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The Ballad of

Kandy Kim, Part 1

Do not spin this aircraft. If the aircraft does enter a spin it will

return to earth without further attention on the part of the aeronaut.

—Manual issued with the first Curtis-Wright Flyer in 1909

Kandy Kim was a P-38D Lightning twin-engine fighter that rolled off the Lockheed assembly line in Burbank, California on June 7, 1944, not thirty-six hours after the Allies’ great and terrible victory on the D-Day beaches in Normandy. When she was towed into the sunlight on the shimmering asphalt tarmac for the first time she was P-38D No. 1138-926-8-42, and in her olive drab paint and US Army Air Corps livery she was identical to the forty-two other P-38Ds that came off the lines that day. We can verify that her construction required sixty-six men and women and that it took 5,700 tooling hours from her first rivet to her final coat of paint, plus another 447 hours at a modification center to ready her for the winter duty to which she had been assigned in Alaska. Were we so inclined we could even ascertain the names of those sixty-six men and women with a telephone or email request to the Air Force archives. However, we know the Lockheed worker who had the distinction of giving Kandy Kim her name. For purposes of understanding Kim the other sixty-five are rather superfluous (that’s a good example of a fact that would clutter things up).

His name was Gytis Vygantas, and he was a first generation Lithuanian-American Jew from the city of Klaipėda. His family was among the few who escaped the German occupation that began in 1939, when Gytis was fourteen years old. When the United States entered World War II on December 8, 1941 he was one of the first men in line at the Army recruitment station in Los Angeles, where his family had settled after time in Flushing, New York and Skokie, Illinois. He wanted nothing more than to wear the American uniform and fight the Germans, but unfortunately for Gytis he was born with a left leg that was two inches shorter than his right. He was designated 4-F without so much as a physical. The recruiting officer took one look at his leg, and the clunky shoe with the big sole he wore on his left foot, and simply shook his head.

Gytis was gravely disappointed, but he was not the sort of man to let disappointment hold him back. Having fled certain death in the face of the Nazi war machine as a young teenager, Gytis had perspective on life’s travails. If he couldn’t fight, then by God he’d do his part some other way. He got a job at the Lockheed plant as a rivet catcher, then a riveter, and a week before D-Day he was promoted to welder. Kandy Kim was the first airframe he touched with his torch.

As we mentioned No. ’8-42 rolled off the assembly line less than two days after D-Day. More importantly for our story, it was also less than a week after Gytis became a father for the first time. He and his wife named their baby girl after her mother’s mother Kornelija, a nurse in World War I who died in August 1918 during the darkest days of the Battle of the Somme. Before ’8-42 was towed out to the tarmac, Gytis penned an oil-stained note in broken English signed with a Mishnah and a Star of David and taped it to the pilot’s seat. The note asked that ’8-42 be named in his daughter’s honor.

That very afternoon ’8-42’s first pilot discovered the note. Nora Hall was a thirty-one-year-old Women Airforce Service Pilot, better known as a WASP, from Tacoma, Washington. She’d been ferrying new fighters throughout the United States and Europe since July of ’43. A ranch girl originally from the Wyoming plains, Nora started driving her daddy’s tractor when she was twelve, had gotten her driver license at fifteen, her pilot’s license at seventeen, and her teaching certificate at twenty-one. She had been a high school health teacher and a graduate student at the University of Washington until she learned the government had formed the WASP Corps. She was Washington state’s first volunteer.

Nora could only make out about half of Gytis’s message but she got the gist. She felt that Kornelija was a bit exotic for the US Army Air Corps so she shortened it to Kim. In the flight manifest transmitted via cable to the 344th Fight Squadron Headquarters at Elmendorf Field in Anchorage, the Notes column next to ’8-42’s entry said, Kandy Kim, named for Kornelija Vygantas, Los Angeles, CA. Nora put Gytis’s note in the little compartment in Kim’s cockpit where her manual, logbook, and service record were kept. It remains there to this day.

