The Last Fighter Pilot Page 2

  I have said that the greatest honor of my life is to have served my country. Now, just three weeks past my ninety-third birthday, I remain standing for my fellow pilots. And still, the greatest honor of my life is to have served with these men, and to have served my country.

  Jerry Yellin

  Captain, U.S. Army Air Force

  Orlando, Florida

  March 7, 2017

  FOREWORD BY MELANIE SLOAN

  IN LOVING MEMORY

  First Lieutenant Philip Schlamberg

  United States Army Air Force

  EDITOR’S NOTE—First Lieutenant Phil Schlamberg, U.S. Army Air Force, who lost his life over Tokyo on August 15, 1945, is the last known combat death of World War II, cut down after a final raid on a Tokyo air field while flying as Jerry Yellin’s wingman. Phil was the youngest of ten children of Jewish-Polish immigrants in New York. He was born on the lower east side of Manhattan before moving to a poor section of Coney Island in Brooklyn, where he graduated from high school as valedictorian of his class before volunteering for the Army Air Corps. Only nineteen years old when he was killed, Lieutenant Schlamberg is memorialized on the Tablets of the Missing at the Honolulu Memorial, in the National Cemetery of the Pacific.

  Melanie Sloan, the talented American film producer, actress, and talent manager, who is also the mother of the great American actresses Scarlett and Vanessa Johansson, is Phil Schlamberg’s surviving niece. In this foreword, Melanie pens a loving tribute to her uncle, the man her father affectionately nicknamed “Phelly,” who now takes his rightful place in history as the final combat death in the greatest war the world has ever known.

  I can tell you that I used to wonder why my dad always cried when he mentioned his baby brother. They had a tremendous bond, being two out of ten children. Phil used to follow my dad in this annoying way a little brother sometimes does.

  They almost drowned together in the Atlantic when they were kids growing up in Coney Island. I didn’t understand the depth of his pain until after my dad died and I decided to look into my Uncle Phil’s army records through the Freedom of Information Act. I found out he was a genius with the highest IQ ever measured in the Army/Air Corps, and was a guitarist, harmonica player, a comedian, a brilliant writer, and a gentle, sensitive soul.

  I have a very strong bond with my dad and still feel his presence and likewise my Uncle Phil. Out of ten kids they had at least seven valedictorians and a plaque at Abraham Lincoln High School. Phil’s report cards were through the roof and he got a hundred on every Regents exam. They had a very tough life. Their mom was on public assistance after my abusive grandfather deserted the family so they tried to make a few dollars for their mom by peddling ice cream on the beach while trying to evade the cops. My dad slept on the fire escape.

  No one in my dad’s family ever got over his death. He was the great hope of the Schlamberg Family. It killed my Grandmother Mollie.

  Her baby had vanished into thin air and was declared dead after the armistice was signed with Japan. Who could make sense of it? Having a book written in his honor is a dream come true. Phil was a hero after all. He insisted on going on this last mission even with his premonition of death. I cry now sometimes thinking of my dad and Phil and the lost promise of his youth. I see him in the pure goodness and sweet smile of my son Hunter.

  Despite the hard life, they all set the bar very high. I often wonder how it’s possible without any guidance they were able to grow up and mature with character, strong morals, ethical standards, and a sense of purpose and duty during this time. This really was the greatest generation!

  Melanie Sloan

  New York

  March 7, 2017

  HISTORICAL FOOTNOTE

  The Aftermath of World War II

  Like scattered hot embers popping in the glow of a dying fire pit, the long aftermath of World War II brought a smattering of skirmishes from a small handful of former enemy forces who either had not gotten the message that the war was over or, for a while, stubbornly refused to lay down their arms. This phenomenon of flickering resistance had occurred in the wake of every major war, including the American Civil War, the War of 1812, and World Wars I and II.

