Something about Poppy noone ever questions

[pen dragon]

namely Chichi Jima.

Does anyone else here think it was probably the earliest deception orchestrated in Poppy's long career? I've always found it very interesting how the US sub that unexpectedly surfaced after he bailed from his plane leaving his two mates to perish and was drifting off Chichi Jima in what surely must have been an easy to spot rubber raft, just happened to have a movie crew on board to film Poppy's heroic rescue. What with FDR busting old Prescott back home under the trading with the enemy act, and Poppy going into the service as a result to fly bomber missions against the Japanese to show that unquestioned Bush patriotism, this footage of him being pulled out of the ocean must have played dandy well in newsreels shown at the time.

I think the story has a lot of holes and suspicious plot twists and I'm surprised no one ever brings it up. Especially after CNN sent Paula Zahn after the old man to the scene of the event to make that warm and inspiring piece of propaganda "A Flyboy's Story" last year.

Anyone else with me on this?

[SouthernDem2004]

1. Nope.

The subs were sent out up look for downed flyers. This was common place. The film was taken by one of the many crews on US naval vessels. Watch the WWII Channel um I mean the History Channel. They have countless hours of actual footage from naval vessels, aircraft and ground forces.

[Bridget Burke]

3. I'm not as concerned about the film....

As I am about the cowardly kid who bailed out & left his crew to die. But he's a HERO!

I wonder about his geriatric sky-diving adventures. Is he trying to exorcise his past?

[SouthernDem2004]

8. Do you know what happened?

Their Avenger was hit making a bombing run. They made it back out to sea with the aircraft damaged. Bush and one other crew member ejected. The third crew member did not eject for some reason, probably already dead. The person that ejected with Bush had a parachute failure and died. He continued to fly combat missions after that.
I do not like Bush's politics but calling him a coward is ignorant. The man did join, not drafted. He served honorably and unfortuantely lost his crew on one aircraft. Not a very rare scenario for WWII. Calling him a coward when it is obvious he was not does nothing more then make Democrats look bad.

[Bridget Burke]

11. There's more than one version....

Chester Mierzejewski, an old war buddy of Bush, who said he was angered by the "false assertions" made by candidate Bush when describing the incident, gave a different account.

After 44 years of silence, Mierzejewski, who also was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, told the New York Post that Bush had abandoned his crew to death when there was another choice.

He said he was approximately 100 feet in front of Bush's plane as the turret gunner for Squadron Commander Douglas Melvin's plane, "so close he could see in the cockpit" of Bush's bomber. Mierzejewski's close wartime buddy was one of the two crew members in Bush's plane.

According to Mierzejewski, the squadron was in a tight-formation bombing raid against a Japanese radio installation on an island reported to be heavily fortified. He saw "a puff of smoke" come from Bush's plane which quickly disappeared and was certain only one man parachuted from the plane and that it was Bush, the pilot.

www.usvetdsp.com/story46.htm

Bush joined the Navy very young because his father & uncle were in trouble for trading with the enemy. How nice that he was assigned to the Pacific Theater--blowing up his family's investments would have been so tacky. When my father's B-17 was shot down in 1943, all the crew cooperated so everyone could bail out; I'm glad the little twerp was on the other side of the world.

[jdj]

18. The History Channel is pure and unmitigated propaganda.

They recently ran a fluff piece on mercenaries and their companies and it was so shiny and happy and positive it almost had even me convinced. Seriously.

I Don't know what happened to Bush, probably his Daddy's Nazi friends rescued him or something, but something having been on the history channel holds the same weight as something reported on Faux.

[SouthernDem2004]

21. I saw the mercenarie piece. It was...

not fluffy at the end. They discussed the problems the last 5 minutes or so. Well, they have been effective in the cases they mentioned. Wonder how many times mercs failed but did not get any press.

[Clark2008]

2. Kind of like the Republicans bringing up all those photographs of

Kerry.

Why were all those people there with cameras - although, in Bush's case, it was more unheard of than in the Vietnam era.

I get your point.

[Name removed]

17. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[karynnj]

20. Kerry bought a camera in Vietnam

Kerry took film of the Vietnam countryside, the swiftboat when they were NOT on missions and filmed his crew. He showed all his film to the editor of the NYT to disprove that he "recreated attacks" he didn't, the film reportedly just showed them walking - and because he took most of the pictures, he was in very little of the film. Kerry was sending the film home to family and made copies for some of the others. The same tiny film of him walking towards the camera was in his ads and in Going Upriver. There were a few other innocuous, non-military clips were in Going Upriver. If they had more they would have used it.

It was the RW that said he was making films for later political runs and recreating the actions he was in. (In Tour of Duty, it was clear that they didn't actually win the areas they fought in. If he took his crew back into the canals, which were in areas controlled by the VC, to make an action film, he would have risked being killed and would have been severely punished by his superiors. I doubt that his crews would have had anything positive to say about him if he did something so vain, while putting them in unnecessary risk.

[punpirate]

4. I'm more interested in some...

... other facts, such as why it took a month to get him back to his carrier, that the intelligence report related to his bailing out was unsigned, and that detailed debriefing journals of others in his squadron don't jive with Poppy's accounts, and that SOP in such circumstances was a water landing (which Bush had done with an earlier plane when it had lost oil pressure), and that the only eyewitness to events (a rear gunner in the lead plane) contradicts Bush's account.

Other than that... :shrug:

[grumpy old fart]

5. links?

eom

[SouthernDem2004]

9. Have a link to any of that? I have not heard some of that.

[moof]

12. links ? you supplied none with your post.

and the message included no qualifiers such as
" I heard ..... " or "this is what some others say ...... "
Is your browser incapable of accessing google ?

[SouthernDem2004]

14. Wow, are we not hostile today?

Get up on the wrong side of the bed or ya just one of those negative types???

http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq10-1.htm

[moof]

15. Interesting conclusion about the emotions of a stranger,

here's hoping you hold no interest in a career in mental health.

As for your opinion of the son of a Nazi sympathizer.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=994545

[SouthernDem2004]

16. Your hostility is evident in your post:

"and the message included no qualifiers such as
" I heard ..... " or "this is what some others say ...... "
Is your browser incapable of accessing google ?"


Sounds rather hostile now doesn't it...

[punpirate]

19. It shows up in several places...

... but most of it is here:

http://www.usvetdsp.com/story46.htm

I should add that I misspoke--the intelligence report was signed, but not dated.

Mierzejewski's story appears in Tarpley's book, and while I don't take Tarpley very seriously, Tarpley got the information from a newspaper interview done in 1991, I think.

[candle_bright]

6. Where can we see the footage online?

I've never seen the footage of the rescue.

[ironflange]

7. If you've seen one, you've seen them all

The rather grainy B&W footage shows a guy, hard to recognize, being dragged from a rubber raft onto the sub's deck, then hustled below.

[Straight Shooter]

10. Read Kitty Kelly's book, "The Family" for more details.

It seems the episode was never fully answered, lingering questions and doubts remain from those who served with him, but that may be because Pere bush was not *cough* very popular, and yet there is a code of loyalty within the military.

And remember he joined not out of a sense of service to his country, but to attempt to restore his family honor which became smeared by his father's association with the Nazis in his *cough* business associations.

[moof]

13. Not only with you, but way ahead of you.

There have been several posts about this topic on the Democratic underground before.