The bombing of Pearl Harbor happened on a Sunday morning. John Tashjian heard about it and did not wait to see how things developed. Two days later, on December 9, 1941, he walked into a recruiting office and enlisted. He was twenty years old.
He had been born on July 10, 1921, in Fresno, California, to John and Arax Tashjian, the children of Armenian immigrants. The name Arax is the name of the great river that runs through the Armenian homeland and forms part of the ancient border between Armenia and what is now Turkey, a name given to daughters by Armenian families as a way of keeping the homeland present in the rhythms of daily life. The Tashjians had come to California as part of the wave of Armenians who fled the Ottoman Empire before, during, and after the Armenian Genocide of 1915 to 1918, in which more than a million people were killed and hundreds of thousands more driven into exile. The survivors and their immediate families who reached California settled first and most heavily in Fresno, where the climate and agricultural land resembled what they had left behind, building one of the largest Armenian communities in America from almost nothing in the space of a single generation. Being born in Fresno in 1921 to parents named John and Arax Tashjian places the family precisely in that world: genocide survivors or their children, who had crossed the world and built something new in the San Joaquin Valley. At some point in John's childhood the family moved north to Oakland, where he grew up, and it was in Oakland that he heard the news from Pearl Harbor and made his decision.
He entered the Navy's V-5 Naval Aviation Cadet program, the joint pipeline through which both Navy and Marine Corps pilots were trained during the war. The program required no prior flying experience, only a high school diploma and the ability to pass demanding physical and aptitude examinations. Cadets progressed through civilian elimination flying, Navy Pre-Flight School, Primary Flight School in the Stearman biplane, Intermediate Flight School at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi in Texas, and for those going on to carrier operations, Field Carrier Landing Practice at a facility in Michigan, where pilots learned the precise and unforgiving technique of putting an aircraft down on a moving flight deck. At commissioning, graduates were designated Naval Aviators and assigned either to the Navy as Ensigns or to the Marine Corps as Second Lieutenants. Tashjian went Marine. In 1943, roughly two years after walking into that recruiting office, he was a Marine Corps fighter pilot.
He flew two tours during World War II in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands. His family's memorial record describes his service across both island chains, which covered the full arc of the central Pacific campaign from the Gilbert Islands through the Marshall Islands. The Battle of Tarawa, one of the bloodiest 76-hour engagements of the Pacific war, had been fought in the Gilbert Islands in November 1943. Given that Tashjian enlisted in December 1941 and the V-5 training pipeline took roughly two years, his commissioning would have come at approximately the same time as that battle, making it essentially impossible for him to have been present at the assault itself. His service in the Gilbert Islands area almost certainly came after Tarawa, when American forces had seized the atolls and were using them as staging bases for the drive into the Marshalls. By 1944 he was flying with VMF-441, the Blackjacks, a Marine fighter squadron that had joined Marine Aircraft Group 31 on Roi-Namur at the northern tip of Kwajalein Atoll on January 1, 1944, flying combat air patrols and strike missions against Japanese garrisons throughout the Marshalls as part of Operation Flintlock. 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. He did not know the aircraft's history before him, and could not have known its history after him. He flew the mission and came home.
Later that summer, on a strike or patrol mission over the Marshall Islands, the Corsair flown by a VMF-441 pilot named Ferrill Purdy took a hit to its oil cooler. The weapon that found him was almost certainly anti-aircraft fire from the Japanese garrison on Wotje. The Wotje defenders had lost their aircraft entirely by early 1944, but their anti-aircraft guns remained lethal, roughly 90 heavy and light weapons ringing the island's perimeter, and Marine squadrons flying against the bypassed atolls were getting hit on nearly every mission. There was no air battle. No enemy fighter had bounced Purdy's formation. The threat was entirely from below, from a garrison that had been cut off and left to starve but was still shooting at everything that flew over it. Purdy's oil cooler bled out and the engine stalled. He ditched in the ocean approximately 68 nautical miles from Wotje, as far as the dying engine carried him, swallowing seawater, engine oil, fuel, and shark repellant while waiting for help in open Pacific water.
Tashjian was Purdy's wingman. He did not leave. With no enemy aircraft to fight, the whole weight of what he did next was a choice, pure and simple. He flew circles above Purdy's position in the water, refusing to break away while the other pilots in the flight located a nearby Navy destroyer and directed it to the scene. It took roughly thirty minutes for the ship to reach Purdy, by which time he had drifted to within twelve nautical miles of shore, close enough that the enemy was watching from the beach and the coastal guns could reach the water. Tashjian circled above the whole time. Purdy was pulled from the water and taken to the hospital at Roi-Namur. He was flying again the next day. He credited Tashjian with saving his life and never stopped saying so. Michele Spry, the author who eventually pieced this story together, described Tashjian's decision simply: he promised never to leave him. He never did.
Both men completed their tours and came home. Tashjian remained in the Marine Corps Reserve after the war, and it was during that reserve service that the second remarkable chapter of his aviation career happened. In 1955, while flying a McDonnell F2H-2 Banshee from Naval Air Station Oakland, Tashjian found himself suddenly and unexpectedly outside the aircraft. The ejection was involuntary, the result of some malfunction rather than a decision, and he parachuted to the ground while the pilotless Banshee flew on without him and crashed into the mountains east of the Bay Area, where the burned-out wreckage reportedly remained visible for years. Tashjian landed safely.
