By the spring of 1944, the San Jac was bound for the Pacific. My father was in the cockpit of his Avenger for the first catapult shot off the new carrier. As he wrote to his mother, he was “mighty glad the machine worked.” By April 20, 1944, the carrier had traveled from Norfolk, Virginia, through the Panama Canal, and out to Pearl Harbor in the middle of the Pacific. The crew saw the charred remains of the USS Utah and Arizona, a fresh reminder of the reason they were at war—and of the enemy they were about to confront.
The months after Pearl Harbor had been grim, as the Japanese war machine expanded its reach throughout the Pacific. By the spring of 1942, only Australia and New Zealand remained as allied bulwarks. The tide began to turn in May of that year, when American and Australian naval forces stopped the Japanese advance at the Battle of Coral Sea. A month later, the United States won its first major victory at Midway. The Navy then began an island-hopping campaign to liberate Japanese-occupied territories one by one, with the ultimate objective of attacking Japan.
The San Jac’s first assignment was to strike Japanese installations on Wake Island. The mission was successful, but the reality of combat quickly hit home. On a patrol flight, Dad’s roommate and closest friend on the carrier, Jim Wykes, dropped off the radar screen. Search parties could not locate him. He and his two crewmen were listed as missing. Soon it was clear they were not coming back. My father ached for his friend. He understood that death was part of war, but this loss was personal.
A few days later, he wrote a heartfelt letter to Jim’s mother. “I know your son well and have long considered myself fortunate to be one of his intimate friends,” he wrote. “His kindly nature and all around goodness have won for him the friendship and respect of every officer and enlisted man in the squadron.” He continued, “You have lost a loving son; we have lost a beloved friend.”
That was the first of many such letters that my father would write to the families of fallen comrades during the war. Decades later, he would write similar letters as President. So would I. Of course, nothing you say in such a letter can ever make up for the loss of a loved one. But the simple act of writing the note—of showing that you care—can help ease a grieving family’s pain.
After the engagement at Wake Island, the San Jac continued toward Saipan. In mid-June, the carrier came under sudden attack by Japanese planes. As the catapult launched my father’s Avenger into the air, the oil pressure suddenly dropped. The engine was failing. The only option was a water landing. Ensign Bush guided the plane into the ocean, touching down with the tail and skidding across the water. He and his crew climbed out onto the wing, inflated the life raft, and paddled away as the Avenger’s bombs exploded underwater. An American destroyer, the C.K. Bronson, scooped them up with a cargo net. It would not be the last time that George Bush gave thanks for a life raft.
Flying was dangerous, but so was life on the ship. One night my father was on duty on the carrier deck when a plane approached for landing. The pilot misjudged the distance, failed to grab a tail hook, and smashed into a gun mount. The pilot, crew, and several bystanders were killed. Dad saw the pilot’s severed leg twitching on the deck until a petty officer ordered the sailors to clean up the mess and get ready for more landings.
Those experiences must have deeply affected a twenty-year-old kid. The more I have learned about the horrors of World War II, the more my admiration has grown for George Bush and the many others in his generation who served.
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OF ALL THE harrowing days that George H.W. Bush endured, none was more dramatic than September 2, 1944. The pilots in the squadron were up early for a briefing on their mission to take out the radio tower on the heavily fortified island of Chichi Jima. The structure was the most important communications node in the Bonin Islands, a key element in protecting the heart of the Japanese empire.
My father almost always flew with the same two crewmen, gunner Leo Nadeau and radioman John Delaney. But that day Lieutenant Junior Grade Ted White asked if he could serve as the gunner. White, the squadron’s ordnance officer and a Yale alum, wanted to see the weapons system in action. Dad warned that it might be a rough trip. They had taken heavy fire over Chichi Jima the day before. White insisted, my father agreed, and the skipper, Lieutenant Don Melvin, approved.
