Just as Emperor Hirohito was announcing Japan\u2019s surrender, two US Army Air Corps P-51 fighters attacked a Tokyo airfield on August 15, 1945 during the last few hours of World War II. <\/p>\n
Their strafing run on Japanese forces completed, the leader of the US mission, Capt. Jerry Yellin, and his wingman, 1st Lt. Philip Schlamberg, exchanged \u201cthumbs up\u201d signals and flew higher to avoid antiaircraft fire from below. <\/p>\n
When Yellin topped the clouds, Schlamberg had disappeared. The young pilot would never be seen again. <\/p>\n
US Defense Department records show 291,557 American deaths in World War II during nearly four years of involvement in the conflict. <\/p>\n
More than three months after Nazi Germany surrendered to Allied forces \u2013 and thousands of miles from the former battlefields of Europe \u2013 Schlamberg, a 19-year-old Jewish honor student from Brooklyn, was the last American serviceman to die. <\/p>\n
It was the US military\u2019s final combat mission of the war. And eerily, it was a fate Schlamberg felt was coming. <\/p>\n
From Ukraine to the Middle East, Sudan to Myanmar, conflict is raging across the globe as many countries honor those who fought in wars on Armistice Day \u2013 Veterans\u2019 Day in the United States. <\/p>\n
Yellin and Schlamberg will be among those whose sacrifice is remembered on Saturday. <\/p>\n
Back in 1945, they thought the war should have been over by August 15. <\/p>\n
Six days earlier, a US B-29 bomber had dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, just three days after detonating the first devastating weapon of its kind over Hiroshima. At least 100,000 people were killed in those atomic bombings, but Tokyo still did not capitulate. <\/strong> <\/p>\n \u201cWe 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,\u201d Yellin wrote in a 2017 book, \u201cThe Last Fighter Pilot.\u201d <\/p>\n But some in the Japanese military government wanted to fight until death \u2013 and its six leaders argued among themselves long into the night of August 14. Shortly before midnight, Hirohito recorded a speech that Japanese radio would play at noon the next day, saying the war was over. <\/p>\n By that time, Schlamberg, Yellin and other fighters from the Iwo Jima-based 78th Fighter Squadron were flying over Japan looking for \u201ctargets of opportunity\u201d \u2013 essentially anything with military value that could be attacked from the air. <\/p>\n Just after noon on that August day, the American pilots dived on a Tokyo area airfield. <\/p>\n \u201cWe hit the field, and then climbed into a cloud embankment, with Phil flying tight in beside me,\u201d Yellin wrote in the foreword to \u201cThe Last Fighter Pilot.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cWhen I emerged from the clouds a few minutes later, Phil was gone. I would never see him again.\u201d <\/p>\n As they flew that day, the US pilots listened for the word \u201cUtah\u201d to come over their radios. The codeword would indicate Japan had surrendered and hostilities could cease. <\/p>\n Some of the American warplanes flying over Japan on August 15 did hear \u201cUtah\u201d broadcast. Those in Yellin\u2019s group didn\u2019t. <\/p>\n According to Yellin\u2019s account, the pilots in the 78th Fighter Squadron would only find out after they\u2019d flown the three hours back to their airfield on Iwo Jima \u2013 way too late for Schlamberg to avoid his fate. <\/p>\n Yellin, Schlamberg and the rest of the squadron had learned of their August 15 mission the night before at a briefing in a Quonset hut on Iwo Jima. <\/p>\n With no word of Japanese surrender, the American pilots had been ordered to keep up the pressure on Tokyo. The squadron would fly over the Japanese capital in the morning, the fliers were told. <\/p>\n According to the book, Schlamberg then leaned over and whispered to Yellin: \u201cIf I go on this mission, captain, I\u2019m not coming back.\u201d <\/p>\n Worried about how such a thought could affect Schlamberg\u2019s confidence in combat, Yellin suggested he see the unit\u2019s flight surgeon, who could order him not to fly that day. <\/p>\n But the 19-year-old would have none of it, according to Yellin\u2019s account. The youngest of 10 children of Jewish-Polish immigrants, the young flier was \u201cthe great hope of the Schlamberg Family,\u201d his niece, Melanie Sloan, wrote in a foreword for \u201cThe Last Fighter Pilot.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cThey had a very tough life,\u201d Sloan wrote, surviving on public assistance with Philip and his siblings illegally selling ice cream on Coney Island to help make ends meet. In \u201cThe Last Fighter Pilot,\u201d Yellin and main author Don Brown wrote that Schlamberg hoped to attend college, but didn\u2019t have the finances. <\/p>\n \u201cThough he\u2019d been accepted to college, he had no money for tuition and books,\u201d they wrote. <\/p>\n But Schlamberg\u2019s smarts were unquestioned. <\/p>\n Sloan said that through a search of US military records she obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, she found that her uncle had the highest IQ ever recorded in Army Air Corps entrance exams. <\/p>\n \u201cThe Last Fighter Pilot\u201d says when the service saw those scores, Schlamberg was offered his pick of jobs and chose to be a fighter pilot. <\/p>\n It was Jerry Yellin\u2019s choice to be a fighter pilot too. <\/p>\n In the 2021 documentary film about this life, \u201cJerry\u2019s Last Mission,\u201d he recalled the immediate aftermath of Japan\u2019s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, that drew the United States into the war. <\/p>\n \u201cI felt devastated, like everybody in this country. We all hated the whole country of Japan,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n Thanks to a