Good detective work
TOPSFIELD — Lois Allan stood in a wheat field, marveling. This was hallowed ground, where her brother had floated down on a gossamer web of silk before German soldiers captured him in 1944. This field gave birth to a question that had tortured her brother for decades: When he ordered his crew to bail out of the bomber he piloted, had he killed a crew member?
This field in Velehrad, the Czech Republic, was a long way from the family's roots in South Dakota. It was a long way from Norman Isler, a Topsfield man whose search for answers would vindicate her brother decades after the war.
But when Isler visited the country in April 1990, he had more practical matters in mind, like how he could get General Electric engines from Lynn onto the wings of Czechoslovakian airplanes still being built as the Soviet Union crumbled.
Factory workers asked if he'd like to see a monument a few miles away for an American pilot who had saved a Czech village from destruction by crashing his plane into the forest.
Isler wondered about the monument near the tree line. He wondered who put fresh flowers out to honor the pilot killed in the crash — this, in a time and place where honoring Americans could be hazardous. Isler wrote down the date of the crash — July 7, 1944. He learned it was a B-17 bomber. The Czechs didn't know the name of the dead pilot. Isler, who is the leader of the Topsfield Historical Society, decided to poke around.
http://www.salemnews.com/punews/local_story_047074137.html
TOPSFIELD — Lois Allan stood in a wheat field, marveling. This was hallowed ground, where her brother had floated down on a gossamer web of silk before German soldiers captured him in 1944. This field gave birth to a question that had tortured her brother for decades: When he ordered his crew to bail out of the bomber he piloted, had he killed a crew member?
This field in Velehrad, the Czech Republic, was a long way from the family's roots in South Dakota. It was a long way from Norman Isler, a Topsfield man whose search for answers would vindicate her brother decades after the war.
But when Isler visited the country in April 1990, he had more practical matters in mind, like how he could get General Electric engines from Lynn onto the wings of Czechoslovakian airplanes still being built as the Soviet Union crumbled.
Factory workers asked if he'd like to see a monument a few miles away for an American pilot who had saved a Czech village from destruction by crashing his plane into the forest.
Isler wondered about the monument near the tree line. He wondered who put fresh flowers out to honor the pilot killed in the crash — this, in a time and place where honoring Americans could be hazardous. Isler wrote down the date of the crash — July 7, 1944. He learned it was a B-17 bomber. The Czechs didn't know the name of the dead pilot. Isler, who is the leader of the Topsfield Historical Society, decided to poke around.
http://www.salemnews.com/punews/local_story_047074137.html
