Clarence E. “Bud” Anderson, the last World War II triple ace flyer, died peacefully in his sleep at his home in Auburn, California, on May 17 at the age of 102. He had been the terror of the skies over Europe, the highest scoring flying ace in his P-51 Mustang squadron. He served two combat tours, was promoted to major in 1944 at the age of only 22, went on to become a test pilot, a fighter squadron and wing commander, and served in Korea and Vietnam. He retired in 1972 as a full colonel; in 2023, the Air Force gave him a post-retirement promotion to brigadier general.
Anderson’s death is a sad reminder that there are few left for whom the last World War is a memory rather than simply history; of the 16.4 million Americans who served in World War II, only 119,550 of them are still alive as of 2023. There are still a handful of D-Day veterans left—less than 1% of those who participated in one of the largest battles in human history—and a few of them are currently making their way back to Europe for the 80th anniversary of the day they stormed the beaches. Anderson was one of the pilots tasked with clearing the skies of the Luftwaffe in the leadup to Operation Overlord.
I once spent an hour chatting with Bud Anderson. He was 98 at the time, and told me in a gravelly, far-off voice that he was working as a junior aircraft mechanic at an air depot near Sacramento when the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor. They were informed by the foreman. “That’s when I knew we were off to war. I didn’t even know where Pearl Harbor was,” Anderson told me. Anderson enlisted with the U.S. Army as an aviation cadet, received his wings and commission as a second lieutenant in September, and ended up based in RAF Leiston, England.
Anderson started off flying combat missions against the Luftwaffe with the 365th Fighter Squadron of the 357th Fighter Group. “We had good pilots in our group,” he told me. “All we had to do was be turned loose, and we were going to chew somebody up. I was quite proud of our unit. That was one of the greatest times of my life, working with these guys.” Anderson was frank about the fact that he enjoyed himself. “It was very rewarding. It was scary when you first got over there; you looked down, and that’s enemy territory. If I go down, all these farmers are going to pitchfork me; they’re just waitin’. Once I got some experience, it kind of opened things up.”
“I wanted to do it,” Anderson told me with a chuckle. “You had to engage the enemy. There were a lot of fighter pilots who flew a whole tour and never saw an enemy airplane.” Anderson remembered his first kill vividly. He’d been “casing ‘em,” he said, and his squadron had been following the “18,000-foot rule—you drive the enemy away, and you come back. That was our instruction. I chased these guys down to 18,000 feet, fired a long burst, [and] came back. But on this mission, I was a leader, and on my way home. You had to fly with three, and another squadron pulled in behind us.”
We got about halfway out of Germany when there came three ME-109s. We were on the left side, and they were coming in from the right side. They obviously couldn’t see us because there were seven of us. I thought, One of these is mine. We cut ‘em off at the pass before they could do any attacking. I latched onto this guy. It was down low, where an ME-109 could give the Mustang a harder time. I just couldn’t get on this guy’s tail. I was coming at him at very steep angles, and I just couldn’t slide in behind him.
I had been through three gunnery schools, so I knew how to shoot. I said, when this guy comes around again—we’re both in a very high-speed turn—that means your wingtip is vertical—I’m going to get my stick site right on him, pull through him—this’ll mean I can’t see him because he’ll be under my nose. I’m going to pull through to my estimated lead, fire a burst, and see what happens. Sure enough, I hit him with a golden bullet. He pulled up and bailed out.
Anderson’s fellow pilot—John England—pulled up beside him. “He’s grinning like a kid, and he gave me the OK sign.” Confirmation of a kill had to come from other members of the squadron. On the ground, none of them could confirm having seen who made the shot. Heading over to the club for a drink, John ran over to him from the bar, beaming. “Andy,” he said, “that’s the greatest shot I ever saw. You got the sucker out there at about 60 degrees!” Anderson ran his hand up and down his left shoulder and modestly shrugged it off: “Aw, Johnny, lucky shot.” And then he laughed: “I rushed to the phone and claimed my first victory.”
