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 settingWar
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.
The Army airfield is described without hyperbole: “Two Flying Fortresses and their fighter
escorts were making a spectacular showing against its backdrop. On the ground,
squadrons of bombers were lining up for reconnaissance practice, and pursuit
planes were waddling out of hangers into position for take-off. Trucks, tractors, jeeps and station wagons
sped in and out of the post gates.”
The small town nearby has changed with the war: “Men
in uniform were everywhere. They stood
in doorways and they walked up and down, talking. They filled the drug stores, drinking
innumerable cokes and cups of hot coffee.
They jammed the movies and they patronized the shops and brought a wave
of prosperity such as the little town had never known before.” Much could be said of many, many towns across
the United States during the war.
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;
States of Mind: New England,
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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