Over a million Allied airmen flew missions over occupied Europe during WWII, and many of their planes were shot down. The parachute played a pivotal role in saving the lives of tens of thousands of these troops. Fascinating stories of miraculous parachute drops abound. Here are some of the experiences of Royal Air Force (RAF) flyers.
First, a little information about the process of parachuting during WWII is in order. Once a soldier left his aircraft, either by jumping or being blown out, he fell at about 175 feet a second – 120 miles an hour. After his parachute fully opened, his descent slowed to 19 – 21 feet per second – about 11 miles an hour. If the parachute was dry and had been freshly packed, once he pulled his ripcord, the parachute fully opened in one to two seconds. The faster the aircraft traveled, the quicker the chute opened.
The closer the soldier was to the ground, the more dangerous his landing and chance of death. If a man jumped from an aircraft that was diving, he would fall at a faster rate, and a thousand feet above ground might have been too low for his parachute to open.
RAF Flight Lieutenant Dudley Davis defied these odds. On July 21, 1940, he flew his Hampden aircraft over the Wilhelmshaven harbor at fifty feet above the water and dropped a mine under the German battleship Tirpitz. It was timed to explode an hour after release.
Two other Hampdens flew in separately for the same purpose. A high-level diversionary bombing attack was scheduled for a few minutes before their arrival. However, unexpected winds interfered with the operation, and the diversionary attack was over when the Hampdens arrived. The flak guns gave the three enemy aircraft all of their attention. Davis’ plane was the last to arrive, and streams of flak set his plane on fire before he arrived at the docks.
The Hampden continued flying with fuel tanks ablaze, and Davis dropped the mine close beside the Tirpitz. By this time, flames were spurting up through the cockpit floor, and the plane was too low for Davis to order his crew to jump. With the cabin behind him on fire and heavy smoke in the cockpit, Davis open the hood, crouched on the starboard wing, and clung to the cockpit edge. As the aircraft began to roll to starboard, Davis pulled his ripcord. He was no more than fifty feet above the water.
Davis’ canopy filled and snatched him backwards off the wing. His back hit the plane, bounced off, and hit something else. He discovered he was lying on his side on a stone pier. He stood up and was unhurt except for a few bruises and a minor face burn. He was immediately captured and spent the next five years in a German prison camp.
The Germans were outfitting the newly launched Tirpitz at the time, so the explosion from the mine delayed its completion. Crew members from the other two Hampdens also survived by parachuting from their planes which were shot down.
During the Battle of France in the spring of 1940, Flight Lieutenant Crews and wireless operator/air gunner Evans flew out of their base at Rheims, France, to bomb a vital bridge on the German invasion route at the German-Belgian frontier. About thirty miles from their target, they encountered heavy fire from German antiaircraft gunners from the convoys below. The ack-ack smashed the plane’s instrument panel.
When Crews flew within sight of the target, anti-aircraft fire blasted a big hole behind the engine, causing burning gasoline to stream back under his seat in the cockpit. At this point, Crews was flying over rolling wooded country with no place to land. He shouted for his men to bale out. He slid the hood back, and flames gushed up, burning his legs and face. They were no more than 200 or 300 feet above the trees, and the plane would go no higher.
Crews didn’t doubt that he must jump, but he didn’t expect to survive. He stepped out on to the wing root and pulled his ripcord as he dove off. He closed his eyes, hit the trees seconds later, felt burning on his face from pine needles scraping his skin, and then experienced a tremendous jolt.
Crews discovered “he was hanging on his rigging lines held from the top branches of a pine tree by the half-opened canopy” only six feet above the ground. Two yards away, Evans was suspended in another tree in the same way. They stared at each other. “Apart from minor cuts and bruises neither was injured.” Their plane was burning on the ground only thirty feet away. Crews and Evans tried to escape through the German lines but were captured and held prisoner for the next five years.
Rear gunner Ken Downing served on an RAF Hampden on April 18, 1941 when he and his fellow crew members bombed a German airfield in Cherbourg, France. Downing’s aircraft was protected by a cloud blanket over the French coast until it broke through the clouds at 900 feet. The plane dropped to 850 feet, bombed the fighters sitting on the airfield, and pulled up to escape into the cloud. A shell of anti-aircraft fire hit the port engine which burst into flames. The pilot announced he would try to land the Hampden, but gave permission for everyone else to bale out.
Downing pulled the jettison wire on the main door of the Hampden, but it would not release. He lost valuable time kicking the door until it finally gave way. Downing pulled the ripcord on his parachute as he slid out of the Hampden. His head just missed the horizontal stabilizer, and his chute, which was streaming, cleared the aircraft. Because he was facing up, Downing didn’t know how close he was to the ground. His body jolted, his harness tightened, and he blacked out for a few seconds.
