One Man's Tale of Courage Flying Fighters in the Dark

He flew the P-61 Black Widow in World War II.

Northrop’s P-61 Black Widow was late to the war. The fighter-bomber didn’t fly its first combat mission until June 1944, when it penetrated German airspace to bomb and strafe trains, railways, and military vehicles. The Black Widow was assigned to every theater of the war, including combat operations in the Pacific.

The P-61 has the distinction of being the first American airplane purpose-built to destroy enemy aircraft under the cover of night and in bad weather. Equipped with a nose-mounted radar, the dual-engine Black Widow had a three-person crew: gunner, radar observer-gunner, and pilot. One of those pilots was Joseph Paul Hendrickson, the son of a Kentucky sharecropper, who enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1937.

In his latest book, Fighting the Night, published last May, Paul Hendrickson writes about his father’s experiences as a military pilot, including his deployment to Iwo Jima, which required leaving his wife and two young sons behind in Ohio. The 25-year-old Hendrickson and his squadron arrived on the small Pacific island on March 20, 1945. Six days later, Japanese soldiers who had been hiding out in caves and underground bunkers mounted a surprise attack at 4 am, killing and injuring American servicemen as they slept in their tents. U.S. Marines based on Iwo Jima ended the assault four hours later. The incident left Hendrickson’s father with a constant feeling of unease, but he carried on with his duties, flying some 75 missions over the next five and a half months.

Fighting the Night is a riveting tale about World War II military aviation. The book also movingly—and unsparingly—documents Hendrickson’s relationship with his sometimes-distant father. Hendrickson—a former staff writer at the Washington Post and the author of the New York Times bestseller Hemingway’s Boat—was recently interviewed by Air & Space Quarterly senior editor Diane Tedeschi.

Have you ever seen a P-61 up close? Maybe even get to sit in the cockpit?

I’ve never sat in the cockpit of a Black Widow, but I’ve gotten to experience the inside of one at point-blank range. It was on a spring day several years ago in Reading, Pennsylvania. “You want to look in the cockpit? Go ahead,” the head of the Mid Atlantic Air Museum had suddenly and generously said. I had been interviewing him in his office. His name is Russ Strine. It was a slow tour day. He led me into a museum hangar where the Widow was on display, even as she was being lovingly rebuilt. The restoration has been going on for more than three decades (but the dream to save her has been kept alive for even longer).

There are said to be only four known P-61s in existence in the world (see “A Black Widow’s Second Act,” p. 39). The one at the Mid Atlantic Air Museum sits about an hour and 15 minutes’ driving time from my home outside Philadelphia. I stood on the top rung of a small yellow stepladder, with my head and shoulder blades sticking up through the floorboard of the fuselage. My heart was thumping wildly. I was spit-close to all those knobs and dials and levers and gauges that my father would have known in his sleep. I was at eye-level with the control wheel. I could see the firing switch for the 20-millimeter cannons on the upper right side of the wheel. I could see the gunsight mounted on the cowl in the middle of the windshield above the instrument panel. I could have stood on that ladder and peered in at that cockpit all afternoon. But the museum’s owner was clearing his throat down below. He had let me keep my head in for about 15 minutes. That quarter of an hour is burned into my brain cells for eternity.

What is your opinion of the P-61?

Perhaps you get the drift—I like her. (And, incidentally, I can think of the airplane my father flew off Iwo Jima for the last five months of World War II only in the feminine.) It is her sleekness. It is her glossy blackness. It is her alluring twin-boom design. It is her firepower. It is her surprising speed. It is the spareness of her three-man crew: pilot, gunner, radar operator. It is the fact that so relatively few were built. (In the entire course of the war, only 706 Widows rolled off the assembly lines, as opposed to, say, 9,816 B-25 Mitchell bombers.)

The P-61 came into the shooting war very late. Her record cannot begin to compare to, say, the P-51 Mustang’s. But her legend, her mystique, are right there with some of the greatest aircraft of the war. I think the myth has chiefly to do with the idea of dark, of stealth, of working under cloud cover or in the glow of moonlight. It is a fact that the Black Widow was the first operational warplane of World War II to have been built specifically as a night fighter. But that doesn’t really explain things. In my boyhood imagination, this combination fighter-bomber seemed as exotically poisonous as the spider from which she’d taken her name. And my dad had sat at the wheel.

