Note: The following article is excerpted from the book To Fly and Fight:
Memoirs of a Triple Ace by Col C. E. "Bud" Anderson with Joseph P. Hamelin.
The book is currently available in a $29.95 trade hardcover edition
published by Pacifica Military History.
He Was Someone Who Was Trying to Kill Me, Is All
by Col C. E. "Bud" Anderson with Joseph P. Hamelin
Copyright 1990 © by Clarence E. Anderson and Joseph P. Hamelin
The sky above was a bright crystal blue, and the land below a green-on-green
checkerboard divided by a silver-blue ribbon. Below was occupied France,
beyond the river lay Germany, and it all looked the same, rolling and
peaceful and bursting with spring.
But this was an overpoweringly sinister place. From our perch six miles up,
we couldn't see the enemy, some huddling over their guns taking aim, some
climbing into their airplanes to fly up and get us, and some, on the far
side of the river, waiting with pitchforks and hoping we'd fall somewhere
close. All we could see was the green of their fields and forests. But we
knew they were there, looking up, watching us come, and thinking how they
could kill us.
The day was unusually, incredibly clear. In better times, it would have been
a day for splashing through trout streams with fly rods, or driving so fast
that some giggling girl would beg you to slow. But these weren't those kinds
of times. These were the worst times God ever let happen. And so the trout
streams were left to the fish, gasoline was a thing you used sparingly, and
it was just one more day for flying and fighting and staying alive, if you
could, six miles high over Germany. Staying alive was no simple thing in the
skies over Europe in the spring of 1944. A lot of men couldn't. It was a bad
thing to dwell on if you were a fighter pilot, and so we told ourselves we
were dead men and lived for the moment with no thought of the future at all.
It wasn't too difficult. Lots of us had no future and everyone knew it.
This particular day, out of the year I flew combat in Europe, is the one I
have thought of on a thousand days since, sometimes on purpose and sometimes
in spite of myself. Sometimes it's in cameo glimpses, other times in slow
motion stop action, but always in Technicolor. I sit on my porch, nearly a
balf-century and half-world removed from that awful business, looking out
over a deep, green, river-cut canyon to the snow-capped Sierra, thinking
about getting tires for the Blazer or mowing the lawn or, more likely, the
next backpacking trip . . . and suddenly May 27, 1944, elbows its way to the
front of my thoughts like a drunk to a bar. The projectionist inside my head
who chooses the films seems to love this one rerun.
We were high over a bomber stream in our P-51B Mustangs, escorting the
heavies to the Ludwigsbafen-Mannbeim area. For the past several weeks the
Eighth Air Force bad been targeting oil, and Ludwigshafen was a center for
synthetic fuels. Oil was everything, the lifeblood of war. Nations can't
fight without oil. All through my training, and all through the war, I can't
remember ever being limited on how much I could fly. There always was fuel
enough. But by 1944, the Germans weren't so fortunate. They were feeling the
pinch from the daily bombardments. Without fuel and lubricant, their war
machine eventually would grind to a stop. Now that the Mustang fighters were
arriving in numbers, capable of escorting the bombers all the way to their
targets and back, Germany's oil industry was there for the pounding.
The day would come, and it would be soon, when the German Air Force, the
Luftwaffe, would begin picking its spots, contesting some missions and not
others; or concentrating on isolated bomber formations, to the exclusion of
all the rest, largely at random from what we could tell. The Luftwaffe's
idea was to conserve fuel and pilots. But for the moment, at least, there
seemed no great shortage of fighter planes between us and the target.
We'd picked up the bombers at 27,000 feet, assumed the right flank, and
almost immediately all hell began breaking loose up ahead of us. This was
early, still over France, long before we'd expected the German fighters to
come up in force. You maintained radio silence until you engaged the enemy,
and after that it didn't much matter since they knew you were there, and so
people would chatter. They were chattering now, up ahead, and my earphones
were crackling with loud, frantic calls: "Bandits, elevem o'clock low! . . .
Two o'clock high, pick him up! . . . Blue leader break left!" It sounded as
though the Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs were everywhere.
You knew how it was up ahead, and you knew it would be like that for you any
minute now, the German single-seat Fw 190s and Me 109s coming straight
through the bombers, mixing it up with the Mustangs, the hundreds of
four-engined heavies and the hundreds of fighters scoring the crystal blue
sky with their persistent white contrails.
