Fighting the night : Iwo Jima, World War II, and a flyer's life
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

In the fall of 1944, Joe Paul Hendrickson, the author's father, kissed his twenty-one-year-old wife, Rita, and their two very young sons goodbye. The twenty-five-year-old first lieutenant, pilot of a famed P-61 Black Widow, was leaving for war. Soon 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. Rita took the babies to wait out the war with her parents in small-town Ohio, just one among countless American wives 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 to pilot the newly arrived, almost-mythic Black Widow. A world away, the carnage continued.