The Last Fighter Pilot Read online

Jerry Hears the News

  August 6, 1945

  Jerry looked down at the familiar, pork chop-shaped island, with the small mountain rising at the far-right end of it, as he made his final turn out over the water and lined up with the airfield stretching from the base of Mount Suribachi. From his vantage point, the Quonset huts along the coast of the island looked smaller than postage stamps, and the sea of P-51 fighters and Army jeeps parked along the side of the airfield appeared even smaller. Iwo Jima would never look like home. But at least there was a degree of comfort knowing that friends and fellow countrymen were there, and the island was—at least for the time being—relatively safe from imminent Japanese attack.

  It was the afternoon of August 6, 1945, and the Seventy-Eighth was returning from a strafing mission over Tokyo, during which Jerry had attacked several strategic airfields. There had been no casualties among the men of the Seventy-Eighth that day, for which Jerry was grateful. But the Fifteenth Fighter Group had suffered one; First Lieutenant Howard Weaver of the Forty-Seventh would never return home. It was one loss out of the entire group, but still one too many. And after Jerry’s hellish July, he knew all too well the pain his brothers in the Forty-Seventh were about to feel.

  With the nose of his aircraft lined up with the end of the runway, Jerry brought the Dorrie R II in for landing, flaring up on the nose as he felt the wheels touch the ground. Just as he throttled down the Dorrie R II, and even before the plane’s propeller stopped spinning, he saw one of his buddies, Phil Maher, who had been Jim Tapp’s go-to wingman, running toward the plane and waving his arms. Phil then jumped up on one of the wings and started shouting:

  “It’s over, it’s over! We dropped one bomb, wiped out a city, no more missions, it’s over!”

  Jerry looked down from the cockpit, confused. No one had briefed the Seventy-Eighth about any missions being flown against Japan that day except their attacks on Tokyo.

  “What are you smoking, Phil?” Jerry shot back. “Whatever it is, I want some.”

  He soon discovered, however, that Phil’s excited utterances were true—at least the part about the bomb. The Twentieth Air Force had dropped a super-weapon on Hiroshima with a destructive power almost beyond imagination. At the very moment the city had been engulfed in flames, obliterated by a nuclear blast from something being called the “atom bomb,” Jerry and his fellow pilots of the Seventy-Eighth had been attacking Tokyo, 420 miles away from this secret mission.

  As a result of this newly deployed super-weapon, a false sense of relief swept over the Seventh Fighter Command as they learned the news. They thought Japan had been delivered its death blow and that the war was over. Rumors flew: Japan’s surrender was imminent, the Seventy-Eighth would be transferred there, or they were going to be transferred to the Philippines. An even better rumor followed: they were staying together as a unit and going back to the States.

  None of those rumors, of course, materialized. As devastating as the atomic bomb had been to Hiroshima, the stubborn Japanese refused to surrender.

  This war was not over. Not yet, anyway.

  CHAPTER 21

  The Enemy Stalls

  The day after the atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, the Seventh Fighter Command flew a long-range mission to Toyokawa, home to the Toyokawa Naval Arsenal. During this attack, forty-eight Mustangs from Iwo Jima escorted 135 B-29s launched from Guam, Saipan, and Tinian The American warplanes arrived over the target area at 10:13 a.m.; twelve B-29s peeled off to attack the naval arsenal, while the remaining bombers concentrated on Toyokawa’s civilian population center.

  Still, Japan did not surrender.

  The next day, August 8, more missions were launched against the island, this time by the Twenty-First Fighter Group and the newly arrived 414th Air Group. On August 9, another solitary B-29, this one named Bockscar, dropped another atomic bomb. In a flash, the city of Nagasaki vanished. This bomb was even more powerful than the first dropped on Hiroshima. It set off another wave of rumors that Japan was about to surrender.

  President Harry S. Truman took to the airways to deliver a blunt message to the world.

  The British, Chinese, and United States Governments have given the Japanese people adequate warning of what is in store for them. We have laid down the general terms on which they can surrender. Our warning went unheeded; our terms were rejected. Since then, the Japanese have seen what our atomic bomb can do. They can foresee what it will do in the future.…

  Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.

