To have fought in World War II was a badge of honor. The country so revered the uniform that cheers rang out in restaurants when soldiers and sailors walked in, and military men were applauded in the streets. “As future warriors we were held in unaccustomed esteem,” said Benjamin C. Bradlee, former editor of
The Washington Post
.
Three young naval lieutenants who did not know each other but fought in the South Pacific at the same time would become President of the United States, in no small part because each could claim service in this war: John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Richard Milhous Nixon, and George Herbert Walker Bush. Directing the European theater of operations was General Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose country would also reward him for his service with eight years in the White House. World War II was such a glorious political credential in the twentieth century that some men felt the need to manufacture a more heroic war record for themselves. Even as President, Ronald Reagan fabricated stories about being an Army photographer assigned to film the horror of the Nazi death camps. The truth is that he had never left California during the war. As a captain in the Army Air Force, he was assigned to a motion-picture unit in Hollywood, where he narrated training films and played the lead in a musical comedy about the Army.
After ten months of training, George Bush received his wings and realized his dream of becoming a Navy pilot on June 9, 1943. His father gave him a set of cuff links, which George said were his most precious possession. After the ceremony, he had a short home leave and became “secretly” engaged to Barbara, but could not keep the secret from his “beloved mum,” who then told the whole family. He later chided her: “You do tell—I tell you things in the strictest confidence and you tell everyone—Aunt Margie, Mary, Ganny, Betty W. Everyone. Please don’t Mum. I’d love to tell you everything always, which I have and I guess will, but I do wish you wouldn’t tell everybody.”
Months before, Dorothy Bush, who believed a kiss should mean eternal commitment, was horrified when she saw her daughter kissing a casual date. She shared her consternation with George, who commiserated. “I would
hate
to have Nancy a necker at heart,” he wrote. “Nothing could be worse.”
“Greenwich legend has it that by the time Nan Bush was eighteen, she had forty-one proposals of marriage,” said her Boston friend Courtney Callahan. “She was the town beauty. Very, very flirtatious.”
In his letter to his mother, George related the facts of life from his sweet and innocent vantage point:
During the summer of 1942 I kissed Barbara and am glad of it . . . I have never kissed another girl—this making myself . . . an oddity . . . since most of the boys do not stop with kissing—how terribly true that is here, more than home, but then again most of these fellows are grown men—also men with different backgrounds . . . For a kiss to mean engagement is a very beautiful idea, Mama, but it went out a while back . . .
Now for me to continue and tell you the facts of life—of the life I’m living in the 1940s . . . Pressy and I share a view which few others,
very few
others, even in Greenwich share. That’s regarding intercourse before marriage. I would hate to find that my wife had known some other man, and it seems to me only fair to her that she be able to expect the same standards from me. Pres agrees as I said before, but not many others our age will . . . Most fellows here [Naval Air Station, Minneapolis] . . . take sex as much as they can get. This town in particular seems full of girls (working in offices, etc.) rather attractive girls at that who after a couple of drinks would just as soon go to bed with some cadet. They are partly uniform conscious I suppose but the thing is they, as well as the cadet, have been brought up differently. They believe in satisfying any sexual urge by contact with men . . . These girls are not prostitutes, but just girls without any morals at all . . . I would be most facetious were I to deny ever having experienced said feelings. The difference is entirely in what we have been taught; not only in “what” but in “how well” we have been taught it.
George signed this letter “Much love, Pop professor ‘sexology’ Ph.D.”
After his brief stay at home, he went to join the troops overseas. By the end of 1943 he had acquired a crew—a gunner named Leo Nadeau and a radioman–tail gunner named John Delaney. They were assigned to the USS
San Jacinto
, a carrier ship headed for the fire zone of the South Pacific. “From now on it’s going to be plenty rugged duty,” George wrote to his mother, “and in a way, I’m glad, ’cause I probably need the experience.”
