National Post (National Edition)
When GHWB looked north,
Mulled joining RCAF, before U.S. entered war
In 1997, the Canadian author and war hero Richard Rohmer met George H.W. Bush at a Toronto event organized by former prime minister Brian Mulroney.
“Mr. President, you and I are contemporaries. When you were flying in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, I was flying Mustangs in Normandy with the Royal Canadian Air Force,” Rohmer told the former commander in chief.
To this, Bush gave the retired general a surprise reply: The two of them could easily have been much closer contemporaries than Rohmer suspected.
“General, nobody knows this, but by the end of 1941, just before December 7th that year, I was planning to come to Canada to join the Royal Canadian Air Force,” Bush told him, according to Rohmer’s 2004 memoir Generally Speaking.
With the United States neutral in the first two years of the Second World War, the easiest way for an American to fight Nazi Germany was to cross the border and enlist with the Canadians.
But with the Dec. 7 attack on Pearl Harbor — and the subsequent U.S. declaration of war against Germany and Japan — Bush could now go into battle against the Axis under the Stars and Stripes.
A slightly different account appears in Destiny and Power, the semi-official biography of Bush published in 2015. In this, Pearl Harbor had already happened, but Bush considered enlisting with the Canadians anyway because it was possible to “get through much faster.” By late 1941, Canada was already the established epicentre for British and Commonwealth flight training and was spitting out trained aircrews in as little as six months.
More than 9,000 Americans would fight for the Canadian military during the Second World War and 840 would be killed in action.
The dead would include men much like Bush — the scions of wealthy American families who felt a need to fight fascism.
Richard Fuller Patterson was the heir to a tobacco fortune in Virginia and signed up with the RCAF to “get into the war.” On the same day of the Pearl Harbor attack, Patterson was killed when his Spitfire was shot down over Belgium.
In fact, several of Bush’s former classmates at Andover Prep School had already joined up with the Canadians for this very reason.
As author Jon Meacham noted, at the same time that Bush was considering fighting for the King, he could have read a letter in the school newspaper from R.W. Clifford, an Andover alumnus already flight training north of the border. Had Bush followed his classmates, the course of U.S. presidential history would have been changed markedly.
For one, it could have been a liability for a future career politician to admit that he had essentially participated in a violation of U.S. law.
The United States isn’t necessarily averse to Americans fighting for foreign militaries, provided those militaries aren’t U.S. enemies. But wartime Canada had been running an elaborate clandestine network to recruit motivated U.S. citizens such as Bush, a clear violation of the U.S. Neutrality Act.
Then, just as now, Bush would have been putting his U.S. citizenship at risk by enlisting with Canada.
The most likely outcome, however, is that Bush would not have survived the war as a Canadian pilot. The inside of a Canadian bomber was one of the most dangerous places to fight the Second World War as a member of the Western Allies.
At the precise time that Bush would have been deploying to Europe as an RCAF pilot, bomber crews had only a 25 per cent chance of surviving their first 30 missions.
On Canada’s Bomber Command Memorial there are 379 names of U.S. citizens. Had Bush been killed, it also would have meant that another U.S. president, George W. Bush, never would have been born.
As it was, Bush’s wartime experiences were harrowing enough. He got his wings as a U.S. Navy pilot in June 1943, while still only 18 and was soon flying carrierbased bombing missions in the Pacific.
On Sept. 2, 1944, Bush’s TBF Avenger was shot down near the Japanese island of Chichi Jima. He bailed out of a smoke-filled cockpit and plummeted into the ocean with a torn parachute.
His fellow crew members did not survive the crash.
Grabbing a life raft dropped by a fellow airman, he paddled frantically for the open ocean while Japanese gunboats bore down on him.
Only the strafing of fellow Avengers allowed him to slip away, where he was rescued by a submarine, the USS Finback.
The full horror of the episode would not emerge until years after the war.
Bush was the only American flyer shot down over Chichi Jima who both survived and evaded capture by the Japanese. Eight other Americans taken prisoner on the island were tortured and executed, with some having their corpses prepared and eaten at banquets arranged by a sadistic Japanese commander named Major Sueo Matoba.
“I had it pierced with bamboo sticks and cooked with soy sauce and vegetables,” Matoba reportedly told another Japanese officer as they ate a meal consisting of an American’s liver.
Bush would live 74 years beyond the day that he statistically should not have survived. Even after a life filled with power and heavy decisions, the crash and narrow escape would still dominate his thoughts as an old man.
“I wake up at night and think about it sometimes,” Bush told CNN on his one and only return to Chichi Jima in 2003. “Could I have done something different?”
I WAKE UP ... AND THINK ABOUT (BEING SHOT DOWN) SOMETIMES.