Photo By Cpl. Zachary Orr | MARINE CORPS BASE HAWAII – Jeremy Yellin, a former fighter pilot in the Army Air...... read more read more
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MARINE CORPS BASE HAWAII – “I woke up at around 11:00 a.m. on Dec 7, 1941,” said Jeremy Yellin, a former fighter pilot with the Army Air Corps. “I was listening to the radio around 12:00 p.m. and they were talking about Pearl Harbor. I made up my mind on that day, at the age of 17, I was going to fly fighter planes.”
Yellin spoke with service members and DoD employees about his war story at the Officers Club aboard Marine Corps Base Hawaii on March 17, 2017.
He enlisted two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on his 18th birthday.
“In 1937, Col. Claire Chennault took a bunch of P-40’s and went to China to fight the Japanese in China,” Yellin said. “The guys were flying Submarine Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain; they were my heroes and I was going to be just like them.”
In August of 1943, Yellin graduated flight school and became a fighter pilot. He spent the remaining of the war flying P-40, P-47 and P-51 combat missions to the Pacific with the 78th Fighter Squadron.
“I flew the first long range mission over Japan on April 7, 1945,” he said. “We were escorting Boeing B-29 Superfortress. I watched from 12,000 feet [in the air] as a square of fire was made over Tokyo.”
Yellin said 150 B-29’s dropped bombs onto Tokyo which caused a square mile of the city to burn down.
On August 14, 1945, Yellin flew the final combat mission of WWII.
“I remember 19 year old 2nd Lt. Philip Schlamberg leaned over to me and said ‘Captain, if we go, I’m not coming back,’” Yellin said. “I responded ‘just stay on my wing, tuck it in tight and you’ll be fine.’"
Yellin’s wingman, Schlamberg, was the last man killed in a WWII combat mission.
“I gave him a thumbs-up; he gave me a thumbs-up,” Yellin said. “I went under some weather and when I came to clear skies, there was no one on my wing. There was no visual or radio contact; he was just gone.”
Yellin said he came home with Schlamberg’s lieutenant bars and wings to present them to Schlamberg’s family in Brooklyn, New York.
“When I was leaving, his mother said to me ‘It should have been you who was killed, Captain, not my son Phillip. I hope you never sleep a night in your life like I can’t,’” he said.
Yellin said he couldn’t sleep for the next 30 years. He was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from what he endured in war.
“The smell of death never left me,” Yellin said. “I can still smell today, what I smelled on Iwo Jima 71 years ago.”
Yellin said he didn’t know he was sick and the service members and veterans with PTSD that commit suicide from today don’t know their sick.
He now travels the world to share his story in hopes to help veterans with PTSD or anyone who lives with a person suffering in silence.
For more information on dealing with PTSD, utilize the link below.
http://www.usmc-mccs.org/services/support/dstress-line.
| Date Taken: | 03.16.2017 |
| Date Posted: | 03.21.2017 23:13 |
| Story ID: | 227632 |
| Location: | MARINE CORPS BASE HAWAII, HI, US |
| Web Views: | 157 |
| Downloads: | 1 |
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