When Downing opened his eyes, he discovered he was sitting on the ground in deep soft mud, the only patch of mud in the vicinity. “Less than ten yards away on the other side of a hedge was the burning wreck of the Hampden.” Downing’s parachute lay close enough that the top of the canopy caught on fire. There were no other chutes near him – he was the lone survivor. Ammunition from the Hampden exploded, forcing Downing to crawl away on his broken right thigh and leg.
German airmen ran across the field and took Downing to the naval hospital at Cherbourg. The next day the German commander at the airfield visited Downing and congratulated him for his successful jump from 130 feet (almost unheard of). He spent the next four years in captivity.
Lieutenant Commander P.E.I. Bailey and another pilot flew their RAF Seafire planes across the English Channel on the second day of D-Day. Their job was to spot for “the naval ships whose guns were supporting the ground forces in their drive inland” between Boulogne and Dieppe. “No sooner were they within range of the first ships than they were vigorously fired upon. Quickly they turned round and flew out to sea again.” The gunnery officers on the ships had mistaken them for the enemy. Bailey later learned that German fighters had strafed the fleet only minutes before.
Bailey reached one of the headquarter ships by radio and was promised his message about being fired upon would be passed along. The two pilots flew in again, were shot at again, and retreated again. Bailey radioed the headquarters ship once more and was told to wait ten minutes before returning. Ten minutes later, Bailey returned. As he passed directly over a heavily armed anti-aircraft cruiser, the ship opened fire, spraying the two planes with metal. The tail of Bailey’s plane broke off, and the nose went down. At 400 feet above the sea, he couldn’t get his damaged hood to open more than nine inches. The plane continued diving toward the beach. At about 250 feet, although he was still trapped in the cockpit, Bailey pulled the ripcord on his parachute.
Next, the drop tank on Bailey’s plane exploded, and as the aircraft disintegrated, Bailey was blown out. His chute opened and jolted him right before he bumped onto the beach. “The wind filled his canopy, and he was hauled off along the beach, dragged on his back over the sand.” The canopy of Bailey’s parachute detonated small anti-personnel mines attached to stakes near the water’s edge before Bailey reached those areas.
Bailey succeeded in stopping his runaway chute, undid his harness, and discovered he was uninjured. A group of British beach commandos surrounded him, thinking they’d captured a German airman. After all, a British ship had shot him down, and he was wearing black flying overalls. The commandos pointed their guns at Bailey. He didn’t have any proof that he was British, so the soldiers marched him off to a temporary wire cage, housing 150 disgruntled-looking German prisoners. By this time Bailey was quite disgruntled. He protested the whole way, but no one listened to him.
A captured German officer, who spoke perfect English, was also in the cage. He told the British soldiers that Bailey wasn’t a German airman, but no one listened to him either. Finally, after two hours in the cage, Bailey drew the attention of a British officer who took him to a brigadier. The brigadier telephoned and established Bailey’s identity and ordered him released. He returned to England the next day.
In July 1940, Sergeant Roger Peacock’s Blenheim was seriously damaged by flak when returning to Britain after a bombing run near Wilhemshaven, Germany. Peacock was the mid-upper gunner on the flight. (See the gunner turret midway back on the aircraft pictured above.)
After both engines stopped on the Blenheim, the pilot gave the order to bale out at 6,500 feet, and he and the observer jumped. Unfortunately, Peacock didn’t hear the order. The aircraft went into a slow spiral dive at about 4,000 feet, and Peacock didn’t know if the pilot would recover in time.
Twice Peacock called over the intercom, asking if he should bale out, but no one responded. He figured the guys up front were too busy to reply. After waiting until the plane had descended to 1000 feet above the ground, he asked again if he should bale out. No reply. So he removed his parachute and moved forward to the cockpit. Finding he was the only person left on the aircraft, Peacock returned for his parachute, clipped it on and looked out the escape hatch. The altimeter registered he was at 450 feet.
Peacock jumped. Even though it was dark, he detected the black carpet of the ground below him. His parachute began to stream; however, he knew he’d jumped too late. Then a miracle unfolded. “The Blenheim crashed under him and exploded. A blinding orange flash lit up the ground for hundreds of yards.” This caused “a great upsurge of hot air. A few feet from the ground the blast snapped his canopy fully open and blew him upwards and sideways away from the blazing aircraft. When he landed safely a few moments later he was some distance from the wreckage, in another field.”
Because Peacock stayed with his aircraft for so long, he overtook the pilot and observer who had baled out much earlier, and he reached the ground before them. The pilot came down close to Peacock five minutes later, and the observer landed in a ditch several miles away.