The Germans liked to roar through the bombers head-on, firing long bursts,
and then roll and go down. They would circle around to get ahead of the
bomber stream, groping for altitude, avoiding the escorts if possible, then
reassemble and come through head-on again. When their fuel or ammunition was
exhausted, they would land and refuel and take off again, flying mission
after mission, for as long as there were bombers to shoot at. They seldom
came after us. Normally, they would skirmish the escorts only out of
necessity. We were an inconvenience, best avoided. It was the bombers they
wanted, and the German pilots threw themselves at them smartly and bravely.
It was our job to stop them.
It seemed we were always outnumbered. We had more fighters than they did,
but what mattered was how many they could put up in one area. They would
concentrate in huge numbers, by the hundreds at times. They would assemble
way up ahead, pick a section of the bomber formation, and then come in
head-on, their guns blazing, sometimes bitting the bombers below us before
we knew what was happening.
In the distance, a red and black smear marked the spot where a B-17 and its
10 men bad been. Planes still bearing their bomb loads erupted and fell,
trailing flame, streaking the sky, leaving gaps in the bomber formation that
were quickly closed up. Through our headsets we could hear the war, working
its way back toward us, coming straight at us at hundreds of miles per hour.
The adrenaline began gushing, and I scanned the sky frantically, trying to
pick out the fly-speck against the horizon that might have been somebody
coming to kill us, trying to see him before be saw me, looking, squinting,
breathless . . . Over the radio: "Here they come!"
They'd worked over the bombers up ahead and now it was our turn. Things
happen quickly. We get rid of our drop tanks, slam the power up, and make a
sweeping left turn to engage. My flight of four Mustangs is on the outside
of the turn, a wingman close behind to my left, my element leader and his
wingman behind to my right, all in finger formation. Open your right hand,
tuck the thumb under, put the fingers together, and check the fingernails.
That's how we flew, and fought. Two shooters, and two men to cover their
tails. The Luftwaffe flew that way, too. German ace Werner Mo1ders is
generally credited with inventing the tactic during the Spanish Civil War.
Being on the outside of the turn, we are vulnerable to attack from the rear.
I look over my right shoulder and, sure enough, I see four dots above us,
way back, no threat at the moment, but coming bard down the chute. I start
to call out, but . . .
"Four bogeys, five o'clock high!" My element leader, Eddie Simpson, has
already seen them. Bogeys are unknowns and bandits are hostile. Quickly, the
dots close and take shape. They're hostile, all right. They're
Messerschmitts.
We turn hard to the right, pulling up into a tight string formation,
spoiling their angle, and we try to come around and go at them head on. The
Me 109s change course, charge past, and continue on down, and we wbeel and
give chase. There are four of them, single-seat fighters, and they pull up,
turn hard, and we begin turning with them. We are circling now, tighter and
tighter, chasing each other's tails, and I'm sitting there wondering what
the hell's happening. These guys want to hang around. Curious. I'm wondering
why they aren't after the bombers, why they're messing with us, whether
they're simply creating some kind of a diversion or what. I would fly 116
combat missions, engage the enemy perhaps 40 times, shoot down 16 fighters,
share in the destruction of a bomber, destroy another fighter on the ground,
have a couple of aerial probables, and over that span it would be us
bouncing them far more often than not. This was a switch.
We're flying tighter circles, gaining a little each turn, our throttles wide
open, 30,000 feet up. The Mustang is a wonderful airplane, 37 feet wingtip
to wingtip, just a little faster than the smaller German fighters, and also
just a little more nimble. Suddenly the 109s, sensing things are not going
well, roll out and run, turning east, flying level. Then one lifts up his
nose and climbs away from the rest.
We roll out and go after them. They're flying full power, the black smoke
pouring out their exhaust stacks. I'm looking at the one who is climbing,
wondering what he is up to, and I'm thinking that if we stay with the other
three, this guy will wind up above us. I send Simpson up after him. He and
his wingman break off. My wingman, John Skara, and I chase the other three
fighters, throttles all the way forward, and I can see that we're gaining.
