Lieutenant Bush, the Grumman Avenger Named Barbara, and the September Second Bailout Over Chichi Jima

On September 2, 1944, a 20-year-old Navy torpedo bomber pilot named George Herbert Walker Bush completed his bomb run against a Japanese radio installation on Chichi Jima with his engine on fire, bailed out over the Pacific, and floated alone for four hours before the submarine USS Finback surfaced and pulled him aboard. He would go on to become the 41st President of the United States. The airplane that carried him to that mission - the Grumman TBF Avenger - is one of the defining aircraft of the Pacific war, and the story of that September morning is a window into what naval aviation demanded of the men who flew it.

What the Grumman Avenger Replaced

To understand why the Avenger mattered, you have to understand what it replaced: the Douglas TBD Devastator, the Navy’s standard torpedo bomber at the outbreak of the war. The Devastator had been cutting-edge in 1935 - a modern monoplane with retractable gear and an enclosed cockpit in an era of fabric biplanes. Aviation moved fast through the late 1930s, and the Devastator didn’t keep up.

Midway proved it.

On June 4, 1942, three torpedo bomber squadrons launched from the carriers Enterprise, Hornet, and Yorktown - 41 Devastators in total. Japanese Zero fighters tore through the low-altitude formations. Nearly every Mark 13 aerial torpedo either ran too deep, ran too slow, or failed to arm. The aircrews pressed home their attacks anyway, straight and level at wave-top height. Most didn’t come back. The airplane failed the men who flew it - and it remains one of the most heartbreaking episodes in American naval aviation history.

The Avenger’s Combat Debut

While those squadrons were dying over Midway lagoon, six brand-new aircraft from Torpedo Squadron Eight’s shore detachment were already launching from Midway Island itself - not Devastators, but Grumman’s answer to the problem. All six were shot down in that same battle. Only one pilot survived the water: Ensign George Gay, who spent the day floating in the lagoon with his life raft held over his head, watching the entire Battle of Midway play out above him.

The Avenger survived as a program, and Grumman was building more as fast as the factory could run.

What Made the Avenger Different

The Grumman Avenger was genuinely large for a single-engine aircraft. Wingspan: 54 feet, 2 inches. Empty weight: approximately 10,000 pounds. Fully loaded for a torpedo mission, you were pushing 17,000 pounds off the carrier deck on one engine.

That engine was the Wright R-2600 Cyclone - 14 cylinders in two rows, producing approximately 1,700 horsepower - enough to push the aircraft to around 265 miles per hour at altitude. It wasn’t going to outrun a Zero in a turning fight. But for what it was designed to do, it was exactly right.

Three crew members flew each mission. The pilot sat up front behind a large canopy. A powered dorsal turret behind the wing carried a single .50-caliber machine gun. In the belly tunnel, the radioman doubled as bombardier on attack runs. The internal weapons bay - opened by wide hydraulic doors - held one Mark 13 torpedo or up to 2,000 pounds of bombs. Later in the war, Avengers were fitted with rockets and radar for anti-submarine patrol. The design adapted. General Motors eventually took over much of production through its Eastern Aircraft Division, and by the time the war ended, close to 10,000 Avengers had been built.

George Bush: From Andover to the Flight Deck

George Herbert Walker Bush was born June 12, 1924, in Milton, Massachusetts, and grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. He attended Phillips Academy at Andover. His father, Prescott Bush, was a prominent figure in finance and would later serve as a senator from Connecticut - the kind of family background that, in 1941, could have led to a comfortable desk commission. None of that mattered when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

Bush was 17 years old and had just been accepted to Yale. He enlisted anyway.

On June 9, 1943 - three days before his 19th birthday - he received his naval aviator wings at 18 years old. Some records identify him as the youngest naval aviator in the U.S. Navy at that time; the documentation from the era is incomplete enough to preclude absolute certainty, but he was unquestionably among the youngest.

The Navy assigned him to Torpedo Squadron 51 and eventually to the USS San Jacinto, an Independence-class light carrier converted from a Cleveland-class cruiser hull. He named his Avenger Barbara - after Barbara Pierce, the young woman he had met at a Christmas dance in Greenwich in 1941 and had been exchanging letters with across the Pacific for over a year.

The Mission: September 2, 1944

Chichi Jima is one of the Bonin Islands, under Japanese control since the late 19th century. By 1944, it housed a substantial garrison, a harbor, and a communications complex tied into the Japanese Pacific command network - radio equipment, direction-finding arrays, and command-and-control infrastructure that coordinated defensive operations across a wide area of the western Pacific.

The island was defended accordingly. Layered anti-aircraft positions. Veteran gunners who had been in those positions long enough to know exactly how American strike aircraft approached from the sea.

