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  • Published: 4 February 2003
  • ISBN: 9780142002902
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $35.00

Flights of Passage

Recollections of a World War II Aviator



Samuel Hynes served as a consultant on "The War", directed and produced by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, and appears on camera in several episodes."The War" is a seven-part, 14-hour documentary series that debuts on PBS on Sunday, September 23, 2007.
Sam Hynes was eighteen when he left his Minnesota home for navy flight school in 1943. By the time the war ended he was a veteran Marine pilot, still not quite twenty-one, and had flown more than a hundred missions in the Pacific theater. In this eloquent narrative, by turns dramatic, funny, and elegiac, Hynes recalls those extraordinary years during which he came of age. he makes real the places—the training fields and the liberty towns and the Pacific islands, and the people—the other young pilots, the girls and the young wives, even the enemy pilots. He remembers friendship, and the excitement and tedium of war, the high exhilaration of flying, and the dying. More than a tale of combat, Flight of Passage is a story of one boy's growth to manhood in the turbulent, testing world of war in the air.

  • Published: 4 February 2003
  • ISBN: 9780142002902
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $35.00

About the author

Samuel Hynes

Samuel Hynes is Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature as Princeton University. Together with his earlier works- The Edwardian Turn of Mind and The Auden Generation- A War Imagined forms an important continuous study of the relationship between literature, the arts and th4e events of history during the first four decades of the twentieth century.

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