“We were after the machine, not the pilot,” Anderson recalled. In the spring of 1944, that changed with new rules of engagement: “Pursue and destroy.” It was no longer enough to shoot down the plane—fighters had to follow them to the ground and make sure the pilot was dead, too. D-Day was coming, and high command wanted the Luftwaffe neutralized before the invasion. “So that’s what we did,” Anderson recalled. “I think it was remarkable. We did it by killing their experienced pilots.”
That’s the story of how we defeated the Luftwaffe. I don’t think it’s very well told in the history books. We tore into them when they came in. It also let us go out and look for them. We were hamstrung before because we had to stay with the bombers. But when they turned us loose, we would go looking for them and try to get them before they formed up. The kills really sky-rocketed from there. The Germans did not have a good pilot replacement program, and they just ran out of their core experienced pilots.
Anderson himself racked up 16 and a quarter kills, a few probable kills, and crippled many fighters over the course of 116 missions. When I spoke with him, he said he still missed those days. “I enjoyed squadron life,” he told me. “I enjoyed being in a combat unit more than anything I did. The camaraderie. Most of us guys would say we were fighting for our country or the flag. But we were fighting for each other. I think that’s true of any good combat unit with good morale.”
Like almost everyone else, Bud Anderson lost friends. He later named his son after two of them, Jim Browning and Eddie Simpson. “Jim came back for a second tour like I did,” Anderson recalled. “He and Captain Bochkay were out looking for trouble and found it. Two ME-262s. One of them tried to do what they shouldn’t: dogfight with a Mustang. A Mustang will just eat ‘em up. Bochkay shot him down, and when he turned to look for Browning, he wasn’t there. Made radio calls. As it turned out, Jim had engaged the other 262, and they played chicken—and nobody broke. They had a violent mid-air collision. Vaporized them both.”
Eddie Simpson had been Anderson’s wingman and later a flight leader. He was shot down over France in 1944, and it would be years before his fate was pieced together. On the ground, he connected with the French Maquis, rural guerrilla bands of French Resistance fighters. After a German patrol stumbled across a forest funeral for nine murdered resistance fighters, the Free French Forces decided to move locations. Simpson was on the last truck of the convoy, and as it pulled onto the Orleans highway, a German column spotted them. Simpson and five Maquis fighters jumped off the truck with a heavy machine gun and opened fire, hitting the lead German vehicle and blocking the road. They continued firing until, one by one, they were killed. Eddie Simpson died on August 14, 1944. The convoy escaped.
Paris was liberated that same month as the Red Army hammered through Eastern Europe towards Berlin, and by the end of the year, the German counter-offensive at the Battle of the Bulge had killed 19,000 Americans but failed to halt the Allied advance. On April 30, 1945, Hitler put a pistol in his mouth. V-E Day, Anderson told me, “was a big letdown.” He’d gone stateside in January and was at a training base in Texas with his friend Chuck Yeager (the test pilot who would, two years later, become the first man in history to exceed the speed of sound in level flight). The two pilots and their wives celebrated together. “We went out somewhere in Texas.”
With Anderson’s passing, a great American war hero has left us. He was not only a triple war ace (someone who has shot down at least 15 enemy planes); he commanded an F-86 squadron during the Korean War, a F-105 wing in Japan, and flew Republic F-105D fighter-bombers over Vietnam as commander of the 355th Tactical Fighter Wing. By the time he retired, he had been awarded five Distinguished Flying Crosses, 16 Air Medals, two Legions of Merit, a Bronze Star, and a Commendation Medal. He had flown more than 130 different types of aircraft and spent more than 7,500 hours in the air over three decades of extraordinary military service.
Seventy-five years after the war ended, Anderson was still grappling with what it all meant. “World War II was a big deal,” he told me. “The tragic thing is [that] we lost so many lives because of a war. Forty to fifty million people died. I can’t comprehend that. I try to break it down: How did it affect my unit? The guys I deployed with overseas? Well, the squadron had exactly 28 pilots, and 50% of them were either killed or made prisoners of war. We had a five-to-one kill ratio. For every one of us they shot down, we shot down five of them. That’s high casualties. The enormity of it …” and his voice trailed off.
Brigadier General Clarence E. “Bud” Anderson was one of the very last of the Greatest Generation. May his memory be eternal.
