The Last Fighter Pilot

The True Story of The Final Combat Mission of World War II

By Don Brown with Captain Jerry Yellin

Like scattered hot embers popping in the glow of a dying Like pit, the long aftermath of World War II brought 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.

(Brown and Yellin 2017, xxvii-xxix)

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.

(Brown and Yellin 2017, 191)

His own life had been a series of twists and turns, triumph and tears, hope and tragedy, patience and perseverance.He never married the girl named Doris for whom his plane had been named. But he had spent nearly a lifetime with the true love of his life, Helene, who he met on a blind date on Good Friday, 1949. Helene had passed away on June 23, 2015, after sixty-five wonderful years of marriage. Her loss, so late in life, would be the most painful of all for the old fighter pilot.

In perhaps the supreme irony of the veteran’s life, meanwhile, his son would marry a Japanese girl and move to Japan, and Jerry would learn to love, respect, and commune with the very people that he had once, with all his might, tried to kill, and who had taken the lives of the fellow airmen closest to him.