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George H. W.'s account of his aircraft being shot down and being rescued - RJNorton - 01-05-2019 03:38 PM
Thank you to Laurie for sending:
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Excerpt from the book “Flyboys” by James Bradley on one of President George H.W. Bush’s missions as a Navy dive bomber pilot in the Second World War…
September 2nd, 1944
At 7:15 A.M., after a breakfast of powdered eggs, bacon, sausage, dehydrated fried potatoes, and toast, George lifted his torpedo plane off the carrier (USS San Jacinto) with Ted White and John Delaney in back. Each boy wore a Mae West over his flight suit. George’s plane carried four 500 pound bombs.
As the Flyboys winged toward Chichi Jima, the enemy was monitoring their progress, Emperor Hirohito’s antiaircraft gunners scanning the telltale pips on their radar screens.
At 8:15 A.M., George and his squadron initiated their glide-bombing run. Mount Yoake and Mount Asahi and their radio stations were easy targets to spot. The twin peaks rose abruptly from the Pacific to a height of about one thousand feet and were distinguished by their forests of antenna towers, which served as the Japanese military’s radio transmitters and receivers. Surrounding these radio towers were nests of antiaircraft guns and radar facilities, now homed in on George and his group.
The lead plane went down through black clouds of antiaircraft fire, followed by the second. The two dropped eight bombs-two tons of explosives-on the radio complex. Now, however, the Japanese gunners had the Flyboys’ range in their sights. George was the next to dive. He could see that he had to fly into the middle of intense antiaircraft fire.
Fifty-seven years later, I asked George Bush what it was like to dive straight toward antiaircraft gunners trying to blow him out of the sky.
“You see the explosions all around you,” he said, “these dark, threatening puffs of black smoke. You’re tense in your body, but you can’t do anything about it. You cannot take evasive action, so you get used to it. You just think to yourself, ‘This is my duty and I have got to do it.’”
Bush paused for a moment and then added, “And of course, you always thought someone else was going to get hit.”
But on September 2, that “someone else” was George Bush. At release altitude, a Japanese shell tore into his plane.
“There was a fierce jolt and it lifted the plane forward,” he recalled. “We were probably falling at a speed of a hundred and ninety miles per hour. Smoke was coming up from the engine; I couldn’t see the controls. I saw flames running along the wings to the fuel tanks. I thought, ‘This is really bad.’ But I was thinking of what I was supposed to do. And what I was supposed to do was drop those bombs and haul a-s-s out of there.”
The twenty-year-old, not yet old enough to vote or drink in a bar, was now at the controls of a burning, falling plane with two buddies in the back. A potential explosion loomed. Flight leader Don Melvin, hovering nearby in a torpedo plane, later said, “You could have seen that smoke for a hundred miles.”
Amazingly, George stayed on course long enough to drop his bombs on target, as instructed. Later he would be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his bravery. His flight leader wrote, “Bush continued his dive, releasing his bombs on the radio station to score damaging hits. He then turned sharply to the east to clear the island of Chichi Jima, smoke and flames enveloping his engine and spreading aft as he did so, and his plane losing altitude.”
Once the bombs were away, it was time to escape. “Hit the silk! Hit the silk!” George shouted into the intercom, telling Ted White and John Delaney to bail out. “Then,” he told me “I turned the plane starboard to take the slipstream pressure off the door near Delaney’s station.” Bush was riding a volatile fireball, but he still thought to maneuver the plane in such a way to give his crewmen a better chance to survival, though it would hinder his own ability to get out. By dipping the right wing slightly and turning the tail rudder to the left, George caused the plane to “skid” sideways through the air, thus relieving air pressure on the crew door and providing them a better opportunity to escape. It was a maneuver that used up precious time and delayed his own exit.
Finally, it was time for George to save himself. “I unfastened my seat belt and dove out and down to avoid the tail,” he told me. “But I pulled the cord too quickly, and the tail came up and hit me in the head.”
Now George had a big bleeding gash above one eye, and there was more. “Then the parachute hooded on the tail and tore a few panels out,” he said. “As a result, I was falling faster than normal.”
“Bush’s plane was smoking like a two-alarm fire,” said radioman Richard Gorman, “then I saw a chute blossom out.” Gorman saw Bush “hit the drink” and at the same instant, he saw a “huge ball of fire.” Bush’s bomber had exploded.
George had the presence of mind to unsnap his parachute chest strap just as he slammed into the water. He put his hand up, and the parachute blew away from him toward Chichi Jima. He splashed down about four miles northeast of the island and swam to a collapsible yellow one-man life raft dropped from another plane. He inflated it and climbed in. He had no paddles, and the wind was blowing him toward Chichi Jima.
“I could see the island,” Bush told me. “I started paddling with my hands, leaning over the front of the raft, paddling as hard as I could. A Portuguese man-of-war had stung my arm and it hurt. I had swallowed a few pints of water and I was vomiting. My head was bleeding. I was wondering about my crewmen. I was crying I was twenty years old and I was traumatized. I had just survived a burning plane crash. I was all alone and I was wondering if I’d make it.”
George scanned the horizon looking for his crewmen. He saw nothing. Witnesses later said that only two chutes came out of the plane. One was George’s, but it was unclear who was in the other. Neither Ted White nor John Delaney survived.
