I have heard a couiple of times an account of an RAF Bomber Command gunner who’s plane was hit badly over Germany. The plane caught fire and the order was given to bail out. Apparently he went for his parachute but found it ablaze. Not wanting to burn to death, he decided to jump. There were at high altitude – 20,000 feet or more apparently.
He freefell till he hit a very tall pine tree, who’s soft branches slowed him, and he landed in several feet of snow. Amazingly – according to the story – he walked away with just a grazed – or perhaps broken depending who tells it – elbow.
I know this really happened because they used this case among many others in my training in the RNZAF when I did my parachite packing and maintenance phase of my Safety Equipment Workers trade course. And I have heard people mention it in bars, etc.
One account, and I’m almost sure it was my course instructor, stated the gunner was actually a New Zealander,
I’d really love to find out who the chap was, what the real extent of his injuries were, and what happened to him subsequently after his fall to earth. Was he captured? Is he still alive?
It’s a great story, one in a billion chance of survival I guess.
By: trumper - 26th September 2004 at 20:04
🙂 Have a chat with the very nice knowledgable chaps from the Rear gunners association who have a hangar full of Rear turrets, http://www.yorkshireairmuseum.co.uk/
http://www.yorkshireairmuseum.co.uk/collections/airgunners/index.asp
We had a wonderful chat with some of these guys at the last airdisplay,they told us many tales that would make you’re hair go grey just thinking about it. 🙂
By: macky42 - 26th September 2004 at 17:20
I believe that a Russian flyer also joined this exclusive club during WWII, as I recall he ended up sliding across a frozen lake or something like that.
Possibly duff memory, but for those of you old enough, didn’t F/Sgt. Alkemade appear on ‘What’s my Line’ on the TV once? (For those who don’t know, a panel have to guess the contestant’s unusual work/story/experience etc.).
By: planejunky - 26th September 2004 at 16:35
I believe that F/Sgt Alkemade did appear in the Guiness Book of Records at one point for this.
Indeed he did, I remember reading it as a kid and was amazed then too. Funny this thread should spring up now as I was only thinking about this incident last week and wondered who it was!
By: Auster Fan - 26th September 2004 at 16:06
I believe that F/Sgt Alkemade did appear in the Guiness Book of Records at one point for this.
By: Dave Homewood - 26th September 2004 at 15:51
Thank you for that, finally some proof. I’ve wondered for nearly 15 years now about this.
I know there have been cases of this happening since the war, parachutists surviving a jump where the chute fails, but are there any others known in wartime? Did any others manage to jump without a chute and survive?
By: SqL Scramble. - 26th September 2004 at 15:29
This is Sergeant Roy Keen’s account
In 1944, Roy was flying with 166 Squadron, from RAF Kirmington near Grimsby (today Humberside Airport). On 24 March, flying in Lancaster III ND620/AS-I, he was shot down on a raid to Berlin. One of 44 Lancasters lost that night, his was one story from over three hundred downed…
“In Stalagluft 3 I met a guy who was shot down the night before me, but he jumped out without a parachute. The night we were shot down was very snowy, and he fell through trees into a snowdrift. When I met him he’d just got a bit of sticky plaster over one of his eyebrows!”
Flight Sergeant Nicholas Alkemade jumped from his Lancaster at 18,000 feet to escape the holocaust of his blazing bomber, leaving behind his useless parachute that had been torn to shreds by shrapnel. His headlong fall was broken by a fir tree and he finally landed in an eighteen inch snow-drift, without a single fracture. Naturally, the Luftwaffe authorities were highly suspicious of his story of falling from such a height without a parachute, but on investigation they found his shredded and unused ‘chute in the crashed remains of the aircraft. Tail gunners had to stash their ‘chutes inside the fuselage, and when Alkemade opened the rear hatch of his turret, he found flames raging inside the plane and his only means of escape a blazing mass of silk. Faced with the choice of falling to his death or burning to a crisp, he rotated the turret and did a back somersault into space, 18,000 feet above Germany. Falling at speeds of up to 120mph, it would have taken him about two minutes to hit the ground. He was fantastically lucky. First, he blacked out during the fall, ensuring his body would not be dangerously rigid and tense on impact. Second, he fell into a dense pine forest, whose branches broke his fall, and then into a deep snowdrift. He survived with nothing worse than a somewhat twisted ankle. Alkemade’s case is particularly well-researched because the Germans who found him discovered that his parachute harness had not been used and suspected him of being a spy. A Luftwaffe probe, involving an investigation of the crashed bomber, proved the airman’s story, and Alkemade was shipped off into captivity. He survived the war and eventually passed away on 22 June 1987.
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September 26, 2004 at 2:53 pm