WWII’s Most-Built Torpedo Bomber Later Carried A Future US President Into Combat

On September 2, 1944, a 20-year-old Navy pilot named George H. W. Bush climbed into the cockpit of a torpedo bomber for the 58th time in combat, dropped his bombs on a Japanese radio station, and then had to jump out of a burning airplane over the Pacific. He was the only one of nine airmen shot down that morning near Chichi Jima who came home. The aircraft that put him there was not some obscure prototype, but the single most mass-produced torpedo bomber of the second world war, a design whose production run of 9,836 units has never been matched by any torpedo bomber before or ever since.