Salty Sam’s Fun Blog for Children
Number 592
Nicholas Alkemade
Hello Everyone
l don’t know this name Salty Sam, l hear you say.
Well, no you probably don’t.
But when l tell you his story, you will be glad that l did, because it is a very interesting one.
lt is full of bravery and daring – a proper adventure!
You can see from his photograph at the top of the page that he was an airman in WWll. He was a trained Air Gunner.
So here is his story…
He was born on 10th December 1922, in North Walsham, Norfolk.
He became a market gardener, that meant he grew vegetables, but when war broke out he went to join the RAF and was stationed in Cambridgeshire in the east of England.
On the night of 24th March 1944, he was flying as a rear gunner in a Lancaster bomber the crew had named Werewolf.
lt was hit in an air battle.
On this particular night, the plane was part of a flight of 811 planes which had been ordered to bomb Berlin.
The 7 man crew had returned from many successful raids before, but on the way back from their mission, they encountered strong north winds that blew them south into the path of a large number of anti-aircraft defences.
There, at around midnight, enemy planes attacked them.
Alkemade tried to defend the plane by shooting back, but to no avail.
Their plane was hit by cannon and machinegun fire and the right wing and entire rear caught fire.
As the flames spread and the plane started to spiral down and out of control, it became apparent that the plane could not be saved. The pilot, James Newman, gave the order for the men to take their parachutes and jump to safety.
He and three other crew members were not to survive.
The rear gunner was in such a cramped place in the aeroplane, it was not possible for him to have worn his parachute all the time.
Alkemade opened the door that led to the rear of the plane where he would be able to retrieve his parachute from a storage locker.
But when he tried to access the rear of the plane to collect his parachute, he realized his parachute was on fire too.
He was caught in the fire, his clothes were catching light and his oxygen mask was beginning to melt.
He felt he had no choice but to bale out – without his parachute!
He thought that falling to earth would be a quicker and less painful death than staying where he was.
He shut the door back up and turned to escape the plane by jumping into mid air.
He did a back flip into the night sky. He felt no sensation of falling.
The plane exploded above him.
He fell 18,000 feet at 120 miles an hour.
He lost consciousness during the fall.
Three hours later, he woke up to find that he was still alive.
He had fallen into a pine forest where the sloping branches of the trees had slowed his descent as he fell through them.
He realized that he had landed in a thick bank of snow.
He was lying on his back and could see the starlit sky above him, and although he had sprained his knee, amazingly he had not broken any bones.
Slowly he moved and tried to stand.
He had lost his boots and thought that they must be caught up in the trees above him.
Just a little distance away, he saw a bare patch of earth. lt was a miracle that he had landed where he did.
But he discovered that he could not walk because of the pain in his knee.
He took off his unused parachute harness and blew his distress whistle hoping that somebody would hear him and come to his aid.
Soon some locals found him, and he was taken to a hospital where all his burns and other injuries were attended to.
Then the Gestapo arrived to talk to him. They were the secret police of the state in Nazi Germany.
Alkemade should have been classed as a prisoner of war and under the rules of war he should have been transferred into a prisoner of war camp – which was a prison comprising huts in a guarded compound.
But Alkemade had no parachute, and the Gestapo could not believe that he had fallen from a plane and survived without one. They thought he must have buried his parachute. This made him look like a spy, rather than Royal Air Force personnel.
Being a spy would lead to execution.
The Gestapo continued to question Alkemade; but he stuck to his story.
A search of the area where Alkemade had been found led to the discovery of the parachute harness which had clearly not been used.
ln addition to this, the wreckage of the Werewolf was found 20 miles away with the parachute still wrapped up in its container and so the Gestapo realized that the story of the miraculous escape was true.
So Alkemade escaped being shot as a spy, and was taken to a prisoner of war camp in Poland.
And what was more, the Germans gave him a commemorative certificate stating he had fallen 18,000 feet without a parachute and lived to tell the tale!
