The bombing of Pearl Harbor happened on December 7, 1941. John Tashjian enlisted two days later.
He was twenty years old, the son of Armenian immigrants, and he had grown up in Oakland, California. He did not wait for a draft notice. He did not wait to see how things developed. Two days after the attack he walked in and signed up for the United States Navy, and eventually became a Marine Corps aviator.
By 1944 he was flying with VMF-441, the Blackjacks, as part of Operation Flintlock, the Allied campaign to capture the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The Blackjacks flew hundreds of combat sorties during the operation. On June 10, 1944, Tashjian was at the controls of bureau number 17799, a Vought F4U-1A Corsair, flying a combat air patrol over the task force below. He did not know the aircraft's history before him. He did not know its history after him. He just flew it.
At some point during the Pacific campaign, another pilot in his formation was shot down. Tashjian refused to leave. He circled over the downed pilot, staying with him over the open ocean until help arrived and the man was recovered alive. The rescued pilot later said he owed his life to Tashjian. Michele Spry, who eventually told this story to the world, described it simply: he promised never to leave him.
He never did.
Both Tashjian and bureau 17799 survived the war and came home. Tashjian remained in the Marine Corps Reserve after the war and continued flying. In 1955, while flying a McDonnell F2H-2 Banshee from Naval Air Station Oakland, he found himself unexpectedly airborne without an aircraft, the result of an involuntary ejection. He parachuted to safety. The Banshee did not.
He settled in San Diego, worked for a time as a firefighter, and then followed what turned out to be his true calling. Zoology. He went to work at major zoos, became a recognized expert in reptiles and amphibians, and contributed photography to published herpetology books. The Marine fighter pilot who had flown combat air patrols over the Marshall Islands spent his civilian life studying frogs and lizards. He was, by every account, very good at it.
Meanwhile bureau 17799 had its own postwar career, going from Pacific combat veteran to MGM movie prop to a decade of deterioration in a Hollywood parking lot before being rescued, restored, and eventually achieving a kind of fame through the television series Baa Baa Black Sheep. The aircraft and the pilot had gone their separate ways, each unaware the other was still out there.
Then Michele Spry found Ferrill Purdy in a lamp repair shop in Columbia, Missouri, and everything changed. Spry traced the serial numbers in Purdy's logbook to bureau 17799 at the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino, California, and discovered that Purdy's wingman, Major John Tashjian, was still alive in California. She reached out. Tashjian flew to Missouri. In June 2016, the two men sat down together for the first time in nearly 70 years. They had not spoken since the end of World War II.
On July 10, 2021, John Tashjian turned 100 years old. The Planes of Fame Air Museum had a plan. They asked if he wanted to fly in bureau 17799 one more time.
There was no hesitation. Yeah, he said.
The date of the flight was 77 years and 11 months to the day since Tashjian had last been at the controls of that aircraft over the Pacific. A small seat had been fitted behind the pilot's seat in place of the armor plating, allowing a passenger to be carried. Tashjian climbed in. Bureau 17799 took to the sky over Chino. The smile on his face when he landed did the talking for him.
He died sometime before February 2023, at the age of 101. His son Peter described him as a super positive guy who was always smiling, just a wonderful guy. An amazing life.
On a Friday in February 2023, bureau 17799 flew over Miramar National Cemetery in San Diego for the memorial service. Planes of Fame pilot Matt Nightingale had placed a small urn containing some of Tashjian's ashes on the instrument panel before takeoff. After the flyover, Nightingale said he had been laughing all the way, thinking about how wonderful it was to fly with him one last time.
Peter Tashjian watched the aircraft come straight up the column toward him, low and close, the sound filling the cemetery. He said it was a perfect picture. A wonderful closure.
The son of Armenian immigrants who enlisted two days after Pearl Harbor, who refused to leave a downed pilot over the open Pacific, who survived a Banshee ejection, who spent thirty years studying reptiles at the zoo, who climbed into a Corsair at age 100 and said yeah without hesitation.
He was always smiling.