Early in my journalism career, I had the pleasure of interviewing Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, a Marine Corps fighter ace and Medal of Honor recipient whose exploits fighting the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II inspired his best-selling memoir, “Baa, Baa Black Sheep,” and, later, a popular television series based loosely on his book. I asked Boyington in our conversation if he thought he was born he was born to be a fighter pilot. “Hell, no,” he shot back. “I wanted to be a 17th Century buccaneer. I was just born too late.”
I know the feeling.
In the pantheon of “people I wish I had been,” World War II fighter pilot ranks right up there. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, like Pappy Boyington, I too was born much too late. Which may explain why, when it comes to reading for vicarious pleasure, I particularly enjoy nonfiction memoirs like his. I’ve read a ton of them over the years, marveling at the heroism of their authors. Their bravery remains unquestionable and unmatched. The caliber of their prose remains another matter.
Most such books were penned by men who never aspired to be wordsmiths. They were combat pilots. Sky-borne war daddies. Even when their books were ghost-written by professional scribes, the finished product, however engaging, rarely approached anything resembling literature. Which is why I remain so impressed after recently finishing Flights of Passage: Reflections of a World War II Aviator by Samuel Hynes.
Hynes, who died in 2019, was a Midwestern boy barely 18 when he left home and learned to fly torpedo bombers. He logged 78 combat missions in the Pacific before the fighting stopped, gaining in the process a Distinguished Flying Cross and a depth of insight into war—the boredom, the madness, the absurdity, the exhilaration—I’ve rarely derived reading other, similar books. No less significantly, Hynes captures elegantly the sheer joy of being aloft without anyone shooting at you–that wondrous, ethereal bond between all pilots, be they civilian or military, and their flying machines. Consider this bit of eloquence:
“Memories of flying are almost always memories of landscape. It isn’t that you think I’m flying over this state or that one, but that you are moving above a landscape pierced by a mountain, or patched with woodlands, or edged by the sea. The earth is always there below, apart and beautiful (no land is ugly from the air), revealing its private features in a way that it never does to the traveler on the surface. A pilot can see where a road goes; what is over the hill, the shape of lakes and towns; and I suppose this knowledge of the earth’s face is a part of the feeling of domination that a pilot feels when his plane reaches a commanding altitude and he looks down on the world that stretches out beneath him.”
I was not surprised to learn that after the war, Hynes became a distinguished scholar, literary critic, and the Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton University. I only wish I had discovered Flights of Passage before he flew West, to tell him how much I relished it.