Fighting the Night

Iwo Jima, World War II, and a Flyer's Life

By: Paul Hendrickson

Narrated by: Fred Sanders, Paul Hendrickson

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.

This program includes a bonus PDF with photographs, referenced in the book, that are essential to the listening experience.

Not as expected

Those who knew the flyers talked about in this book may be interested in this level of detail, but I thought i would be learning about flying the P-61 in the Pacific Theater. The pilots mentioned never even saw an enemy plane.

next to nothing about actually flying

I selected the book on the mistaken assumption there would be some details on the role, tactics, capabilities, experience, and performance of night fighters in this particular theater. instead, we get an emotional, sentimental imagined recreation of details of Hendricksen's pilot-father's history, minus any of the above. Might be OK if that's what you're looking for. I wasn't.