W. Britain's WWII collection includes something unusual: six figures depicting men who would later become President of the United States. All six wore American uniforms in the same war. Five were junior officers in the U.S. Navy — most in their twenties, most in the Pacific, most in commands nobody had heard of yet. The sixth was running the war itself.

The most striking piece is the consecutive run. From January 1961 through January 1977 — sixteen straight years — every President of the United States had served in the same conflict, and all four had done so in Navy uniform. John F. Kennedy (35th) had commanded a PT boat in the Solomons. Lyndon B. Johnson (36th) had flown a single combat observer mission over New Guinea. Richard Nixon (37th) had run a South Pacific air transport command. Gerald Ford (38th) had nearly been washed off the deck of an aircraft carrier in a Pacific typhoon. Their stories are not equally dramatic. But they are all real, and it is a rare accident of history that four presidents in succession shared the same formative war experience.

George H.W. Bush (41st) is the other Navy officer in the group — the youngest commissioned Naval Aviator when he received his wings, shot down over the Pacific at age twenty. Dwight D. Eisenhower (34th) is the outlier and, in a different sense, the anchor: he served in this war as Supreme Commander, running the invasion the other five men were fighting inside of. This post is about all six of them, in the order they came to the presidency.

John F. Kennedy — PT-109, Solomon Islands, 1943

Lieutenant John F. Kennedy commanded PT-109, a Patrol Torpedo boat operating from Rendova in the central Solomon Islands. On the night of August 1–2, 1943, PT-109 was one of fifteen PT boats sent to intercept the "Tokyo Express," the Japanese destroyer runs resupplying troops in the Solomons. In near-total darkness, PT-109 was rammed and sliced in half by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri. Two of Kennedy's twelve crewmen were killed instantly. The rest were thrown into a sea burning with spilled aviation gasoline.

Kennedy was thrown backward against the cockpit, aggravating a back injury he had brought with him to the Navy. He and his surviving crew clung to the drifting bow of PT-109 for hours before deciding to swim for a small island roughly three and a half miles away. One of the wounded, machinist's mate Patrick "Pappy" McMahon, was badly burned and unable to swim. Kennedy towed him — clenching the strap of McMahon's life jacket in his teeth — through the water for hours. They made land at what was later renamed Kennedy Island.

Over the following days Kennedy swam repeatedly through the surrounding waters searching for a way to signal Allied patrol boats. He eventually convinced two Solomon Islander scouts, Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, to carry a message scratched into the husk of a coconut to the Allied coastwatchers on New Georgia. All eleven survivors were recovered. Kennedy received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his rescue work, along with the Purple Heart for his injuries.

That coconut later sat on his Oval Office desk. The W. Britain John F. Kennedy figure shows him in his 1945 Naval officer's dress uniform — the young Lieutenant who by that point had already lived through the story that would follow him into every campaign he ever ran.

Lyndon B. Johnson — Heckling Hare, Papua, 1942

Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson had enlisted in the Naval Reserve in 1940 with a Lieutenant Commander's commission. When the U.S. entered the war after Pearl Harbor, Johnson requested active duty and, in the spring of 1942, President Roosevelt sent him on a personal inspection tour of the South Pacific — part official fact-finding, part Roosevelt using a trusted Congressman as his eyes and ears at MacArthur's headquarters.

On June 9, 1942, during that tour, Johnson flew as an observer on a B-26 Marauder called Heckling Hare, part of a raid launched from Port Moresby against the Japanese-held airfield at Lae, New Guinea. Heckling Hare developed generator trouble before reaching the target and turned back. On the return leg the crippled aircraft was set upon by a swarm of Japanese Zeros and took heavy damage. It survived — one of the other B-26s on that raid, Wabash Cannonball, did not, going down with all hands. Johnson was under fire for perhaps thirteen minutes.