As you might have guessed, Kandy Kim proved to be anything but just another P-38D. She quickly became famous throughout the Army Air Corps, for Kim sometimes flew where she pleased and how she saw fit, unconcerned with what her pilot may have had in mind or her mission parameters. The men (and women) who flew her came to believe she was possessed by a mischievous spirit. Her reputation circulated and grew, and every mission added a new facet, a new wrinkle to the legend. Kandy Kim’s puckish exploits also gave rise to stories about other airplanes, or maybe gave other pilots the courage to tell their tales. The marines talked about a Chance Vought F4U-1 Corsair carrier-based fighter that was badly damaged by Japanese anti-aircraft fire over Guadalcanal but managed to fly her critically wounded, unconscious pilot back to the USS Saratoga and land herself in the midst of a squall. The Brits claimed an Avro Lancaster four-engine heavy bomber started up all by itself one morning before dawn and took off from Stendstall Field in Essex. Air Command scrambled four Supermarine Spitfires to intercept her, but the pilots watched in disbelief as the bomber flew itself into the path of a V-2 rocket that otherwise would have landed in central London and killed thousands.

In contrast to the men and women who serve in them, militaries cannot abide anything resembling superstition, least of all in wartime. For every story about airplanes performing miracles to save their crews or aid their countries’ fight, military leadership and government bureaucrats offered the sorts of explanations that seemed logical to the sorts of people who populate military leadership and government bureaucracies. The Marine Commandant reported the Corsair involved in the Saratoga incident had not flown itself at all, but that her pilot had stayed conscious long enough to make it home. His injuries and blood loss simply caused a short-term memory failure. The Commandant’s conclusion was dutifully reported in Stars and Stripes and the censor cut the paragraph in which the pilot, Lt. J. G. Maxwell Ross, stated that he remembered the exact moment he lost consciousness some 200 nautical miles from the carrier and still over enemy territory. Likewise, the British government announced the Lancaster, dubbed London’s Saviour, was in fact piloted by a German double agent who knew the rocket’s launch coordinates and target vectors but was unsuccessful in persuading Air Command to plan an intercept (the Brits apparently concluding, in a foretaste of the postwar world, that the public would find mortal bureaucratic ineptitude and suicide more palatable than divine intervention or the supernatural).

So it was with Kandy Kim. Her exploits were easier to conceal from the official news outlets than the others because she was based on a remote Alaskan island and because she never saw combat. And so when one day Kim proved too mischievous for her own good and her left supercharger blew at the apex of a too-aggressive Immelman on a training flight, it didn’t even register. Besides, the Army Air Corps was preparing for the atomic bomb drops on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and couldn’t be bothered to investigate a phantom P-38 in the frozen north.

Kandy Kim crash-landed on a glacier, and it preserved her for the better part of a century (not to worry, her stupefied pilot was rescued within a couple hours). It’s true, some glaciers have a weakness for airplanes, and it was Kandy Kim’s good fortune that she found one of them. Then again, planes like her always seem to land in luck.

That might have been the end of the story, but Kandy Kim had other ideas. From time to time over the years bush pilots and military pilots reported observing what appeared to be a downed twin-engine airplane in a crevasse on the Hubbard Glacier near Yakutat. Once she even showed up on an Air Force satellite image. She showed herself just often enough to become a sort of talisman among Alaska fliers and to keep her legend alive in the Air Force.

Finally, Kandy Kim’s resting place was revealed to two members of a clan of nomadic bards one night two Julys ago at the King Salmon Saloon in Kodiak. A seventy-seven-year old bush pilot called Derringer Bill, who claimed to have apprehended his own demise at the controls of a Cessna 180 float over the Alagnak River, spent what he believed was his last night on Earth drinking bourbon and unburdening his soul of its secrets.

The biggest secret of all, the one that cost the fellows the better part of a bottle of Wild Turkey to loosen from his lips, was that he was the only man alive who knew Kandy Kim’s resting place. He was old enough to have flown in the war but, like many Alaskans, his own story began later in 1968 when he moved to the last frontier.

Moreover, whether or not he was Kandy Kim’s pilot on that final flight was neither here nor there. In the dark saloon with walls adorned with taxidermied fish and faded framed pictures of bush pilots, the fellows asked him the obvious, why he’d never recovered her for himself.

He replied, Let’s just say there’s a good reason she ended up in that glacier. As he skimmed the edge of unconsciousness and talked to pilots who’d been gone for many years, the fellows took notes in shorthand:

You wanna take off with full tanks from the old field at Fort Glenn. That’s on the north side of Umnak Island. Yeah, it’s important you start way the Hell out there. Now quit interruptin’. When you hit a thousand on your climb out, turn east-north-east and follow the panhandle until you hit Seward. Don’t bother with the ’lectric compass and fer Chrissake stay north of Kodiak Island. There are bad things to the south.

