num_pages: 270
description: Samuel Hynes served as a consultant on The War directed and produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick and appears on camera in several episodes.The War is a seven-part 14-hour documentary series that debuts on PBS on Sunday September 23 2007.Sam Hynes was eighteen when he left his Minnesota home for navy flight school in 1943. By the time the war ended he was a veteran Marine pilot still not quite twenty-one and had flown more than a hundred missions in the Pacific theater. In this eloquent narrative by turns dramatic funny and elegiac Hynes recalls those extraordinary years during which he came of age. he makes real the placesthe training fields and the liberty towns and the Pacific islands and the peoplethe other young pilots the girls and the young wives even the enemy pilots. He remembers friendship and the excitement and tedium of war the high exhilaration of flying and the dying. More than a tale of combat Flight of Passage is a story of one boy's growth to manhood in the turbulent testing world of war in the air.
language: English
title: Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator
publisher: Penguin Books