During the Second World War, there were several attempts at sabotage made by German spies, most notably a plot to blow up bridges on the East Coast, as well as a plot to poison the water supply in New York City2. In June 1942 a German submarine snuck in two teams of spies off the shores of New York and Florida. All of the spies were later caught and several were executed. However, the fears and suspicions about Japanese spies in the United States proved to be unfounded. In fact, during the entire Second World War, only ten people were convicted of spying for Japan. None of them was Japanese; all ten were Caucasian.
In December 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court finally ruled that the detention camps violated the civil rights of interned American citizens. Over the following months in 1945, the camps were shut down and the Japanese American internees were allowed to leave. Some were angry at the way they had been treated, and after the war they chose to go to Japan. Most, however, remained in the United States and tried to rebuild their lives.
In 1988, the U.S. House of Representatives formally apologized to the Japanese internees and allocated $1.2 billion in compensation. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 declared the evacuation and internment a grave injustice “motivated by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
When war broke out in 1941, the P-40 Warhawk was the main fighter plane of the U.S. military. By the war’s end, however, it had been replaced by faster, more maneuver-able planes like the P-51 Mustang, P-38 Lightning, and F4U Corsair.
Fifty years later, in 1991, the U.S. Congress lifted the female air combat ban, allowing the first American women to become combat fighter pilots.
1Several thousand Germans and Italians visiting or living in the United States were also detained and sent to camps, but unlike the Japanese internees, these included only non-U.S. citizens.
2The spies were members of the Abwehr, a true-life German spy organization that successfully planted deep-cover agents throughout the United States as early as 1925.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Some years ago I found myself at an air show in upstate New York while working on a TV series about World War Two aircraft. We were shooting a classic plane known as the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, a rugged, very American-looking fighter with dark olive paint and a ferocious shark mouth painted on its giant conical nose. The plane had been immortalized in an old John Wayne movie, The Flying Tigers, and I remember feeling some childlike excitement at the chance to sit in the cockpit and be Walter Mitty for a moment while we rigged an onboard camera.
As I worked in the cockpit, two children climbed onto the wing, admiring the historic plane. The girl was about nine or ten, with short blond hair and a defiant stare. The smart-aleck boy, who was relentlessly teasing her, was obviously her slightly older brother. They were arguing back and forth about whether the Warhawk or its sleek descendant, the P-51 Mustang, was the better plane. The girl said she didn’t care what her brother said, she thought the Warhawk was the best, and one day she’d prove it by flying it.
“Girls can never be fighter pilots,” he told her flatly.
I remember that his pronouncement kind of shocked her. She disputed him at first, but when he asked her to name one girl fighter pilot, of course she couldn’t. She climbed down from the wing and drifted off like a deflated balloon.
Several years later, I was teaching sixth-grade English, and a female student wanted to read an action-adventure story with a girl hero. I gave it some thought, recommended a few novels, but realized none of them was really action-adventure. Some had heroines who solved mysteries, witnessed history, or survived hardships, but there were none where the girl got to save the day. By this time I was a father of two girls, and I found myself thinking more and more about that little girl at the air show. A story began to take shape in my mind.
For these reasons, and especially because a ten-year-old girl wanted to fly a P-40 Warhawk and her brother said she couldn’t, I wrote Born to Fly.
Michael Ferrari lives in Avon Lake, Ohio, where he is a teacher. Born to Fly is his first novel.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Michael Ferrari
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ferrari, Michael (Michael J.)
Born to fly / Michael Ferrari. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: In 1942, an eleven-year-old girl who longs to be a pilot and her family try to manage their lives in Rhode Island when the father goes to fight in World War II.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89096-3
[1. Flight—Fiction. 2. Airlplanes—Fiction. 3. Family life—Rhode Island—
Fiction. 4. Friendship—Fiction. 5. Sex role—Fiction. 6. World War, 1939–1945—
Fiction. 7. Rhode Island—History—20th century—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.F3644Bo 2009
[Fic]—dc22
2008035664
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