Bud Anderson, last of World War II’s ‘triple ace’ pilots, dies at 102

Clarence “Bud” Anderson, a pilot in the 357th Fighter Group of the United States Air Force, in March 1944. (Wikipedia)

By Richard Goldstein

Brig. Gen. Bud Anderson, who single-handedly shot down 16 German planes over Europe in World War II and became America’s last living triple ace, a fighter pilot with 15 or more “kills,” died May 17 at his home in Auburn, California, northeast of Sacramento.

Anderson, who teamed with renowned Brig. Gen. Chuck Yeager in combat and later in the storied age of pioneering test pilots, was 102.

His family, in a statement on Anderson’s website, said he died in his sleep.

In his 30 years of military service, Anderson flew more than 130 types of aircraft, logging about 7,500 hours in the air.

Piloting P-51 Mustang propeller fighters in World War II — he named them Old Crow, for his favorite brand of whiskey — he logged 116 missions totaling about 480 hours of combat without aborting a single foray.

When World War II ended, he held the rank of major at 23 years old. When he retired from active duty in 1972, he was a colonel.

His decorations included two Legion of Merit citations, five Distinguished Flying Crosses, the Bronze Star and 16 Air Medals.

He was promoted to the honorary rank of brigadier general by the Air Force chief of staff at the time, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., in a ceremony at the Aerospace Museum of California in December 2022. Brown called him “kind of a wrecking ball of a guy.”

Anderson scored the third-highest number of “kills” in the Army Air Forces’ 357th Fighter Group, whose three squadrons downed nearly 700 German aircraft, mostly while protecting American bombers on their missions over Europe.

Yeager was Anderson’s squadron mate and downed 13 German planes. Becoming the first pilot to break the sound barrier, in 1947, Yeager later joined with Anderson in the test-flight program in California chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s book “The Right Stuff” (1979).

“On the ground, he was the nicest person you’d ever know,” Yeager said of Anderson in reflecting on their wartime years.

But as he put it in his 1985 autobiography, “Yeager,” written with Lee Jonas: “In the sky those damned Germans must’ve thought they were up against Frankenstein or the Wolfman. Andy would hammer them into the ground, dive with them into the damned grave, if necessary, to destroy them.”

Anderson attributed his prowess in dogfights to his exceptional ability to identify enemy fighters such as the Germans’ Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs when they were specks in the sky, just preparing to pounce.

“Part of that probably traces back to my fascination with planes as a kid, making models, filling up scrapbooks with pictures,” he recalled in “To Fly and Fight: Memoirs of a Triple Ace” (1990), written with Joseph P. Hamelin. “But part must be physical. My eyes, I’ve always believed, communicate with my brain a bit more quickly than average.”

Of the German fighter planes, he added: “I wanted to see them. I might have been a little more motivated than most.”

He flew his first mission in February 1944, with the 363rd Squadron, and became an ace (a pilot with at least five “kills”) in mid-May. He was credited with 16 kills in his own right and one-quarter of a kill for a mission in which he joined with three other pilots in shooting down a German plane. Yeager, who flew a P-51 in that squadron while holding the rank of captain, was shot down over France in March 1944. Parachuting with leg and head wounds, he was hidden by the French Resistance, eventually made it back to England and continued to fly in the war.

Anderson became a test pilot at what is now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio in the late 1940s and early ’50s. After retiring from the Air Force in March 1972, he was chief of test-fight operations for McDonnell Aircraft Co. at Edwards Air Force Base in California’s high desert. Yeager, whom Wolfe portrayed as personifying “the brotherhood of the Right Stuff” for his nonchalance in the face of flight emergencies, became deputy director of flight testing.

Anderson commanded a tactical fighter wing in the Vietnam War and flew 25 missions in an F-105 Thunderchief that he named Old Crow II, bombing enemy supply routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Clarence Emil Anderson Jr., known as Bud since he was a boy, was born Jan. 13, 1922, in Oakland, California, and grew up in Newcastle, near Sacramento.

He was fascinated by commercial airliners flying above his town, and his father, a farmer, treated him to a biplane ride when he was 7.

“As far back as I can remember, I wanted to fly,” he recalled in an interview with the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.

He gained a pilot’s license in a civilian training program as a teenager, then, turning 20, he joined the Army’s air wing a few weeks after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 7, 1941.

He married Eleanor Cosby in 1945. She died in 2015. His survivors include his son, James; his daughter, Kathryn Burlington; four grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren, according to his website.