Chuck Yeager was not the sort of person to concede piloting skills to anyone else ... normally. But when he introduced his war buddy Bud Anderson to engineer Jack Ridley, he described Anderson as being the only fighter jock ever to have whipped him in a dogfight.
Even though Anderson later said he didn't remember doing that, it must have happened for Yeager to have admitted lowering his colours.
Clarence E "Bud" Anderson was by any account a remarkable pilot, one of the generation of pilots that fought in WWII and went on to pioneer the world of aviation that we have today. Along with Yeager and Bob Hoover, he was one of the three pillars of US aviation folklore.
Anderson, a retired US Air Force Brigadier General, died last Friday in his sleep. He was 102 years old.
A native of Oakland in California, Anderson enlisted in the US Army as an aviation cadet in 1942, completing his training at Lindbergh Field in San Diego. He was later assigned to the 357th Fighter Group (FG) at Tonopah, Nevada, where he first met Yeager.
The 357th FG was deployed to RAF Leiston in the UK in January 1944 and equipped with the P-51 Mustang with which Anderson would later become closely associated. He named his Mustang Old Crow, after his favourite brand of bourbon. He would go on to score 16.25 aerial victories and become one of the highest scoring aces in the US Army Air Force.
Famously, during an escort mission very late in the war when they had been assigned as spare aircraft, Anderson followed Yeager as they embarked on a farewell tour of Europe. The Luftwaffe, they considered, was beaten and could present no resistance to the bomber stream, so they flew into Switzerland and strafed their own drop tanks, then buzzed Mont Blanc, the Pyrenees and Paris.
On arrival back at base, they found out the Luftwaffe had made one last all-out effort, resulting in a mass dogfight after which the 357th claimed 57 kills. The group's best two pilots had been swanning around and scored no victories at all.
Anderson stayed in the air force after the war, becoming a test pilot at Wright Field in Ohio, where he took part in the FICON project, developing a parasite fighter to be carried beneath a B-36 Peacemaker long-range bomber. He later served overseas in the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, rising to the rank of Colonel.
He retired in 1972, having been awarded the Legion of Merit, five awards of the DFC, the Bronze Star, 16 Air Medals, the French Legion of Honor and Croix de Guerre.
After retirement, Anderson became manager of McDonnell Aircraft's flight test facility at Edwards AFB in California, overseeing projects such as the F/A-18 Hornet and C-17 Globemaster. In 2008, he was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame.
His 1990 book To Fly and Fight – Memoirs of a Triple Ace is a classic of aviation literature, and in 2022, Anderson was promoted in retirement to the honorary rank of Brigadier General.
In his later years, Anderson became an icon of the P-51, regularly attending warbird gatherings and was a staple at Oshkosh, often photographed in front of Mustangs carrying his own Old Crow livery.
Bud Anderson's name will forever be associated with that of Chuck Yeager, but his contribution to aviation was substantial in its own right. Although his name wasn't as famous as Yeager's or Hoover's, he nonetheless deserves to be remembered as one of aviation's great pioneers.