The most likely outcome is that Bush would not have survived the war as a Canadian pilot
In 1997, the Canadian author and war hero Richard Rohmer met George H. W. Bush at a Toronto event organized by former prime minister Brian Mulroney.
“Mr. President, you and I are contemporaries. When you were flying in the U. S. Navy in the Pacific, I was flying Mustangs in Normandy with the Royal Canadian Air Force,” Rohmer told the former commander in chief.
To this, Bush gave the retired general a surprise reply: The two of them could easily have been much closer contemporaries than Rohmer suspected.
“General, nobody knows this, but by the end of 1941, just before December 7th that year, I was planning to come to Canada to join the Royal Canadian Air Force,” Bush told him, according to Rohmer’s 2004 memoir Generally Speaking.
With the United States neutral in the first two years of the Second World War, the easiest way for an American to fight Nazi Germany was to cross the border and enlist with the Canadians.
But with the December 7th attack on Pearl Harbor — and the subsequent U. S. declaration of war against Germany and Japan — Bush could now go into battle against the Axis under the Stars and Stripes.
A slightly different account appears in Destiny and Power, the semi-official biography of Bush published in 2015. In this, Pearl Harbor had already happened, but Bush considered enlisting with the Canadians anyway because it was possible to “get through much faster.” By late 1941, Canada was already the established epicentre for British and Commonwealth flight training and was spitting out trained aircrews in as little as six months .
More than 9,000 Americans would fight for the Canadian military during the Second World War and 840 would be killed in action .