On September 2, 1944, Bush launched with three other Avengers in a four-plane strike against the Chichi Jima radio installation. He was leading the flight. The attack profile required a low-level approach threading through the island’s terrain below ridge lines - which meant flying at close range against gunners who had seen this approach before.

Bush’s Avenger took hits on the inbound leg. The engine caught fire.

His two crewmen were Lieutenant Junior Grade William White in the dorsal turret and Radioman Second Class John Delaney in the tunnel below. Bush pressed the attack. He flew through the flak, completed his bomb run, released his ordnance on target, and pulled away from the island with the engine still burning. He called for his crew to bail out, rolled the aircraft to make egress easier, then went out himself.

His parachute opened - partly.

He hit the water hard. Disoriented. Bleeding from a head wound. He deployed his inflatable raft and looked around. The island was closer than he wanted. He could already see boats leaving the shore, moving toward his position. He started paddling - away from the island, out to open water. He was strafed twice by Japanese aircraft that made low passes and didn’t finish the job. He kept paddling.

For four hours he floated in the western Pacific, alone.

White and Delaney did not make it. The exact circumstances have never been fully established. Bush spoke about them for the rest of his life with a grief that never fully faded. People who have studied that mission carefully say he did everything right. That tends to be cold comfort.

Why Chichi Jima Was Especially Dangerous

This part of the story is darker than most histories acknowledge. Nine other American airmen shot down over or near Chichi Jima during the war were captured by the Japanese garrison. General Yoshio Tachibana commanded the island’s forces, and what happened to those prisoners was the subject of war crimes trials after Japan’s surrender - documented thoroughly in James Bradley’s Flyboys.

When Bush’s parachute put him in the water west of the island rather than on it, the difference between water and beach was not a small thing. It was specific and consequential.

Rescue: The USS Finback and the Submarine Lifeguard Program

A periscope broke the surface.

The USS Finback - a Gato-class submarine assigned to lifeguard duty during the Chichi Jima strikes - had been positioned offshore specifically to recover downed aircrew. She surfaced. Her crew came out on deck and pulled Bush aboard.

By the fall of 1944, the Navy had a well-organized system for exactly this: submarines assigned to loiter offshore during major strike operations to recover men whose aircraft didn’t come back. The program saved close to 500 aircrew members over the course of the Pacific war. A surfaced submarine is vulnerable - to enemy aircraft, patrol craft, and the shallow water near islands. The Finback’s crew understood that and surfaced anyway.

Bush remained aboard Finback for approximately one month while the boat completed her patrol. When they put in to port, the Navy offered him rotation home. He turned it down and returned to the San Jacinto.

He flew 23 more combat missions. 58 total.

Awards: the Distinguished Flying Cross and three Air Medals.

He was 21 years old when the war ended.

What Came After

Forty-four years later, George Herbert Walker Bush raised his right hand and took the oath of office as the 41st President of the United States. Every time he talked about flying in his later years - and he talked about it often - there was something in his voice that wasn’t quite nostalgia. It was closer to reverence. He knew exactly what that airplane had cost, and exactly what it had given him.

Surplus Avengers sold for a fraction of their production cost after the war. Many ended up in Canada, flying maritime patrol and firebombing operations - dropping retardant on forest fires over terrain the original design team never imagined. Some went into agricultural use. A handful remain airworthy today at airshows and in museum collections.

Standing next to one, under the wing, looking up at the belly, it’s worth thinking about the tunnel where John Delaney sat - and what it meant to build 10,000 of those aircraft in four years, and what it meant to be 20 years old and fly one toward an island full of anti-aircraft guns because that was the mission and you were the lead.

Key Takeaways

The Grumman TBF Avenger replaced the failed Douglas Devastator after Midway and became one of the defining aircraft of the Pacific war, with nearly 10,000 built by war’s end.
On September 2, 1944, 20-year-old Navy pilot George H.W. Bush completed his bomb run on Chichi Jima with his engine ablaze before bailing out and floating four hours alone before rescue.
Bush was among the youngest naval aviators in the U.S. Navy when he earned his wings at age 18 on June 9, 1943.
The USS Finback and the Navy’s submarine lifeguard program - which rescued approximately 500 aircrew in the Pacific war - saved Bush’s life; his two crewmen, Lt. JG William White and Radioman 2nd Class John Delaney, did not survive the mission.
Bush flew 58 total combat missions, including 23 after returning from Finback, earning the Distinguished Flying Cross and three Air Medals before the war ended.

Sources: George Bush, Looking Forward; James Bradley, Flyboys; Naval History and Heritage Command records on Torpedo Squadron 51 and the Pacific submarine lifeguard program.