One of the strange stories of WW2 involves a crew member of a B-17 on a bombing mission over France in 1943. The Flying Fortress was hit directly by German flak and airman Alan E. Magee was sucked out of the plane without a parachute at 22,000 ft altitude! He lost consciousness, but fell right through the glass roof of the St. Naziare railroad station! Dumbfounded German occupation troops came to his aid and got him to a nearby hospital where he recovered for 3 months. His miraculous survival was told everywhere. Only two other airmen (1 from the USSR and one from Britain) survived similar falls w/o parachutes. A year earlier Lt. Chisov's Il-4 bomber was hit and he fell from 22,000 ft also, hitting a snow covered slope and sliding down a ravine with a fractured pelvis and some spinal injury. In 1944 over the Ruhr Nicholas Alkemade of the RAF had to bail from his bomber (most likely a Lanc) from 18,000 ft and came crashing through a line of fir trees into 1.5 feet of snow with minor injuries. The Germans thought him a spy until he showed that his parachute harnass snaps went unused (the Brits stored their chutes on a rack inside the bomber and in this case as it went up in flames, Alkemade made the decison to jump rather than burn to death in a downward dive).