Attack Meant End of Innocence for Bush, Much of U.S. : Memories: Fateful Sunday left deep impression on President, who left school to become decorated pilot.

The President who will gaze into the watery tomb of Pearl Harbor this morning was only a Massachusetts schoolboy 50 years ago, but for him the Japanese attack marked the end of innocence.

“Poppy” Bush, a 17-year-old student at Andover Academy, baseball captain and president of most everything, had just walked past the chapel that Sunday when someone shouted the news to him from across the wintry campus.

“It just changed my life and the life of everybody then,” President Bush recalled in a television interview this week.

The son of New England wealth, George Herbert Walker Bush joined young men across America in a rush to uniform, and soon he, too, was in the Pacific, flying a single-engine Avenger, dodging Japanese fire.

Bush survived his own narrow escapes with death. But once, when his plane plunged into the sea, his two crewmen perished; and of his squadron of 15 men, six did not return.

And the memories of the war and the fateful Sunday on which it began still affect Bush as they do the nation. “For me and a lot of other Americans of my generation,” Bush said Friday as he left the White House for Pearl Harbor, “this is a very emotional time.”

From the White House lawn, Bush insisted he felt “no rancor” toward Japan and said he regarded today’s ceremonies here as part of “a day of healing.”

But clearly, for the President as for tens of thousands of World War II veterans, that time of war has left deep and perhaps indelible impressions.

“I was there in a tiny little way,” he said in a televised conversation with ABC’s David Brinkley. But the tale of his near-fatal flight aboard the Avenger, shot down by Japanese anti-aircraft guns on the island of Chichi Jima, has now become political legend.

As one of the war’s youngest U.S. combat pilots, the 20-year-old Bush bailed out over the Pacific, landed woozy and bleeding in a pitching ocean, owed his life to the fighter pilot who strafed a menacing Japanese patrol boat, and finally was rescued from his drifting life raft by a submarine, the Finback, whose conning tower rose miraculously from the depths.

In an understated shorthand that foreshadowed presidential Bushspeak, the young lieutenant noted in his logbook for the day: “Crash Landing in Sea, near Bonin Is.--Enemy Action.”

If that experience and the war around it have always been a part of the way Bush looked at the world, it is only recently--with today’s anniversary approaching--that the President has begun to talk about those recollections and those lessons in considerable detail.

“I lost friends, my roommates, two roommates killed in action, you know, off our carrier,” Bush mused Friday morning.

As the Pearl Harbor ceremony has approached, Bush has stressed repeatedly that the anniversary is not the time for recrimination and anger. And the message he plans to deliver today is one that urges the two countries to put old animosities behind them.

But Bush is a man who, when he sailed into Pearl Harbor in early 1944, could still stare with horror at the burned-out hulk that was what remained of the battleship Utah after the Japanese attack. And from his recent conversations with reporters, it is clear that the intervening years still have not entirely healed the scars his generation bears.

Told by ABC’s Brinkley that some Japanese now believe the United States owes Japan an apology, Bush shot back: “For what?”

Reminded that some regard the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima without adequate warning as the moral equivalent of the surprise Japanese attack, he remained defiant. “Not from this President,” he vowed of an American apology.

As he went on to suggest, Bush was one of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who felt his own life might have been spared by the dropping of the bomb. He had orders to return to the Pacific to participate in an attack on Japan itself, and, he noted obliquely, “American lives were saved.”

But the President did say Friday that he intended to express remorse for the U.S. internment of Japanese-Americans during the war--”a very shameful chapter in an otherwise glorious achievement” of the American victory.

For those of Bush’s time, what he called the “tragic” aspect of that policy was long obscured by anger toward Japan. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, young George Bush was suddenly plunged in his senior year into the frenzy of “war activity.” The first-aid classes that were quickly set up were his first hint of a threat of death that would not lift for years.

At 17, Bush could not immediately join the charge to war, though he later wrote in his autobiography that he knew immediately that was what he wished to do. He had to wait until his 18th birthday, when he joined the Navy despite an admonition from Secretary of War Henry Stimson to his graduating class that the war would last a while and that they should first finish their education.

In the Pacific, Bush flew 58 combat missions and made more than 100 carrier landings. He crash-landed not once, but twice, the first time ditching his Avenger in the ocean and praying that its torpedoes would not explode. For completing the torpedo mission on the day he was shot down, the Navy awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross.

The Pacific Fleet faced fierce resistance as it climbed the “ladder” of islands toward the Japanese mainland, and, aboard the aircraft carrier San Jacinto in 1944, Bush, watched as planes and pilots simply did not return. One day, when a fighter plane made a bad landing, he saw it careen into a gun mount, wiping out its crew and leaving the leg of one gunner “severed and quivering” on a bloody flight deck. More than 40 years later, he wrote in his autobiography: “I can still see it.”

One of the crewmen killed when he was shot down was a personal friend, he also wrote--”Our families knew each other back home.”

And even when the war was won, he read in Life magazine a gruesome account of the war crimes trial of Japanese soldiers who killed and cannibalized American pilots who crash-landed on the island on which they were based. They had been on Chichi Jima, and Bush thought with a shudder: “I’ve been there.”

When as an up-and-coming oilman, Bush made his first trip to Japan and found himself sitting across the table from a Japanese who had been on Chichi Jima that same day, “the conversation got rather personal,” the President said last week. Even now, when he meets with the Japanese prime minister, the old recollections still intrude. “I can’t say it’s totally absent,” he said.

Speaking, in the Brinkley interview, of Japan’s wartime emperor, Bush said: “From the American perspective back then, Hirohito had become the symbol of everything that we were taught to hate.” But, the 67-year-old President added: “He was quite different in reality than he was to an 18-year-old kid who had just gotten his wings and was going out to fight in the Pacific.”