One of the few letters he wrote to his father, on November 1, 1943, was to spare “Mum . . . some unnecessary worrying.” He reported that during his last flight of the day, he had hit a heavy slipstream from two previously landed bombers and couldn’t fly free. He swerved, but his wheels hit the runway and as one gave way, his plane careened, falling on one wing:
Everything happened so quickly that I can’t exactly remember it all. The prop hit and stopped. I was scared we’d tip over, but luckily we didn’t. As soon as she stopped—I snapped off the switch, gas, and battery and leapt out and to the stern. My crewmen were scurrying out as I opened the back door. Luckily none of the three of us was injured at all. The plane is a
total
loss. Both wings smashed, fuselage slightly buckled, etc. etc. It gave me quite a feeling. While careening speedily and recklessly across the runway a feeling of helplessness
not
fear seized me. Then there flashed thru my mind the question “will we go over?”—then she stopped and I leapt. Funny I never really was scared. After it was over I had that excited feeling in the pit of my stomach. We were terribly lucky that the ship didn’t burn.
He told his father not to worry. “Nothing will happen to me. I’ll just sign a report. It really was something—one of the things that make flying dangerous is the slipstream, and I really got hit bad.”
After he crashed two more planes—one due to faulty gear—he began to share the news with both parents because they had insisted on knowing everything that happened. In April 1944 he wrote about a bad landing he had made, blowing out his rear tire and stopping precariously close to the catwalk. “How I hate to make a terrible landing,” he wrote. “I get to worrying about it and also it’s not good for the crewmen. Every day someone at least gets a tire or 2; so it’s not serious, but I don’t like it.”
On May 23, 1944, bullets brushed his plane over Wake Island, some twenty-three hundred miles west of Pearl Harbor, and George wrote to announce that he had actually been in combat. “It is quite a feeling, Mum, to be shot at, I assure you. The nervousness which is with you before a game of some kind was extremely noticeable but no great fear thank heaven.” When he returned to the squadron, he learned that his roommate was lost at sea. George cried himself to sleep that night.
“No one saw me,” he wrote, “that wouldn’t do.”
Two months later he was forced to make a water landing and ditch his plane, which was full of bombs. He wrote that he and his crew scrambled into their raft and paddled to safety before the two-thousand-pound payload detonated. “I mean, we were just lucky we were spared,” he said. They were rescued by a destroyer and returned a few days later to their carrier.
“I was scared as hell,” Leo Nadeau recalled. “We had to take it into the drink, riding down with four 500-pound depth charges in the bomb bay.”
The most difficult letter George ever wrote was the one he composed the day after he was shot down over Chichi-Jima, one of the Bonin Islands, five hundred miles south of Japan. On September 2, 1944, he took off with a group of planes from his squadron to bomb a Japanese radio station. His plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire as he approached his target.
He managed to complete his bombing mission, for which he received a Distinguished Flying Cross, but his two crewmates were killed. One of the deaths was particularly difficult for George to deal with. He was flying with his regular radioman, John Delaney, but he had asked Ted White, a friend of the family, if he’d like to go on this flight as the gunner. White accepted, so Leo Nadeau, the regular gunner, gave up his post. After George was rescued at sea by the USS
Finback
, an American submarine patrolling the waters for downed aviators, he wrote to his parents:
We got hit. The cockpit filled with smoke and I told the boys in the back to get their parachutes on. They didn’t answer at all, but I looked around and couldn’t see Ted in the turret so I assumed he had gone below to get his chute fastened on. I headed the plane out to sea and put on the throttle so as we could get away from the land as much as possible. I am not too clear about the next parts. I told them to bail out, and then I called up the skipper and told him I was bailing out. My crewmen never acknowledged either transmission, and yet the radio gear was working—at least mine was and unless they had been hit back there theirs should have been, since we had talked not long before . . . I turned the plane up in an attitude so as to take pressure off the back hatch so the boys could get out. After that I straightened up and started to get out myself. At that time I felt certain that they had bailed out. The cockpit was full of smoke and I was choking from it. I glanced at the wings and noticed that they were on fire. I still do not know where we got hit and never will. I am now beginning to think that perhaps some of the fragments may have either killed the two in back, or possibly knocked out their communications . . . I stuck my head out first and the old wind really blew me the rest of the way out. As I left the plane my head struck the tail.
