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144 Chapter 14 “Vor You, Der Var Iss Ofer” Bottoms Up was in the last few seconds of her life as an airplane. Running now on just two engines, with her controls shot away and headed for earth at 180 mph in a great sweeping left turn, the huge bomber was soon going to become a pile of burning scrap. Lamar realized he had no time to think about what he had to do. Standing at the front of the photo hatch in the back of the mortally wounded plane, he dropped head-first into the void. From his first ride as a student in a Piper J-3 at St. Joseph’s Rosecrans Field, Lamar had assumed that this day would come, sooner or later. So long as he was a pilot, particularly a military pilot during wartime, he always thought that he would have to rely on his parachute. Although pilot and aircrew training did not involve the actual use of a parachute, he had sat through countless intelligence briefings advising airmen on what to expect if they had to bail out of their stricken aircraft, actions to be taken in the air and once on the ground. Those briefings came back to him now as he began the prescribed tuck-androll , essentially turning a somersault in the air. The recommended procedure was a full roll, and a count to ten before pulling the ripcord to release the white silk canopy of the parachute.1 This delayed deployment would allow the airman to avoid getting struck by the airplane, or getting a ’chute tangled with some part of it, it and would also mean being less of a target. It was not unheard of for airmen coming down, helpless beneath the canopy, to be shot as they descended. For about the first third of his forward roll, Lamar thought about the delayed count. For the next half second, or the second third of the roll, he realized that he was far too low to delay pulling his ripcord. He jerked hard on the D-ring, ignoring the fact that the metal wire cord had pulled out once during his struggles to get past the bomb bay and might not function at all. The result was stunning, in a very physical sense. The ’chute, no doubt aided by some propeller wash, snapped open with a vengeance, the G-forces resulting “Vor You, Der Var Iss Ofer” 145 from the collision of speed and rapid deceleration slamming Lamar’s head to the right. Just as the canopy blossomed, he was able to look over his shoulder. He saw Bottoms Up in a nearly level attitude just clipping a line of trees perhaps a half mile away. At that instant he hit the ground, hard. It had been just seconds since he jumped. He looked over in the direction of the crash, where a plume of dense, oily black smoke was already boiling up from the shattered bomber, smoke fed by fuel, oil, tires, and a host of other flammable items aboard. He could see a white strip, a parachute that looked as though it had only partially deployed. “Must have been Webb,” he thought to himself. “His ’chute didn’t open, poor guy.” Lamar quickly gathered his own canopy in both arms and looked around for somewhere to hide both it and himself. Intelligence officers had advised aircrew to hide their ’chutes and try to hide out until the end of the second day. The Germans would probably have stopped looking for them after that. Then, they could try to evade capture and work their way back to Allied territory. Lamar had landed in a field bounded by low stone walls, coming down hard on an exposed layer of worn rock at the apex of a low hill that commanded a view of fields and patches of trees all around. There had been no time to prepare for the impact, and now he found that his right knee would not support his weight unless he locked it in a straight position. His arms were full of the white silk parachute canopy and the long nylon shrouds that connected the canopy to his harness, and he awkwardly hobbled down the hill toward the intersection of two stone walls. There he pushed aside a tangle of sticks and leaves that had been swept by wind into the angle. He clawed at the earth with his bare hands, able only to scrape a...

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