By GENE KEMMETER
of The Gazette
A Stevens Point woman is moving toward closure of the World War II death of her brother in a plane crash in a British river.
Margery Aber traveled to Britain in June as some of the wreckage of the B-17 bomber piloted by her brother was removed from the River Stour in the estuary of Harwich, England.
With her was her younger sister, Jean Murphy of South Bend, Ind., and Major General Walter Longanecke, a career Air Force officer, who was supposed to be the co-pilot of the ill-fated flight but was replaced shortly before take-off.
Aber's brother was Lt. Col. Earle Aber, a 23-year-old U.S. Army Air Corps pilot from Racine who was piloting the plane named "Tondalago."
On March 4, 1945, the plane and its crew of nine was returning from a mission over Germany when a lone German plane invaded British air space. Anti-aircraft fire filled the sky and the "Tondalago" was hit.
Crew members were given the order to jump as Aber and co-pilot Maurice Harper, 21, stayed in the cockpit, trying to fly the plane. Crewman told her family Earle had said, "This is it, boys, bail out."
Margery Aber said one crewman told her family that he brought her brother a parachute and her brother told him to get out of the plane quickly.
That man jumped, she said, and just made it as the plane went down in flames after a large explosion.
All the crewmen who jumped survived, she said, including one whose chute didn't open but he landed in mud.
The day after the crash, a portion of her brother's arm was found in the river, identified by the Eagle Scout ring from the Boy Scouts of America that Earle Aber wore. The ring was sent to her mother, and Margery Aber said she started wearing the ring when she returned to Britain last month and people kept asking to see it.
The portion of his arm was subsequently buried in a military cemetery in Cambridge, as subsequent searches failed to turn up anything more around the crash site.
Aber said her brother wasn't flying as frequently as he had been earlier in the war, but had more than 100 missions before the fateful flight. He was in charge of 500 to 700 men on a base and his unit dropped leaflets from the air on selected sites.
He had helped to develop the leaflet strategy, she said, using an explosive to spread the leaflet closer to the target area instead of having them flitter down to the ground from the plane in a more scattered area.
He was a lead plane for leaflets on D-Day, advising French citizens of the invasion, and wound up receiving a number of awards from the U.S. and its allies, including the Croix de Guerre from France.
After Earle's death, her mother received a wonderful letter from the British prime minister thanking him for the service he had given to the country, Margery said.
Margery said she vividly remembers the day she learned of her brother's death. "That's a day I'll never forget."
A longtime music professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Margery was teaching in strings at an elementary school in Detroit, Mich. She had stayed overnight with a student's family and went home on Sunday, March 17.
Her landlady said to call her father in Racine and she decided to travel home after learning the news.
Earle was the only boy in the family of four and played the violin, including performances on radio. "I think he was more gifted than I was," she said.
He often credited the Boy Scouts for developing his abilities, she said, and "would get his buddies together and make up a skit."
He graduated from Purdue University and decided to go into the Air Corps because he liked flying. He was slim, she said, and was accepted for service after he ate a big breakfast and drank eight glasses of water.
Flyers trousers were called "pinks," and Margery said her mother made a skirt for her from a pair of her brother's discarded trousers.
She said she hopes to write a biography about her brother, with the help of her sisters, including her older sister, Georgia Galbraith of Florida, who was supposed to go to Britain with her but took ill and couldn't go.
Margery has already written some things about him as a young child, while Georgia knows more about his middle years and Jean knows more about his years at Purdue because she lived near him then and he visited her.
The family also has all his letters and diaries from his military years, Margery said.
The family and the British have always known approximately where the plane was, she said, because the tail was periodically visible during times of low tide. The river is about a mile wide where the plane went down.
Her father had been to Britain to look around the river, and Margery had been there twice before also.
Her nephew, a scientist, was in Britain last year giving lectures and wanted to see where the plane had gone down, he said, so he went to the river, meeting a man who had seen the tail sticking out of the water.
After that, the family wrote letters to the government, asking to give Earle and his co-pilot a proper burial, "thinking we could get the whole of him."
The government consented, and recovered other bits from the plane, some of which Margery has.
But now the family is awaiting the identification of bones found in about four to five feet of mud in the plane's wreckage. The bones were near the bomb bay, indicating the two were trying to get out, she said.
Also found in the wreckage were two silk scarves that are maps of the area the flight went over so crews would know where to go if they crashed. Those scarves will hang in a museum in Hawaii, Margery said.
The bones are also going to Hawaii for identification. Once they are identified, a family member will go to pick up the bones. Her brother's will be taken to Cambridge to be buried with the portion of his hand.
"That will be the final closure," she said. "But one of the hard things for me, is talking about bones. What is most important is his spirit. He had a wonderful spirit."