Evan Flys
C.E. “Bud” Anderson
C.E. “Bud” Anderson is one of my all time heroes. He’s a triple ace with 16 kills over Germany. I’ve read his book "To Fly and Fight", twice, seen him countless times on the TV show “Dogfights” and also on “Showdown: Air Combat”.
I was kind of nervous and afraid I’d get tongue-tied about meeting my hero, but I made a lot of notes, and questions, and studying up on him helped.
The best thing though was that Bud is a really nice guy. I loved hanging out with him and hearing his stories!
Here's part of our interview:
So, can you tell me about the duck proof glass incident?
“Well, when I got into the Army Air Corps, went through my training and got into a P-39 unit, as luck would have it, we were stationed nearby, actually in Oroville, California, where this thing actually happened. The Army had built airfields all over the country. So we had moved there from Santa Rosa and were flying P-39’s out of there. The 357th Fighter Group Headquarters attached to our squadron. So one day, I think he was a Major then, I guess he was our Dir. of Operations, came down and he said, ‘I've been talking to some of the folks in town, and their rice crops around here are getting invaded by ducks who are eating up the crops!’ He said, he kind of asked, if we could fly out and chase the ducks off with our airplanes. And of course we thought that would be a terrific a lot of fun because it would be legal buzzing so we could fly around and raise heck and buzz across the fields. The P-39 was a combat airplane, and it had an allegedly bulletproof glass that was about 2 inches thick right in the front center windscreen directly in front of you. That thing was mounted sturdily and was supposed to be able to take a .50 caliber or .30 caliber shells and be bulletproof. We didn't foresee this problem that was going to come up.
So we get out early in the morning, kind of a dawn patrol, that's the first thing we did was to come in and scare the ducks off. The ducks would come that night and feed. I wasn't on this particular flight but there was guy in our squadron by the name of Peters, in this flight. They were out there buzzing the rice fields and he took a duck right in the center of that windshield. It didn't shatter the bulletproof glass but it did knock the thing so badly that the duck came on through, splattered all over the cockpit and made a mess out of the airplane. It didn't touch him, but he had feathers and duck guts all over his dark glasses and the cockpit was a terrible mess. It did do a lot of damage. So that kind of put a stop to ‘Operation Duck’. And that airplane stunk for a long time after that. It never really got cleaned up properly.”
In your book you talked about dropping toilet paper on the carrier's deck. It must've been fun! Can you tell me about it?
“I didn't actually do the toilet paper but I was involved in the flight and I'm the one that made the sonic boom. I was stationed in Korea after the war and had an F-86 squadron. It was an unaccompanied assignments and no family and it was right after the war. It was kind of a miserable place to be. We hadn't decided whether we were going to be there or not. The facilities were kind of rundown and the country was in shambles. Living conditions were horrible. Well anyway, the Fifth Air Force’s, Japan and Korean based fighter units would go on what they called “Mobility Exercises” where we would go off to a different base and demonstrate we could operate. You know if something happened down in such and such place, we can fly down there, arrive and start flying the next day or even the day we got there. So they were these exercises to test us. We would fly down to Taiwan which was then Formosa, and this was where the Chinese were, the Nationalist Chinese, because they were separate from China and we operated off of a Chinese airbase. We were just continuing our training and were a demonstration of our combat capability. We would do some gunnery, drop some bombs, fly formation, and stuff like that. Well there was some kind of a joint command there, and they wanted to have an exercise with the Navy. So we're down there and the Navy, they always think that the fleet can move around and we can't find them, and all that kind 
of stuff. And so they said, all right the fleet is out here somewhere and they’re going to be steaming about 100 miles off the coast and they wanted to see if we could go in and intercept the carrier and they were going to test the fleet’s air defenses. So I had this one guy, who was a Major, the rest were second lieutenants on their first duty assignment. So I got old Ben and I said, ‘well we’ll put on the external tanks so we have the endurance, and we’ll go as high as we can get better fuel specific, and then we can see a greater area also. When the weather report came out there was going to be a cloud factor and that was not going to help us too much. Our plan was if we didn't get intercepted, I would fly the top cover and when we found a carrier, I'm going to roll over, take the F-86 supersonic, and try to cast the sonic boom on the carrier. You can do a pretty good job of directing the sonic boom. You can hit an airfield! I’ve done that many, many times! And then Ben says you do that and then he's going to take his flight down, and what he'd done is the F-86 has speed brakes that pop out of the side of the fuselage, and they put all these toilet paper rolls inside there and closed the speed brakes. So I would do the sonic boom if we found them and then he'd go down, down, down, and come across the deck of the carrier pop the speed brakes and send the toilet paper all over the carrier!
So we were out there and I'm up at 40,000 feet, we got a fuel margin to get back what we call our bingo fuel so were getting very close to our bingo fuel in fact we’re at our bingo and I’m thinking, ‘darned we can't find him’, and I’m rolling around and looking and all of a sudden I look and there’s a break in the clouds and I see this huge wake and there she is! I told Ben where the carrier was and he saw it, so I go down, hit them with the sonic boom, and Ben dove down beneath the clouds and came up on the carrier and hit them with the toilet paper.
We got a commendation from an Air Force general on the joint staff that was part of the exercise. We had sent a report in and said that, ‘We'd laid a sonic boom on the carrier and we had dropped a simulated atomic weapon on it!’ The Air Force General got big kick out of it. Later we got a report back that said, ‘there was a high sea with pitching decks and they had a tail hook problem on the Panthers. They never did get airborne.’ I don't know what the true story is but I know what we did!”
“Well, we used to have fun now and then.”
For the rest of my interview with Colonel Bud Anderson, visit my website http://evanflys.com