The American Airman Who Survived a 22,000 Foot Fall Without a Parachute
Alan Eugene Magee (1919 – 2003) joined the United States Army Air Force immediately after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. After completing aerial gunnery training, he became a B-17 ball turret gunner, and was sent to join the Eighth Air Force in Britain. He joined the crew of a Flying Fortress nicknamed Snap! Crackle! Pop! that was part of the 360th Bomb Squadron of the 303rd Bomb Group. Magee’s seventh mission, on January 3rd, 1943, was a daylight raid against Saint-Nazaire in France. It ended with him falling over 22,000 feet from his B-17, without a parachute. While bombing U-boat pens in Saint-Nazaire, Alan Magee’s ball turret took a flak hit that rendered it inoperative. Exiting, he discovered that his parachute had been shredded. Before he had time to contemplate the implications, another flak hit destroyed the B-17’s right wing, started an uncontrollable fire, and sent the bomber spinning towards earth.
Magee blacked from lack of oxygen as he crawled to the plane’s front. Unconscious, he fell out of the dying B-17. He plummeted for four miles, crashed through Saint-Nazaire railroad station’s glass roof, which shattered and observed some of the impact, then slammed into the station’s floor. He was injured, but alive. The fall left Magee a bloody mess. In addition to 28 shrapnel wounds he took in the B-17, he sustained damage to his nose, an eye, lung, kidney, had several broken bones, plus a nearly severed right arm. Nonetheless, he had miraculously survived. Magee spent the rest of the war in a POW camp, until he was liberated in 1945. In 1993, on the 50th anniversary of his fall, Saint-Nazaire erected a monument in honor of Magee and the crew of Snap! Crackle! Pop!