I close to within 250 yards of the nearest Messerscbmitt--dead astern, 6
o'clock, no maneuvering, no nothing--and squeeze the trigger on the control
stick between my knees gently. Bamhamhamhamham! The sound is loud in the
cockpit in spite of the wind shriek and engine roar. And the vibration of
the Mustang's four. 50-caliber machine guns, two in each wing, weighing
60-odd pounds apiece, is pronounced. In fact, you had to be careful in
dogfights when you were turning hard, flying on the brink of a stall,
because the buck of the guns was enough to peel off a few critical miles per
hour and make the Mustang simply stop flying. That could prove downright
embarrassing.
But I'm going like hell now, and I can see the bullets tearing at the
Messerschmitt's wing root and fuselage. The armor-piercing ammunition we
used was also incendiary, and hits were easily visible, making a bright
flash and puff. Now the 109's trailing smoke thickens, and it's something
more than exhaust smoke. He slows, and then suddenly rolls over. But the
plane doesn't fall. It continues on, upside down, straight and level! What
the hell . . . ?
The pilot can't be dead. It takes considerable effort to fly one of these
fighter planes upside down. You have to push hard on the controls. Flying
upside down isn't easy. It isn't something that happens all by itself, or
that you do accidentally. So what in the world is be doing?
Well. It's an academic question, because I haven't the time to wait and find
out. I pour another burst into him, pieces start flying off, I see flame,
and the 109 plummets and falls into a spin, belching smoke. My sixth kill.
The other two Messerschmitt pilots have pulled away now, and they're
nervous. Their airplanes are twitching, the fliers obviously straining to
look over their shoulders and see what is happening, As we take up the chase
again, two against two now, the trailing 109 peels away and dives for home,
and the leader pulls up into a sharp climbing turn to the left. This one can
fly, and be obviously has no thought of running. I'm thinking this one could
be trouble.
We turn inside him, my wingman and I, still at long range, and be pulls
around harder, passing in front of us right-to-left at an impossible angle.
I want to swing in behind him, but I'm going too fast, and figure I would
only go skidding on past. A Mustang at speed simply can't make a square
corner. And in a dogfight you don't want to surrender your airspeed. I
decide to overshoot him and climb.
He reverses his turn, trying to fall in behind us. My wingman is vulnerable
now. I tell Skara, "Break off!" and be peels away. The German goes after
him, and I go after the German, closing on his tail before he can close on
my wingman. He sees me coming and dives away with me after him, then makes a
climbing left turn. I go screaming by, pull up, and he's reversing his
turn--man, be can fly!--and be comes crawling right up behind me, close
enough that I can see him distinctly. He's bringing his nose up for a shot,
and I haul back on the stick and climb even harder. I keep going up, because
I'm out of alternatives.
This is what I see all these years later. If I were the sort to be troubled
with nightmares, this is what would shock me awake. I am in this steep
climb, pulling the stick into my navel, making it steeper, steeper . . . and
I am looking back down, over my shoulder, at this classic gray Me 109 with
black crosses that is pulling up, too, steeper, steeper, the pilot trying to
get his nose up just a little bit more and bring me into his sights.
There is nothing distinctive about the aircraft, no fancy markings, nothing
to identify it as the plane of an ace, as one of the "dreaded yellow-noses"
like you see in the movies. Some of them did that, I know, but I never saw
one. And in any event, all of their aces weren't flamboyant types who
splashed paint on their airplanes to show who they were. I suppose I could
go look it up in the archives. There's the chance I could find him in some
gruppe's log book, having flown on this particular day, in this particular
place, a few miles northwest of the French town of Strasbourg that sits on
the Rhine. There are fellows who've done that, gone back and looked up their
opponents. I never have. I never saw any point.
He was someone who was trying to kill me, is all.
So I'm looking back, almost straight down now, and I can see this
20-millimeter cannon sticking through the middle of the fighter's propeller
hub. In the theater of my memory, it is enormous. An elephant gun. And that
isn't far wrong. It is a gun designed to bring down a bomber, one that fires
shells as long as your band, shells that explode and tear big holes in
metal. It is the single most frightening thing I have seen in my life, then
and now.
But I'm too busy to be frightened. Later on, you might sit back and perspire
about it, maybe 40-50 years later, say, sitting on your porch 7,000 miles
away, but while it is happening you are just too damn busy. And I am
extremely busy up here, hanging by my propeller, going almost straight up,
full emergency power, which a Mustang could do for only so long before
losing speed, shuddering, stalling, and falling back down; and I am thinking
that if the Mustang stalls before the Messerscbmitt stalls, I have bad it.
