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,