Fighting the night Iwo Jima, World War II, and a flyer's life
"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...
| Main Author: | Hendrickson, Paul, 1944- (Author) |
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| Format: | Books Print Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Alfred A. Knopf,
2024.
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| Edition: | First edition. |
| Subjects: |
| Summary: |
"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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| Item Description: |
"This is a Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Knopf." |
| Physical Description: |
301 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm |
| Bibliography: |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: |
9780593321133 0593321138 |
| Author Notes: |
Hendrickson's books are Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott (a finalist for the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award); The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (finalist for the National Book Award in 1996); and Hemingway's Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961. (Bowker Author Biography) |