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Un pilote juif de la Seconde Guerre mondiale meurt à 93 ans
Perturbé par le massacre au Japon, Jerry Yellin se tourna plus tard vers la méditation transcendantale
Le vétéran Jerry Yellin, apparaît dans cette capture d’écran de la vidéo World War Two. (YouTube)
Jerry Yellin, qui a piloté la dernière mission de combat de la Seconde Guerre mondiale et a ensuite aidé d’autres anciens combattants à surmonter leur traumatisme, est décédé.
M. Yellin est mort jeudi en Floride chez l’un de ses quatre fils après avoir lutté contre un cancer du poumon. Il avait 93 ans.
Yellin, lieutenant du 78e escadron de combat de l’armée de l’air américaine, a mené une attaque sur les aérodromes japonais le 15 août 1945 lorsque l’empereur Hirohito annonça la capitulation du Japon. Quand il retourna à sa base sur Iwo Jima, Yellin apprit qu’un cessez-le-feu était entré en vigueur, et que son escadron n’avait pas reçu le signal codé les informant d’arrêter leur attaque, la dernière de la guerre.
Le copilote de Yellin, le lieutenant Philip Schlamberg, 19 ans, de Brooklyn, que Yellin avait encadré, a été abattu lors de ce dernier raid, après avoir pressenti qu’il ne sortirait pas vivant de la mission.
« En raison de notre héritage juif commun et parce qu’il était l’un de nos plus jeunes pilotes, j’avais naturellement pris Phil sous mon aile », a rappelé Yellin dans Le dernier pilote de chasse, une biographie écrite par Don Brown avec Yellin et publiée cette année, selon le New York Times.
Il a été très troublé d’avoir été témoin du carnage sur Iwo Jima où il a dit « il n’y avait pas un brin d’herbe et il y avait 28 000 corps pourrissant au soleil », et plus tard 16 membres de son escadron ont été tués en mission.
Quelque 6 800 soldats américains et plus de 20 000 Japonais ont été tués dans la bataille pour l’île du Pacifique.
La Bataille de Iwo Jima (Crédit photo : United States Marine Corps, ibiblio.com, Wikimedia Commons)
Yellin a été libéré de l’armée en décembre 1945 avec le grade de capitaine. Parmi ses honneurs militaires, mentionnons la Croix du service distingué dans l’Aviation. Au cours des dernières années, il a été le porte-parole national de l’Esprit de 45, une organisation à but non lucratif qui promeut l’héritage des anciens combattants de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. selon Stars et Stripes, une publication militaire.
Pendant des années après sa démobilisation, souffrant de ce qui est maintenant connu pour être un trouble de stress post-traumatique, Yellin a lutté pour rester employé et a déménagé plusieurs fois aux États-Unis et transféré un temps en Israël, en partie pour protester contre la guerre du Vietnam, selon Stars et Stripes.
Il a bénéficié d’un certain répit grâce à la méditation transcendantale, que sa femme lui a conseillé d’essayer après avoir vu l’auteur de la pratique, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, dans l’émission « Le Merv Griffin ».
Yellin a parlé à d’autres anciens combattants qui ont lutté pour s’adapter à la vie civile et, en 2010, il a co-fondé ‘Bien-être du guerrier en opération’, une division de la Fondation David Lynch qui aide les vétérans à apprendre la méditation transcendantale. Yellin a reçu un soutien dans des vidéos promotionnelles de l’actrice Scarlett Johansson, une petite-nièce de Schlamberg.
Yellin est né et a grandi à Newark, New Jersey, et s’est enrôlé dans l’armée deux mois après l’attaque sur Pearl Harbor, lors de son 18e anniversaire.
Le fils de Yellin a déménagé au Japon après l’université et a épousé une femme japonaise dont le père s’était entraîné comme pilote de kamikaze et avait travaillé sur un terrain d’aviation pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Les pères se sont mis à discuter de leurs stratégies et de leurs expériences de vol pendant la guerre avec l’aide d’un traducteur, et sont devenus des amis pour la vie, selon Stars and Stripes.
