WWII ‘Flyboys’ remembered

It was a moment former President George H.W. Bush never forgot: the jolt, the flames and the determination to drop a quartet of 500-pound bombs on target.

Mr. Bush was just 20 years old when his TBM Avenger torpedo-bomber was hit by anti-aircraft fire on Sept. 2, 1944, during a bombing run over Chichi Jima, an island 600 miles south of Japan, just north of the better-known Iwo Jima.

The young pilot stayed on course long enough to release those bombs on an enemy radio transmitter before bailing out above the Pacific, his aircraft now a fireball, his two crewmen dead.

Mr. Bush never forgot his men, the black smoke and the moment he himself sliced into the ocean with a damaged parachute. He was rescued by a U.S. Navy submarine after three hours in the water and was later awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

But these events — the visceral moments of a young pilot — have not been lost. Mr Bush’s experiences have been retold in both a new book and an upcoming CNN documentary.

“Flyboys,” by James Bradley, will be published Tuesday, chronicling the stories of nine airmen shot down over Chichi Jima, eight of whom died as prisoners of war. Some were beheaded, according to recently declassified documents with “facts so horrible” they were hidden from the men’s families.

But the ninth airman — Mr. Bush — survived.

“The Flyboy who got away became president of the United States,” Mr. Bradley wrote in his account.

To this day, that president can’t forget his lost crew mates, gunner Ted White and radio man John Delaney.

“It still plagues me if I gave those guys enough time to get out,” Mr. Bush told the author. “I think about those guys all the time.”

It was Mr. Bush himself who pined, at age 78, to return to the site of his own history.

“Mr. Bush called me and said, ‘Let’s do a documentary about this,’” Mr. Bradley said Friday by phone from New York. “He told me it would be the most important thing he was going to do before he died.”

Mr. Bradley had his own stake in the era and the area. His father — Navy Pharmacist Mate 2nd Class John H. Bradley, who was attached to the Marines — was one of the men who raised the U.S. flag atop Mount Suribachi on nearby Iwo Jima in 1945.

The former president got his wish.

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