B-17 Ball Turret Gunner Survived 22,000 ft Fall Without A Chute

Average man was tougher back then.

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Good for him. I’d like to see him try to be a woman in America today and then let me know if he still thinks he’s tough. /s

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He's not a fruitbat so there's that

Look it up.

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I can't imagine what went through his head as he was falling.

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Probably a lot. Assuming that his terminal velocity was 120 mph and he reached that velocity in 5.5 seconds he was falling for around 2 minutes 8 seconds.

Falling never hurt anyone. Now, the sudden stop, that’s what gets ya.

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I can't imagine what went through his head as he was falling.

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Sounds like he was unconscious for most of the fall, which I’m sure he was grateful for.

How did he survive?

A few months later a British tail gunner in a Lancaster fell only 18,000 feet and survived:

History on Line

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Faced with a terrible choice – that of burning to death, or falling to his death, Alkemade chose the latter option. Better to suffer the brief terror of the fall and have a swift, merciful end than suffer through the torment of fire. He jumped from the burning plane without his parachute, and, falling at almost 120mph and looking up at the starry sky and the burning airplane from which he had just jumped, he lost consciousness.

Amazingly he woke up three hours later, lying in deep snow in a pine forest. It seemed that the flexible young pines had slowed his descent enough that the snow was able to cushion his fall. He had not broken any bones, but had managed to sprain his knee after his 18,000 foot fall from the sky. In addition, he had suffered burn wounds from the fire and had pieces of perspex from his flak-shattered screen embedded in his skin.

he was interrogated by the Gestapo.

He told them his story, but they refused to believe that he could have survived such a fall without a parachute. They insisted that he had buried his parachute somewhere and that he was a spy – but when they sent men to investigate the landing site, as well as the wreckage of Werewolf, they were amazed to find that the remains of Alkemade’s parachute were indeed still in the wreckage of the plane.

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Ah it was the Lancaster gunner. I conflated the two stories.