Around seven fifteen a.m., four Avengers lifted off the San Jac and flew in formation toward Chichi Jima. Hellcat fighters covered them from above. My father’s plane, with White as gunner and Delaney manning the radio, was third in line to dive toward the target. As they began their descent, Japanese anti-aircraft guns on the island let loose. Tracer fire crossed the sky, and exploding shells filled the air with black smoke. All of a sudden, the Avenger shook hard and lurched forward. The plane had been hit. Smoke poured into the cockpit, and fire ran along the wings toward the fuel tanks.
Dad was determined to complete the mission. He continued his two-hundred-mile-per-hour dive, dropped his bombs, hit the target, and banked hard away from the island. He had hoped to make a water landing, but the plane was on fire and he was out of time. The only option was to bail out.
“Hit the silk!” he shouted to his crewmen through the intercom.
Then he turned the plane slightly to reduce pressure on the crew door. He assumed that Delaney and White had jumped. With seconds left, he unbuckled his harnesses, dove out of the cockpit, and pulled the rip cord on his parachute.
The jump did not go as planned. My father gashed his head and tore his parachute on the tail of the plane. He hit the water hard and submerged. When he surfaced, his head was bleeding, he was vomiting from swallowing seawater, and he had been stung by a Portuguese man-of-war. He swam furiously away from the island, which was only a few miles away.
Then he saw Doug West, one of his fellow Avenger pilots, tip his wings at an object in the water. It was an inflatable yellow life raft. One of the pilots had dropped it after they watched the plane crash. He climbed in and started paddling with his hands. Overhead, American pilots laid down withering fire to drive away a convoy of small boats that the Japanese had deployed to capture the downed flier.
For the next three hours, under the baking summer sun, he paddled against the current and prayed for rescue. Somehow he found the strength to keep going. I’ll never know for sure what went through his mind. I think he must have thought back to the lessons his parents taught him—to try as hard as he could, never give up, and have faith that God would find a way to protect him.
Weary from paddling, he finally saw a black spot in the water. At first he thought he had imagined it, but eventually he could make out a periscope. His next fear was that it was a Japanese sub. As it got closer to him and surfaced, he recognized the U.S. Navy logo. The USS Finback rescued my father a few minutes before noon. Two sailors grabbed his arms and pulled him out of the life raft and onto the ship. “Welcome aboard, sir,” one of the enlisted men said. “Happy to be aboard,” he said, clearly an understatement.
In a remarkable twist of history, Ensign Bill Edwards captured my father’s arrival on the Finback using a handheld Kodak movie camera. Decades later, a national audience would see the footage of that morning in the Pacific: American sailors saving the life of a twenty-year-old pilot who would go on to be the President of the United States and the father of another.
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IN THE DAYS after the shoot-down, my father thought constantly about his crewmen Delaney and White. Neither of them had been found. Aboard the Finback, he had nightmares about the crash. He would wake up wondering if he could have done more for his men. The day after his rescue, he wrote a letter to his parents saying that he felt “so terribly responsible for their fate.” Eventually he would learn that witnesses to the crash had seen one of the crewmen bail out of the plane and fall to his death when his parachute failed to open. The other had almost certainly been killed aboard the plane.
My father wrote letters to the families of Delaney and White. He extended his sympathy and told them that he wished he coul
d have done more. Del’s sister Mary Jane wrote back. “You mention in your letter that you would like to help me in some way,” she said. “There is a way, and that is to stop thinking you are in any way responsible for your plane accident and what has happened to your men. I might have thought you were if my brother Jack had not always spoken of you as the best pilot in the squadron.”
Despite her words, Dad continued to feel a sense of responsibility for his crewmen’s deaths. He stayed in touch with both of their families for decades. When he was elected President more than forty years after the crash, he invited Delaney’s and White’s sisters for a private visit in the White House. During Dad’s interview with Jenna on his ninetieth birthday, almost seventy years after the shoot-down, she asked whether he still thought about his crewmates.
“I think about them all the time,” he said.