Sa femme de 65 ans, Hélène, est décédée en 2015. Il laisse derrière lui quatre enfants, une soeur et six petits-enfants.
Jerry Yellin
Army Air Corps fighter pilot Jerry Yellin (February 15, 1924-December 21, 2017) flew the last combat mission of World War II. Taking off from Iwo Jima on August 15, 1945 in his P-51 Mustang, he attacked airfields near Nagoya, before heading back to base, his wingman Phillip Schlamberg lost and presumed dead. It was only then that Yellin learned Emperor Hirohito had announced his nation’s surrender hours earlier following the United States’ two atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
After the war, Yellin had difficulty fitting back into civilian life, and suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. He would find peace in the 1970s after becoming an adherent of Transcendental Meditation, while the marriage of his youngest son to the daughter of a Japanese kamikaze pilot would take him, he wrote, “from hatred to love.” An author of four books, Yellin toured extensively to bring hope to veterans suffering from PTSD, and to heal wounds brought by war.
CREDIT: Senior Airman Ariel D. Partlow/U.S. Air Force
By RICHARD GOLDSTEINDEC. 24, 2017
Jerry Yellin, who flew a combat mission over Japan in his plane Dorrie R on the day Emperor Hirohito surrendered, at Culpeper Regional Airport in Virginia in May 2015 for an observation of the 70th anniversary of V-E Day. Credit Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, plunging the United States into World War II, Jerry Yellin was a teenager living with his family in Hillside, N.J.
Having been intrigued by flight since he was a youngster — he constructed planes modeled on World War I aircraft — he joined the Army Air Corps in February 1942, on his 18th birthday, and became a fighter pilot.
On Aug. 15, 1945 (Aug. 14 in the United States), Lieutenant Yellin was leading an attack on Japanese airfields by four P-51 Mustang fighters from his 78th Fighter Squadron, as American airstrikes on Japan continued even after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki earlier that month.
In the days following the atomic raids, all aircraft pounding Japan were to receive a coded signal from their bases if a Japanese surrender came. If one did, they were to halt their missions and turn back.
Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender at noon local time on Aug. 15, just as Lieutenant Yellin, flying from his base on Iwo Jima, was leading his four-plane attack.
But as he told it years later, for some reason that he could never determine his planes did not receive the cease-fire message that had gone out to American aircraft at the time.
It was only when he returned to Iwo Jima some three hours after completing the mission that he learned the war had formally ended while he was still blasting away.
Mr. Yellin died on Thursday in Florida at 93. His death was announced by his son Steven.
In paying tribute to him, the Air Force’s chief of staff, Gen. David Goldfein, called him the fighter pilot “who flew the last combat mission of World War II.”
But for Mr. Yellin, the war had not truly ended. He was afflicted by what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder, having witnessed the carnage on Iwo Jima and later having 16 members of his squadron killed on missions.
Iwo Jima was needed as a base for fighter planes that would escort long-range B-29 bombers based in the Mariana Islands while they raided Japan. It was conquered with a fearsome toll on both sides.
“Body parts were everywhere and the smell of death permeated the air,” Mr. Yellin recalled in a May 2014 interview with the Library of Congress for its Veterans History Project, telling of his first weeks on Iwo Jima after the Marines had seized its airstrips from the Japanese.
Mr. Yellin, who later flew 19 missions over Japan, was especially grieved by a very personal loss on that final raid of the war.
His wingman, Lt. Philip Schlamberg, a 19-year-old Brooklyn native he had helped mentor, never emerged from a cloud embankment that the four Mustangs of the 78th Squadron encountered upon crossing the coast of Japan en route home. Mr. Yellin speculated that he had been shot down by Japanese antiaircraft fire.
“Because of our common Jewish heritage and because he was one of our younger pilots, I had naturally taken Phil under my wing,” Mr. Yellin recalled in “The Last Fighter Pilot,” a biography written by Don Brown with Mr. Yellin’s collaboration and published this year.
