Tony Eff (not monetised)

March 24, 1944. A British Lancaster bomber is on its way home from a raid on Berlin when a German night fighter tears into it. The plane catches fire. The crew is ordered to bail out. In the tail turret, 21 year old gunner Nicholas Alkemade turns around to grab his parachute. It's on fire. Rear gunners on the Lancaster sat in a tiny, cramped turret at the very back of the plane. There was no room for a parachute in there with them, so it was stored just inside the fuselage. Alkemade opened the door and watched his parachute burn up in front of him. The flames were coming for him. His oxygen mask was melting. His clothes were starting to burn. He had two choices. Stay in the plane and burn alive. Or jump. Without a parachute. From around 18,000 feet. More than three miles up. He later said he decided he'd rather die quickly than burn. So he turned the turret, opened the doors, and threw himself backward into the night sky. He fell for what must have felt like forever. He said that at one point he felt strangely calm, like he was lying on a cloud, and assumed he was about to die. Then he blacked out. He woke up lying in deep snow beneath a stand of pine trees, staring up at the stars. The branches had broken his fall, and the snow had cushioned the landing. He had burns, cuts, and a badly twisted knee. That was it. No broken bones. The first thing he reportedly did was light a cigarette. He couldn't walk far, so he blew his whistle until Germans came and found him. And that's when his problems started. The Germans didn't believe him. Why would they? An enemy airman with no parachute, claiming he had just fallen out of the sky. They assumed he was a spy who had sneaked in somehow and was lying about it. The Gestapo interrogated him. Alkemade begged them to go look at the wreck of his bomber. So they did. They found the Lancaster's remains, and the burned harness from his parachute. The clips showed it had never even been attached. Everything matched his story. The Germans were so stunned that they gave him a written certificate confirming that he had fallen from his aircraft without a parachute and survived. His fellow prisoners in the POW camp reportedly treated him like a celebrity. He spent the rest of the war as a prisoner at Stalag Luft III, the same camp made famous by the Great Escape. After the war he went back to an ordinary life in England. Factory work. A family. He lived until 1987. Three miles. No parachute. A cigarette in the snow.