When you make the bay keep your course ’til you overfly an inlet what looks like a bikini girl doin’ a swan dive. Her left leg points to the Sustina River. Glacier’s at the headwater, beyond Talkeetna. Kim’s next to a red splotch on a big crevasse on the south face, shaped like a spawning humpie. But I gotta warn you, you’ll only see her if she wants you to. It’s like the old song says, she’s funny that way.

Such is the way bush pilots see the world and God love ’em for it. As far as the fellows have been able to determine, no 180s went down in Alaska that summer. In fact, no one in Kodiak, no one anywhere, could recall a pilot named Derringer Bill. Something told the fellows that didn’t matter quite as much as the story he’d told and the waypoints he revealed.

And damned if he wasn’t right.

The fellows followed his instructions to the letter, three of them in a Beech Bonanza V-tail starting off from the abandoned ghost of an airfield at the end of the Aleutian Chain. They saw Kim, all right. Not only that, the fellows called the clan together and four dozen men and women from a dozen countries worked six weeks to rescue her from the ice. Two of the oldest and oddest fellows, who claimed lineage from Peter the Great and disappeared for seven weeks every winter to visit their homeland in Minsk, arranged for Kandy Kim to be carried home aboard a converted A-90 Orlyonok amphibious transport. Being every bit Kim’s equals in tomfoolery they painted the massive craft like Further from The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Between the aircraft identification, its altitude (an Orlyonok is a sort of half-plane, half-hovercraft that flies in ground effect precisely five feet above the water and leaves quite a rooster tail in its wake) and its pilots’ inexplicable accents, it took the two fellows at the Orlyonok’s controls several tries to explain themselves to air traffic control once they were out of the Alaska and British Columbia wilds and into the orderly airspace of the continental United States. It also took a goodly amount of patience, a quality for which this particular clan, and the particular fellows at the Orlyonok’s controls, are not noted. The Air National Guard scrambled three different pairs of interceptors between Seattle and Los Angeles to keep an eye on them. Then again, maybe the pilots just wanted to record Orlyonok intercept in their logbooks. Those sorts of things matter to fighter pilots.

At last Kandy Kim arrived in California at Van Nuys Airport, not twenty miles from where she emerged from the Lockheed plant in ’44. A convoluted and admittedly archaic contractual arrangement precludes us from disclosing her owner (to the extent a gal like Kim can be owned in any sense of the word). Rest assured she’s in good hands.

She did require a bit of TLC, of course, before she was airworthy again. That many years in deep freeze takes a toll even on a plane as rugged as Kim. The clan’s greatest smithy, specially flown in aboard an equally outrageous craft from his homeland where the sun that time of year shined nineteen hours a day and twice on Thursdays, miraculously saved everything but her left wingtip. With Kim’s permission, so he claimed, he repurposed it into a desk before forging a new one and completing her refurbishment.

The desk circulated within and among the clan for a while, each woman and man getting a few good stories out of it before passing it along. The stories were of such quality and proved so popular that the fellows, who until meeting Kandy Kim had supported themselves by ghostwriting famous authors through writer’s block (you’d be amazed who’s used them over the years), were able to buy three more airplanes, a hot air balloon, and their first small dirigible (which, for reasons known only to themselves, they named the Leap Year Blimp).

Finally, it came time to part with the desk. The clan had a regular stall at the East Highlands Farmers’ Market in Los Angeles and one day last fall a group of wayward writers saw the desk and inquired after it. After a bit of haggling that everyone recognized as a formality the fellows tending the stall sold the desk for a sum that would hardly have purchased a box of heirloom tomatoes.

These days you might spot it at a fiction reading in East LA, a poetry slam in the San Gabriel Mountains, or an art installation in the Mojave Desert. It lifts off every now and again, reminding us (and occasionally an incredulous visitor) what’s really important in our all-too-brief lives.

As for Kandy Kim herself, there will be much more to tell. For now, the fellows are putting her through her paces and helping her get used to a world of turbojets, GPS, fly-by-wire, and Pulse-Doppler radar.

Of course, they tell stories all the while.