Fighting the Night
Iwo Jima, World War II, and a Flyer's Life
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- ¥2,000
発行者による作品情報
From the acclaimed and best-selling author of Hemingway’s Boat, the profoundly moving story of his father’s wartime service as a night fighter pilot, and the prices he and his fellow soldiers paid for their acts of selfless, patriotic sacrifice
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biographer Hendrickson (Plagued by Fire) offers an intimate exploration of the life and military career of his father, U.S. Army Air Corps pilot Joe Hendrickson (1918–2003). Probing his family's history of violence, the author searches for the root of his father's anger and frustration, which was worsened by wartime PTSD. Born in rural Kentucky and forced to leave home at 19 to ease his family's financial burden during the Great Depression, Joe joined the Army four years before Pearl Harbor. He trained as a pilot and eventually flew the P-61 Black Widow, the first U.S. aircraft designed as a night fighter. In March 1945, less than a month after the capture of Iwo Jima, with pockets of Japanese resistance still lingering on the island, his squadron was assigned to fly nightly raids from Iwo Jima against nearby Japanese-held islands. Four days after their arrival, the remnants of the Japanese Army launched a desperate nighttime attack, killing six members of the squadron while Joe and others were holed up in a tent, armed only with pistols. The resulting carnage stayed with him for the rest of his life, though he rarely discussed it. Hendrickson closely and sinuously narrates the painstaking process of piecing together his father's wartime exploits and life story. Coupling a poignant personal journey with propulsive aviation action, this WWII history flies high.
