The Last Fighter Pilot

United States Army Air Force

On March 7, 1945, seventy-two years from the very day that I write these words, I sat in the cockpit of a P51-D Mustang fighter plane, flying at ten thousand feet above the western Pacific, cutting a northerly course through the sunny afternoon sky toward the red-hot island of Iwo Jima, where sixty-seven thousand American Marines were still locked in battle with thousands of Japanese troops. Just three weeks beyond my twenty-first birthday, I was in many ways still the Jewish kid who grew up in Jersey, just a few years removed from many fun-filled sandlot football and baseball games with my boyhood friends in my neighborhood. I was also the same Jewish kid who had later experienced my first taste of an unfathomable prejudice sweeping the world called anti-Semitism, from some of those same friends, a bitter pill that I did not understand.

But that afternoon, over the sun-sparkled waters of the Pacific, my mind was focused only on one thing: my mission.

I had not yet experienced the war, at least not in combat. But like so many young men of my generation, I wanted to get into the fight. I wanted to repay the Japanese for what they had done to our Navy at Pearl Harbor. Now, it was my turn.

We were the men of the Seventy-Eighth Fighter Squadron, of the Fifteenth Fighter Group, of the Seventh Fighter Command, of the U.S. Army Air Force. Our first assignment was to land on Iwo Jima, a pork-chop-shaped island of only eight square miles, in the midst of flying bullets and exploding mortars. We would become the air vanguard that would execute the final phase of the war against Japan. Our first role was to help the marines on the island by flying close-air support combat missions against twenty-one thousand Japanese troops who still occupied two-thirds of the island. Those missions would occupy the first thirty days of our mission on Iwo Jima.

Next, once the Japanese were finally defeated on Iwo Jima, our mission would be to provide fighter cover for the B-29s on long-range bombing runs from the Mariana Islands to Japan, and we would also strike and attack Japanese targets in the air and on the ground.

As my fighter approached Iwo Jima that first day, I looked out the glass canopy covering my cockpit and saw other members of my squadron, the “Bushmasters” of the Seventy-Eighth Fighter Squadron. Most of these pilots were as young as me, and many were younger. Some were in their teens, entrusted alone in the cockpit of a P-51 by their country. Most of us had not yet seen combat. Some could not even drive a car, but all were given the confidence of their country to pilot what was at the time the world’s most sophisticated fighter plane. Now, that might seem incredible to ponder. But then, it was simply our duty.

None of us knew how long our mission would be. But we knew that it would be a deadly mission. We knew this from the beginning. We were all volunteers. No one was drafted into the Air Corps, later renamed the Army Air Forces. And many who volunteered had not made it this far. I had already lost the lives of five of my squadron buddies on training missions over Hawaii. The death of these five men struck hard. But there would be more loss of life. We all knew this from the beginning, but we were fully prepared to make that sacrifice for the United States.

On August 15, 1945, five months and eight days after that first flight to Iwo Jima, I was flying a combat mission over Tokyo. Six days had passed since President Truman ordered a second atomic bomb dropped, this time on Nagasaki, on August 9. For the men of the Seventy-Eighth Fighter squadron, and for all the pilots flying off Iwo Jima, we had hoped that the second bomb on August 9 would end the war and that we would never have to fly another mission in combat.

The president gave the Japanese an opportunity to surrender. We had been ordered to stand down. But August 10 passed, and still, the Japanese refused to surrender. So we were ordered back into the skies, with orders to resume striking Japanese targets-of-opportunity on the Japanese homeland, and to keep attacking until they surrendered.

My wingman that day was a nineteen-year-old Jewish kid from Brooklyn named First Lieutenant Philip Schlamberg. Phil had a life full of promise and opportunity in front of him. The valedictorian of Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, Phil’s service-entrance test scores were among the very highest in the history of the Army. Because of our common Jewish heritage, and because he was one of our younger pilots, I had naturally taken Phil under my wing.

On the morning of our final flight, Phil had a premonition that he was going to lose his life. Phil had flown in combat before. But this mission had a different feel for him. I had found that whenever a pilot had a premonition, that premonition was usually right. I approached our commanding officer, Major Jim Tapp, about grounding Phil for the flight and substituting another wingman. But Phil would have none of it. He was determined to fly the mission, premonition or no premonition.

It happened shortly after we had attacked an airfield over Tokyo just after noon. We had avoided being hit by antiaircraft fire up to that point, but I was worried about Phil. I told him to stay tight on my wing, and that he would be okay. And he had done just that. We hit the field, and then climbed into a cloud embankment, with Phil flying tight in beside me. When I emerged from the clouds a few minutes later, Phil was gone. I never saw him again.

When I landed back on Iwo Jima, I learned that the war had been over for several hours, and the emperor had announced cessation of hostilities, even as we attacked that airfield. Phil and I never received the broadcast code on our radios signifying the war’s end.

Phil Schlamberg, as it turned out, would take his place in history as the last-known combat death of World War II, and together, Phil and I had flown the final combat mission of the war.

History sometimes serves fascinating slices of irony. With the news emerging in 1945 of the Nazi atrocities against Jews half a world away, how ironic that the war’s final mission would be flown by a couple of Jewish pilots from New York and New Jersey, and that the final combat life in the defense of freedom would be laid down by a teenage Jewish fighter pilot who had not yet learned to even drive a car.

The Last Fighter Pilot, by Don Brown, is not only my story during the final six months of the air war against Japan from Iwo Jima, but is also the story of many brave fighter pilots with whom I served, the overwhelming majority of whom are long since gone. I lost sixteen of my fellow squadron pilots during the war, men who I knew personally, and eleven of them were killed during the final phase of the air war from Iwo Jima. Most of the others have long since passed into eternity. Now, at the age of ninety-three, I am left standing to speak on their behalf. Our story needs to be told, for the sake of fully completing the history of the war.

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