New England locations are featured in several middle grade and young adult novels published during World War II. My latest book, Children's Wartime Adventure Novels - The Silent Generation's Vicarious Experience of World War II explores these stories and how they inspired and indoctrinated a young generation too young to fight, but not too young to be affected by a global war.
In the first of this three-post series, I wrote about locations in western Massachusetts -- Smith College and Mount Holyoke College -- that were settings for two books for girls on officers' training in the WAVES and Women Marines.
In the second post last week, I talked about two boys' novels that show us New London, Connecticut, locations, including the Naval Submarine Base, where young men train during World War II.
Today, in the third and last post in this three-part series, we have a look at a book for girls set in Maine that blends the war and the home front.
Carol Rogers in War Wings for Carol by Patricia O’Malley, is an administrative assistant in a regional airline in northern Maine. The author worked for the Civil Aeronautics Association from 1938, for Transcontinental & Western Air, Inc. (TWA) and was employed by (its later incarnation) Trans World Airlines in the public relations department at the time of the book’s publication. Ms. O’Malley brings the details of a career for young women as stewardesses and administrative staff to, in this case, a wartime setting
War Wings for Carol begins with her arrival in a rather isolated town in northern Maine where a small regional airport now shares its facilities with an Army Air Transport unit, which gives Carol and the reader a window on the mundane but very necessary non-combat military units which ferry supplies to the front.
Along
with the nuts and bolts of airline administration, we are treated to Carol’s
impressions of a part of the country with which she is not familiar, and the
author describes New England in sometimes lyrical prose.
“The cities were built along the banks of rivers, and the rivers were lined with miles of red brick mills, chimneys belching tall columns of thick black smoke in defiance of an enemy which would reduce mankind to slavery. For this was the heart of industrial New England, where thousands of men, women and machines had been mobilized into the unconquerable army of American production, where the wheels of democracy turned unceasingly, grinding out implements of victory.”
It is the dead of winter when she arrives on a connecting flight from Boston and Bangor.
“There were farms outside the villages, their red barns dark against the white earth. In the distance, small hills rose against the western horizon and they flew across the icy Kennebec at Augusta, where the dome of the capitol rises in stately dignity above the very site where the men of the Massachusetts Bay Colony established the first trading post in America.”
She is to be assistant to Mr. Ingram, the Vice President of the fictional New England Airlines, and because he must travel a great deal, he leaves important duties in her lap, including the hiring and training of new air hostesses. They are in northern Maine, close to the Canadian border, where they share the airfield with the Army Air Corps, and do some contract work for the military, carrying cargo and supplies along with its regular passengers. Mr. Ingram hired Carol to take many details off his shoulders. “‘It’s a big job for a girl and I thought a long time before I made up my mind to take you. But women must shoulder men’s work, and I suppose we’ll see more of it before this thing ends.’
“After a few minutes of reflection, during which Carol sat quietly, he added, ‘And they always do it as well…or better. It’s a sad commentary on the stronger sex, Miss Rogers, but it’s true.’” We can hope the young female readers took note of the praise.
Another loving passage on New England brings the story through the crisis and past a challenging winter. “Spring in northern New England is not like spring anywhere else in the world. She is not a hoyden here, who leaps at your throat and forces you to notice her presence. She doesn’t hurl herself in your path. Spring in New England is a perfect lady. She has been taught how to enter a room and takes her time making an appearance. She knows that winter lingers, loathe to leave the land on which he had such a long, secure hold. But she also knows that victory is inevitably hers, so she walks softly and is gracious in her conquest. She is all the more beautiful because of her good behavior. The snows melt, the hills turn green, the rivers break free from their bondage, and the waters sing as they carry the ice cakes down toward the sea. The skies are washed, and crisply starched and ironed, and the chirp of the robin is heard in the early morning from the branches of trees that are giving promise of the gracious abundance which is to follow.”
Carol deals with wartime administrative problems, encounters a Nazi spy, and agonizes over one of their military supply planes lost in a winter storm somewhere over Maritime Canada.
Children's Wartime Adventure Novels is available in eBook directly from my online store here.
It is also available in eBook from Barnes & Noble, Apple, and a wide variety of online shops here.
It is also available in eBook, paperback, and hardcover from Amazon here.
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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of The Ames Manufacturing Company of Chicopee, Massachusetts - A Northern Factory Town's Perspective on the Civil War;
Comedy and Tragedy on the Mountain: 70 Years of Summer Theatre on Mt. Tom, Holyoke, Massachusetts;
A Tragic Toast to Christmas -- The Infamous Wood Alcohol Deaths of 1919 in Chicopee, Mass.; as well as books on classic films and several novels. Her Double V Mysteries series is set in New England in the early 1950s.
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