interview
Former President George H.W. Bush in his Kennebunkport office.
Is that why they called the N2S the Yellow Peril? [Laughs] No, this was in a TBF. It might have been the same thing in the Yellow Peril, I don’t know that I did there, otherwise I might have been washed out. And then, of course, the big one was Sept. 2, 1944, when I was shot down. That’s all been documented, but it was scary. …
As you said, the Sept. 2, 1944, mission has been fairly welldocumented and I want to go past that to when you came back to flying. You had obviously lost friends and even in training there were people who were crashing and you lost friends that way, but there’s an account where, after returning to the squadron, you were flying a strike on shipping in Manila Bay, and one of your crew told you that flak had blown a hole in one wing, and you were said to have responded, “You’re right, there’s a hole in the wing.” And then you went in for a second attack. Well, I don’t remember being quite that heroic, but the plane was hit, I think, and we made it back to the carrier all right. Do you think you’d had enough experience, having gone through so much at that point, that it wasn’t as …
How did you feel taking off on your first combat mission?
Traumatic? Yeah, I don’t – frankly, I don’t remember it as vividly as I do Sept. 2, obviously. It was hostile, you could see the flak, but I don’t remember the details of it, and I don’t want to make them up.
Scared. Why not admit it? Everybody else was too, I think. The first combat mission was at Wake Island, and we didn’t know what to expect, but it wasn’t a terribly hostile environment, so we got that one out of the way.
You are one of a fairly small group of naval aviators that have experienced a war patrol in a submarine, as well, and considering there is a traditional rivalry between carrier sailors and submarine sailors, what did you come away with after that experience?
Photo by Ross Jobson
So that was scary, but on that one, the crewmen didn’t even get wet, they just stepped out of the turret and climbed onto the wing or to the life raft we had and paddled away. The plane went down and we went over to get rescued by a destroyer. It was a scary experience. We just wanted to be sure we did it right, and the sea was a calm sea state, like today, so it wasn’t a big heroic adventure. But it was ... well, you never know, you get it done and that was the first real close experience like that. I had a couple of ground loops in training, did in a wing or two on these planes.
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Bush interview 12.15.indd 24
12/15/08 4:10:17 PM