“I thought being rescued by the submarine was the end of my problem,”Bush said. “I didn’t realize that I would have to spend the duration of the sub’s 30 remaining days on board.”
The following day, Finback retrieved Lieutenant Junior Grade James Beckman, a fighter pilot on USS Enterprise who was shot down over HaHa Jima.
“We put Bush and the other four men to work as lookouts,” Spratlin said. “Four hours on, eight hours off.”
As lookouts, they helped make sure that enemy planes and submarines didn’t sneak up on Finback during daylight or at night. The submarine did much of its patrolling on the surface in the daytime and always at night because that was when Finback recharged its batteries.
“Bush and the other aviators really got into the submarine experience,” Spratlin remarked. “Every time an enemy plane would force us down, they’d curse it just like we did.”
Bush said that the most beautiful time for standing watch was between 2400 and 0400. “I’ll never forget the beauty of the Pacific — the flying fish, the stark wonder of the sea, the waves breaking across the bow,” he remarked.
The 30 days aboard Finback weren’t all beautiful, however. Some of the more dramatic moments included being depth charged and bombed by enemy ships and planes.
“I thought I was scared at times flying into combat, but in a submarine you couldn’t do anything, except sit there,” he said. ”The submariners were saying that it must be scary to be shot at by antiaircraft fire and I was saying to myself, ‘Listen brother, it is not really as bad as what you go through. The tension, adrenaline and the fear factor were about the same (getting shot at by antiaircraft fire as opposed to being depthcharged). When we were getting depth charged, the submariners did not seem overly concerned, but the other pilots and I didn’t like it a bit. There was a certain helpless feeling when the depth charges went off that I didn’t experience when flying my plane against AA.”
Besides being bombed and depth-charged, Bush was aboard when Finback sank two enemy freighters which were trying to get supplies into Iwo Jima a few months before U.S. forces invaded it. By war’s end, Finback had received 13 battle stars and had sunk 59,383 tons of enemy shipping.
“It was obvious to me that Bush would be a very successful guy in whatever he decided to do,” said Tom Keene, now a retired architect living in Elkhart, Ind. “He was always saying something to make us laugh. He kept up our morale.”
