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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.

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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.

Photo by Stan Behal/Toronto Sun/Postmedia Network

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.