5 Veteran Presidents Who Fought on the Battlefield

On Veterans Day, Americans celebrate the valor of members of the United States armed services, but did you know that 31 of the 45 men who have served as president of the United States served in the military beforehand?

Here are five presidents who served on the battlefield before the White House.

Harry Truman

Before President Harry Truman presided over the Allied victory in World War II, he fought in the World War I as an artillery captain.

Truman saw extensive combat against the German military in France. I “fired 500 rounds at the Germans at my command, been shelled, didn’t run away thank the Lord and never lost a man,” Truman wrote his future wife Bess Wallace in September 1918 of a run-in with German forces in France. 

“My greatest satisfaction is that my legs didn’t succeed in carrying me away although they were very anxious to do it … please don’t worry about me because no German shell is made that can hit me. One exploded in 15 feet of me and I didn’t get a scratch so you can see I have them beat there,” Truman’s letter continued.

The Missourian was almost 33 years old when he joined the Army in 1917.

George H.W. Bush

President George H.W. Bush is the last president to have served in World War II, where he also saw extensive combat in the skies above the Pacific Ocean.

A blue-blooded New Englander, Bush served as Navy pilot in the Pacific theater, where he bombed Japanese forces.

In 1944, he was one of nine American airmen to escape their planes after being shot down during an attack on the island of Chichi Jima.

Bush, stranded on a life raft for hours, was the only survivor of the group. He was rescued by a United States submarine. The moment was caught on film and became an iconic symbol of his political career. 

Theodore Roosevelt

From April 1897 to May 1898, Theodore Roosevelt helped prepare the Navy for war with Spain as assistant secretary of the Navy. But he resigned that post to become a colonel in the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry, known as the “Rough Riders.”

“Easterners and Westerners, Northerners and Southerners, officers and men, cow-boys and college graduates, wherever they came from, and whatever their social position—possessed in common the traits of hardihood and a thirst for adventure,” Roosevelt later wrote of the Rough Riders. 

Roosevelt played an active role in Cuba, fighting on horseback at the Battle of San Juan Hill.

“I sent messenger after messenger to try to find General Sumner or General Wood and get permission to advance, and was just about making up my mind that in the absence of orders I had better ‘march toward the guns,’ when Lieutenant Colonel Dorst came riding up through the storm of bullets with the welcome command ‘to move forward and support the regulars in the assault on the hills in front,” Roosevelt wrote of his charge on San Juan Hill.

“I feel that I have done something which enables me to leave a name to [the] children of which they can be rightly proud,” Roosevelt later said of his service. 

His military service was part of a storied career in which he served as a New York state assemblyman, New York City police commissioner, governor of New York, vice president, and president.

Zachary Taylor

Before becoming president, Zachary Taylor, a member of an aristocratic Virginian family that moved to Kentucky, had a multidecade military career in which he fought in multiple conflicts. Over Taylor’s decades in the military, the belligerents he faced varied from the British to Black Hawk’s warriors.

As a captain in the War of 1812, he defended Fort Harrison in modern-day Terre Haute, Indiana, from a siege from Tecumseh, a Shawnee chieftain allied with the British.

He later fought against Chief Black Hawk as a colonel in the Black Hawk War. In 1837, he battled hundreds of Seminoles at the Battle of Lake Okeechobee in Florida.

In the Mexican-American War, he commanded the Army of Occupation, leading his troops to victories in multiple battles.

William Henry Harrison

William Henry Harrison died after just 31 days as president, making his presidency the shortest in American history, but his military career was long.

During Tecumseh’s War, Harrison, as governor of the Indiana territory, took on the Tecumseh Confederacy, an alliance of tribes led by the Shawnee chief Tecumseh and his brother “the prophet” Tenskwatawa.

He defeated the Indian forces at the Battle of Tippecanoe in November 1811 after they launched a surprise attack, and then he proceeded to destroy Prophetstown, the Confederacy’s base of operations.

Harrison would soon thereafter fight in the War of 1812, defeating the British and Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames in Ontario, Canada, in October 1813, where Tecumseh was killed, bringing an end to the Tecumseh Confederacy.

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