Earlier in 1945, in another particularly searing episode, a less experienced pilot was lost on a mission to Japan while flying Mr. Yellin’s Mustang, which he had named Dorrie R for his girlfriend, whom he had met while training in California. The unit dentist had grounded him that day to carry out the urgent removal of painful wisdom teeth.
Mr. Yellin was discharged from the military in December 1945 as a captain and received the Distinguished Flying Cross.
And then his battles continued.
“I was angry,” he said in the Library of Congress interview. “I could go to college. I had no desire to do that. I couldn’t hold a job. I had many, many jobs. I was depressed. Every symptom that they now diagnose as post-traumatic stress disorder, I had.”
Mr. Yellin married Helene Schulman in 1949, and they began raising a family even while his emotional distress continued. It was not until he embraced Transcendental Meditation in 1975, at the suggestion of his wife, that he was able to alleviate his stress and find a productive life.
Jerome Yellin was born on Feb. 15, 1924, in Newark. After graduating from high school, he worked seven days a week in a steel mill to earn money for college. Then came Pearl Harbor Sunday.
In his later years he helped fellow veterans, from World War II and the wars that followed, in their efforts to overcome combat-related trauma.
Mr. Yellin and his wife, who died in 2015, had four sons, David, Steven, Michael and Robert. They survive him, as do six grandchildren and a sister, Maxine Giannini.
In 1983, when Mr. Yellin was a consultant to some banks in California, he was asked to visit Japan to speak about investments in real estate in the United States. He was reluctant to make the trip, having demonized the Japanese during the war. But his wife wanted to go, and when he got to Tokyo, he later said, he was impressed by the “well-dressed, well-mannered, beautiful-looking people.”
The Yellins sent their son Robert, a college senior at the time, to visit Japan in 1984. He loved the country and married a Japanese woman, Takako Yamakawa, four years later. The Yellins attended the wedding and made many subsequent visits to Japan to see the couple and their three children.
Takako’s father, Taro, had been a pilot in World War II. But Jerry Yellin and Taro Yamakawa found they could surmount the hatreds spawned by the war and, as Mr. Yellin once put it, “We became brothers, he and I.”
“I went from thinking a group of people were my enemy to finding my best friend,” Mr. Yellin told People magazine in 2017. “It’s a lesson to remember that at the end of the day we are all human and have so much love to give.”
Correction: December 26, 2017
An earlier version of this obituary misstated Mr. Yellin’s full given name. It was Jerome, not Jeffrey.
Ricochet – The Last Fighter Pilot
Contributor
EJHill
December 23, 2017
In my year-end round up of notable deaths, I noted that not many names of the Greatest Generation were showing up. The few are getting fewer and fewer.
Add to the list the name of Captain Jerome “Jerry” Yellin. On August 14, 1945 — five days after the 2nd atomic bomb drop — Yellin led a two-man raid against a Japanese airfield in P-51 Mustangs. His partner, Phil Schlamberg, did not come back. When Yellin landed back at Iwo Jima he learned that the war was over. While he was in the air Japan had accepted the demand for unconditional surrender. His command was unable to raise him on the radio to stop the mission.
Yellin then went down as the last combat fighter pilot of World War II and Schlamberg the last casualty. Attached to the 78th Fighter Squadron of the USAAF, Yellin lost 16 buddies in the war and struggled in the postwar world. He became an advocate for vets suffering from PTSD in his later years.
He passed yesterday in Orlando at age 93 from lung cancer.
Published in History
WDBJ7– Jerry Yellin, an American hero, flew the last combat mission of WWII. Yellin visited Bedford County in June as the key note speaker at the National D-Day Memorial. He was a supporter of the memorial and had just signed on to be co-chair of the capital campaign.
Yellin traveled the country sharing his story and others.
“The world has to know that 16 million of us in America and that 8 million young women were Rosie the Riveters,” said Yellin back in June. “24 million people served in uniform for the purity and purpose of defeating evil.”
Yellin was battling lung cancer. He was 93 years old.
