320 pages | 7th May, 2024 | Non-fiction | Memoir; World War II History
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.
“[A book] to brighten the rest of the season…. [Paul] Hendrickson, a former Washington Post staff writer, has written acclaimed books about Ernest Hemingway and Robert McNamara…. In his latest, he turns to the subject of his own family.”
The Washington Post
“A beautifully written exploration of [the author’s] father’s World War II service as the pilot of a P-61 Black Widow night fighter… Paul Hendrickson…is a probing journalist who prioritizes facts over sensationalism…[in this] absorbing narrative…. Mr. Hendrickson spoke with a dizzying array of family members and friends… [and though] he never met the only enlisted man on the three-man crew… his research… is so evocative and perceptive that one might think the author knew him intimately…. The book is a journey into discovery…. a fascinating immersion in the melancholy yet somehow uplifting tale of one American family… One comes away…highly impressed.”
John C. McManus, The Wall Street Journal
“Detailing the challenges of a young military family, Joe Paul’s dangerous wartime missions, and the lingering effects of war, Hendrickson poignantly examines a life and a historic time.”
Library Journal
“[A] detailed, vivid narrative, which benefits from intensive archival research and exhaustive interviews… An expert account of a father’s WWII experiences that gives his fellow airmen equal attention.”
Kirkus Reviews
“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)… Coupling a poignant personal journey with propulsive aviation action, this WWII history flies high."
Publishers Weekly
“There are countless books about World War II, the war in the Pacific, and the fight for Iwo Jima. Paul Hendrickson’s Fighting the Night is unique — a son telling the story of his father’s experiences as a combat pilot in the aftermath of the Iwo Jima campaign but written with extraordinary intimacy about how he got there, what he did there, and the impact it had on the rest of his life and on his family. It is a story of friendships forged, the emotional scars, and just coping after the war. Fighting the Night is more, though. It is the story of every war, every man in combat, and the scars each man — and his family — bears. It is a beautiful book, a stark and raw one in many ways, and a magnificent tribute to the author’s father.”
Robert M. Gates, Secretary of Defense 2006-2011
“With deep vision, Paul Hendrickson narrates his search for what his Dad and his combat buddies experienced in the Pacific. It is beautifully reported and written, like all of Paul’s work. What makes this book special is that it’s a much larger journey into the collective psyche of the members of the Baby Boom generation who have lived in the light and shadow of their parents’ experiences in combat long ago.”
David Ignatius, columnist, The Washington Post
Paul Hendrickson is a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a winner in 2003 for his book Sons of Mississippi. The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War was a 1996 finalist for the National Book Award. Hemingway’s Boat was a New York Times best seller and also a best seller in the UK. He has been the recipient of writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation. Since 1998, he has been on the faculty of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania, and for two decades before that, he was a staff writer at The Washington Post. He lives with his wife, Cecilia, a retired nurse, outside Philadelphia and in Washington, DC.
US: Knopf