We often hear military pilots talk about compartmentalizing their emotions. Do you think your father’s fear of dying in the war was tempered by the joy of flying the P-61?

I have come to believe my father was scared out of his skull for most of the time he was on Iwo Jima. And I also think there must have been moments of godlike exhilaration mixed in with and inextricable from the terrible fear he felt at certain moments. The great mid-century poet James Dickey (himself a night fighter, although not a pilot, as he claimed throughout his life) wrote an immortal poem called “The Firebombing.” He describes the “moon-metal shine of propellers” and the “silver night-sea” and the Faustian feeling-bargain of the “greatest sense of power in one’s life.” Those ambivalent feelings must have come at an intractable price—in some cases only later to be paid.

Your father flew as a military pilot, an airline pilot, and as a private pilot. What was it about flying that appealed to him so much?

I think my father was always happiest up there in his wild blue yonder. It pains me to write that. His family was down on the ground, waiting. He came back to us—all through my childhood we prayed that he’d safely get back down from the airliners he piloted for Eastern Air Lines out of Chicago—but then, in a few days or a week, he was back up there, loosed once more from the earth. “It’s something I’ve never really been able to explain,” I remember my dad once saying. “The feeling I’ve always gotten from flying.” I have a kid brother who’s an aviator, and I’ve heard him say much the same thing. Like some other things in life, I suppose you can’t know the feeling unless you’re the one doing it. I’ve heard old jazzmen say a similar thing. They call people in the outside world “civilians.”

What qualities did your father have that made him such a good pilot?

Fabulous eyesight. Belief in his own powers. An uncanny sense of direction. A certain fatalism. Self-reliance. A beautiful sense of touch. When he was a private pilot, I would fly with him in his single-engine Beechcraft Debonair. I marveled at the way he worked the controls. Deep into his 70s, he could stick a landing like a man working with a hand trowel. 

Back then, the prevailing attitude was that if combat didn’t kill or permanently injure you, then you’d be just fine. Today, we also recognize the psychological scars that wars can cause. Did your father ever talk about what is now referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)?

Who’d ever heard of PTSD in the 1950s, when I was growing up and when my father—or so I am convinced—was exorcising his Iwo Jima demons? That terminology, that concept, that understanding, didn’t really exist. But to answer your question: no. A time or two or three he talked to me of his fear, and I wish now I could have heard him better. It’s only one of the things that haunts me about our relationship. It was as if I wanted to hear about his fear and simultaneously wanted to clap my hands over my ears. Once, I remember, I asked him about it on the telephone. I was writing a piece for a magazine about men in the war. We didn’t have to look at each other. He went straight in. “I guess it was a little something like, ‘My God, I just don’t have that constant….’ ” (There was a pause on the line.) “ ‘…threat of dying anymore. It’s not at you. It’s gone, that thing you don’t want to talk about but that’s always there in the background.’ ”

World War II is an example of ordinary people serving in extraordinary circumstances, and your father is such an example. He was a small-town boy stationed on a Pacific island and the commanding officer of a fast, multi-engine aircraft with a three person-crew. Was he proud of his wartime service? Do you think he drew confidence from it?

My dad is buried with my mother in a family plot in a Catholic cemetery in Xenia, Ohio. It’s instructive to me that he wanted these words etched into the pink marble stone of his marker: “WWII Pilot Night Fighter CPT.” He’d been little more than a boy over there. He lived to be almost 85. He’d known decades of accomplishment as a commercial flier. But he wanted this on his stone.

What would you like people to know about your father?

That he went to the war, and he did some brave things. That he steered himself and two crewmates safely through the black of an ocean so far from home, so long ago. That he, along with my stateside mom, had no choice but to throw himself against one of the largest events in human history. That I consider him an American hero.

This article, originally titled “Quiet Hero,” is from the Winter 2025 issue of Air & Space Quarterly, the National Air and Space Museum's signature magazine that explores topics in aviation and space, from the earliest moments of flight to today. Explore the full issue.

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