General MacArthur awarded Johnson the Silver Star for the mission. Historians have debated the decoration ever since. No other observer or crewman on that raid was similarly decorated, and the mission Heckling Hare flew was aborted before contact with the primary target; some scholars have argued the Silver Star was a courtesy to a Congressman with considerable influence over Pacific war appropriations. Others have noted that Johnson was, at minimum, in real combat with a real enemy. What is beyond dispute is that Johnson wore the Silver Star ribbon proudly for the rest of his political career.

The W. Britain U.S.N. Commander Lyndon Baines Johnson figure shows him in Navy khakis with the collar bars of a Lieutenant Commander — a Texas Congressman in uniform, standing at the edge of his short but real Pacific service.

Richard Nixon — SCAT, South Pacific, 1943–44

Lieutenant (junior grade) Richard Nixon spent his war in the South Pacific with the Naval Air Transport Command — specifically, with SCAT, the South Pacific Combat Air Transport Command. His posting was to Bougainville and later to Green Island, both forward air bases within range of Japanese air attack. His role was ground-based: coordinating cargo, moving supplies onto the transport aircraft that kept the forward bases supplied with fuel, ammunition, and food.

Nixon did not see direct combat. That has led some observers to minimize his war service, which is unfair on the facts. Forward air transport in the Solomons was in a combat theater; Bougainville was subject to periodic Japanese air raids; and the SCAT logistics chain kept a great many other men alive. Nixon proved a competent officer and was known, at both his postings, for a small operation nicknamed "Nick's Hamburger Stand," where he cadged flour, coffee, and beer for the exhausted flight crews passing through. He earned two Navy Commendation Ribbons for his logistics work.

The W. Britain Richard Nixon figure shows him in Navy officer's blues at the rank of Commander — his terminal reserve rank, achieved after the war. Standing straight, hands loosely clasped behind him, the figure is a portrait of a young Navy officer whose combat generation would not have imagined he was looking at a future president.

Gerald Ford — USS Monterey and Typhoon Cobra, 1944

Lieutenant Commander Gerald R. Ford served aboard USS Monterey (CVL-26), a light aircraft carrier attached to Admiral William Halsey's Third Fleet. Ford was Assistant Navigator, Athletic Officer, and Anti-Aircraft Battery Officer aboard Monterey from 1943 through much of 1944, and the carrier participated in most of the year's major Pacific operations — the Marshall and Marianas campaigns, the raids on Truk and Rabaul, the Leyte landings, the Philippine Sea.

The story worth telling is what happened on December 17–18, 1944. Halsey's Third Fleet was refueling east of the Philippines when it steamed into the eye of Typhoon Cobra — an unforeseen and monstrously destructive storm. Three destroyers — Hull, Monaghan, and Spence — capsized and sank in high seas, taking roughly 790 sailors with them. Monterey herself caught fire when aircraft parked on the hangar deck broke free of their lashings and their fuel tanks ruptured.

Ford was climbing to his general quarters station on the bridge when the ship rolled hard to port. He was thrown across the flight deck and slid toward the edge, catching himself on the catwalk railing at the last moment. He recovered his footing, made his way below, and joined the crew fighting the hangar fires — which came close to gutting the ship before they were brought under control. Monterey survived. She was, however, badly damaged and had to return to the West Coast for repairs. Ford was transferred to a shore billet in Illinois for the remainder of the war.

The W. Britain Lt. Cdr. Gerald R. Ford figure shows him at the end of the war in Navy officer's khakis, hands clasped behind his back. He was thirty-two when the war ended — a former Yale Law graduate who had spent the previous two years watching a Pacific carrier fight, and had briefly, nearly gone down with the flight deck.

George H.W. Bush — Chichijima, September 1944

George H.W. Bush enlisted in the Navy on his eighteenth birthday, June 12, 1942 — the day he graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover. His father, Prescott Bush, was a Wall Street banker with connections that could have kept the youngest son out of the fighting; Bush went anyway. Roughly one year later, on June 9, 1943, three days before his nineteenth birthday, he received his wings and was commissioned an ensign. He was the youngest commissioned Naval Aviator in the U.S. Navy at the time.

