Paratroopers make a big deal about jumping out of planes from 800 feet, but U.S. Army Air Force Staff Sgt. Alan Magee fell out of a plane at 22,000 feet without a parachute while the plane was on fire.
And he lived.
Magee was a ball turret gunner in a B-17 Flying Fortress named “Snap! Crackle! Pop!” after the three mascots for Rice Krispies cereal. That plane, along with others from the 360th Squadron, was sent to bomb German torpedo stores in Saint-Nazaire, France on January 3, 1943.
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During the mission, anti-aircraft guns shot at the “Snap! Crackle! Pop!” and the B-17 soon became a ball of flames. Magee maneuvered his way into the fuselage to retrieve his parachute and bail out, but flak had shredded it.
As Magee was trying to figure out a new plan, a second flak burst tore through the aircraft and then a fighter blasted it with machine-gun fire.
“I Know Nothing of Life”
Magee was knocked unconscious and thrown from the aircraft. When he woke up, he was falling through the air with nothing but a prayer.
“I don’t wish to die because I know nothing of life,” Magee told God, according to reports from the 303rd Bomb Group.
Not wanting to see the distance between himself and the ground rapidly decreasing, Magee turned his body so he was looking skyward. Struggling with a shortage of oxygen and likely in shock from the events of the past few minutes, he passed out again.
God seemingly answered his prayer.
The young noncommissioned officer fell into the town of Saint-Nazaire and through the glass roof of the train station. German soldiers later found Magee dangling on the steel girders that supported the ceiling.
A German Doctor Treated Magee
U.S. Paratrooper (World War II)
The glass had slowed his fall, and he regained consciousness as the Germans took him to medical care.
Magee broke his right leg and ankle, he sustained 28 wounds from shrapnel and glass, and his right arm was cut nearly the whole way off. He had also suffered numerous internal injuries.
“I owe the German military doctor who treated me a debt of gratitude,” Magee said. “He told me, ‘We are enemies, but I am first a doctor, and I will do my best to save your arm.’”
Doctors didn’t have to amputate Magee’s arm, and he eventually made a full recovery. He spent most of the rest of the war as a prisoner of war.
Returning to the Site of His Fall
In 1995, Magee returned to France as part of a ceremony sponsored by French citizens to thank Allied service members for their efforts in the war.
Magee saw monuments to the crew of the “Snap! Crackle! Pop!,” including the nose art that had been used as a Nazi trophy until a French man recovered it after World War II. It was restored in 1989.
During his trip, Magee visited the site of the train station where he landed five decades earlier. Recalling his harrowing experience, Magee said simply: “I thought it was much smaller.”