On a training flight in a R.A.F. Wellington, Sergeant F. W. R. Cumpsty baled out right before his aircraft crashed in the Welsh mountains. He was only fifty feet above a mountain top. A gale-force wind carried him away from the top and into a valley, allowing time for Cumpsty’s chute to open. “He landed safely 200 feet below the peak.”
After his Stirling Bomber was shot down by flak over France in 1944, Flight Engineer Joseph Cashmore baled out from below 300 feet. The flight was halfway across France and traveling at 300 feet to avoid radar detection when searchlights revealed its presence to the enemy. After the ensuing bombardment destroyed the plane, the pilot ordered his men to bale but then rescinded the order while he attempted to bring the Stirling higher. He wasn’t successful.
Each crew member prepared to jump. Cashmore went to the rear floor escape hatch and kicked the locking handles that were preventing the hatch from opening. They broke off. Cashmore and the flight sergeant beside him each insisted that the other jump first. By the time Cashmore exited, the bomber was in its last dive.
After pulling his ripcord, Cashmore “felt a sharp jerk as the harness tightened between his thighs and a thud, after which he knew no more.” He came to but had no injuries. “He had landed in a depression which contained the only patch of deep snow in the whole field.”
The French Underground rescued Cashmore, but the Germans captured him escaping near the Swiss frontier. After the war, he returned to England and was appointed Warrant Officer-in-charge of an enemy prisoner-of-war camp. Unteroffizier Heinz Ulrich was a prisoner there and, after learning that Cashmore had flown in Stirlings, bragged to Cashmore that he had earned an Iron Cross for shooting a Stirling down in 1944.
The date was March 4th, the same night Cashmore had been shot down. Cashmore grabbed a map of France and had Ulrich point out where the kill had taken place and at what time. Both answers, along with other descriptions, matched up with Cashmore’s ill-fated flight. Ulrich was the man who had ended Cashmore’s active participation in the war. The two became friends, and after Ulrich’s release, they corresponded for several years.
Flight Sergeant Eric Sanderson served as Rear Gunner on a Halifax named ‘R’ for Robert. On the night of March 22, 1944, Sanderson flew on the last operation of his tour. On their way to bomb Frankfurt, Germany, a strong force of enemy fighters attacked Sanderson’s bomber group. After watching the fighters go after the bombers behind them, Sanderson was ready. Sure enough, he spotted a Ju88 lurking under their tail, and he notified the crew.
Sanderson’s pilot initiated several maneuvers, diving, climbing, turning, performing a corkscrew, but the enemy fighter stayed with them, below and just out of reach of the bomber’s guns. As a desperate measure, the pilot rolled the Halifax on its belly so the mid-upper gunner could shoot down at the fighter. The fighter took advantage and hit them with his cannon fire, igniting the incendiaries on the “R.” With the wing root on fire, the pilot ordered all bombs to be released, but the mechanism didn’t work.
The fire moved to the fuselage, and the pilot called for his crew to jump. The other members left through the main door and the nose hatch, but Sanderson was left to wind his turret 90 degrees by hand and attempt to tumble backwards out of the turret. Unfortunately, when he swung down, his legs caught under the dashboard. He dangled upside down and could not swing back up into the turret to release his legs. Flames from the aircraft poured over him, searing his hands and face.
Courtesy of Author Martin Čížek via Creative Commons and Wikimedia
Sanderson expected to die. He didn’t know how close he was to the ground, but by this time, the “R” had descended from 16,000 feet to 1,000 feet, which he later learned. Suddenly, Sanderson decided to pull the ripcord on his parachute, hoping he’d be snatched clear. He was now below 400 feet. His chute rapidly filled and Sanderson felt as if his body had been torn in half. He saw the trees below him and then passed out.
Sanderson, lying on his back, awoke to utter darkness and silence. He thought he had died. But his vision and hearing slowly returned, and joy filled him when he realized he was alive after all. He moved his head and his arms, but he had no feeling in his legs. He sat up, but only saw a tangled twisted mass where his legs should have been. Upon further inspection, his legs and feet were intact but tangled up in his Mae West and harness. After untangling himself, he was able to stand.
Next Sanderson pressed a patch of snow to his face, which was bleeding from severe burns. A flap of loose skin hung from the his burned hand holding the snow. He crawled on his hands and knees to where he could observe the burning Halifax. Sanderson called to four German soldiers nearby. After running over to him and flashing a lamp in his face, they carried him off to a village.
Sanderson’s face and hands and broken collar bone healed in a prison hospital. “The only damage his legs suffered in their violent exit from the turret” were torn ligaments and muscles in his legs. All of his fellow crewman who bailed from the “R” for Robert landed safely, and Sanderson met them in captivity.
Source:
Mackersey, Ian. Into the Silk: The Dramatic True Stories of Airmen Who Baled Out – and Lived. Sapere Books.