National D-Day Memorial mourns the passing of WWII pilot
by Barbara EstradaFriday, December 22nd 2017
Captain Jerry Yellin delivered the keynote address at the Memorial’s commemoration of the 73rd anniversary of D-Day. (National D-Day Memorial)
BEDFORD, VA – The National D-Day Memorial Foundation is mourning the loss of Captain Jerry Yellin.
This past June, Capt. Yellin delivered the keynote address at the Memorial’s commemoration of the 73rd anniversary of D-Day. One of the nation’s best-known World War II veterans, Yellin shared his harrowing story of having flown the final combat mission of WWII, in which his wingman became the final American to die in battle during the war.
When the veteran paid a visit in June, Yellin became further involved with the memorial and its mission. In September, he raised the flag to open the National D-Day Memorial Golf Classic and played as a celebrity guest golfer. One of Yellin’s final interviews was recorded at the National D-Day Memorial in October, as he joined the Memorial’s capital campaign as honorary Chair.
RELATED: WWII pilot visits National D-Day Memorial on 73rd anniversary of Normandy invasion
“We gave our lives in World War II so that we can have freedom, freedom for our country and freedom in the world,” said Yellin. “Every American should come and see this memorial, to see what we did in my generation so that your generation could live as free Americans. We fought for freedom, but we live for peace.”
Though well-known for his role in the war, Yellin often said he was just one of more than 16 million young Americans willing to fight for freedom in WWII. Yellin’s message and dedication to his fellow veterans will live on through his books, speeches, and interviews.
Staff, board, and volunteers at the foundation offers their deepest condolences to Capt. Yellin’s family and many friends.
“We are deeply saddened by the loss of Jerry Yellin. He was not only a dear friend, but a tireless advocate for veterans who believed in educating our youth about the lessons and legacy of WWII,” said April Cheek-Messier, National D-Day Memorial Foundation President. “He loved the National D-Day Memorial and was working diligently with us as Co-Chair of our capital campaign to build the future education center. He will be remembered as the hero he was, and honored for the inspiring message he imparted to all. Fly high Jerry. We will miss you.”
Obituaries
Jerry Yellin, fighter pilot in last combat mission of World War II, dies at 93
Jerry Yellin in 2016, holding a photo of himself when he was a fighter pilot in World War II. (Richard Bell/For the book “The Last Veterans of WWII”)
By Harrison Smith December 21 at 6:17 PM
The last combat mission of World War II began Aug. 15, 1945, when fighter pilot Jerry Yellin and his wingman, 19-year-old Philip Schlamberg, took off from Iwo Jima to attack airfields near Nagoya, Japan.
The war seemed all but over. Germany had surrendered in May, and much of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were in ruins, decimated by atomic bombs dropped the previous week. If Mr. Yellin heard a code word — “Utah” — Japan’s rumored surrender had occurred, and he was to cancel his mission and return to Iwo Jima, a rocky island that he had helped secure months earlier and that offered a base for American bombers headed north to Japan.
Later that day, on what was still Aug. 14 in the United States, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender. For some reason, however, Mr. Yellin and Schlamberg never got the message.
Taking on antiaircraft fire in their P-51 Mustangs, they strafed their targets and headed home, passing through a thick bank of clouds. Schlamberg, who had previously admitted a sense of foreboding to Mr. Yellin, saying, “If we go on this mission, I’m not coming back,” never emerged from the haze.
Disappearing from Mr. Yellin’s wing, he was presumed dead and considered one of the last Americans to be killed in combat during World War II.
Mr. Yellin in 2015. (Lightfinder Public Relations)
Mr. Yellin, who landed on Iwo Jima to discover that the war had ended three hours earlier, and who later became an outspoken advocate of veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, died Dec. 21 at his son Steven Yellin’s home in Orlando. He was 93 and had lung cancer, his son said.
For Mr. Yellin, the war was a hellish necessity, essential for halting the spread of Nazism and Japanese aggression. But he also spoke forthrightly about its costs, including the mental anguish over memories of combat that nearly led him to suicide. He recalled with particular horror the experience of landing on war-torn Iwo Jima for the first time, where “there wasn’t a blade of grass and there were 28,000 bodies rotting in the sun.”
