Skip to main content

Flights Of Passage

March 2023
2min read

Reflections of a World War II Aviator

By Samuel Hynes; Frederic C. Beil & Naval Institute Press; 270 pages.

“Every generation,” writes Samuel Hynes in the preface to his new book, “is a secret society.” The secret his generation shared was the experience of coming of age in the Second World War. Hynes was eighteen when he entered Navy Flight School, and not yet twenty-one when the war ended. In the meantime, he’d learned to fly in combat effectively enough to earn an Air Medal and a Distinguished Flying Cross in the Pacific. Afterward he went back to the normal business of living, became Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature at Princeton, and wrote books on the Edwardians and on W. H. Auden. But still he carried the secret. It “made us different from those who were older or younger than ourselves, or who were not in the war. I can’t formulate the differences in terms that seem adequate to the experience, but perhaps I can recover something of the experience itself.”

To do so, Hynes has tried, he says, “to tell it with the voice of the young man who lived it, and to see it with his eyes, and not to impose upon it the revisionary wisdom of age.” Though this intention carries with it the alarming possibility of a cloying, disingenuous simplicity, Hynes instantly finds the voice he seeks, and his memoir is written with unfailing grace and clarity.

Every stage of his development as a pilot is described with a richness of observation. Here, picked at random, is a routine flight at the beginning of his career: “It was late as I flew back from some practice solo, and the sun was nearly set, but the air was still warm and bright. … Below me lights began to come on in houses and farms, and everything that was not a light became dark and indistinct, so that the ground was almost like a night sky. But still I flew on in sunlight. The surface of the plane seemed to absorb and hold the light and color of the sunset; brightness surrounded me. It was as though the earth had died, and I alone was left alive.”

Hynes brings the same sense of both mood and specific to every aspect of his years as a flier: the training, the endless chatter with his fellow pilots-to-be about sex, his plunge into marriage, the death of friends, the indispensable drinking and bawdy songs, the planes, the fighting. It is not a book about war, although of course the war informs it throughout, nor about hardware, although Hynes is very good on it (“That month the Navy took away half the squadron’s TBM’s and gave us SB2C’s instead. These were the Navy’s new divebombers, bigger and faster than the SBD’s 1 had trained in but in every other way less satisfactory … some public relations man had decided to call the SB2C the Helldiver, and it was as showy and as phony as the name, like a beach athlete, all muscle and no guts”). Inevitably the “wisdom of age” that the author sought to keep at bay seeps quietly onto every page, and Flights of Passage is a calm, poetic, and sometimes very funny musing on the quality of youth, and the gains and losses that come with the passing of time.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "September/October 1988"

Authored by: John S. Watterson

SMU isn’t playing this season; men on the team were accepting money from alumni. That’s bad, of course; but today’s game grew out of even greater scandal.

Authored by: The Editors

Reflections of a World War II Aviator

Authored by: The Editors

Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900

Authored by: The Editors

A Picture Postcard Record of Mexico’s Revolution and U.S. War Preparedness, 1910-1917

Authored by: The Editors

Essays on Literature, Technology, and Culture in the United States

Authored by: The Editors

The Transformation of the American Diet

Authored by: Greg Mitchell

To keep Upton Sinclair from becoming governor of California in 1934, his opponents invented a whole new kind of campaign

Authored by: Jack Larkin

Forget your conventional picture of America in 1810. In the first half of the nineteenth century, we were not at all the placid, straitlaced, white-picket-fence nation we imagine ourselves to have been. By looing at the patterns of everyday life as recorded by contemporary foreign and native observers of the young republic and by asking the questions that historians don't think to ask of another time—what were people really like? how did they greet one another in the street? how did they occupy their leisure time? what did they eat?—Jakc Larking brings us a portrait of another Americna, an America that was so different from both our conception of its past life and its present-day reality as to seem a foreign country.

Authored by: A. R. Gurney

For generations it was the mainspring, the proof, and the reward of a civilized social life. Now, a fond student of the ritual looks back on the golden age of the dinner party and tells you just how you should have behaved.

Authored by: Gary A. Reynolds

He was the best society portraitist of his day. But that day came to an end.

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told about how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

The world’s most prominent actress risked her career by standing up to one of Hollywood’s mega-studios, proving that behind the beauty was also a very savvy businesswoman. 

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.