Under a War-Torn Sky

“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, / And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.”

These are the first two lines of “High Flight”, a poem that Henry has memorized. He recites it silently to help him get back to sleep after his nightmare. The poem was written by John Gillespie Magee Jr., an American who served with the Royal Canadian Air Force (not the Royal Air Force, as it says in the book, which is the British air force). In 1941, Magee died in a mid-air collision with another plane during a training flight in England. In the novel, Henry reflects on how he had expected flying to be as described in the poem but he found it was a very different experience, considering all the death and destruction he had witnessed.

“‘Hey, didya hear Lord Ha Ha last night?’ asked Henry’s navigator, Fred Bennett, as they slogged across the mud-washed base.

‘Naw, I never listen to that guy,’ said Henry, even though he did. ‘He’s full of baloney.’”

Lord Haw-Haw (not Lord Ha Ha as the author writes) was the nickname of William Joyce. He was born in New York, and his family later moved to England, where Joyce obtained a British passport. He became a German citizen in 1940. He supported the Nazis and broadcast Nazi propaganda to the United Kingdom during the war from his base in Hamburg, Germany. The nickname was a reference to his haughty, pseudo-aristocratic manner of speaking. Joyce was captured in 1945 and returned to Britain.