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 understate
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 could 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.