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MY FATHER SPENT about a month on the Finback before rejoining his squadron. Even though he had few official responsibilities, he threw himself into submarine life. He befriended the crew and learned as much as he could about the operation of the sub. Among other tasks, he volunteered to censor outgoing mail to prevent the release of classified information. He read letters from farm boys asking about the latest harvest and from lonely sailors professing their love for a sweetheart back home. The military was providing him with an education that was not available at Andover or Yale.
He volunteered to sit watch on the Finback, including the overnight shift. Years later, he would remember those quiet times alone on the submarine deck, underneath the pitch-black sky in the middle of the Pacific, as important moments of clarity in his life. He thought a lot about how grateful he was for his family. He thanked God for answering his prayers when he needed it most. And he dreamed about Barbara, the girl he loved and planned to marry.
After his time on the Finback, my father had the option to go home on leave. Although I am sure he would have loved to see Barbara and his family, he felt a duty to return to his squadron. He reunited with the San Jac in early November. In December, the men received a month of leave.
Lieutenant Bush arrived at the train station in Rye, New York, on Christmas Eve 1944. As he stepped onto the platform, he saw the woman he had pictured so often during those long months at sea. Mother and Dad had planned to get married after the war. But during their months apart, they had agreed to have the wedding as soon as he returned home. Given the short notice, they had to handwrite the date on the invitation: January 6, 1945.
When asked on his ninetieth birthday what the happiest moment of his life had been, Dad said that it was the day that he married my mother. My parents had a classic wartime wedding: Dad in his Navy blues and Mother in her white dress with a veil borrowed from Dorothy Walker Bush. Several of my father’s Navy pals, along with his younger brother Jonathan, served as ushers. His older brother, Pres, who had just gotten married a week earlier, acted as best man. My father agreed to a first dance but warned Mother it would be the last time he danced in public. Obviously he never dreamed that he would one day have to dance at twelve inaugural balls.
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AFTER A BRIEF honeymoon in Sea Island, Georgia, my father returned to duty. His assignment was to prepare for the final stage of the war, the invasion of mainland Japan. The Japanese had defended their home islands ferociously, and the operation promised to be bloody. As he trained at an air base in Maine on April 12, 1945, he heard on the radio that President Roosevelt had died. My dad had disagreed with some of Roosevelt’s domestic policies that dramatically expanded the reach of the federal government, but he respected his Commander-in-Chief and he mourned the loss of the nation’s leader in such a perilous time.
Vice President Harry Truman took the oath of office that day. Having sat behind the same desk that he did, it’s hard for me to imagine how overwhelming it must have been to take over unexpectedly in the midst of two major military campaigns, and then to be briefed for the first time on the secret program that had developed a nuclear weapon. Within months, Truman faced one of the most agonizing decisions any President has ever confronted. When the massive firebombing of Tokyo failed to break Japan’s resistance, he gave the order to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He knew the human costs would be devastating. The introduction of a new and horrifying weapon destroyed the enemy’s will to fight and spared many American lives, possibly my dad’s. My father always defended Harry Truman’s decision as courageous and right.
Mother and Dad had moved to Virginia Beach, where he was stationed before an expected deployment. There they heard the news of the Japanese surrender. They raced into the streets with his fellow pilots and their families to celebrate. Then they went to church, where they gave thanks to God.
On September 2, 1945, a year to the day after the shoot-down over Chichi Jima, the Japanese delegation arrived aboard the USS Missouri to sign the formal declaration of surrender. All told, my father logged a little over 1,200 hours in the air for the Navy, flying 58 combat missions and making 126 successful carrier landings. But it was a different flight that his family remembered most. To celebrate the end of the war, he buzzed over Walker’s Point in his Avenger. His family cheered and wept below. On September 18, 1945, three years and three months after enlisting on his eighteenth birthday, George H.W. Bush was honorably discharged from the Navy. He had given his all to the war. He had survived. And America had won.
