In the Second World War, US Army Air Forces Second Lieutenant Bruce Carr became the only American pilot to have ever left base on a mission in an American plane, and returned in a German one. Below are some fascinating facts about that extraordinary exploit.
A Precocious Pilot
Bruce Ward Carr was born in 1924 in Upstate New York’s Cayuga County, and first flew in 1939, when he was only fifteen-years-old. When America was thrust into World War II, eighteen-year-old Carr signed up for USAAF’s Flying Cadet Training Program. Fortunately, he was assigned the same flight instructor who had taught him how to fly in 1939. Since he had prior experience, Carr was sent to Spence Airfield in Georgia for an accelerated pilot training program. There, he flew P-40 Warhawk fighters. After 240 hours in the air, he graduated in late August, 1943, and was sent for more specialized training.
Carr spent two months on more advanced flight training after his graduation from Spence. During that time, he qualified in early North American P-51 Mustang fighters, and the Mustang’s dive-bombing and ground attack version, the A-36 Apache. In early 1944, Carr was sent to the European Theater of Operations, and assigned to the 380th Fighter Squadron, 363rd Fighter Group, Ninth Air Force in England. Until then, Carr had never flown about ten thousand feet. His Mustang’s handling left a powerful impression on him when he took it to thirty thousand feet. So he he named it “Angel’s Playmate”.
An “Overaggressive” Flyer?
On March 8th, 1944, Carr scored the 380th Fighter Squadron’s first aerial victory. That day, he got behind a Messerschmitt Bf 109 near Berlin, and chased it to near-ground-level while firing his guns. Only a single bullet hit the enemy fighter, but its pilot panicked. Unable to escape in his airplane, the German pilot decided to ditch his fighter and parachute to the ground. Unfortunately for him, he jumped too close to the ground for his parachute to fully open. Unfortunately for Carr, his superiors refused to credit him with the downed enemy plane, because they deemed it to have crashed, not shot down.
Carr saw it differently, and argued that the Messerschmitt had crashed as a direct result of his aggressive pursuit. He reasoned that he had literally frightened the German airman to death. To make matters worse, Carr’s superiors not only denied him credit for his first kill, but also labeled him “overaggressive”. Clearly not a good fit where he was, Carr was transferred to 353rd Squadron, 354th Fighter Group. It was his old unit’s loss. It did not take long for Carr to become one of the 354th Fighter Group’s top aces. He got his start on June 14th, 1944, when he scored a probable victory over a Bf 109 over Normandy, France.
Shot Down Deep Inside the Third Reich
Three days after his first probable victory, Carr helped one of his comrades shoot down a Focke-Wulf Fw 190. Carr received his second lieutenant’s commission in August, and on September 12th, 1944, his squadron strafed Ju-88 bombers on a German airfield. During their return, Carr’s flight spotted more than thirty Fw 190s two thousand feet below them. They pounced, and in the mad melee that followed, Carr achieved a hat trick when he scored three kills. After the dogfight, Carr noticed that the plane of one of his comrades had been badly damaged, so he hung back and shepherded him back to base.
Carr received a Silver Star – the US military’s third highest medal – for his September 12th heroics. He shot down his fourth and fifth enemies, and became an ace, over Germany on October 29th, 1944. Four days later, Carr led his flight on a strafing run over a Luftwaffe airfield in Czechoslovakia. During that mission, his P-51, Angel’s Playmate, was badly damaged by German flak. He was forced to parachute from his stricken fighter, and made it to earth without injury. Having evaded death in the air, Carr now how to evade the enemy on the ground.
Evading Capture Behind Enemy Lines
Deep inside the Third Reich, hundreds of miles behind enemy lines, Carr evaded capture for several days. Cold, wet, tired, and starving, he struggled on, before he realized that his situation was hopeless and decided to surrender. Aware that the Luftwaffe treated enemy airmen better than other prisoners of war, Carr headed towards a Germanairfield he had spotted. He reached its fence, and decided to hide in nearby woods that night, then walk up to the front gate and surrender the next morning. He changed his mind when he saw something that made him think that maybe his situation was not that hopeless, after all.
Near the edge of a runway, close to his hiding spot, Carr saw German ground-crew fueling and performing maintenance on an Fw190. When they finished, the Germans tightened the panels back on the plane and left, leaving it ready for combat the next day. That night, Carr screwed up the courage to sneak up to the enemy fighter, and climb into its cockpit. Although at the edge of collapse from exhaustion and hunger, he fought off sleep until dawn’s early light allowed him to inspect the instruments. They were labeled in German, but German and American cockpits shared enough similarities for Carr to make educated guesses about what the various levers and buttons and knobs did.
Stealing an Enemy Airplane
Once Carr figured out which lever started the enemy plane, he spent half an hour building up his courage, then pulled it. The Fw 190 did not start. Eventually, he figured out that German starters worked the other way around, and pushed it forward. The plane’s BMW motor roared to life. Without wasting any time taxiing to and lining up on the runway, Carr immediately went full throttle. He jounced across a corner of the airfield, raced between two airplane hangars, then took off over the heads of sleepy and startled enemy airmen. Carr was in the air, but not out of the woods yet.
Soon as he crossed over Allied lines, Carr came under fire as grounds troops opened up on the readily recognizable enemy Fw 190. To avoid friendly fire, he flew just above treetop at 350 miles-per-hour. After a flight of about two hundred miles, Carr made it to his airfield in France. He could neither communicate via radio, nor lower the landing gear, and was forced to make a belly landing before his own airfield’s defenses blew him out of the sky. Carr had trouble convincing the MPs who surrounded the crashed Fw190 that he was American, until the group commander finally arrived and vouched for him.
Carr’s Further Heroics
Carr was promoted to first lieutenant, and granted a well-deserved leave. The war was not over yet, though. He returned to duty, and continued to fly. On April 2nd, 1945, he led three P-51s on a reconnaissance mission, when sixty German fighters were spotted above. The odds were fifteen to one against the American airmen, but the ever-aggressive Carr immediately led them in an attack. They scored fifteen kills within a few minutes. Carr shot down three Bf 109s, two Fw 190s, and damaged a sixth plane. That made Carr the European Theater of Operations’ last ace-in-a-day – a pilot who scored five or more kills in a day.
For his April 2nd exploits, Carr was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross, America’s second highest medal. All in all, Carr flew 172 combat missions during WWII, shot down fifteen confirmed enemy airplanes, had several more unconfirmed aerial kills, and destroyed many more enemy planes on the ground. He went into action again during the Korean War, in which flew 57 combat, followed by 286 more combat missions in the Vietnam War. In the process, he earned a Legion of Merit, plus three Distinguished Flying Crosses. Bruce Ward Carr retired from the Air Force in 1973 as a colonel in 1973, passed away in 1998, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
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Some Sources and Further Reading
Air Force Magazine, February 1st, 1995 – Valor: Thanks, Luftwaffe
Baron, Scott – Valor of Many Stripes: Remarkable Americans in World War II (2019)
History Halls – The Night Witches: The Female Pilots Who Gave the Nazis Nightmares
Together We Served – Carr, Bruce W. (DSC), Colonel
