongue instead of working. I heard it coming before I could see it. It came over the rise. It seemed about a hundred feet over my head, as if it was going to land and pick me up, or maybe drop a ladder down. I could make out the pilot in the little window on the side of the fuselage under the wing. Must have been about ’32. I was fourteen or fifteen. It went right on past me, the noise just huge. I was trembling. It landed in a big pasture on the other side of Morganfield. The next day the people who owned it, and who were barnstorming it through the countryside, along with a biplane that was doing acrobatics, started taking people up for a dollar a ride. I got a ride. I have no idea where I got that dollar. A dollar? Who had a dollar? After, when I told my folks I was someday going to fly airplanes, my mother said, ‘Joe Paul, if you want to commit suicide, why don’t you just go out there and jump off the barn?’ ”My dad wasn’t Wiley Post or Lindbergh, but it was his own kind of leap, and he made it. None of it would have happened without World War II. But it’s also true that the leap could not have been made without my father’s force of will, his certainty in self. None of his other siblings ever possessed this quality of character to the extent he did. Why the third-born in a sharecropping family of nine kids in far rural and unelectrified western Kentucky should have had such vision and vaulting ambition is something I won’t try to answer here. It was just in him. I doubt he ever quite understood it himself. To reference the beautiful Robert Penn Warren poem at the start of this book: Something was happening in a boy’s heart. He didn’t know what it was. Those great geese in the moonless thirties night were honking him northward, away from Union County, even if there is a whole other sense, or so I believe, in which my father never left Morganfield and Union County at all.Long Ago in KentuckySuch a serious gaze, almost unnerving. I can’t say it’s untypical. In his baggy and high-waisted dungarees turned up at the cuff. In his coarse-looking work shirt, which must have been rubbed so many times across the washboard by my grandmother that the coarseness of the cloth, with its glints of bluing in it, may actually have felt soft as lanolin against his skin. With his fist held tight on that bridle, right at the edge of the bit, showing the horse who’s boss. With the slightest stoop to his shoulders that I remember so well the entire time I knew him. My father told me once that he felt self-conscious when he went into the service because he seemed taller than everyone else around him. But at his tallest, he was only six-foot-one, and he doesn’t look quite grown out to that here. “I’d’ve been handsome if I ever stood up straight,” he used to say.Yes, serious-looking, and with that pencil of cig that’s probably a roll-your-own and that he’s holding so naturally between index and middle finger. I remember him holding his smokes like that, down low, against his trouser leg, with his slightly raised thumb poised to flick off...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
059346642X
ISBN 13 
9780593466421
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
321
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