  In Europe, for example, after the German Army had surrendered, and after the fall of Berlin, there was the strange battle for Castle Itter, where American forces actually fought alongside a ragtag group of Wehrmacht soldiers who, days before, had been the enemy of the American Army. Because the German Army had already surrendered, the Germans voluntarily joined the Americans to battle against Nazi SS forces who were trying to assassinate French dignitaries holed up in the castle. This skirmish at Castle Itter, fought on May 5, 1945, erupted five days after Hitler’s suicide, and after the German Army had surrendered in Austria, Berlin, and Italy. With the surrender of the German Army and the fall of Berlin, the war was over in Europe, though the shooting erupted two days before formal surrender papers were finally signed.

  In Japan, reports surfaced of disorganized Japanese forces firing at a few U.S. Navy aircraft over Japanese waters, even after the emperor had announced Japan’s surrender.

  Long after World War II ended, rare reports of disorganized resistance lingered for decades, with isolated Japanese soldiers fighting on in the jungles of the Pacific. Perhaps the best-known of these was Sergeant Shoichi Yokoi, who was found in 1972, in Guam, twenty-seven years after the war ended. Believing his life to be in danger, Sergeant Yokoi actually attacked his discoverers. Two years later, the last surviving Japanese soldier holding out, Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda, surrendered in 1974 in the Philippines.

  While these minuscule pockets of resistance diminished over time, historians agree that World War II ended at noon in Tokyo, on August 15, 1945, local time (August 14 in the United States), when Emperor Hirohito took to the radio airways to announce Japan’s acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, which called for its total surrender. As the emperor began his four-minute announcement on national radio, Captain Jerry Yellin and First Lieutenant Phil Schlamberg were carrying out their final strike against a Tokyo airfield, making their historic airstrike the last known combat mission of the war, and minutes later, making Phil Schlamberg the last combat death of the war. After that, all Allied combat operations ceased, the war was over, and fate had carved the names of Yellin and Schlamberg forever into the granite annals of world history.

  “Duty, honor, country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying point to build courage when courage seems to fail, to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith, to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.”

  —General Douglas MacArthur,

  General of the Army,

  Supreme Commander,

  South West Pacific Theatre of

  World War II.

  PREFACE

  Springtime in America

  During the spring and summer of 1945 in America, a mix of joy and apprehension swept the land.

  Nine months after General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s “Great Crusade” for the liberation of Europe, images of American boys storming the beaches at Normandy sparked a new, electric excitement that jolted the national consciousness. The Allied victory there and the suicide of Adolf Hitler, followed by the final surrender of Nazi Germany, buoyed this optimism, for the end of the war in Europe seemed at hand. On May 8, by happenstance the birthday of new U.S. president Harry S. Truman, thousands of Americans cheered in the streets, reveling under confetti-laced showers along tickertape parade routes in Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles, and New York’s Times Square as they marked the final conquest of Europe. Across the Atlantic, people were also celebrating in the great capitals of America’s allies. As Winston Churchill’s powerful voice pronounced absolute victory over Nazi Germany, President Truman declared VE Day to be “the greatest birthday present” that he had ever received.

  The jubilant frenzy was for good reason: no more GIs would die
in the Kasserine Pass, Sicily, the Ardennes, Normandy, the Hurtgen Forest, and dozens of other places throughout Europe and North Africa that, before 1942, most Americans had never heard of. Yet beneath the veneer of the public celebration, the cruel reminder of war’s cost still lurked: two hundred fifty thousand Americans had perished in Europe. And apprehension remained over the prospect of an even bloodier war looming in the Pacific. As brutal as the war in Europe had been, defeating Axis ally Japan was projected to cost another one million American lives, meaning four times as many American soldiers would die in the Pacific as had been lost in Europe.

