Flying high with a WWII Navy commander
By Daniel Wolowicz camarillo@theacorn.com

John Kistler

Part 1 of two parts

John Kistler so matteroffactly shares stories about his past adventures, it's hard to fully appreciate the scope of the Camarillo man's exploits and his long list of accomplishments.

The 89yearold retired commander spent 27 years in the U.S. Navy, logging nearly 13,000 combat flight hours as a pilot in World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam.

Kistler narrowly missed the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and while flying daring night missions against Japanese ship convoys in the South Pacific, he survived more than 20 forced crash landings due to enemy fire.

The Michigan native was on Tinian Island in the Marianas in August 1945 and witnessed the loading of the atomic bomb onto Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets' infamous B-29, the Enola Gay, just hours before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Kistler would go on to command Air Force Two in the 1960s, flying then-Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson across the United States. He crossed paths with four U.S. presidents during his time in the Navy. Johnson was his least favorite, Kistler said, because he disapproved of many of the president's policies.

Upon retiring from the Navy in 1968, Kistler went on to earn double doctorates in transportation and education and spent 20 years as a professor at colleges in Ohio and Florida.

But having spent nearly three decades dodging enemy fire in the Orient, Kistler wasn't satisfied with retiring to a quiet life of academics. Early in that career, the veteran introduced to an Ohio college campus the martial art called Tang Soo Do.

And what began simply as a self-defense class for the college's Navy ROTC midshipmen has since helped spark a martial arts revolution across the U.S.and influenced karate studios around the world.

A professor's advice

It was early 1940 and Kistler was a student at Central Michigan College. Although the United States had not yet been pulled into WWII, Kistler's history professor assured the class that America would no longer be able to sit idly by as the Japanese continued their invasion of China and the South Pacific while the Nazi army marched across Europe.

Kistler, 21 at the time, asked the professor what he should do.

"He told me to enlist right away," said Kistler, who admitted he was hesitant about the prospect of going to war. Regardless, he enlisted in the Navy and was sent to Corpus Christi, Texas, to begin boot camp.

Why the Navy? "I'm not much of a walker," he said with a laugh.

Kistler was assigned to Pearl Harbor, where he served as a crew member aboard a PBY-5A Catalina Flying Boat. The U.S. Navy used the two-engine bomber extensively in the Pacific for its long-range capability as well as its ability to take off from and land on the water.

On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, Kistler was aboard the patrol bomber miles from Pearl Harbor when the first wave of Japanese fighter planes struck.

Unable to return to the base, the bomber and its crew were ordered to head for the mainland. Two months later, Kistler returned to the South Pacific as a newly trained combat pilot.

Surviving the South Pacific

Over the next four years, Kistler flew more combat missions than he cares to count as U.S. forces stretched across the Pacific ocean in a brutal naval campaign to take back islands scattered between Guadalcanal and Japan.

Much of that time Kistler spent piloting a large seaplane. When he wasn't running night

time bombing raids on Japanese ships in the mid-Pacific, he traversed the ocean on search and rescue missions, seeking out fellow American fly men.

Kistler and his fellow crew members- from four to 13 at any given time- spent long stretches at sea aboard their plane, which was anchored miles from the nearest island.

"We would be on the ocean for 30 days at a time," Kistler said. "You've got to be pretty tough."

The plane's remoteness, he said, forced the crew to fix the aircraft as they went, invent solutions to life-threatening problems and make sure the plane was able to fly and fight at a moment's notice.

"We were just like a family, and I still hear from them," Kistler said of his crew. "They were just a wonderful bunch of guys. Of course, we saved each other's lives."

Kistler flew in 13 major invasions, including the battles for Saipan, Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal.

He tells the story of two particular invasion flights during which his crew was joined by "a tall, good-looking fellow," whose rank was unknown.

On both missions, the stranger spent time with Kistler in the cockpit and watched him navigate the plane- a task done without the use of modern-day technology.

"You navigated strictly from the skies, the sun, the moon, the stars . . . or you navigated from watching the waves in the ocean," Kistler said. "That's the only way you can navigate."

It wasn't until after their second long flight together that Kistler learned the tall stranger was Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was covertly in the Pacific at the time learning firsthand, Kistler assumed, invasion techniques to be used later in France and Germany.

'Somebody will be along'

It was 1944 and Kistler's plane was flying a night mission known as "Black Catting" against a Japanese ship, when his aircraft was riddled with some "300 holes," forcing him to make an emergency landing.

Trained to seek a beachhead- a shot-up sea plane would sink- Kistler safely crashlanded his PBY on a sandbar a couple hundred yards off tiny Kwajalein Island.

The crew radioed for help, but the response wasn't heartening.

"They said, 'Somebody will be along someday,'" Kistler said. The U.S. fleet had earlier secured and abandoned the tropical island.

For the next few weeks, Kistler and his men lived off the land and waited for rescue. Unable to sit idle with no word from command, the crew set about salvaging a downed Martin PBM-5 Mariner in hopes of flying it off the island.

After dragging the plane out of the shallow water using an abandoned jeep and a Japanese tractor, the crew poured concrete to fill the bullet holes that had riddled its bottom and went about in search of replacement parts for the damaged aircraft.

They scavenged parts from other crashed planes- including a set of bent propellers that had to be repaired to spin at the same speed- until the enormous seaplane was ready for limited flight.

Although the seaplane lacked electricity- only the altimeter and an airspeed gauge worked- Kistler and his crew brought the aircraft to life and took off from the small island a month after their crash landing.

Once the Martin Mariner seaplane was airborne, they decided not to return to Kwajalein but instead to make for Hawaii, more than 1,500 miles to the west.

Within minutes of safely landing at a naval base in Hawaii, Kistler said, the plane was taken to the junkyard and scrapped. Kistler and his men were asked to report back to duty.

"We just prepared and picked up a new plane and returned to the war," he said. "During war, nothing bothers you. If you live through it, that's it. You're real happy."