Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator [Paperback]

Samuel Hynes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 3, 2003

He was a wide-eyed teenager when he left his Minnesota home in 1943 to learn to fly. By the end of World War II, he was a battle-worn Marine bomber pilot who'd survived more than a hundred missions in the Pacific. With stunning eloquence and breathtaking clarity, Samuel Hynes recalls those extraordinary years: the madness of war and the horror of death, the friendships forged in cockpits and gin mills, the wives and sweethearts left at home, and the wonder of flying-that exquisite harmony between pilot and machine aloft in the insubstantial air. More than a combat tale, this is the story of one man's remarkable rite of passage in that timeless world of innocence gone to war.

Editorial Reviews

Review

An unusual and moving book . . . an authentic fragment, poignant and real, of a great and tumultuous past. (The Washington Post Book World)

From the Publisher

6 1.5-hour cassettes --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 270 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (February 3, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0142002909
• ISBN-13: 978-0142002902
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #754,330 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Good Wars" Still Kill, September 11, 2005

By 

Bill Slocum (Norwalk, CT USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator (Paperback)

Watching planes fly over his Minneapolis home, young Samuel Hynes never imagined himself flying in one, let alone being a pilot. He never saw an ocean, yet before he turned 21, he would be flying and fighting over the largest of them. World War II was a transforming conflict in many ways. For Hynes, it was his ticket to a larger world.

Not that he seems too happy for the experience. Yes, Hynes writes with humor, and some nostalgia, about his experiences fighting in the Pacific Theater with the Marines air wing in the last year of the war. Yet, when he describes his feelings about his return to civilian life as "the end of something that had been good, perhaps like the breaking up of a marriage," it feels odd and wrong.

Hynes didn't see a lot of combat, but he saw a lot of waste, deadly waste, pilots in training killed attempting maneuvers, or else later on, lost at sea because they were lost in the clouds. There are attacks on a Japanese-held island tucked too deep behind Allied lines to threaten anyone. There's no glory in Samuel Hynes' war; even the deaths of Japanese foes are related with bitter resignation.

Hynes writes of his and his comrades' struggle less in terms of victory than simple survival, doing what the military asks them and no more. Hynes mentions the film classics "Wings" and "Dawn Patrol," but there's more here of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22," where the carnage of World War II is played as a sick joke. Even the humor has that same acidic quality. When one pilot is lost at sea, only to be rescued, his comrades disguise their relief by pretending to have gotten rid of his belongings when he returns.

The book is three-fourths over before Hynes reaches the only real battle he participated in, Okinawa. As he hops from post to post stateside, the narrative sometimes gets dull. But the overall tone of "Flights Of Passage is what makes it worth reading. With most war books, the focus is naturally on battles, or individuals who made some difference in the conflict. Hynes, a self-described small cog in giant machine, writes of the other side of war, its boredom, pettiness, infidelity, and creeping ennui. Danger, too, and tragedy, but in such small doses one can never be ready for them, not ready enough.

While his style is dispassionate and nonjudgmental, I get the feeling Hynes didn't care much for what he saw of the war. It's not that he was a bad Marine, just not a warrior.

His best sections involve the spurts of battle he did see, his impressions of flying the different combat planes of the era. Corsairs were prized as beauties but prone to spinning out during landing approaches, while the Hellfighters were "all muscle and no guts."

Hynes spends a lot of time on his comrades, but except for one hotshot he gets close to named Joe, none really stick out, not even Hynes. Carefully written, at times beautifully, the book avoids any non-factual embellishments that might make it more readable but less true, the kind that other memoirists would defend as compensation for fading memory. The result is a flat, dry read, but one you trust to tell it like it was.

I'm glad for the service Hynes gave his country, more perhaps than Hynes himself. But his book makes clear why wars, even when fought for the most noble of purposes, leave scars and a sense of loss that outweighs any triumph, however worthy.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Talk About Situational Irony!, June 1, 2003

By 

Dave Schwinghammer "Dave Schwinghammer" (Little Falls, Minnesota USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Flights of Passage: Recollections of a World War II Aviator (Paperback)

By the time I got to the last page of Samuel Hynes's memoir GROWING SEASONS, I had developed such an attachment to young Sam that I was reluctant to quit reading. Luckily Hynes had written an earlier memoir about his days as a dive bomber pilot during WWII entitled FLIGHTS OF PASSAGE. Imagine my surprise when I spotted the book already in my bookcase. I'd read it when it was published in 1988. I had to read it again.
Hynes writes with such humility it's easy to put yourself in his shoes. Sam is continually worried about being cut from the flight program and sent to Great Lakes to train as an enlisted man. He also doesn't shirk from describing the times he crashed his plane or did something stupid, trying to show off. Although he went on over a hundred missions on Okinawa, he isn't sure his contribution to the war effort was worth that much. He's disappointed when he's left behind when his squadron goes on a bombing run of Japan.
As an ex-Navy man myself I can relate to a lot of what Hynes went through: the depressing bus stations, the sexual braggadocio, the feeling of vertigo when changing duty stations, the hurry-up-and-wait mentality, the obsession with drinking and playing cards.
About the only problem I have with the book is that the other pilots don't really come alive for me--I had trouble remembering who they were. Sam also gets married (at nineteen) before going overseas, but we never get to know his wife. He doesn't say much about her letters; he doesn't even seem to miss her. I had an ominous feeling about that marriage.
Perhaps the most memorable part of the book is when the war ends and Hynes and his fellow pilots are sitting around waiting for orders and they're caught in a typhoon! It blows away several tents and several men are killed. Talk about situational irony.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A lyrical book about the coming of age of a boy during WWII, November 19, 1999

By 

Robin S. Ferris (San Antonio, TX) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Flights of Passage (Paperback)

I have read this book 4 times now, and it gets better every time. Samuel Hynes has achieved something a lot of other writers have not. He has written about events that happened to him decades before, yet tells his story with the same sense of wonder as if it had just happened to him. This is a blunt, emotional, and at times extraordinarily humorous book that pulls no punches in its depictions of military life and the actions of young men about to go off to war. It is a shame it is out of print. If you can find a copy, whether through Amazon or at your library, it is worth reading over and over again!