When Bud Anderson died in May 2024 at the age of 102, America lost the last of a vanishing breed: a World War II triple ace, a man who shot down enemy aircraft in the skies over Europe and lived to tell the story for eighty years. He flew a P-51 Mustang he named ‘Old Crow,’ and he never lost it — not once was his aircraft hit by enemy fire.
His was the rarest kind of combat career: brilliant, sustained, and survived.
Quick Facts
| Name | Brig. Gen. Clarence "Bud" Anderson (1921-2024) |
| Unit | 357th Fighter Group, Eighth Air Force |
| Aircraft | P-51 Mustangs, all named "Old Crow" |
| Victories | 16.25 aerial victories — a "triple ace" |
| Missions | 116 combat missions, two tours, never hit by enemy fire |
| After the war | Fighter test pilot and commander |
| Later honour | Honorary promotion to brigadier general, 2022 |
| Legacy | America’s last surviving World War II triple ace |
Old Crow
Clarence Emil Anderson joined the 357th Fighter Group and began flying long bomber-escort missions deep into Germany. He named every one of his Mustangs ‘Old Crow’ — not for the bird, he liked to say, but for the bourbon. In the first five months of 1944 he downed five German aircraft to become an ace, and by year’s end he had reached triple-ace status, with a final tally of 16.25 aerial victories across 116 missions.
He flew alongside another young pilot in the same group who would become rather famous himself: Chuck Yeager. Anderson never rated his own skill as exceptional so much as his aircraft.
A pilot’s pilot
After the war Anderson stayed in uniform and became a test pilot and fighter commander, flying well into the jet age and, informally, right up into his old age. But it was as a storyteller that he found his last and perhaps greatest role — through his memoir, To Fly and Fight, and through decades of airshow and museum appearances where he patiently explained to new generations what it had been like.
The last of his kind
In 2022 the Air Force gave him an honorary promotion to brigadier general, a belated salute to one of its greatest fighter pilots. When he died two years later, obituaries noted the same fact again and again: he was the last living American triple ace of the Second World War.
The men who won that air war are almost all gone now. Bud Anderson outlived nearly all of them, and spent his final decades making sure the rest of us understood what they did. Old Crow has flown west — but the stories he told will keep flying for a long time yet.
Sources: U.S. Air Force; Air & Space Forces Magazine; Task & Purpose; Bud Anderson, To Fly and Fight.
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