George was in even more trouble than he could imagine. Not only was the current pushing him toward Chichi Jima, but some small boats had been launched from the island to capture him.
“I saw those small boats heading his way and thought, ‘Oh, he’s a goner,’” said gunner Charles Bynum. Two American planes dove and strafed the boats. Battle reports later noted that “San Jacinto ordnance records indicate 1,460 rounds of machine gun bullets were fired at the would-be Bush captors.”
For the moment, the boats retreated, but Bush’s fellow pilots could only help for so long. They were running low on fuel and had to return to their carriers. The flight leader radioed George’s location to the rescue submarine USS Finback, which was standing by for just such an emergency.
For what seemed like an eternity, George paddled and hoped and paddled some more. “I had seen the famous photo of the Australian pilot being beheaded,” Bush told me, “and I knew how Americans were treated at Bataan. Yes, I had a few things on my mind.”
After paddling his raft and praying for three hours and thirteen minutes, George saw a black dot emerge from the water about a hundred yards away. “The dot grew larger,” he recalled. “First a periscope, then the conning tower, then the hull of a submarine emerged from the depths.” Bush had no idea that anyone had radioed his position. “At first I thought maybe I was delirious,” he said, “and when I concluded it was a submarine all right, I feared that it might be Japanese. It just seemed too lucky and too far-fetched that it would be an American submarine.”
Five submariners threw Bush a line, pulled him alongside the sub, and helped the soaking-wet and exhausted Flyboy aboard. George managed just four words to his saviors: “Happy to be aboard.”
George spent a month on the Finback, which gave him plenty of time to reflect on his brush with death. He would often stand the midnight-4A.M. watch while the sub was surfaced. Later, he recalled those reflective moments:
I’ll never forget the beauty of the Pacific—the flying fish, the stark wonder of the sea, the waves breaking across the bow. It was absolutely dark in the middle of the Pacific; the nights were so clear and the stars so brilliant. It was wonderful and energizing, a time to talk to God. I had time to reflect, to go deep inside myself and search for answers. People talk about a kind of foxhole Christianity, where you’re in trouble and think you’re going to die, and so you want to make everything right with God and everybody else right there in the last minute. But this was just the opposite of that. I had already faced death, and God had spared me. I had this very deep and profound gratitude and a sense of wonder. Sometimes when there is a disaster, people will pray, “Why me?” In an opposite way I had the same question: why had I been spared, and what did God have in store for me? One of the things I realized out there all alone was how much family meant to me. Having faced death and been given another chance to live, I could see just how important those values and principles were that my parents had instilled in me, and of course how much I loved Barbara, the girl I know I would marry. As you grow older and try to retrace the steps that made you the person that you are, the signposts to look for are those special times of insight. I remember my days and nights aboard the Finback as one of those times—maybe the most important of them all.
Many years after those Pacific nights, I interviewed former President Bush about the events of that tragic September day in 1944. When we finished, I was shutting my computer down and we were making idle conversation. Out of the blue, he asked me if I had any additional information about the fates of his crewmen, Ted White and John Delaney.
I was surprised by the question because I assumed it had been answered long before. If there was anything new to learn, surely the press would have dug it up during his four campaigns for vice president and president. But no one knew exactly what happened to Ted and John that day, only that they both died. I told the president I had no additional information.
“It still plagues me if I gave those guys enough time to get out,” he said with a pained grimace.
At that moment, I was looking into the eyes of arguably the most accomplished and successful man alive. George Herbert Walker Bush had led a storied life as an athlete, war hero, businessman, congressman, ambassador to the United Nations, ambassador to China, head of the CIA, vice president, president, and father of the current president. He had been in love with one woman since he was seventeen and they were approaching sixty years of marriage.
But in George Bush’s eyes, I could see the same survivor’s guilt—however illogical and unfounded—I had observed in other war veterans. I thought of my father, how he never got over the torture death of his buddy Ralph on Iwo Jima.
“I and everyone else thinks you did all you could, Mr. President,” I said. “And I am sorry you had to be put into the position where you have these feelings still today.”
For a few heartbeats we were both still. Then, as if to break the emotion of the moment, he uncrossed his legs, stood, and pushed his chair against the wall as I went back to putting my computer away.
I glanced up when he didn’t walk back to his desk. He was standing at his large office window. His hands were in his pockets, causing his sport jacket to rumple a bit. The Texas sunlight illuminated President Bush’s face.
Staring at the sky, the former Flyboy said, “I think about those guys all the time."
RE: George H. W.'s account of his aircraft being shot down and being rescued - LincolnMan - 01-06-2019 07:02 AM
Great read!
RE: George H. W.'s account of his aircraft being shot down and being rescued - JMadonna - 01-06-2019 08:26 AM
The man who's political enemies labeled him a wimp.
RE: George H. W.'s account of his aircraft being shot down and being rescued - L Verge - 01-06-2019 11:58 AM
(01-06-2019 08:26 AM)JMadonna Wrote: The man who's political enemies labeled him a wimp.
This piece was just done in December: http://time.com/4754901/president-george-hw-bush-accomplishments/
I hope (but doubt) that various members of our newly-sworn-in Congress remember or read for the first time one sentence about half-way down the text -- a quote from his inaugural address: "The American Public did not send us here to bicker."