I look back, and I can see that he's shuddering, on the verge of a stall. He
hasn't been able to get his nose up enough, hasn't been able to bring that
big gun to bear. Almost, but not quite. I'm a fallen-down-dead man almost,
but not quite. His nose begins dropping just as my airplane, too, begins
shuddering. He stalls a second or two before I stall, drops away before I
do.
Good old Mustang.
He is falling away now, and I flop the nose over and go after him hard. We
are very high by this time, six miles and then some, and falling very, very
fast. The Messersebmitt had a head start, plummeting out of my range, but
I'm closing up quickly. Then he flattens out and comes around hard to the
left and starts climbing again, as if he wants to come at me head on.
Suddenly we're right back where we started.
A lot of this is just instinct now. Things are happening too fast to think
everything out. You steer with your right hand and feet. The right hand also
triggers the guns. With your left, you work the throttle, and keep the
airplane in trim, which is easier to do than describe.
Any airplane with a single propeller produces torque. The more horsepower
you have, the more the prop will pull you off to one side. The Mustangs I
flew used a 12-cylinder Packard Merlin engine that displaced 1,649 cubic
inches. That is 10 times the size of the engine that powers an Indy car. It
developed power enough that you never applied full power sitting still on
the ground because it would pull the plane's tail up off the runway and the
propeller would chew up the concrete. With so much power, you were
continually making minor adjustments on the controls to keep the Mustang and
its wing-mounted guns pointed straight.
There were three little palm-sized wheels you had to keep fiddling with.
They trimmed you up for hands-off level flight. One was for the little trim
tab on the tail's rudder, the vertical slab which moves the plane left or
right. Another adjusted the tab on the tail's horizontal elevators that
raise or lower the nose and help reduce the force you had to apply for hard
turning. The third was for aileron trim, to keep your wings level, although
you didn't have to fuss much with that one. Your left hand was down there a
lot if you were changing speeds, as in combat . . . while at the same time
you were making minor adjustments with your feet on the rudder pedals and
your hand on the stick. At first it was awkward. But, with experience, it
was something you did without thinking, like driving a car and twirling the
radio dial.
It's a little unnerving to think about bow many things you have to deal with
all at once to fly combat.
So the Messerschmitt is coming around again, climbing hard to his left, and
I've had about enough of this. My angle is a little bit better this time. So
I roll the dice. Instead of cobbing it like before and sailing on by him, I
decide to turn hard left inside him, knowing that if I lose speed and don't
make it I probably won't get home. I pull back on the throttle slightly, put
down 10 degrees of flaps, and haul back on the stick just as hard as I can.
And the nose begins coming up and around, slowly, slowly. . . .
Hot damn! I'm going to make it! I'm inside him, pulling my sights up to him.
And the German pilot can see this. This time, it's the Messerschmitt that
breaks away and goes zooming straight up, engine at maximum power, without
much alternative. I come in with full power and follow him up, and the gap
narrows swiftly. He is hanging by his prop, not quite vertically, and I am
right there behind him, and it is terribly clear, having tested the theory
less than a minute ago, that he is going to stall and fall away before I do.
I have him. He must know that I have him.
I bring my nose up, he comes into my sights, and from less than 300 yards I
trigger a long, merciless burst from my Brownings. Every fifth bullet or so
is a tracer, leaving a thin trail of smoke, marking the path of the bullet
stream. The tracers race upward and find him. The bullets chew at the wing
root, the cockpit, the engine, making bright little flashes. I hose the
Messerscbmitt down the way you'd hose down a campfire, methodically, from
one end to the other, not wanting to make a mistake here. The 109 shakes
like a retriever coming out of the water, throwing off pieces. He slows,
almost stops, as if parked in the sky, his propeller just windmilling, and
he begins smoking heavily.
My momentum carries me to him. I throttle back to ease my plane alongside,
just off his right wing. Have I killed him? I do not particularly want to
fight this man again. I am coming up even with the cockpit, and although I
figure the less I know about him the better, I find myself looking in spite
of myself. There is smoke in the cockpit. I can see that, nothing more.
Another few feet. . . .