  In March of 1945, as Americans from coast to coast awaited the final fall of the Nazis, a heroic group of young pilots on the other side of the world dug themselves into musty foxholes. On a lava-splashed hellhole called Iwo Jima, captured with the spilled blood of seven thousand U.S. Marines, the pilots of the Seventy-Eighth Fighter Squadron, many of whom had not yet seen combat, prepared for their final rendezvous with destiny. Their impending aerial assault on Japan would lay the groundwork for the Allies’ planned invasion of the island—potentially the bloodiest ground battle the world had ever known. Flying escort to an armada of American Superfortress bombers, they would rain hell on the Japanese capital, and more Japanese would die in Tokyo from their attacks than would later die at Hiroshima. But the missions would prove deadly for these American pilots as well; in fact, many had resigned themselves to the certainty of death even before the engines on their P-51 Mustangs roared in battle. Several would perish in the cruel waters of the western Pacific as vibrant young men, their hope and future abruptly sacrificed on the altar of freedom. The survivors would continue to battle the Japanese even after the last atomic bomb blast against Nagasaki on August 9.

  Their story is the final chapter of the greatest war the world has ever known, and the war’s history is not complete until it is told: the heroic deeds of the Seventy-Eighth Fighter Squadron, culminating in the final combat mission flown by the man who would become the last living fighter pilot of World War II.

  CHAPTER 1

  The Seventy-Eighth Fighter Squadron

  Ten thousand feet above the Western Pacific—Approaching Iwo Jima

  March 7, 1945

  They sliced through a sun-splashed afternoon sky at ten thousand feet above the waters of the western Pacific. It was early March 1945, and they flew together in clusters of four known as “flights,” with the smaller, four-plane groups making up larger squadrons of sixteen. Altogether, they totaled sixty-four American warplanes headed due north at a steady course of 360 degrees. The machines roared together in a thunderous chorus—a frightening and deadly sound for anyone who might be listening from the waters below.

  They were the pilots of the Seventy-Eighth Fighter Squadron of the Fifteenth Fighter Group, part of the Seventh Fighter Command of the Twentieth United States Army Air Force. They sat in the cockpits of their powerful P-51D Mustangs, the most formidable fighter planes in the world at the time. With their sleek bubble canopies and aerodynamic fuselages, the planes posed a terrifying sight and packed the firepower to rain down hell from the air.

  Yet despite the technological superiority of the aircraft, many of the highly trained men who flew them had not yet seen combat; they knew the war only through pictures, or War Department newsreels. Most of these pilots had arrived in Hawaii after Pearl Harbor and served in what became known as the “Pineapple Air Force,” where their principal military assignment was the defense of the Hawaiian Islands against another attack by the Empire of Japan.

  That attack never came.

  Still, the pilots of the Seventy-Eighth had trained ad nauseam for battle, practicing simulated dogfights against one another, strafing targets on the ground and at sea, studying the tactics of their Japanese opponents, and counting the minutes till they could join the fight.

  Eventually, they got their wish, which had sent them on this voyage through the sky in early March. Their destination: Iwo Jima, where many of their countrymen’s lives had already been lost, with more to follow in the days ahead.

  Now on the last leg of their flight, the warbirds soared across the Pacific in their “four finger” formations, so called because when viewed from above, the position of the four planes would match the tips of a man’s fingers (excluding the thumb). Out front, where the tip of the longest finger would be, flew the designated flight leader, whose role in combat was to spearhead the attack on enemy aircraft and targets on the ground. Flying to his left and a little behind was the wingman, tasked with defending the flight leader against attacks from the left side or behind the squadron. To the right of both, or the tip of the ring finger, a third pilot, known as the element leader, positioned his aircraft. The element leader, like the flight leader, assumed an offensive role—he would attack airborne aircraft and ground targets, but deferred to the flight leader when the group first opened fire. Flying behind and to his right (the tip of the “pinkie”), the element leader’s wingman, just like the flight leader’s wingman, played a defensive role by protecting the squadron against assault from the rear or the right flank.

  When viewed from above, the position of the four planes matches the tips of a man’s four fingers, thus the phrase “four finger” formation.

  This four-plane flight would join three other such flights in the air to form a sixteen-plane squadron, which provided a canopy of fighter protection for larger, slower bombers that might otherwise fall easy prey to Japanese or German fighter ambushes. Each group of four had a color designation within the squadron, usually Red Flight, Blue Flight, Yellow Flight and Green Flight.

