The Hard Way Home : Page 1 of 3

Flight Magazine, Summer 1996

Bruce Carr stands by "Angels Playmate" during WWII

The dead chicken was starting to smell. After carrying it for several days, 20-year-old Lt. Bruce Carr still hadn't decided how to cook it without the Germans catching him. But, as hungry as he was, he couldn't bring himself to eat it. In his mind, no meat was better than raw meat, so he threw it away. Resigning himself to what appeared to be his unavoidable fate, he turned in the direction of the nearest German airfield. Even POW's get to eat. Sometimes. And aren't they constantly dodging from tree to tree, ditch to culvert. He was exhausted!

He was tired of trying to find cover where there was none. Carr hadn't realized that Czechoslovakian forests had no underbrush until, at the edge of the farm field, he struggled out of his parachute and dragged it into the woods. During the times he had been screaming along at treetop level in his P-51 "Angels Playmate," the forests and fields had been nothing more than a green blur behind the Messerchmitts, Focke-Wulfs, trains and trucks he had in his sights. He never expected to find himself a pedestrian far behind enemy lines.

The instant antiaircraft shrapnel ripped into the engine, he knew he was in trouble. Serious trouble. Clouds of coolant steam hissing through jagged holes in the cowling told Carr he was about to ride the silk elevator down to a long walk back to his squadron. A very long walk. This had not been part of the mission plan. Several years before, when 18-year-old Bruce Carr enlisted in the Army, in no way could he have imagined himself taking a walking tour of rural Czechoslovakia with Germans everywhere around him. When he enlisted, all he could think about was flying fighters.

By the time he had joined the military, Carr already knew how to fly. He had been flying as a private pilot since 1939, soloing in a $25 Piper Cub his father had bought from a disgusted pilot who had left it lodged securely in the top of a tree. His instructor had been an Auburn, NY, native by the name of Johnny Bruns.

"In 1942, after I enlisted, " as Bruce Carr remembers it, "we went to meet our instructors. I was the last cadet left in the assignment room and was nervous. Then the door opened and out steped the man who was to be my miitary flight instructor. It was Johnny Bruns! We took a Stearman to an outlying field, doing aerobatics all the way; then he got out and soloed me. That was my first flight in the military. "The guy I had in advanced training in the AT-6 had just graduated himself and didn't know a damned bit more thanI did," Carr can't help but smile, as he remembers; "which meant neither one of us knew anything. Zilch! "After three or four hours in the AT-6, they took me and a few others aside, told us we were going to fly P-40s and we left for Tipton, Georgia. "We got to Tipton, and a lieutenant just back from North Africa kneeled on the P-40's wing, showed me where all the levers were, made sure I knew how everything worked, then said 'If you can get it started, go flying,' just like that! "I was 119 years old and thought I knew everything. I didn't know enough to be scared. They didn't tell us what to do. They just said 'Go fly,' so I buzzed every cow in that part of the state. Nineteen years old and 1100 horsepower, what did they expect? Then we went overseas."

By today's standards, Carr and that first contingent of pilots shipped to England were painfully short of experience. They had so little flight time that today, they would barely have their civilian pilot's license. Flight training eventually became more formal, but in those early days, their training had a hint of fatalistic Darwinism to it: if they learned fast enough to survive, they were ready to move on to the next step. Including his 40 hours in the P-4terrorizing Georgia, Carr had less than 160 hours flight time when he arrived in England.

His group in England was to be the pioneering group that would take the Mustang into combat, and he clearly remembers his introduction to the airplane. "I thought I was an old P-40 pilot and the -51B would be no big deal. But I was wrong! I was truly impressed with the airplane. I mean REALLY impressed! It flew like an airplane. I FLEW a P-40, but in the P-51, I was PART OF the airplane, and it was part of me. There was a world of difference."

When he first arrived in England, the instructions were, "This is a P-51. Go fly it. Soon, we'll have to form a unit, so fly." A lot of English cows were buzzed. "On my first long-range mission, we just kept climbing, and I'd never had an airplane above about 10,000 feet before.

"Angels Playmate"

Then we were at 30,000 feet and I couldn't believe it! I'd gone to church as a kid, and I knew that's where the angels were and that's when I named my airplane 'Angels Playmate.'

"Then a bunch of Germans roared down through us, and my leader immediately dropped tanks and turned hard for home. But I'm not that smart. I'm 19 years old and this SOB shoots at me, and I'm not going to let him get away with it.

"We went round and round, and I'm really mad because he shot at me. Childish emotions, in retrospect. He couldn't shake me, but I couldn't get on his tail to get any hits either.

"Before long, we're right down in the trees. I'm shooting, but I'm not hitting. I am, however, scaring the hell out of him. I'm at least as excited as he is. Then I tell myself to calm down.

"We're roaring around within a few feet of the ground, and he pulls up to go over some trees, so I just pull the trigger and keep it down. The gun barrels burned out and one bullet, a tracer, came tumbling out and made a great huge arc. It came down and hit him on the left wing about where the aileron is.

"He pulled up, off came the canopy, and he jumped out, but too low for the chute to open and the airplane crashed. I didn't shoot him down, I scared him to death with one bullet hole in his left wing. My first victory wasn't a kill; it was more of a suicide.

The rest of his 14 victories were much more conclusive.

(continued...)