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3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 The author tells his own story in novel form Sep 29, 2007
By R. W. Russell
"midway42.org"
"Fear in the Dark" is Navy combat veteran and retired university professor Alvin Kernan's latest offering in his series of novels centered on the famous naval air battles of WWII. His protagonist, torpedo bomber pilot Clay Hunt, was introduced in the first of the series, "Love and Glory", as a survivor of the brutal aerial attacks at the Battle of Midway. Kernan cleverly wove the experiences of various Midway pilots into the fictional Ensign Hunt, whom knowledgeable readers will recognize as a composite of actual TBD torpedo bomber pilots at Midway.
Managing to survive a Japanese atrocity at the beginning of the second book in the series ("Attack-Repeat-Attack") he also escapes the clutches of an amorous golddigger while on leave at home, and the best efforts of an obsessive Navy psychologist to certify him as delusional for not spouting the official line about the slaughter of the TBDs at Midway. He then becomes embroiled in the defense of Guadalcanal as a TBF pilot with the "Cactus Air Force," which is the main thrust of the book.
"Fear in the Dark" opens with LT(jg) Hunt training for his next assignment with the air group aboard the new USS Lexington (CV-16). In the process he has a host of bawdy experiences as a young bachelor on liberty in Hawaii, and it probably should be said here that Kernan's novels include a very high degree of raw realism in describing the good and bad times had by off-duty sailors. Those who haven't lived that life or anything like it might be taken aback by some of the R-rated language and passages, but the fact is they're all very realistic.
The book gets its title from Hunt's transfer to the Navy's first night-fighting carrier squadron, and we fly with him on the first sorties against night attacks by enemy bombers menacing Task Force 58 during the Tarawa and Kwajalein campaigns. The action is as authentic as it can get, for here Kernan is simply presenting a slightly fictional narrative of his own experiences as a TBM turret gunner. Indeed, if you've read his wartime autobiography, "Crossing the Line," you'll recognize the action aboard Hunt's Avenger as a carbon copy of the "fear in the dark" Kernan himself experienced in the Navy's first night-launched sorties in radar-equipped TBMs. Indeed, if you haven't read "Crossing the Line" yet, I strongly recommend it as a starter. It's actually Kernan's best book, and will serve as a basis for better understanding his motivation for writing the Clay Hunt novels, especially this last one.
2 of 2 found the following review helpful:
Fear in the Dark, Night Fighters at Tarawa and Truk , by Alvin Kernan Oct 16, 2007
By Charles K. Cannon
Alvin Kernan's "Fear in the Dark" tells the story of how night fighting in the air began in the American navy. By the time of the American assault at Tarawa, Clay Hunt has grown from the untested, under-trained tyro pilot before Midway to a respected, tough-talking combat veteran. He's respected enough so that when he proposes a way to engage the Japanese two-engine bombers that had begun attacking at night the American task force anchored outside the Bay of Tarawa, the brass listens to him. During these attacks the U.S. ships could only lie quiet, without defending themselves, for to do so would reveal their exact locations, making them easy targets for the Bettys (as the Americans affectionately dubbed the Japanese bombers). Clay's plan for night fighting is to use small formations of three planes: an Avenger torpedo bomber equiped with air-borne radar to pin-point the position of an enemy plane in the dark, accompanied by two fighters. Clay describes his plan to the group comander, who buys it and takes it up to the bridge where the admiral, after the obligatory mulling, approves it. The next night Operation Spook, as the command appropriately calls it, is implemented and night fighting is launched.
The first combat mission for the Spooks is not a disaster, just a big disappointment. After being catapulted from the carrier at 2 a.m., Clay's two formations experience confusion as well as fear in the dark while unable to find the enemy planes (the "bandits"). "Combat Air Control was on the air continuously, giving them range and altitude of groups of bandits.... The [Avengers'] radars had picked up nothing as yet...but CACreported one group after another and flares continued to go off here and there until the Spooks were thoroughly confused and frustrated from shifting from one heading to another.... The Japanese were equally confused and about 0400 they rendezvoused and departed for their base to the north."
The second night of this new and unnerving mode of air combat is more consequential. The Americans do make contact with the Japanese but with mixed results. Clay manages to shoot down two Bettys and his turret gunner gets another. But Rand, his radar operator, is seriously wounded, and the American navy loses its top fighter pilot ace. These two battles, however, succeed in temporarily deterring the surprised Jananese from further night attacks while showing the American brass that fighting in the dark is possible. But to do so effectively, many more pilots will have to be trained in night combat. After the battle at Tarawa ends, Clay and his squadron are sent to Hawaii for a few days of Rest and Recreation, further training, and reassignment. Clay's reputation as a "veteran" Spook has preceded him and he is tagged to help instruct the new night fighter squadrons. But his job in Hawaii(!) will let him pursue other interest when off duty, including women and drink.