He was already doing two things at once by then. While still flying in the reserves, he had joined the Oakland Fire Department, where he would serve for more than twenty years. It was there, in the firehouse, that he met a woman named Katy. They married in 1964 in California and had two sons, John T. Tashjian, who settled in San Marcos, and Peter Tashjian, who settled in Vista, both in San Diego County.
After retiring from the fire department, he followed what turned out to be his deepest calling. He had always been drawn to reptiles and amphibians, the creatures most people walked past without looking at, and he pursued that interest with the same thoroughness he had brought to everything else. He became a recognized herpetologist, an expert in the study of amphibians and reptiles, and a photographer of exceptional skill, traveling around the world to document some of the rarest species on earth. Zoos and colleges sought out his photographs to teach students about animals they might never have the opportunity to see in person. His photographs appeared in a number of herpetology books and papers, including two images in Doris Cochran's Living Amphibians of the World, published in 1961 by Hamish Hamilton in London and Doubleday in New York, one of the definitive popular treatments of the subject in its era. His photographic archive was ultimately substantial enough that 295 of his images were accessioned into the California Academy of Sciences collection, where they remain catalogued under his name and available for academic use. The Marine fighter pilot who had flown combat air patrols over the Marshall Islands and the firefighter who had spent two decades with the Oakland Fire Department spent his final professional chapter photographing marsupial frogs in the field and corresponding with herpetologists around the world.
The two threads of his life, aviation and zoology, ran on separate tracks for decades. Then in 2016 a children's book author in Missouri named Michele Spry, who had spent two years researching the story of Ferrill Purdy, traced the serial numbers in Purdy's logbook to bureau 17799 at the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino, California. In the process she found that Purdy's wingman, Major John H. Tashjian, was still alive in California. She tracked down his son John, who told her his father was traveling in Australia. Three weeks later she was talking to Tashjian on the phone. At the end of June he would be in St. Louis for a symposium. She arranged to have him picked up and brought to Columbia.
On June 26, 2016, John Tashjian arrived in Columbia, Missouri. He and Ferrill Purdy sat down together for the first time since the end of World War II, two men in their nineties who had not spoken in nearly seventy years. Tashjian had brought his own flight logbook. Going through it together, they found the entry from June 10, 1944, confirming that Tashjian had flown bureau 17799 in combat, on a Combat Air Patrol with VMF-441. Both men had flown the same Corsair. Neither had known it until that afternoon.
"I thought I was never gonna see John again," Purdy said. "All the other friends I flew with are gone."
In August 2016, Tashjian and his son Peter flew to Chino for a living history event at Planes of Fame, where bureau 17799 was flown in their honor. Peter Tashjian was given a flight in the aircraft his father had flown in combat as a young man. Spry spoke afterward to more than 650 people gathered at the museum.
Five years later, 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 flight was 77 years after Tashjian's documented combat flight in the aircraft, a single-seat fighter that had been modified to carry a passenger by fitting a small seat behind the cockpit in place of the armor plating. Tashjian climbed in. Bureau 17799 took to the sky over Chino. When it landed, the smile on his face did the talking for him. He was, by every account that exists of that day and of his life in general, genuinely and completely happy.
John H. Tashjian died peacefully on November 24, 2022. He was 101 years old. The memorial service was held at Miramar National Cemetery in San Diego on February 17, 2023. Planes of Fame pilot Matt Nightingale had placed a small urn containing some of Tashjian's ashes on the instrument panel of bureau 17799 before takeoff, and then flown the Corsair over the cemetery during the service. Nightingale said afterward that he had been laughing the whole way. At a memorial service that might call for solemnity, that response needs a word of explanation. John Tashjian was, by every account of everyone who knew him, a man who was always smiling. His son described him as super positive, always smiling, just a wonderful guy. Flying with his ashes in the aircraft he had loved, Nightingale felt the presence of exactly that spirit. The laughter was not disrespectful. It was the most honest tribute the moment allowed, the sound of a pilot who genuinely felt he was flying with his friend one last time.
Peter Tashjian watched the aircraft come straight up the column toward him, low and close, the sound filling the cemetery. It was a perfect picture, he said. A wonderful closure.
The son of John and Arax Tashjian, whose family had come out of the wreckage of the Armenian Genocide to build a life in California. The twenty-year-old who walked into a recruiting office two days after Pearl Harbor. The Marine fighter pilot who stayed above a man in the water until the ship arrived. The firefighter who worked twenty years in Oakland and met his wife there. The herpetologist who traveled the world to photograph frogs and lizards and gave his archive to science. The man who climbed into a Corsair at the age of 100 and said yeah without hesitation.
He was always smiling. His son said he was healthy, super positive, just a wonderful guy. An amazing life.
He flew bureau 17799 in combat on June 10, 1944. He flew it again 77 years later, on his birthday, over the California hills where he had made his life. He was laughing then too.