By Mike Stucka
Staff writer
Tue, May 13 2008 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. "When it started, I thought, 'Gee, a couple of phone calls and I'll be all set,'" he remembers. He checked with the Topsfield American Legion post commander, who suggested asking former prisoners of war. Soon, Isler was getting mail from all over the country, written by men whose planes had been shot down decades ago. The closest match was a week off and 100 miles away. Was the Czech monument wrong? The U.S. military insisted it hadn't lost any B-17 bombers that day in 1944. The only plane shot down was a P-51 fighter on an escort mission. Isler dismissed the account as irrelevant. Isler returned to Czechoslovakia. A witness to the crash, Frantisek Drinka, plied him with homemade wine and historical details. Drinka was sure it was a B-17 bomber; he even recognized the exact type, a B-17G, as it staggered, wounded, through the air. Drinka had a copy of an old newspaper article with the pilot's name, Antonin Koleman. Isler sent a friend into U.S. government archives, but there was no sign of Antonin Koleman. Mystery solved In October 1990, Isler returned to the Czech airplane factory and met a World War II aviation historian who offered a different name — Staff Sgt. William J. Mack, a tail gunner on the plane Isler was tracking. With that detail, an amateur historian near Washington, D.C., found 30 pages of information on the mission. Isler called Mack's sister and told her of the Czech monument. She seemed comforted. More sleuthing turned up the crew's names, some current addresses and most of the story: That day in 1944, the plane, a B-17G, was going to the Blechhammer oil refinery in what is now Poland. A P-51 fighter, that clue Isler had ignored, might have been escorting it and 35 other bombers on the mission. Flak explosions started to erupt around the planes. Then came about 30 JU-88 fighters. Two attacked the plane with rockets, knocking out one engine and hurting Mack and the radio operator. A second engine quit. The pilot, 23-year-old Edward Lindbloom, ordered the 10-member crew to bail out before he set the ailing plane on autopilot. Nine landed with parachutes. Mack was still in the plane when it crashed outside Velehrad, setting part of the forest on fire. Lindbloom landed in the wheat field, finding his co-pilot and the turret gunner. When captured, Lindbloom and two officers were separated from the enlisted men and placed in a prisoner-of-war camp. The men had never flown together before. After the war, Lindbloom got in touch with his co-pilot but no one else. He finished his military service, became a school superintendent, got his doctorate and had a debilitating stroke. All the while, he was haunted by the thought that Mack might have been killed because of the decision to bail out and crash in the forest. 'Relieved my brother's mind' Isler's investigation got all the men to contact each other for the first time in nearly 50 years. A gunner told Isler they had checked on Mack and confirmed that he had already died before they bailed out of the plane. Isler told Lindbloom. "My brother worried all those years about the tail gunner," Allan said. "That relieved my brother's mind from all the worry." Isler kept working. "When I was growing up in World War II, those guys were my heroes," he said. "The further I got into it, the more determined I was to see it through to completion. I was a Korean War vet, so I knew what those guys were going through, in a way." Isler pushed to get Lindbloom a medal, only to be rebuffed because of the decades of delay. The co-pilot, John Sant, told Isler he was surprised Lindbloom hadn't gotten the Distinguished Flying Cross he'd recommended. Sant still had a copy of the paperwork. "With the aid of a congressman, in a Veterans Day ceremony at a VFW post in Florida, Ed Lindbloom finally got his DFC," Isler said. It was a long road. "I guess the biggest part of this whole thing, as far as I'm concerned, is he was the pilot who got no recognition for what he did," Isler said. "The stroke he suffered might have well been initiated by the trauma that he went through. And then to be carrying around on his conscience that the tail gunner might have died by his order to bail out and everyone might not have gotten out, that made everything worthwhile." Last year, Lindbloom's other sister, Phyllis Moore, called Lois Allan. She was planning a trip to see a granddaughter in Germany. Lindbloom couldn't join them; he was too sick. So Allan agreed to come along, but only if they could go to the Czech Republic. Only if they could go to Velehrad, where their brother had nearly died, to the place that had haunted him for decades. Last September, Allan stood in the wheat field. She finally had her answers.
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