Alvin Kernan's three Clay Hunt novels, needless to add, are filled with carefully researched facts about the major sea battles of the Pacific war, but they tell the reader much more about life in the American navy than contemporary newspaper accounts and books by professional historians. The conventional categories of military writing--time, place, actions, casualties, strategies, tactics, major players--provide only the background for Kernan's superbly written stories about individual officers and enlisted men who endure the hell of combat and often, and inevitably, are wounded or killed. But they cannot always be flying in Avenger torpedo bombers or Hellcat fighters. Clay and his friends spend much of their time being briefed in the ready room for the next mission, second guessing the brass on which tactics will be most effective, praising or deriding the weapons they've been given to fight the war. But more often, we hear their casual, often ribald banter about women, their gripes about the navy's red tape, their amusement or disgust at the stupidity of the navy's psychiatrists and counselors. The young pilots on leave, of course, do much more than talk. They party and get drunk, trash hotel rooms, pick up women, then cut loose, get jilted, and one of them actually gets married. (The story of this sudden and unusual marriage in "Fear in the Dark" is one of many memorable self-contained scenes Kernan has packed into his Pacific War trilogy. But I'll fall back on the lame evasion that "space does not permit" and leave the pleasure of discoverilng it to the reader.) And, at least on one occasion we hear a serious conversation, one between Clay and his fellow bomber pilot and Princeton educated buddy, Sam "Hotdog" Parker. Hotdog holds forth on how their generation (the World War II generation in 1943) is "more wised-up, more savvy" than the older one. "[We] know that love [is] more sex than the most ennobling of emotions. Wars...don't end wars, they just breed new ones, and none of us really expect the world to be any better after we have beaten the shit out of the Japanese and the Germans." Clay does resist Hotdog's "practical pessimism" but only "a little bit." Before the end of the novel, however, Clay will have learned how wrong Hotdog is, at least about love and sex; and how immature and irresponsible he, Clay, has been with women.
Looking for women and drink during his three day R and R in Hawaii, Clay finds them in a hotel beach bar. There are plenty of town girls, WAVES, navy and army nurses, and a few wives whose husbands are at sea, all eager to meet young officers. But Clay's interest is caught by "a serious looking girl standing alone who seemed to be in doubt whether she should stay." After accepting a drink and making a self-conscious attempt to dance, she loosens up a bit, and though she can't stay to have dinner with Clay, she says she'll try to come back to lunch the next day. Mary does, and what follows is predictable. But it's a beautiful romantic idyll. Clay's earlier sexual experiences have been fly-by-night, foolish, or exploitive. Clay and Mary's love is the real thing, definitely Granada, not Asbury Park. It is consumated but we'll have to wait until Alvin Kernan's next Pacific War novel (we hope) to learn what happens next in the Clay-Mary story.
And Hotdog? The practical pessimist who claims that love is more sex than an ennobling emotion is actually the one who gets married in the scene referred to above. The marriage is a spur-of-the-moment thing that occurs while Hotdog and Clay are waiting in San Diego to join a new carrier group. After the marriage, the two friends with the rest of the group are, of course, sent back to the war. And a month or two later, Hotdog is killed during the American assault on Tarawa,leaving his bride, Alice, bereft and widowed.
One of the many passages from Alvin Kernan's "Fear in the Dark" what will stay with me is Clay's thoughts on hearing of Hotdog's death:
" 'They shouldn't have gotten married when he was going overseas. But then, strange and short a wedding as it was, it was all they had and maybe they were right to seize what they could get. Well, she's a tough girl, we found that out, and she will find a way of living with it, and we will too.'
And they did. There were long faces for a day or two while they struggled with writing letters to Alice, remembering to call him "Sam" not "Hotdog," but war and death were their game and they had enough to do with keeping themselves alive."
The final clause could be the epigraph for the Clay Hunt trilogy. The undisguised desire to stay alive without shirking combat while accepting the possibility of dying without sentimentality or morbidity is a pervasive theme in all of Alvin Kernan's stories about the Pacific War. I enthusiastically recommend them not only to readers with an interest in that war but to everyone who likes fast-moving, intelligently told, realistic action stories, who has an ear for lively, colloquial speech, and a fondness for clear, cogent English prose, enlivened with some arch, satiric wit.
0 of 9 found the following review helpful:
 Fear in the Dark Aug 23, 2007
By Richard Smith
Both books are complete rip off's. A child could have done a better job of writing. I threw both books away.
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