  We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us.”

  The president’s ominous warning to Japan increased hope among the American pilots on Iwo Jima that the war would end.

  Still, Japan did not capitulate the day Nagasaki was bombed.

  Nor did they officially surrender the next day, nor the next, although negotiations had begun regarding the terms of a possible surrender on August 10. President Truman slowed down the frequency of the air strikes, which only fueled the surrender rumors even more. But when those talks began to break down, the Twentieth Air Force was ordered to step up the air raids again.

  On August 14, at four p.m., Tapp called members of the Seventy-Eighth together at the command Quonset hut to announce a mission for the following day.

  The men of the Seventy-Eighth had thought—or at least hoped—the war was over. They asked Tapp why they were going to fly the mission.

  “We have to keep them honest,” Tapp responded. He added that if the Japanese surrendered while the mission was in progress, the Seventh Fighter Command would radio out the code signal “UTAH.” If the signal went out, the Seventy-Eighth would turn around and fly back to Iwo Jima.

  At the meeting, Jerry sat next to his good friend Phil Schlamberg. During the briefing, Phil leaned over and whispered into Jerry’s ear, “If I go on this mission, captain, I’m not coming back.”

  “What are you talking about, Phil?” Jerry gave him a curious look.

  “The feeling I have,” Phil mumbled.

  It wasn’t the first time Jerry witnessed a pilot having a premonition about his own death. Phil’s comments bothered him so much that he tracked down Tapp and voiced his concern: Phil should not be flying on this mission. Jerry knew it in his gut.

  Tapp, who always put his men first, was sympathetic.

  “Look, Jerry,” he said. “If Phil goes to see Doc Lewis, and Doc Lewis gives him a waiver, that’s the only way we can excuse him from the mission.” Doc Lewis was the flight surgeon for the Fifteenth Fighter Group.

  Jerry, in turn, went to Phil and suggested he go see Doc Lewis.

  But Phil flat-out refused.

  “No,” he insisted, “I’m going to fly the mission.”

  And that was that.

  Still, Phil’s premonition bothered Jerry. Frankly, Jerry felt a bit protective of him; he’d spent a bit of time with the nineteen-year-old and had gotten to know him better than most of the others on Iwo Jima did. Phil was actually the youngest of ten children in a family of Jewish-Polish immigrants. He’d been born on the lower east side of Manhattan before moving to a poor section of Coney Island in Brooklyn. The two oldest of the Schlamberg children, who were actually Phil’s stepsiblings, had grown up in a different household than the eight youngest. When Phil’s dad left his mom early on, these younger eight were left basically to live on welfare in their mother’s small, one-bedroom Coney Island apartment. The Schlamberg kids were so poor growing up—and so hungry—that they illegally sold ice cream on the beach in the summertime to make extra money for food. Often, they were rounded up off the bea
ch by the police and even arrested for selling without a permit. But that didn’t stop the kids. Once released, they’d go back down to the beaches and sell more ice cream.

  Phil, known as “Phelly,” was viewed as something of a lovable pest by his older brothers and sisters, yet he was nevertheless their favorite. They were a hard-working bunch, and not just illegally selling ice cream on the beach. Five of the kids, including Phil, graduated as valedictorian from nearby Abraham Lincoln High School. Phil himself displayed many talents: along with being an academic whiz, he was an amateur musician and learned to play the harmonica well, choosing it because it was the only instrument that he could afford. Upon graduation from Abraham Lincoln with highest honors, he hoped to attend college before going into the military. However, though he’d been accepted to college, he had no money for tuition or books. His older brothers Michael and Sidney had already joined the military, with Michael in the Army and Sidney in the Army Air Force. Neither were pilots—Michael had actually been disqualified because of inner ear problems. But he’d scored well on his Army aptitude tests and became a Morse code expert assigned to the China-Burma-India Theater. When Phil later took the Army aptitude tests, his scores—including his I.Q. results—were among the highest ever recorded by the U.S. military. Based on those numbers, the Army basically offered Phil whatever job he wanted. And Phil wanted to fly fighter planes, which, until now, had proved a good choice.

