The morning after the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941, a 22-year-old Del Byler enlisted in the Army Air Corps.
Before joining in a patriotic fervor, Byler already had dropped out of premed school at the University of Kansas after dust storms walloped his father’s ranching operation, which helped pay for his education. He’d been living and working in Chicago when he enlisted.
“I wanted to fly. I had my private license at that time. If I was going to be in the service, I wanted to fly,” recalled Byler, now age 96 and living in the Ridgemark community near Hollister.
“I passed everything but I missed some of the color charts. Everything else was perfect. I was actually sworn in to the Army Air Corps.”
The Kansas native quit his job and waited for orders, but they never came. He said he wrote to the Army and thought maybe they had forgotten about him. That, however, wasn’t the case, as he learned one day with the mail’s arrival.
“I got the nicest letter,” he said, adding how he wished he had kept it through the years.
That letter from a high-ranking Army official thanked him for his patriotism, but informed him about his fate because he missed those charts.
“They decided I was color blind,” he said.
With the military’s strict physical standards, especially when it came to flying warplanes, there was almost no chance for him to fulfill his dream.
Almost, though, was enough for Byler.
“I tried to build up my eyes,” he recounted. “I ate a lot of carrots. I heard they were good for my eyes.”
He had another secret strategy outside of his Vitamin A binge as he sought eventual enlistment. At the time, he was working in Chicago, Cleveland and Pittsburgh for the Dayton Signal Corps Inspection Zone as a military supplies inspector.
“I learned, frankly, how to read the charts,” he said, chuckling with a sense of guilt, even 74 years later. “Maybe it’s not kosher, but I did it.”
Seven or eight months later while living in Ohio, he headed over to Chicago once more so he could try his hand, or eyes, at enlisting in the Navy as an aviator. He admitted upfront to Navy officials how he’d flunked the color charts for the Army enlistment, but they were fine with him making another attempt.
Good thing for Byler, who could read most of the charts by that time through a combination of squinting and “trusting the numbers.”
His work and clever tact paid off, as he passed the vision test the second time around. But Byler, a thin man, faced yet another sudden, daunting roadblock that could derail his enlistment as a pilot.
“I was five pounds underweight,” he said regarding the military’s standards coming to bite him again. “That was a disaster. I wasn’t going to fly.”
Byler, however, would not let the laws of science get in his way, not after pulling off the carrot exploit.
He had a bit longer than an hour to gain those necessary pounds the old-fashioned way.
“What I did, I went out on the streets, to a restaurant. I ate a big breakfast. I ate a lot of bananas. I heard they were heavy. I drank a lot of water from the fountain there at the enlistment place. I gained five and a half pounds.”
Eight months earlier it was carrots. This time it was bananas that took him over the edge.
“I was sworn in. The rest is history.”
That military history is rich and spanned World War II and the Korean War, with 21 years of total service.
Reporting for duty
After getting into the Navy, he reported for active duty and went on to graduate from flight school. Because he was in the top 10 percent of his class, he was ordered to night fighter school to fly Hellcats, mostly over the ocean practicing intercepts of bogey planes.
In July 1945, his squadron of four pilots boarded the USS Enterprise off the coast of Hawaii for the invasion of Japan.
“I think it’s the greatest armada ever assembled,” he recalled. “Every place you looked, there was warships.”
They were en route to Japan when the U.S. dropped the atomic bombs.
“That was great. I was on the right ship at the right time,” he said. “They turned the Enterprise around with escorts and shot us through the canal for Navy Day in New York. The war was over.”
It was October 1945 when he had the chance to fly back a day earlier than expected and surprise his bride, whom he married months prior.
“I surprised Jeannie at Grand Central Station October 16 on her birthday,” he wrote in a log chronicling his milestones, noting how he asked her, “Carry your bags, lady?”
About five years later, discharged from active duty and living in Chicago while in the Naval reserve with his wife and two children—they went on to have six—the military recalled his squadron for the Korean War.
“They needed all-weather fighter pilots,” he said.
Byler didn’t see much action in Korea because, as he put it, “They never came up to meet us.”
He did have a close encounter one time while in the reserves between the two wars.
Test-flying a single-engine Bearcat fighter near Chicago, his windshield became completely immersed in oil.
“I know enough about engines,” he said. “That thing ain’t going to fly very long. I knew it was going to stop.”
He immediately headed back to his base in Glenview and got all the altitude he could for a landing. He called the tower to declare an emergency.
“Clear the decks,” he reported. “I’m coming in dead stick.”
“Sure enough, when the field was well in sight, the engine stopped. I was thinking, Del, you better be high and you better be fast. Low and slow, and you die. I landed that damn thing. I hit the deck. I burned up the brakes. At the end of the runway I ground looped.”
Long, healthy life
Fortunately for Byler and his family, he has lived nearly 70 more years to tell about it. In his retirement from the military and a successful career in the life insurance business, his achievements live on in his stacks of memorabilia. Inn at Tres Pinos, the local restaurant, also hangs photos of Byler in his honor.
About 20 years ago, he hosted a reunion of his squadron mates at Ridgemark, but he is the only one still alive from the group. His wife’s passing, meanwhile, still leaves a mark.
“Jeannie’s been dead for almost 10 years, unfortunately,” he reminisced.
For his 90th birthday, a son and daughter—Jeff Byler and Debbie Sowle—produced a 20-minute video, now uploaded to YouTube, retelling Byler’s colorful life story.
“Jeff is a videographer,” said his daughter, who helped put it together. “I’m just a fan.”
One thing is clear when Byler retells his stories. He is modest about his accomplishments. He doesn’t consider himself a hero.
“A lot of guys went through a lot more than I did,” he said. “I respect that. I’d rather downplay my incidents.”
His daughter underscored his modesty.
“My dad doesn’t think he’s a hero because he didn’t shoot anybody down,” Sowle said. “But he’s a retired lieutenant commander from World War II and Korea. He was a night fighter off a carrier base, off the Enterprise and Saratoga and Oriskany.”
