Jerry Yellin, the last WWII fighter pilot, passes

We get the sad news today that Captain Jerry Yellin who flew the last fighter mission against Japan just hours before the Emperor announced their surrender has passed at the age of 93 on December 21st. From Wiki;

Captain Yellin’s final combat mission was executed five days after the U.S. Army Air Force Boeing B-29 Superfortress Bockscar had dropped a second American nuclear weapon on Japan, namely on the city of Nagasaki.

Captain Yellin flew along with another pilot, First Lieutenant Phil Schlamberg, who was piloting a second P-51 as Captain Yellin’s wingman. The two men were executing their mission against the airfield at or about the time that Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration, wherein Japan would accept allied terms for unconditional surrender. Yellin and Schlamberg did not hear the military’s attempted radio broadcast alerting them that the war had ended.

Immediately after carrying out their mission against the airfield, Yellin and Schlamberg banked steeply into a cloud cover. Yellin emerged from the cloud cover, but Schlamberg had disappeared, apparently shot down, and became the final known combat death of World War II. Schlamberg’s body was never recovered. Short on fuel, Yellin began his four-hour flight back to his home base on Iwo Jima, where he learned that the war had ended.

Captain Yellin earned a Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal while he flew 19 escort missions for bombers over Japan. His wife of 65 years, Helene, passed in 2015. They leave behind four children and six grandchildren.

A book about his last mission, The Last Fighter Pilot: The True Story of the Final Combat Mission of World War II was written by Don Brown and published earlier this year.

Category: We Remember