  It should be noted that each and every pilot who flew for the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy in World War II volunteered to do so. The American military never forced anyone into the cockpit of an airplane during the war. Every U.S. pilot knew the risk of getting into a combat aircraft and flying into an active war zone. Both Phil and Jerry were willing to accept whatever cost each mission might exact.

  The next twenty-four hours would tell.

  CHAPTER 22

  Over Tokyo

  The Final Mission

  August 15, 1945

  A fighter pilot’s mindset was one of the most important things he carried into battle. In a combat situation, a pilot’s need for the proper mind frame became magnified a hundredfold, for it often meant the difference between life and death.

  There were three states of mind germane to a fighter pilot, two of which were deadly. The first deadly mindset was overconfidence. Even in 1945, this maxim rang true: “There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots. But there are no old, bold pilots.” Jerry had learned that confidence in a pilot was the lifeline to survival, but overconfidence could quickly get one killed. He’d witnessed it before he left Hawaii, when his friends Bob Ferris and John Lindner lost their lives conducting overly aggressive dives while flying.

  The other deadly mindset was lack of confidence. When a pilot got it into his head that he wasn’t going to survive a mission, it was never a good thing. The issue occurred sometimes when a pilot panicked and became fearful, or when, because of fatigue or other factors, he lost his edge.

  Jerry knew what that was like. On March 10, 1944, he’d experienced an engine lockup while piloting his P-40 over Hawaii. The plane’s engine kicked into hyper-drive, and Jerry couldn’t control it. He executed an emergency bailout and wound up spending nine hours in the Pacific before being rescued by a crash boat. The incident marked Jerry’s closest brush with death before going into combat, and he’d been shaken up about it.

  The next morning, however, Tapp came, got Jerry up, and put him back into the air. Tapp knew the only way to restore the young pilot’s confidence was to get him flying again before doubt set in or his mind began playing tricks on him.

  Now, Jerry worried that Phil was undergoing a similar dearth of confidence because of that weird premonition. Jerry’s initial plan of getting Phil removed from today’s mission had failed, so today, on the way to their pre-flight briefing, he tried snapping Phil out of his fatalistic mind frame instead. His hope was to restore Phil to the only safe mindset a pilot could have: calm confidence before the wheels of his plane left the runway.

  “Whatever you do, just stay tight on my wing today, and you’ll be okay,” Jerry reassured him.

  “Yes, captain.”

  “And remember, we’ve got Dumbos in the air all the way to Japan and all the way back, and they can pick [us] up out of the water if something goes wrong.”

  “Understand, captain.”

  “Plus we’ve got destroyers and subs all in the water if we need ‘em. So just stay on my wing, and you’ll be fine.”

  “Right, sir.”

  “We’ll probably abort before we reach the target.”

  “Okay, Captain.”

  “Plus, if we hear the broadcast “UTAH,” then the war’s over, and we come home. Got it?”

  “Got it, captain.”

  Jerry had tried.

  But had anything he said worked?

  The P-51s’ mission that day started out well.

  Cruising above the Pacific under the morning sun, the Americans had approached the Japanese coastline without incident. Jerry wondered how many more missions like this he would have to fly. They’d all thought the war was over, but now, here he was again, heading to strike a stubbornly resistant enemy.

  But down below, in the nation they were about to attack, a philosophical battle was raging on whether to surrender or fight on. The “Big Six”—the six military officers running Japan—had been split by a vote of 3-3 on when and how to end the war with honor. In general, hard, passionate divisions of opinion existed among the Japanese military: some of the older officers wanted to surrender to prevent the destruction of Japan, while others wanted to fight on to the death and kill as many Americans as possible.

  The previous night, while another three hundred American B-29s bombed Japan again, a group of rogue Japanese officers had started a coup against Prime Minister Suzuki and Emperor Hirohito. The officers burned the prime minister’s office and surrounded the Imperial Palace, hoping to kidnap the emperor, all in an effort to prevent Japan’s leadership from thinking about surrendering. For these officers, and for so many of the Japanese people, surrender was not an option. There was glory in death, but only shame in surrender; Japan, for its part, had never been invaded or lost a war in its history.