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LIKE MOST VETERANS, my father didn’t spend a lot of time talking about the war. He did not want to relive the grisly details of combat, and he did not consider himself a hero. In his mind, he had done his duty and wanted to move on with his life. He also believed that his service paled in comparison to that of those who had given their lives. To regale his friends and family with stories of his own experiences seemed like dishonoring those who had made the ultimate sacrifice.
Mother was more than willing to share Dad’s experiences. She and I would sit on the floor and page through the scrapbooks she made of his years in the Navy. There were snapshots of his buddies aboard the San Jac, seashells that he collected for her on the beautiful Pacific islands, and a piece of the rubber life raft that saved his life. I would ask him to tell me stories, but he did not oblige. It took years for me to understand the impact the war had on his life.
The war meant that my father, like many in his generation, grew up in a hurry. By the age of twenty-one, he had served in combat and seen friends die. He had risked his life and almost lost it. He knew he could handle pressure and risk. And he discovered the satisfaction that came from selflessly serving others, a cause that drove him for the rest of his life.
In 2002, my father took a trip back to the site of his shoot-down with CNN anchor Paula Zahn and historian James Bradley—the author of Flyboys, a fine book about American pilots shot down over Chichi Jima. As he approached the island, the seventy-eight-year-old man who was once the youngest pilot in the Navy laid two wreaths in the ocean to honor his crewmen Delaney and White. When he arrived on Chichi Jima, two thousand inhabitants of the island turned out to welcome him.
On the island he met a man who had defended Chichi Jima as a member of the Japanese military on the day Dad was shot down. The man had personally observed the torture, execution, and cannibalism of captured American pilots. His brother had been killed in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. Yet he held no malice for the United States. To the contrary, the actions of the Japanese government during the war had so enraged him that he had taken the name of one of the Marines executed on Chichi Jima. He had gone on to work in the American embassy in Tokyo, helping to improve relations between the two countries.
As the two former enemies stood together, their heads topped with gray hair, the man told my father more about the day he had been shot down. He confirmed that the Japanese had sent boats out to capture the downed pilot and that my father would likely have suffered the same horrific fate as the other American prisoners. He described how the boats turned back when
Avenger pilots strafed them from above. As the Finback exposed itself to enemy fire to pull my father aboard, one of the Japanese man’s fellow soldiers expressed his astonishment that the Americans would divert so many resources to save one pilot. One thing was for sure, the man said: Their own government would never have done that for them. How different from our nation. America has an honored tradition of never leaving its soldiers on the battlefield—and we never should.
From his earliest days, George Bush was a man who valued courage, loyalty, and service. Those were the traits that his mother and father had instilled in him. And the United States of America, especially its citizens in uniform, embodied those ideals. That was the country that Dad risked everything to defend. And that was the country he would one day lead.
HEADING WEST
I ONCE ASKED MY MOTHER how she and my father managed to stay happily married for almost seventy years. “Both of us have always been willing to go three-quarters of the way,” she said. She meant that each of them was more committed to their marriage than they were to themselves. They were both willing to alter their own needs in order to satisfy the other’s.
Throughout my life, Mother and Dad exhibited that selfless love. In their early married years, Mother showed it most. After all, she was willing to go three-quarters of the way across the country.
The decision to move from New Haven, Connecticut, where my father graduated from Yale in 1948, to West Texas shaped my parents’ life. By driving his red Studebaker away from the opportunities waiting on Wall Street, George H.W. Bush defied convention, took a risk, and followed his independent instincts. My parents learned that they could survive and thrive amid a harsh climate and unfamiliar people. They took to a competitive industry notorious for its booms and busts. They laid the foundation for a strong marriage—a lasting, lifelong partnership that endured profound trials, produced great joys, and set an inspiring example for my siblings and me. They gave me another gift. All my life, I have been grateful to George and Barbara Bush for raising me in West Texas.
41: A Portrait of My Father Page 3