“BUD” ANDERSON (HE WAS BORN CLARENCE EMIL and Combat Tactics
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COL. BUD ANDERSON Special Thanks to Wings of Valor author Peter Collier and photographer Nick Del Calzo. Be the first to get your copy of world-premier book Wings of Valor beautifully immortalizing the stories from these brave Americans. “BUD” ANDERSON (HE WAS BORN CLARENCE EMIL and combat tactics. One of the men he would meet there was Chuck it in a series of tight turns to get inside position, which caused regarded the nick-name he was given in infancy as an act of Yeager, who would become Bud Ander-son’s longtime good the German pilot to fly directly into his gunnery pattern. Over mercy) always remembered the 1929 crash landing of a Boeing friend. Among the things that the two men had in common the next two months, he got three more. On May 12, Ander- Model 80 Trimotor in a field near his family’s home when he was 20/10 vision: they could spot planes when they were still son became an Ace without firing a shot when he closed on was seven years old. It was a major event: people from all only specks in the air, invisible to men with only average good a Bf 109 and the German pilot, panick-ing at his approach, around came to gawk at the plane. Bud and his best friend vision. preemptively bailed out of the plane. rushed to the crash site and spent the day climbing through the The 357th sailed for England in November 1943 on In late May, Old Crow and the other Mustangs got a cabin and sitting in the cockpit, imagining themselves airborne board the Queen Elizabeth, and was assigned the new P-51 new paint job—black and white stripes on their wings—so and in command. Mustang when it settled into the RAF base at Leiston, sixty that Allied gunners wouldn’t target them during the Normandy Growing up on a large fruit-tree farm near the small miles north of London. (Ander-son had “Old Crow” in the invasion. By the end of June, after supporting the landing, the California foothills town of Newcastle, a few miles north of whiskey-maker’s letter-ing painted on his fuselage.) 357th was back to escorting missions that at times involved as Sacramento at the gateway to the High Sierra, Anderson was The 357th would become one of the most lethal of many as 1,300 U.S. bombers and 1,100 fighters. On June 29, five years old when Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. all the U.S. fighter groups, scoring 658 victories against 128 Anderson’s biggest day of combat, he shot down three Focke- This event helped him fall in love with flight, and his father losses while going up against the Ger-mans’ best pilots and Wulf 190s. deepened the romance soon after by driving him to a little planes. “We weren’t like other people,” Anderson later said, “at By mid-January 1945, Anderson had flown 116 dirt airfield in Sacramento for a ride in a biplane. After this, least not in our own minds. We were bolder, braver, smarter, missions, two tours of combat, and was a triple Ace with 16.25 as Anderson later wrote in his memoir To Fly and Fight, the more spir-ited.” Yet he also saw that only the fittest survived. kills. Amazingly, his plane had never even suffered a hit in all walls of his bedroom were papered with photos torn out of the Of the twenty-eight original pilots in Anderson’s the dogfights he had expe- rienced. On January 14, he and pages of Popular Aviation, squadrons of model planes hung by squadron, sixteen would either die in combat or be shot down Yeager flew their last missions of the war, the two of them flying strings from his ceiling, and he had at least a vague sense that and captured. (Yeager was shot down over France but managed as “spares” to back up the main force of Mustangs heading flying was in his future. to make his way to Spain and returned to the unit.) toward Germany. Since they were not needed for combat that After graduating from high school in 1939, Anderson As the engine of his Mustang idled heavily while he day, they took a sightseeing tour of the Alps. took stock of what was required to get into the Army Air waited to take off on his first mission, Anderson was “more After the war Bud Anderson worked as a test pilot Corps—be single, twenty years old, and have two years of afraid of screwing up than of dying.” But he didn’t even see an and reluctantly spent time at the Pentagon. He did a tour in college. He enrolled in Sacramento Junior College Technical enemy aircraft in his first few missions over France because the Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War in command of the Institute for Aeronautics (later joking that the entrance exam Germans had concentrated their air defense closer to home. 355th Tactical Fighter Wing, and flew combat missions in was being able to remember the name) and also entered Then he had all the action he wanted as his squadron began F-105s against enemy supply lines. While he was there, his son the Civilian Pilot Training Program, which meant he could flying escort for the bombers, which were beginning to pound Jim, just out of flight school, was flying O-2s over the jungle as learn to fly for free while pursuing his studies. He had just aircraft factories and other tar-gets in the German homeland. part of a Special Operations project. Bud made a surprise visit graduated from the junior college, had a few hours’ flight time The German fighters would come at the B-17s and to Jim’s base and accompanied him as copilot on one of their in a Piper Cub, and was working as an aircraft mechanic at B-24s head-on, trying to scatter the formation. They would fire missions. the Sacramento Air Depot when the Japanese bombed Pearl long bursts, roll down, then circle around to get ahead of the Bud Anderson retired from the Air Force as a colonel in Harbor. Less than a month later, Anderson turned twenty and bomber stream and attack again. Before the 357th arrived, the 1972. In 1988, he and Chuck Yeager climbed into refurbished immediately enlisted; he was sent to Lindbergh Field in San bomber losses were fearsome, with up to a 4 percent casualty Mustangs like those they had flown over forty years earlier Diego for flight training. rate being regarded as acceptable by the Allied High Command. (even with the same paint job) and went up together at Troy, Not long after receiving his wings in September 1942, The arrival of the Mustangs improved the bombers’ odds so Ala-bama, disproving the old adage that “there are old pilots he was checked out in the P-39 at Hamilton Army Air Field in dramatically that the mini-mum number of missions for a crew and bold pilots, but no old bold pilots.” Northern California then assigned to the newly formed 357th was raised from twenty-five to thirty-five. Fighter Group. In the spring of 1943, the pilots of the 357th On March 8, 1944, Anderson got his first kill when he were sent to the gunnery range in Tonopah, Nevada, to learn fired a Hail Mary burst at a Messerschmitt Bf 109 after engaging .