  Fortunately for the rest of the world, the coup did not succeed. A group of senior Japanese officers talked the insurgents off the ledge, convincing them that there was nowhere to go. But while the revolt ended, the war did not, and so, with the shoreline of the enemy territory coming into view and Phil on his wing, Jerry knew it was time to go back to work.

  On Jerry’s order, all the planes in his squadron dropped their external fuel tanks over the ocean, then started their familiar aerial trek over the great, snow-capped peak of Mount Fuji. As of yet, there had been no radio signal with the word “UTAH.”

  As the Americans approached the Japanese capital, they began to identify targets. Within minutes, they swooped down over airfields and attacked despite heavy ground fire. Tracer bullets flew up from the Japanese guns as the Seventy-Eighth made multiple passes at each target. Phil stayed tight on Jerry’s wing, just as instructed.

  After strafing the last airfield, Jerry checked his fuel gauge and saw he was still in good shape. But when one of the pilots radioed that his tank had reached the ninety-gallon mark—the amount a Mustang needed for the return flight—it was time to pull up and begin plotting the course back to Iwo Jima.

  Jerry looked over at Phil, who was still on his wing, and gave him a thumbs up.

  Phil looked back and returned the gesture.

  Confidence. Maybe it was working.

  With the battle over Tokyo complete, Jerry set his course back out to the ocean and banked to the south. The three other Mustangs in Jerry’s flight turned with him. A few moments later, as they approached the coast where they would rendezvous with the navigational B-29s, they neared a cloud cover in front of them, often the case when approaching the atmospheric temperature inversions near the coast. With Phil still tight on his w
ing, Jerry led the four Mustangs into the cloud bank. Flying at an altitude of about seven thousand feet, Jerry focused his eyes on his navigation instruments, as the interior of the white, puffy clouds blocking his view of everything else.

  But when the Mustangs emerged on the other side of the clouds, a devastating reality soon surfaced. Phil was gone. Most likely, he had been brought down by antiaircraft bullets fired into the clouds. There was no sign of him.

  His premonition had come to pass.

  Jerry was devastated.

  When he landed at Iwo Jima, meanwhile, he learned something else: the war was over. The emperor had announced Japan’s surrender three hours earlier, while Jerry and his flight were still over Japan. The code word “UTAH” had been broadcast to U.S. aircraft over the country, but the word had not reached the planes of the Seventy-Eighth until they landed.

  It was a surreal feeling as Jerry climbed out of his plane and jumped down to the airfield, standing on a once-bloody Pacific island. Now, suddenly, it was a world at peace. The men of the Seventy-Eighth had a saying, “Alive in ’45.” That had been their goal, and now it was their reality. They were going home alive.

  As Jerry walked away from his plane, another realization hit him: he had just flown the final combat mission of the war, and Phil Schlamberg, his dear friend, was the final combat death of the great war. One day, after Jerry had time to collect his emotions and his thoughts, the great historical significance of the mission he’d just flown would sink in. But for now, one thought consumed his mind:

  At last, it was time to go home.

  First Lieutenant Phil Schlamberg, at age nineteen, was the final known combat death of World War II. Photo Courtesy of Warren Hegg.

  EPILOGUE

  The Final Salute

  Iwo Jima

  March 31, 2015

  Seventy years had passed since the end of World War II when Jerry Yellin stepped foot on Iwo Jima once again. It no longer looked like the war-zone that had greeted him as a twenty-one-year-old pilot. The winds of peace blowing gently across the Pacific proved much sweeter than the smell of death and war that had greeted him during his first stay on Iwo Jima. The mounds of dead bodies he’d witnessed on that first arrival were long since gone, and thousands of neatly maintained graves stood in silent tribute to the Marines who’d died to secure the island for the Allied war effort. The island itself had been turned back over to Japan, a nation that, within a generation, had gone from America’s bitter enemy to trusted ally.