The Pilot Who Stole a Nazi Fighter: Bruce Carr’s Impossible WWII Survival Story | Decoding History

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The Pilot Who Stole a Nazi Fighter: Bruce Carr’s Impossible WWII Survival Story | Decoding History

On November 2nd, 1944, at 3:47 p.m. over Czechoslovakia, Lieutenant Bruce Carr watched his oil pressure gauge drop to zero. This was the beginning of a survival story so incredible it sounds like Hollywood fiction—but every word of it is true. After his P-51 Mustang, "Angel’s Playmate," was crippled by an 88 mm shell, Carr was forced to bail out into the freezing enemy sky. He was 200 miles behind German lines with nothing but a .45 pistol and a 23% chance of ever making it home.

While most downed pilots would head south toward Allied lines, Bruce Carr did the unthinkable: he headed north, straight toward the German airfield he had just been strafing. After four days of starving in the forest, he didn't surrender. Instead, he infiltrated the base, climbed into the cockpit of a Focke-Wulf FW 190—a plane he had never flown—and figured out how to start the massive BMW 801 engine by trial and error.



The Technical Nightmare: How a P-51 pilot mastered the "Butcher Bird" with gauges written in Gothic German script.


The Suicide Run: Flying 200 miles at treetop level while being hunted by German radar and shot at by every Allied .50 caliber gun in France.


The Belly Landing: Returning home to a squadron that thought he was a ghost, landing with no landing gear while his own MPs pointed rifles at his head.


The Legend of an Ace: Carr wasn't just a survivor; he was a warrior who later led four Mustangs against 60 German fighters and won, becoming an "Ace in a day".



Bruce Carr's career spanned three wars—World War II, Korea, and Vietnam—accumulating 505 combat missions. He was a man who refused to accept the limits of what was possible. As he famously said years later after performing high-G maneuvers at age 73: "What’s the airplane capable of? What am I capable of? Let's find out".

Join us as we honor the legacy of Colonel Bruce Ward Carr, a true American hero who rests today in Arlington National Cemetery.

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