boyhood fascination with airplanes and pilots from World War I, he knew where he had to be in the conflict that the US military was entering. <\/p>\n \u201cI had my mother and father sign the papers when I was 18 years old. I said, \u2018I\u2019m going to fly fighters against Japan,\u2019\u201d he said in the film. <\/p>\n The decision that he should fight in the Pacific rather than against Nazi Germany in Europe came despite the fact he was Jewish, and had felt the pain of anti-Semitism when his New Jersey home was vandalized with Nazi symbols in 1936. <\/p>\n Yellin was only two years older than Schlamberg, but in the war years, that was an eternity. <\/p>\n He began his training earlier and arrived before his wingman for combat on the island of Iwo Jima, still more than half occupied by Japanese troops when he landed his P-51 there on March 7, 1945. <\/p>\n Yellin recalled his first vivid memory of the island, the bodies of Japanese soldiers stacked in mounds off the airstrip and truckloads of dead US Marines nearby. <\/p>\n But what haunted him more, for years after the war ended, were the memories of his 16 Iwo Jima-based squadron mates who were killed in action, including Schlamberg. <\/p>\n \u201cI knew it was OK for the Japanese to die, but I didn\u2019t think it was OK for the American guys that I knew to die,\u201d he said in \u201cJerry\u2019s Last Mission.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cI almost felt unworthy of being alive, because these guys died,\u201d he said. \u201cI lived and they died, and I couldn\u2019t figure out why.\u201d <\/p>\n The death of Schlamberg, Yellin\u2019s wingman on his 19th wartime engagement and the final combat mission of nearly four years of conflict, was particularly hard for the US captain. <\/p>\n In a 2020 story on the New Jersey website Montclair Local, Yellin\u2019s son Michael told of his father\u2019s pain when the pilot took his wingman\u2019s belongings to Schlamberg\u2019s mother in Brooklyn. <\/p>\n \u201cShe told my father, \u2018It should have been you who died, instead of my son.\u2019 He understood, but it scarred him for the rest of his life,\u201d Michael Yellin said. <\/p>\n \u201cWhen I came home from the war, I was not a decent human being. I was a killer,\u201d Yellin said in the movie. <\/p>\n But two members of his family changed Yellin\u2019s life. <\/p>\n His wife, Helene, pushed him to travel to Japan in 1983, he said in the film. During that trip, he saw Japanese war veterans up close and felt a kinship, he said. <\/p>\n Meanwhile, Helene fell in love with the country her husband had once hated. And she said Japan seemed the kind of place that their son Robert would like. So prodded, Yellin later encouraged Robert to go on a short homestay program there. <\/p>\n Robert accepted and never looked back, eventually marrying a Japanese woman and starting a family with her. <\/p>\n And the father of his new daughter-in-law was a former fighter pilot too. Taro Yamakawa trained to fly Zero fighters as a kamikaze pilot, but was never assigned a final mission, according to Yellin. <\/p>\n Yamakawa told him, \u201cAny man that could fly a P-51 against the Japanese and live must be a brave man, and I want the blood of that man to flow through the veins of my grandchildren,\u201d Yellin said. <\/p>\n There would be three of those grandchildren, and with them, hatred was replaced by love. <\/p>\n \u201cI was a happy guy, killing people, killing my enemy \u2013 then \u2013 and now they\u2019re my family,\u201d he says in the film as he rides a bullet train through the Japanese countryside. <\/p>\n \u201cThis is home to me. This is a much a home to me as America, because my family lives here.\u201d <\/p>\n Yellin died in December 2017, shortly after \u201cThe Last Fighter Pilot\u201d was published. \u201cAlthough his flying career was short, he witnessed more turmoil than any human being should ever have to witness,\u201d the obituary said. \u201cYellin was discharged in December 1945 and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, before it was recognized as such.\u201d <\/p>\n Yellin\u2019s ashes are interred in a columbarium in Arlington. <\/p>\n Schlamberg is remembered with an inscription on a stone tablet at the Courts of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii. No trace of him or his P-51 have ever been found. <\/p>\n In the foreword to \u201cThe Last Fighter Pilot,\u201d Yellin recounted how World War II\u2019s end was fitting for the times. <\/p>\n \u201cWith the news emerging in 1945 of the Nazi atrocities against Jews half a world away, how ironic that the war\u2019s final mission would be flown by a couple of Jewish pilots from New York and New Jersey,\u201d it says. <\/p>\n \u201cAnd 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.\u201d <\/p>\n\n Just as Emperor Hirohito was announcing Japan\u2019s surrender, two US Army Air Corps P-51 fighters attacked a Tokyo airfield on August 15, 1945 during the last few hours of World War II. Their strafing run on Japanese forces completed, the leader of the US mission, Capt. Jerry Yellin, and his wingman, 1st Lt. Philip Schlamberg, <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":11466,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-11465","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} A premonition of death<\/h2>\n
\u201cI\u2019m going to fly the mission,\u201d Schlamberg said. <\/p>\n Who was Philip Schlamberg?<\/h2>\n
Still, her uncle was a scholar, earning valedictorian honors at Abraham Lincoln High School, Sloan wrote. <\/p>\n Hating Japan<\/h2>\n
A healing \u2013 with family<\/h2>\n
Fitting endings<\/h2>\n
A US Air Force obituary, published when Yellin was laid to rest with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia in 2019, noted his postwar struggles. <\/p>\n