b'student pilot at NASCC during WWII was also among the youngest military pilots in American history. George H.W. Bush came from one of the countrys most prom-inent families, his father later elected to the U.S. Senate, and just a week after gradu-ating from an elite boarding school, he enlisted in the Navy on his 18th birthday to become a pilot. Less than a year later, he earned his wings at NASCC and joined the war effort aboard the light carrier, USS San Jacinto, flying torpedo bombers against the Japanese at Wake Island, starting in the spring of 1944. In September 1944, the TBF Avenger that Bush was flying during a bombing raid on Chichijima Island, 700 miles south of Tokyo, was shot down by enemy ground fireBush bailed out and managed to evade the enemy, but his two crew mates were captured, along with the three-man crews of the two other bombers on the mission. The eight Navy fliers who were captured by the Japanese were infamously tortured and beheaded, four of them cannibalized, Bush being the sole survivor. The incident incited great emotion from the future President of the United States for the rest of his life, once saying, Why had I been spared, and what did God have for me? In his 1990 commencement address at Texas A&I (now A&M) University Kingsville, as President, Bush commented, .when I was an 18-year-old Naval Aviation cadet way back in 1943, I flew all over this countryCorpus and Cabaniss and Waldron and Kingsvilleand I loved every single minute of it. So, I do feel at home.In all, over 35,000 Navy aviators earned their wings of gold at Naval Air Station Cor-pus Christi during World War II, making it the biggest combat flight school of the war, of any country, on either side. In the decades following the war, some of the most famous American pilots learned to fly in Corpus Christi, including the first man to orbit the earth, astronaut John Glenn, the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, and perhaps the most heroic of all, future Senator John McCain, who endured 6 1/2 years of captivity and torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese.Virtually all U.S. aircraft carrier warfare during WWII took place in the Pacific, where the vastness of the worlds largest ocean separated land bases beyond the nav-igable range of military combat aircraft. In Europe, Allied land bases, mostly in the U.K., put American Army air power well within range of the enemy, making carriers less practical and necessary. What the U.S. Navy and its aviators achieved against the mighty Japanese Imperial Navy in the Pacific, following the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, set the military strategy of the United States for the eighty years since. During World War II, 7,250 Navy aviators loss their lives, almost exactly half in combat operations, with 2,891 due to enemy fire and after capture by the enemy. Thousands of them earned their wings in the Coastal Bend, and their sacrifices and the victories of their compatriots are owed for almost a century of freedom since.102THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE TheCoastalBend.com'