And then he falls away suddenly, left wing down, right wing rising up,
obscuring my view. I am looking at the 109's sky blue belly, the wheel
wells, twin radiators, grease marks, streaks from the guns, the black
crosses. I am close enough to make out the rivets. The Messerscbmitt is
right there and then it is gone, just like that, rolling away and dropping
its nose and falling (flying?) almost straight down, leaking coolant and
trailing flame and smoke so black and thick that it has to be oil smoke. It
simply plunges, heading straight for the deck. No spin, not even a wobble,
no parachute, and now I am wondering. His ship seems a death ship--but is
it?
Undecided, I peel off and begin chasing him down. Did I squander a chance
here? Have I let him escape? He is diving hard enough to be shedding his
wings, harder than anyone designed those airplanes to dive, 500 miles an
hour and more, and if 109s will stall sooner than Mustangs going straight
up, now I am worrying that maybe their wings stay on longer. At 25,000 feet
I begin to grow nervous. I pull back on the throttle, ease out of the dive,
and watch him go down. I have no more stomach for this kind of thing, not
right now, not with this guy. Enough. Let him go and to hell with him.
Straight down be plunges, from as high as 35,000 feet, through this
beautiful, crystal clear May morning toward the green-on-green checkerboard
fields, leaving a wake of black smoke. From four miles straight up I watch
as the Messerscbmitt and the shadow it makes on the ground rush toward one
another . . .
. . . and then, finally, silently, merge.
Eddie Simpson joins up with me. Both wingmen, too. Simpson, my old wingman
and friend, had gotten the one who'd climbed out. We'd bagged three of the
four. We were very excited. It had been a good day.
I had lived and my opponent had died. But it was a near thing. It could have
been the other way around just as easily, and what probably made the
difference was the airplane I flew. Made in America. I would live to see the
day when people would try to tell me the United States can't make cars like
some other folks do. What a laugh.
I didn't wonder if I'd just made a new bride a widow, or if he might have
had kids, any more than I would have wondered about a snake's mate and
offspring. I may have given some thought to how many of my friends be had
killed, or might have killed in the future, or how many bombers he might
have shot down had he lived. But that's as far as it went. From what I could
tell, he hadn't been overly concerned about me.
People ask about that all the time. People usually ask it hesitantly, as
tactfully as they can, but they ask it. Did I wonder and worry about the
mothers and children and wives of the men I shot down? Did I carry any guilt
or regret?
No.
Not then, and not now.
World War Two was a total thing, us against them, when being against them
was unquestionably the right thing to be. I flew for my country, and was
proud I could help in any way that I could.
Besides, all of my opponents were trying to kill me. And frankly, I always
was elated they hadn't.
This one had almost gotten a bead on me. He'd come as close as anyone would.
When it was done, the 480 hours of combat flying in P-51s, and another 25 or
so missions in Vietnam, almost all of those in F-105s, I never once suffered
a bit in air-to-air combat. The sum total of the damage all my aircraft
absorbed amounted to one small-arms round that found one of my wings during
a strafing run after D-Day. It bored a bole the size of my little finger. It
didn't even go all the way through, just punctured the underside's skin.
Nobody noticed it until the next day. Needing a patch the size of a coin,
that's exactly what my crew used--a British shilling.
People on the ground often shot at me. Flak batteries. Machine gunners. Foot
soldiers with rifles and pistols. There may have been some who threw rocks,
who can say? But this man, on that day, was the only opponent who was ever
behind me, and he couldn't quite bring me into his sights, and never did
fire.
To my knowledge, I never was fired upon by an airplane in combat.
Skill had something to do with that, I suppose. But there was certainly
something more to it than skill. Lots of hot pilots never came home. I guess
I was lucky. Or blessed.
That night, back at our Leiston base, in the "half-pipe" Nissen but where
the flight leaders bunked, we stoked our little stove with coke and made
toasted cheese sandwiches. And afterward, after twirling the poker through
the coals until it glowed, we ceremonially burned two more little swastikas
beneath my name on the hut's wooden door.
O'Bee O'Brien's name was up there, Ed Hiro's, Jim Browning's, Don Bochkay's,
Daddy Rabbit Peters'. Chuck Yeager, who three years later would become the
first man to fly through the sound barrier, would have his name up there
too, along with some others. Already, there were a lot of little swastikas
burned into that door. Fortunately, there was still lots of room. It would
be a long war.
There would be a lot more.
