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204 Chapter 22 The Real Work During that hectic spring and summer of 2007 leading up to the trip of a lifetime for many of us, it seemed that there were a thousand details to be covered and a constellation of issues to be resolved. I made some changes in the list of scholarship students when the research skills and dedication of some became an issue, and we all continued to grind away at making Lee Lamar’s return to his past—and the bones of Bottoms Up—a success. But our viewpoint was of course skewed toward what we knew and what was happening from the American end of this international story. But in truth, much of the really important work was being done in Croatia by Luka Bekic and his colleagues at the Conservation Institute. While we were busy with researching the air campaign in Italy and Lee’s own personal saga, Bekic had been painstakingly seeking answers to questions that continued to nag him. All of this remarkable story might never have happened if key elements of persistence, curiosity, and luck had not all fallen into place. Bekic’s first email to Lee might easily have been deleted by anyone accustomed to scams on the internet from overseas sources. Lee, at 85, could also be excused for not being tech-savvy or for being computer-phobic. But he was, in fact, extremely adept at computers and understood the Internet. He assembled his first computer years before, and his engineer’s brain had been fascinated by the promise of the computer age. So, on Sunday, 17 September 2006, Lee and Bonnie’s fifty-sixth wedding anniversary, he had opened his email to find a message with the subject heading “B24 Airplane Crash Istria.” He clicked on the message: Dear mister Lee Lamar, my name is Luka Bekic, I am an archaeologist at Croatian conservation institute in Croatia. Excavating a roman villa, we have accidentally found an airplane crash site nearby, in a remote location near village Krvavici, Pula, Istra, Croatia. We recov- The Real Work 205 ered more than 3000 various parts of airplane and equipment. Investigating the finds, right now we know: A silver (aluminum) B24 with blue markings (probably US star) crashed northeast of Pula, near village Krvavici, Marcana (then Italy and Yugoslavia, now Croatia). Allegedly plane was hit by flak near Pula flying from mission in north Italy, at end of ’44. Some of the crew, about 5 of them, bailed out over village Filipana, and their whereabouts is not known. Two parachuted near crashsite itself, one was immediately taken prisoner by Wehrmacht, other was saved by partisans. Bekic detailed the eyewitness accounts of surviving villagers, and went on to add that he had found Lee’s story, placed on the Internet by the Nieman Elementary School of the Shawnee Mission School District. The details seemed to match. Lee and several other veterans had been interviewed by students of a special school group several years earlier, and the teacher and students had created a website of Lee’s wartime experiences. “Browsing through the internet we have read stories about your crash in Istria in 1944. Many things point out that our plane might have been Yours!” Attached to that first email were photos of many of the recovered aircraft parts. The email was an adrenaline shot for the old warhorse. Lee responded the next day: Dear Mister Luka Bekic, Thank you very much for your message. It is quite exciting for me. I believe you may possibly have found the aircraft crash remains belonging to our World War II B-24. I have not, however, been able to identify any thing on the picture you enclosed, except that it obviously is an American aircraft. Lee went on to detail his recollections from that last mission, recognizing the aid provided by courageous locals to several crewmembers. “Some had hardly landed in their parachutes before friendly people grabbed them up and hid them from the Wehrmacht.” He included his last view of Bottoms Up: My last visual image of the aircraft was, as I remember after many years, about a second before I landed. At that time the aircraft was just clipping the tops of some trees along the south edge of an open field. I did not see the aircraft crash, but as I picked myself up, I saw the smoke beginning to boil up from the crash site. At the time of my last observance...

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