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MY FATHER SPENT about a month on the Finback before rejoining his squadron. Even though he had few official responsibi
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 battlefiel