Like so many World War II vets, he came home and rarely talked about what he had seen and felt and learned about love, faith, family, fate, bravery, fear, death and grief. Yet even among his naturally reticent generation, he was particularly reticent to talk about himself and his experiences. It was all part of his family’s brand of Eastern, Episcopalian, patrician, puritanical values. It seems too quaint for some to accept as anything but myth today, yet Bush’s parents inculcated in their children an old-fashioned noblesse oblige that encouraged public service, empathy and personal modesty. His mother, Dorothy, the family enforcer on this score, demanded that her children never “blow on” about themselves. “George, nobody likes a braggadocio,” she told him again and again, and George listened well.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in World War II magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

It wasn’t until he entered politics in the 1960s that he had no choice but to break his mother’s rule and market his war story like a suit off the rack, as did every other politician who could claim the crucible of that war on his resumé—Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Robert Dole, to name a few.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, George Bush was the biggest man on campus at one of America’s great male bastions of private high school privilege, Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., known to the initiated as “Andover.” Captain of the baseball and soccer teams, student council secretary, senior class president. He was a BMOC who, following his mother’s teachings, was kind to everybody, no matter his social pedigree, the kind of kid who helped the fat guy in gym.

At Bush’s graduation ceremony that spring, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, himself an Andover graduate, told the boys they should go to college and let the draft do its work. Young George, already accepted at Yale, would hear none of it. His father, Prescott, a partner in the investment firm Brown Brothers Harriman, asked if Stimson had changed his son’s mind.

“Not a bit,” said George.

Years later, he said simply, “I wanted to serve—duty, honor, country.”

Soon after, Prescott Bush put George, who would go on to become the Navy’s youngest pilot, on a train out of New York’s Pennsylvania Station. It was the only time George had seen his stoic father cry. After nearly a year of training, Bush landed on San Jacinto.

Then came September 2, 1944. As he and his two-man crew dove their Avenger bomber through anti-aircraft fire toward a Japanese radio tower on the volcanic island of Chichi Jima, 150 miles north of Iwo Jima, his plane was hit at 8,000 feet and caught fire. He finished his dive, dropped his four 500-pound bombs successfully on target and headed out to sea. He could have tried to make a water landing, something he had done once already when another Avenger he was flying lost power. That day, he and his crew got out of the plane and into the life raft before the plane sank. But this time, the burning Avenger could blow up before they got to the water. He ordered his radio operator and gunner, neither of whom he could see from the cockpit, to “hit the silk,” an order heard on the radio by crewmen in other U.S. planes. No response. He remembers banking his plane steeply to the right to lessen the slipstream pressure on the rear door and help his crew mates exit. Then, at about 3,000 feet, Bush bailed out and hit his head on the plane’s tail. He landed in the ocean and freed himself from his chute. Another Avenger dived to signal the location of his life raft, which he swam to and climbed in.

His head was bleeding and he was throwing up from having gulped seawater. He secured his revolver and started hand-paddling furiously away from Chichi Jima, where Japanese gunboats had already headed out to get him. Avengers and the Hellcat fighters that protected them strafed the boats but soon had to return to San Jacinto. Young George, who would later be awarded the Navy’s Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions that day, didn’t feel much like a hero. He feared correctly that his crew mates were dead. In that life raft, he began asking himself the question that still haunts him in his Houston office at age 82: “Did I do all I could to save them?” In the raft, he cried. It seemed like a miracle when more than two hours later the periscope of the submarine USS Finback appeared.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to