Bush flew TBM Avenger torpedo bombers with squadron VT-51, embarked on USS San Jacinto (CVL-30). His war was the Central Pacific campaign of 1944 — the Marianas, the Marshalls, the strikes on Palau. On September 2, 1944, Bush's squadron was tasked with attacking Japanese radio installations on Chichijima, one of the Bonin Islands. Bush's aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire; the engine caught fire. He pressed the attack and released his four 500-pound bombs on the radio tower before turning out to sea. He ordered his two crewmen — radioman John Delaney and Lt. (jg) William "Ted" White — to bail out. Bush jumped clear. Neither crewman survived; Bush was the only man from his aircraft to come home.

He drifted in his life raft for roughly four hours before being spotted by USS Finback, a submarine on lifeguard station in the Chichijima area. Finback surfaced, took him aboard, and kept him for the next month of her war patrol. Other American airmen shot down over Chichijima during that campaign were captured by the Japanese garrison and executed; some, in a war crime later prosecuted at Guam in 1946, were cannibalized by Japanese officers. Bush was among the few to survive being downed there. He returned to San Jacinto, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for the mission, and flew additional combat missions before being released from active duty in September 1945. He entered Yale later that year.

The W. Britain George H.W. Bush U.S. Navy figure shows him mid-stride in his flight gear — the youngest commissioned Naval Aviator in the fleet, walking somewhere between the ready room and the flight deck. The figure captures him in his early twenties, at war, before Yale, before Congress, before anything else that followed.

Dwight D. Eisenhower — Supreme Commander

Eisenhower is the anchor and the outlier of this collection. The other five men in this post fought their war as junior officers in their twenties, none of them yet influential enough to reshape the operation. Eisenhower was the operation. He commanded the invasion of Europe.

Born in 1890, Eisenhower graduated from West Point in 1915 with a class that would go on to produce fifty-nine generals — "the class the stars fell on." He did not serve overseas in the First World War, a bitter disappointment at the time that became, in retrospect, a career-defining break: he spent the interwar decades staffing under men like Fox Conner and Douglas MacArthur, learning the strategy and logistics of large-scale operations. When war came again he was still a lieutenant colonel; the promotion to brigadier general came only in September 1941, and he would rise to full general over the following eighteen months.

By June 1942 Eisenhower had been appointed Commanding General of the European Theater of Operations. He commanded Operation Torch in November 1942 — the Allied invasion of North Africa — then Sicily, then Italy. In December 1943 he was named Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, and on June 6, 1944, the largest amphibious operation in history landed on the beaches of Normandy under his command. He carried in his wallet a handwritten note, addressed to the American people, that he intended to release only if the invasion failed. It began: "Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops." He never had to release it.

The W. Britain General Dwight D. Eisenhower figure depicts him in his signature Ike jacket — the short field jacket he made ubiquitous in the winter of 1944–45. Head slightly down, hands in his pockets, the figure captures the man in the tenth of what would be twelve months of the hardest wartime pressure any American general has ever carried.

Six figures. Six men who wore an American uniform in the same war. Four of them served in succession from 1961 to 1977 — an accident of history that gives this collection its editorial spine and, for a collector, a display centered on the Presidency of the United States that is grounded in something more substantive than politics. These men are not represented here as presidents. They are represented as who they were before, at twenty and twenty-one and thirty-two, when the war was the war and none of them had any idea what would follow it.

Jimmy Carter (39th) is the one I do not carry in a WWII framing, though he does appear elsewhere in the collection. Carter graduated from the Naval Academy in June 1946, ten months after the war ended, and his Navy service — submarines, then Rickover's nuclear program — was postwar. He fits a "Presidents Who Served" post; he does not fit this one. Ronald Reagan (40th) served stateside with the Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit and never went overseas, which is why W. Britain has not sculpted him in this line. Their absence is not an oversight. The six above are the six who fit.

If you want to build a presidents-in-WWII display, or if you're curious about which W. Britain versions of any of these figures I can source, write to me at daniel@breagans.com.

— Daniel