The Man Who Rode the Thunder is a helluva story… Haven’t read it since about 1970, but it was about a Marine fighter pilot, LTC William Rankin who punched out of his dead F-8 at 47,000 feet and took a fourty (40)-minute parchute ride through a thunderstorm… It was 50 below zero and he wasn’t wearing a pressure suit either, but he was still managed to hook up his bail-out bottle of O2… Immediate frostbite and decompression set in, he was beaten by hailstones, described lightning as blades several feet thick, was deafened by the thunder, man… He was just all ate up… Updrafts kept sending him back up…
“While We’re At It” Dept:
Flight Sergeant Nicholas Alkemade, as told by Sergeant Roy Keen
In 1944, Roy Keen 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!”
The Story:
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.
