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Heroic People Who Deserve to be Way More Famous

Khalid Elhassan March 31, 2021 36 min

A black GI and captured Germans in WWII. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

A P-51 making a low-level attack on a German plane. Art Station

6. A Heroic Pilot So Good He Scared an Enemy Flyer Into Killing Himself

Bruce Carr’s previous flight experience got him sent to Spence Airfield in Georgia, for an accelerated pilot training program flying P-40 Warhawk fighters. After 240 hours in the air, he graduated as a flight officer in late August 1943, and was sent for additional specialized training. It included qualifying in early models of the North American P-51 Mustang fighter, and its ground attack and dive-bombing variant, the A-36 Apache. Carr was sent to England in early 1944, and was assigned to the 380^th Fighter Squadron, 363^rd Fighter Group, Ninth Air Force.

Until then, Carr had never flown above 10,000 feet. When he took his P-51 to 30,000 feet, he was so impressed by its handling that he named his airplane “Angel’s Playmate“. He notched his squadron’s first kill, and his first heroic deed of the war, on March 8^th, 1944. That day, Carr attacked a Messerschmitt Bf 109 near Berlin and chased it to near-ground-level while firing his guns. Only one hit the enemy fighter, but its pilot panicked. Unable to escape from Carr, the Luftwaffe airman decided to abandon his plane and parachute to the ground. Unfortunately for the German, he jumped too close to the ground for his parachute to fully open.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.