  That afternoon, flying in the element leader position of the Blue Flight, First Lieutenant Jerry Yellin sat alone in the cockpit of his P-51. His plane had been nicknamed the Dorrie R after a girl, Doris Rosen, with whom he’d fallen in love back home and hoped to marry as soon as the war ended. He’d met Doris on his first weekend of leave from Army flight training at Santa Ana Army Air Base in Orange County, California. Glamorous, beautiful, and slim, she was a shade taller than he, with flowing brown hair and long legs. Jerry had taped her picture onto the instrument panel in the cockpit. Yet he knew, as he glanced down at the vast, sparkling waters of the great blue Pacific, that if he were ever to see the real Doris again, he would have to find a way to survive the war.

  These “four finger” formations would join to create a “four finger” squadron of sixteen warplanes.

  Inside the cockpit that afternoon, it was memories that kept him company—not just of his sweetheart, but also of his childhood in Hillside, New Jersey. As a skinny Jewish kid, he’d faced sporadic anti-Semitism growing up and often felt that he had something to prove. One horrible day, with anti-Semitism on the rise in America, he’d discovered the garage of his home painted with the words “Jew” and “Nazi” and his house covered with swastikas. The vandalism happened only a few months after his twelfth birthday. Life had been normal when he went to bed the night before, but the morning brought none of the joy and excitement of being a twelve-year-old boy in the summer of 1936. Instead, Jerry and his family woke up, shocked and stunned, to images that would remain with them forever. Not long after the incident, the friends Jerry used to play baseball with turned on him and called him a “cowardly Jew like the rest of them.”

  Jerry had never understood prejudice growing up. Sure, the kids in his neighborhood came in all sizes and shapes, and all had different abilities. But that did not make one kid superior to the other. Up till that fateful summer of 1936, he had been like any other boy—a decent athlete, playing second base on his school baseball team and quarterback on the football team. He’d never given a second thought to being Jewish. His family, in fact, didn’t practice Judaism. They’d never belonged to a temple nor lived in a Jewish neighborhood. What had suddenly changed now, that he would go from being just like any other boy on the block to a sudden pariah, an instant outcast that no one wanted to associate with?

  He would never find
the answer to that question.

  But one thing he did know, from that point on: he would have to be stronger, smarter, work harder, and perform at a higher level than everyone else. He would have to prove strong enough to overcome any prejudice that immediately threatened to push him aside.

  And, so far, he had. Those were pleasant memories: the day he received his commission as a United States Army officer, his acceptance into flight school, the ensuing triumph of getting his wings. He’d ultimately been selected not just as a pilot, but a fighter pilot, placing him among the crème de la crème of aviators worldwide. Each step had culminated in the triumphant events of the last week of July, 1944, which Jerry would never forget.

  At midnight on July 22, as most of the country slept, the U.S. Navy heavy cruiser USS Baltimore unmoored and departed San Diego accompanied by four destroyers: the USS Cummings, USS Dunlap, USS Fanning, and USS Woodworth. On reaching the Pacific, the crews shut off all navigation running lights, making it harder for enemy aircraft, ships and submarines to spot them. They set a course of 223 degrees and glided through the night without radio contact. At six a.m., four minutes after sunrise, they altered course to 270 degrees. For the next four days, as they voyaged west, the warships cut irregular, pre-arranged zigzag patterns through the water during daylight hours and reverted to total blackouts during the night, all in a heightened effort to avoid detection by the Japanese.

  At nine on the morning of July 26, forward lookouts on the Baltimore spotted the mountains of Molokai Island, Hawaii, some fifty miles in the distance. By 10:45 a.m., the task force altered course to 221 degrees and were soon joined by an air escort from Pearl Harbor, consisting of six U.S. Navy PBM Mariners, known as “flying boats,” and twelve U.S. Navy A-24 “Dauntless” dive bombers.