“The sights and the sounds and the smells of dead bodies and the sights of Japanese being bulldozed into mass graves absolutely never went away,” he told the Washington Times in August.
Mr. Yellin, a captain in the 78th Fighter Squadron of the Army Air Forces, counted 16 downed pilots in his unit during the war, including Schlamberg. For years afterward, he struggled to keep a steady job, moving a dozen times in the United States and Israel (where he settled, at one point, partly in protest of the Vietnam War).
He eventually found solace through Transcendental Meditation, a twice-daily technique of silent concentration that his wife introduced him to in 1975 after she saw the practice’s originator, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, on “The Merv Griffin Show.”
Mr. Yellin soon began speaking to other veterans who struggled to adapt to civilian life, and in 2010 he co-founded Operation Warrior Wellness, a division of the David Lynch Foundation that helps veterans learn Transcendental Meditation. He said he was inspired to start the group after a friend and Army veteran killed himself that year. Mr. Yellin received support in promotional videos by actress Scarlett Johansson, a grandniece of Schlamberg.
“The feeling that one has when a buddy dies? You just can’t emulate that. We have a burden civilians will never understand,” Mr. Yellin told The Washington Post earlier this month, shortly after the release of “The Last Fighter Pilot,” an account of his World War II service written with Don Brown.
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Jerome Yellin was born into a Jewish family in Newark on Feb. 15, 1924. His father was a real estate developer.
Mr. Yellin had just graduated from high school in Hillside, N.J., and was working the night shift at a steel mill, saving money before starting college, when Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Two months later, on his 18th birthday, he enlisted in the Army Air Forces, pursuing an adolescent love of aviation that had led him to build models of World War I-era planes.
Mr. Yellin was slightly nearsighted and initially failed an eye exam for pilots. “The doctor told me to go home and stay in a dark room, eat a lot of carrots, don’t read anything and come back in three days and take the test again,” he said in a 2014 oral history.
In place of the rabbit food, he sought help from his mother, who served on the draft board. She filched a copy of the eye chart, allowing him to memorize the letters and pass the exam on his second try.
Mr. Yellin proved a skilled pilot, successfully bailing out of his plane when the engine locked up during a training mission near Hawaii (he said he spent nine hours in a life raft before he was picked up by a boat) and escorting B-29 bombers on 19 missions over Japan.
His military honors included the Distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medal, and in recent years he served as the national spokesman for the Spirit of ’45, a nonprofit organization that promotes the legacy of World War II veterans.
His wife of 65 years, the former Helene Schulman, died in 2015. Survivors include four children, David Yellin of Winter Haven, Fla., Steven Yellin of Orlando, Michael Yellin of Montclair, N.J., and Robert Yellin of Kyoto, Japan; a sister; and six grandchildren.
Mr. Yellin later told the New York Post he had long believed the Japanese were “terrible people,” and felt no remorse at the time he participated in bombing runs on Tokyo and other cities. “They did horrific things in China, and I saw horrific things done in Iwo Jima to dead Marines — faces bashed in to get gold out of their teeth. They just were not human beings to me then.”
His views began to change after a business trip to Tokyo in 1983, when he was working as a real estate consultant for banks. He said he “looked up through the buildings in the Ginza” — a popular shopping district — and envisioned B-29s “dropping bombs not on those people but on me.”
Mr. Yellin’s son Robert later moved to Japan and became engaged to a Japanese woman. Mr. Yellin was shocked when he found out her father, Taro Yamakawa, trained as a kamikaze pilot and worked at an airfield during World War II.
The fathers bonded, Mr. Yellin said, after discussing their flying strategies and experiences during the war with the help of a translator. They eventually struck up a correspondence, and Mr. Yellin described Yamakawa as his best friend.
“Taro said that in Buddhism, the soul of the dead is worshiped for 50 years as an individual, then, all souls merge to become one and are looked upon as equal,” Mr. Yellin told the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 1995, describing a letter from his friend. “Taro wrote that it has been 50 years since the war. It is time for the souls to merge and put it behind us.”