Presentation Date: October 22, 1998
Bud Anderson
P-51 Triple Ace P-51 Triple Ace
"I didn't fight a 109 any differently than a Focke Wulf.
I really didn't approach them any differently.
I always felt like I had an advantage over them."
C.E. "Bud " Anderson had his first duty assignment at Oakland, when he was a 2nd Lieutenant fresh out of flying school. He was assigned to Hamilton Field with duty at Oakland's North Field, and on his way to speak to the Golden Gate Wing at its October meeting, he drove by the old administration building where he lived for a short while.
"It reminded me of the fun we had here. Air defense of the San Francisco Bay area with four P-39s in commission. It was really something." Anderson says it was where he learned to be a fighter pilot - - developing skills Chuck Yeager qualifies as belonging to ..."the best fighter pilot I ever saw."
From there, Anderson ended up training in a new unit at Tonopah, Nevada, and was shipped over to England. The 357th FG was the first 8th AF unit to get P-51s which had been newly mated with the Rolls Royce Merlin engine. The 354th FG of the Ninth had been loaned Mustangs for ground support prior to D-Day, but the original machines were handed over to Anderson's group. "We were the next unit to get 'em, so we went to the 8th Air Force and that meant Bud Anderson got to fly aerial combat the whole time instead of ground support."
Whenever Bud talks, he includes the dogfight indelibly stamped on his mind. It's the one in he unravels in his book "To Fly and Fight" (scheduled for re-release this coming year).
In early 1944, the 8th Air Force changed its doctrine of having all fighters fly close escort to bombers. Squadrons were selected to roam and hunt for enemy fighters in front of the bomber stream.
Anderson cites General Doolittle's dictum "'...when you engage the enemy, take 'em direct down to the ground and kill 'em.' And that's what we did. And that's when the fighter victories soared and that's what gained us air superiority."
It was a clear day on May 27, 1944 when Anderson was flying P-51 on a bomber escort over the border of France and Germany, and he heard his wingman call, " 'Bogeys coming in on us from five o'clock high.' They were Me-109s. Four of them, four of us. We gotta attack, so we turn back into 'em."
Anderson says most combat in those days had Germans aiming to attack the bombers instead of the fighter escort. This was different Bud says, as they wanted to fight. At 35,000 ft. the eight planes warily circled each other, the Mustangs gradually shortening the circle and coming up behind the 109s, until the Germans rolled out and headed east back towards Germany.
Anderson's flight of four followed, and when the tail-end Me-109 climbed, Bud sent his #3 and #4 planes after him and continued with his wingman to pursue the other three Germans. Bud shot down one 109 from behind and then watched the remaining Germans separate. One 109 climbed, and Anderson and his wingman followed until the 109 passed by from right-to-left and Bud couldn't follow at his speed. So he overshot and climbed, and the German reversed to slide behind Bud's wingman, John Skara. Bud told Skara to put the nose of his P-51 down...and the Me-109 followed Skara's plane with Bud then jumping behind the German.
"He saw that right away, pulls away and separates, then comes around on another hard turn. And I said that still looks bad to me, so I take it over the top. So I pulled up and he reverses and come up after me. I can close my eyes and look back over my shoulder today, and I can still see the nose of that Messerschmitt. I knew a little bit about gunnery and I knew he had to get (his nose) up here to get a shot at me. He's pullin', I'm pullin', he's pullin', I'm pullin'. I'm starting to work on plan "B" and about that time he shuddered and turned and that put me right back on the driver's seat.
"He's not running for home. He wants to fight. He comes around again. Well, this time it was a little bit different and I didn't want to be sittin' up there on top of that. So I dropped a little flap, cracked the throttle back just a little bit and then just really sucked that thing (the stick) in. And sure enough, he saw it right away and reversed turn and pulled that thing straight up, as steep as he could. All I did was push the throttle forward and follow him up.
I got him at about a ten degree angle, and got good hits all about the cockpit and wing root and he started smoking badly. I stopped firing and then coasted right along side of him, just as he was rolling... and he rolled over. He was leaving one helluva trail when he went through 25,000 ft....I saw his shadow and he met his shadow and there was a tremendous explosion."
Bud says they'd shot down three out of the four, safely escorted the bombers and it was a "pretty successful day."
Anderson always pays tribute to the ground crew who kept his P-51s flying in top shape. Bud says Otto Heino, Mel Scheuneman and Leon Zimmerman. They worked outdoors, put in outrageous hours and got the job done for Anderson. He never had to abort a mission for any mechanical reason.
When Anderson mentioned to his crew it the dark olive paint on the upper surfaces of his P-51D didn't camouflage the fighter very well against the winter blanket of snow, overnight the crew hand-rubbed the aircraft with gasoline to strip the paint for their pilot. The next morning "Old Crow shined silver and the crews' hands were red and raw. And whether it was that bare aluminum P-51 or an earlier olive drab P-51B, there was never a hole punched in Anderson's plane from an enemy fighter. That's a record made all the more remarkable by virtue of Anderson's 116 mission (480 hours of combat) without an abort.
Anderson also spoke of his final WWII combat mission which has become legend and is immortalized in Ray Waddy's painting "Double Trouble". Anderson and Chuck Yeager flew the two alternate P-51s on a 357th bomber-escort mission January 14,1945 to bomb German troops in the Battle of the Bulge. This was the only mission the two pilots flew as wingmen, and as Bud says "neither one of us had to be there." Over France, with no aborts, Bud and Chuck headed southeast to Switzerland, where Yeager showed Anderson the route he'd taken during his evasion the year before. They dropped their reserve fuel tanks on Mt. Blanc and tried to strafe them, then flew back to Leiston on the deck. When the two aces arrived home, they buzzed the field and found their squadron mates already celebrating. Anderson's and Yeager's Mustangs rolled to a stop, with the tape over the machine guns ports broken and smoke-stained.
" I'm taxiing up to my hardstand and I see all these people standing there. Holy Smokes, how'd they find out about this already? Oh no, they're hear on my last mission to wish me well. I swung around and shut the engine down. The prop hadn't stopped before Heino jumped on the wing and said "Andy the group shot down 57 airplanes today. How many did you and Chuck get?' And that's the story of how Chuck Yeager and Bud Anderson missed the biggest air battle of World War Two."
Postwar, Anderson served as a test pilot on "parasite fighter" trials, in which a jet fighter was slung into the bomb bay of a B-36. It was highly dangerous work that led to the loss of a number of Anderson's fellow test pilots. On one test run, Anderson flew an F-84 to a boom which hauled the jet into the bomb bay of a B-36. As it was securing the fighter, a heavy stainless steel bolt snapped, punching two holes in the rear of the canopy and causing the F-84 to start fluttering in the bomb bay. Anderson's immediate reaction to punch a release button freed the jet and allowed him to escape what could have been a nasty situation.
He also was the lead test pilot in research on flying an "extended wing" to test theories of fuel conservation. The first of these tests involved linking a Culver Q-14 wingtip-to-wingtip to a C-47. Then, the trials transitioned to F-84 jets and a B-29. Anderson says the project died for several reasons, among them "We got supersonic airplanes, we got refueling, and then we had a very serious fatal accident later on, trying to develop an automatic pilot with it."