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Offbeat Warfare Facts that Will Confound History Buffs

Khalid Elhassan February 15, 2021 36 min

Consolidated B-24 Liberator - Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress — Staff Sgt. Alan E. Magee poses for the camera halfway into his ball turret. Historic Wings

10. The Strange Survival of Flight Sergeant Nicholas Alkemade

A gallows humor joke often told by parachutists is that it is not the falling from high up that kills you. It is the sudden stop at the end that does you in. The preceding is a good rule of thumb, but like most rules, it has some exceptions. One such was RAF Flight Sergeant Nicholas Stephen Alkemade (1922 – 1987), who on the night of March 24^th, 1944, was serving as a rear gunner in an Avro Lancaster heavy bomber.

Nicholas Alkemade’s fall. La Bruja la Verde

Alkemade’s Lancaster, part of No. 115 Squadron RAF, was returning from a nighttime raid that had bombed Berlin when it was attacked by a Ju 88 night fighter. The attack set Alkemade’s bomber aflame, and it began to spiral out of control. Unfortunately, his parachute was burned in the fire. With the flames licking towards him, Alkemade jumped out of the bomber, preferring to die by impact rather than get burned to death. He fell 18,000 feet to the ground, but as seen below, by some strange twist of fate, he survived.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.