George Bush: World War II Navy Pilot

By Walt Harrington | World War II  | 3 comments  | Print This Post  | Email This Post

“He was a lot of fun, a live wire,” fellow pilot Jack Guy said of Bush decades later. “I don’t know anyone who didn’t like him for any reason. I don’t know how to say it any other way.”

Bush also turned out to be a good pilot, not a natural pilot, as his test records from his training days attest, and probably not the best pilot, but a good pilot. In training, he got average to above-average marks. With often older, huskier boys—Bush was 6-foot-2 but weighed only 160 pounds—he held his own at wrestling and in the grueling physical tests. But he also failed. He tried out to become a squad leader but didn’t make it. “Those things make you try harder,” he says. At war, George Bush may not have been the BMOC he was at Andover, but he managed to hold his own.

“Nobody was interested in your background or anything about whether you’d gone to some privileged school or not,” he recalls, adding that the only question asked was, “Can you do your job?”

Yet there were other lessons learned. As an officer, Bush was sometimes assigned to censor the outgoing mail of enlisted men. He read letters in which men talked openly about their fears and worries, their loves and heartbreaks, about crop harvests or fishing or a hot spell back in the cities. For a while, Bush censored the mail of the ship’s black stewards. He suddenly stops talking and squints back tears.

“Golly,” he says, “I get all choked up thinking about it…‘cold storage boys,’ they called them.” Then, with amazing candor, he says, “You know, they were human beings, and I’m not sure I really knew that or appreciated it or was sensitive to it until I had to do that little experience.”

Years later, Bush would adopt as one of his favorite phrases the words of novelist Dan Jenkins—“life its ownself.” Dur­ing his war years, for the first time, George Bush saw “life its ownself.”

On board San Jacinto one day, a plane crashed while landing on the carrier’s deck, and a crew mate was neatly cut into pieces. A leg with a shoe still on its foot landed near Bush. “God, it was horrible,” he once said. While he and others stood in shock, a tough chief petty officer growled, “Get this stuff cleaned off!” Bush never forgot that: No matter how bad the situation, someone must stay clear-headed, someone must lead.

One by one, his buddies flew off the deck of San Jac never to return: Dick Houle, Tom Waters, T.E. Hollowell and Jim Wykes, who was Bush’s best friend. When Jim disappeared, Bush went to his bunk and secretly cried. He wrote letters of condolence. He flew bombing cover over Marines as they stormed the beach on Guam, and he came to believe that his work was nothing compared to their bravery. He learned that being heroic didn’t mean a man was without fear. Being heroic meant a man went on despite his fear. In a letter home to his parents, a matured, perhaps even chastened, George Bush wrote, “The glory of being a carrier pilot has certainly worn off.”

So many years ago… George Bush has no doubt that his war years helped enable him to strike out from his cloistered world in the East for the rugged oil fields of West Texas after graduating from Yale in 1948. He had already bounced all over the country—Grosse Ile, Mich.; Lewiston, Maine; Fort Lauderdale, Fl.; Chincoteague, Va; Corpus Christi, Texas. He’d worked and played with men of every imaginable social stripe. He’d mastered flying and fear. He’d been shot at, shot up and shot down. He’d proven that he could make it outside the protection of his privileged family, that he could hold his own among the whole array of humanity. His confidence was earned and deep.

What was roughneck Texas after that?

You think he and Barbara, herself a member of a cloistered Eastern family, would have been comfortable moving into a shotgun apartment on a dirt road in Odessa, Texas, with a hooker living next door, if they hadn’t first lived in that hole-in-the-wall place in Maine with the Murphy bed in a neighborhood George’s mother insisted was a red-light district? Or if they hadn’t first lived in that basement in Virginia Beach and had that crazy red-haired landlady who wandered around in her nightgown all the time? You think they’d have been game for living in a little wood-frame job in Midland, Texas, if they hadn’t learned from George’s war years to roll with the punches in a way that Greenwich just didn’t teach? You think that if George hadn’t met all those characters during the war, the guy who had made pencils in the mill or worked in his dad’s gas station, if he hadn’t read the letters of those “cold storage boys,” that he would have been at ease that time he was out all night rebuilding the clutch in an oil drilling rig in Jal, N.M., and mixing it up with the grease-caked riggers at the derrick?

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Tags: Aviation History, Historical Discoveries, Historical Figures, World War II