Title: Flights of Passage
First published: 1988
Description: 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 places—the training fields and the liberty towns and the Pacific islands, and the people—the 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.
Subjects: Aerial operations, American, United States. Marine Corps, Campaigns, Personal narratives, American, American Personal narratives, American Aerial operations, World War, 1939-1945, Fighter pilots, United States. Navy, United States, Biography, World war, 1939-1945, aerial operations, american, World war, 1939-1945, personal narratives, american, Fiction, general
Places: United States, Pacific Area
People: Samuel Hynes
LC classification: D767.9