George said he saw no sign of Delaney or White after he had parachuted to safety.
“The fact that our planes didn’t seem to be searching anymore showed me pretty clearly that they had not gotten out. I’m afraid I was pretty much of a sissy about it ’cause I sat in my raft and sobbed for a while. It bothers me so very much. I did tell them and when I bailed out I felt that they must have gone, and yet now I feel so terribly responsible for their fate.”
He cautioned his parents not to write to Ted White’s family until the government notified them. “They will probably receive the word that he is ‘missing in action’ so there too we will have to be tactful.”
He added: “I am now fine and am in all respects ready to finish up with the squadron. I have not forgotten what has happened, but then I never shall completely forget about it; however, I am no longer as troubled by the tragic mishap as I was at first.”
Disregarding his son’s advice, Prescott Bush immediately contacted a friend in the Personnel Department of the Navy for a report on the White case. The young man’s father, Edwin “Ted” White, had graduated from Yale, which is how Prescott knew the family. White’s son, Lieutenant Junior Grade William G. “Ted” White, also graduated from Yale, class of 1942, and was a member of Skull and Bones. As soon as Prescott received the Navy’s report, he sent it with his own two-page letter to Ted White’s mother:
I feel very sad indeed, Ann, to write such a letter for I know what the feelings of yourself and your husband must be. Your son was such a wonderful lad and I am so glad that my boy knew him. His letters spoke so highly of him previous to this disaster; and also, of course, his letters written on the submarine, are just heart-breaking. Our boy is a very sensitive, gentle fellow, and I am fearful that this incident will have hurt him very deeply.
This is the third plane that Pop lost . . . I wish they would send him home now . . . I will write you later on enclosing exact excerpts from his letter.
A few days later Prescott sent a copy of George’s long and anguished letter to the Whites, and begged them to keep it confidential. Sadly, there was no similar letter from Prescott to the family of the other lost crewman, John Delaney, who was the youngest of seven children in Providence, Rhode Island. His mother had died when he was two, and his father when he was seven. John had been raised by his six older sisters. At the age of eighteen, he spent the only money he had ever earned to get his teeth fixed so that he could pass the Navy physical and go to war. He never had a chance to go to Yale.
The families were told later that one other parachute was seen bailing out from the plane about three thousand feet over the water. Unfortunately, the chute never opened. Both of George’s crewmen, after being reported missing in action for a year and a day, were presumed dead.
George remained aboard the submarine for thirty days while it completed its war patrol; after R&R in Hawaii, he was entitled to rotate home, but he elected to return to his squadron, where very little was said about what had happened over Chichi-Jima.
“He came into the ready room and sat down next to me,” said Chester Mierzejewski, the turret gunner for the squadron commander’s plane, who was especially close to John Delaney. “[George] knew I saw the whole thing. He said, ‘Ski, I’m sure those two men were dead. I called them on the radio three times. They were dead.’
“When he told me they were dead, I couldn’t prove they weren’t. He seemed distraught. He was trying to assure me he did the best he could. I’m thinking what am I going to say to him. I have to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
George’s regular gunner, also close to Delaney, avoided the painful subject. “We had plenty of chances to talk about it,” said Leo Nadeau. “It’s just that I didn’t want to talk about it and I don’t think he ever wanted to talk about it . . . When he came back aboard ship, he wasn’t a very happy man, and I wasn’t a very happy man, either, because I’d lost a real good friend. That radioman had been trained with me right from day one. And, of course, I knew Delaney a heck of a lot better than I knew Bush, because we lived together—we were both enlisted men. The loss . . . and the mere fact that I had been that close to going, just bothered me . . . I never wanted to question George, because I never wanted him to have any idea that I doubted what happened. I never wanted him to get that feeling.”