WWII pilot, crash survivor honors fallen comrades

In the slanting sunlight of a chilly English afternoon, an 89-year-old World War II pilot from Huntington helped lay a wreath on the graves of two of his crew members who perished in an air crash 65 years ago.

The pilot, Norman Landberg, had been at the controls of a B-24 when instrument failure led to the midnight crash in farmland near where the crew members now are buried.

Last month, for the first time since the war's end, Landberg returned to the accident site for a ceremony honoring the members of his crew.

"I had trouble coming to grips with why I was living and they were dead," Landberg said in an interview after returning to his Huntington home. "I wanted to pay my respects."

The Nov. 15, 1944, crash northwest of London killed Pfc. Leonard L. Smith, of Brooklyn, and 2nd Lt. Walter S. Lamson, of Minnesota, two of what surviving crew members said was a tight-knit, nine-member bombing crew made up of men in their early 20s. The crash happened during a heavy fog and after instruments failed.

"What bothered me was they never had a chance to live," Landberg said. "They died so young and nobody was there to grieve for them. Everyone was so busy with the war. We drank a few beers, cried on each other's shoulders and went back to flying again."

To attend the ceremony, which drew about 1,000 people, Landberg traveled by airplane for the first time since the end of the war. Though he went on to fly some 40 combat missions after the crash, the fatal accident has anguished him all these years.

"I sort of avoid flying," said Landberg, who was based in Cheddington, Buckinghamshire, England, with the U.S. Army Air Forces' 36th Bombardment Squadron during World War II. "I had my fill."

Like any tough memory of war, Landberg said he had mostly buried the incident inside himself over the years. After flying a B-24 from the Azores to what was then Bradley Field in Hartford, when his service was completed, he climbed from the cockpit and never flew again.

He built a home in Huntington in the early 1950s, raised a family there, and drove the country as a salesman for manufactured goods.

But by the 1990s, unknown to Landberg, the English countryside began disgorging his past.

A farmer plowing the field into which Landberg had crashed began finding bits and parts of Landberg's airplane, harsh reminders of the high price paid during the war. A man named Chas Jellis, a history-buff cousin of the farmer, regarded the parts like pieces of a puzzle. First, he traced the identity of the bomber itself; then, after years of research, he tracked the names of the crew.

In 1996, the telephone rang in Landberg's home. It was Jellis.

For Landberg, the chance to begin unburdening himself of a lifetime of wartime grief had arrived.

Over the following years, Landberg told details to Jellis that helped him organize a memorial to the crew of the B-24.

Jellis' interest stemmed from his own connection to the war. His maternal grandfather had been a part of the Royal Navy's D-Day operation. His paternal grandfather had been a firefighter during the Nazi bombings of London.

Last year, Jellis began organizing a ceremony to honor the crew of the ill-fated bomber. On their own initiative, his family erected a stone monument in a field it owns that overlooks the crash site.

"These young men gave their all for me to live my life a free man," Jellis wrote in an e-mail. "So the least I can do is to honour these men."

The crew's tail gunner, George Eberwine, 84, the only other surviving crew member to attend, helped Landberg lay the wreaths at the grave sites.

"He was very moved and quiet," Eberwine, of Lafayette Hill, Pa., said of Landberg. "You could see tears in his eyes."

Eberwine described Landberg as a "conservative" pilot whose flying skill had delivered the crew from many harrowing missions.

He said Landberg should not have been haunted all these years by that foggy midnight in 1944.

"I think he was thinking what a shame it happened while he was piloting the plane," Eberwine said. "But I think he put too much blame on himself. He brought us home safely through so much during the war."