When word spread about his amazing story, he gained nothing less than celebrity status.
But this was still not the end of the story.
The war was coming to an end, and the Russians were advancing.
ln order to keep their prisoners of war away from the advancing Russians, who were an ally of Britain at the time, they marched many thousands of the men west through the blizzards of that winter.
Alkemade was one of the prisoners who were taken. They were to suffer from the bitter cold, exhaustion and starvation.
Many hundreds of them died.
Eventually liberation came in 1945, and Alkemade had survived the war.
He lived on after the war to bring up a family in Loughborough, and then on until 1987, when he died in Cornwall on 22nd June.
As a tribute to him, his squadron, 115 Squadron at RAF Wittering, voted to rename a building as the Alkemade Building.
l think that was well-deserved, don’t you?
Bye bye everyone – don’t forget to subscribe to my blog!
Love and kisses
Salty Sam
www.christina-sinclair.com
Bill and Bob’s Joke of the Week
Bob: What is your joke of the week Bill?
Bill: One prisoner says to the other, “How long are you in for”
And the second prisoner says, “Only three days.”
So the first prisoner says, “How did you manage to get only three days?”
And the second prisoner says, “Because they’re hanging me on Monday!”
Salty Sam © Christina Sinclair 2015
Unauthorized use and/or duplication of material from this blog without express and written permission from this blog’s author and owner is strictly prohibited.
Links may be used to www.christina-sinclair.com
Picture Gallery
THE SALTY SAM NEWS DESK
This week, Auntie Alice finished up a particularly large jar of home-made jam, and as she was washing out the jar, she had an idea.
The children would be at her house almost every day in the summer holidays – and they were fast approaching.
She liked to keep the children busy, so as to not hear the dreaded words that no adult ever likes to hear.
“I’m bored!”
She decided to start up a suggestion jar.
She would write suggestions of things to do.
If any child were to say those dreaded words, they would have to take out a piece of paper, and do what it told them to do.
If they didn’t like the scheme, they would just have to keep themselves amused before it ever came to the point she had to – get the jar out!
Every time she had an idea, she would write it down on a small slip of paper, fold the paper up and put it in the jar.
The first suggestions she wrote were:
- Do the washing up
- Make me a cup of tea
- Hang the washing out
- Sweep the front path
- Take the dog for another walk
- Lay the table
- Fold the clean laundry
Auntie Alice can be really sneaky at times!
Anyway, she also wrote some other ideas.
Pulling a piece of paper out would be pot luck.
- Bake some home-made bread
- Play Simon Says
- Make a complicated jigsaw puzzle and then play I Spy with it
- Make some ice cubes with borage flowers in them
- Make cardboard masks and write a play for your characters
- Make some home-made ice cream
- Make up a bingo game using a pack of cards – so the bingo cards given to players will have shapes on them with a number or person written in each
- Draw a self-portrait
- Pick some fruit and then find a recipe to make using it all
- Make a sundial
- Make pressed flower pictures
- Draw a really long hopscotch game on the path with chalks
- Write a poem about summer and draw pictures to illustrate it
- Have a relay race around the outside of the garden with one pair going one way and one pair going the other way with no crashing into each other
- Learn the names of clouds and start a cloud spotter’s notebook
- Look for four-leaf clovers
- Draw a comic strip with your own made-up characters
- Make some new plants from cuttings
- See who can spot the most bird species in one hour
- Make a maze with toy building bricks
- Practise playing musical instruments together to put on a concert
- Make some rose water
- See who can do the most star jumps
- Make some home-made lemonade
- Draw a picture of your future life
- Learn a magic trick
- Draw around some leaves and turn the shapes into strange characters
- Learn a song to sing without having to read the words
- Make up your own song
- Hide a toy in the garden and then draw a treasure map for the others to find it
- Design an opening ceremony for a large sports tournament
Then, Auntie Alice thought she had better set up a scavenger hunt, get some balloons, some bubble making mixture and also some cake decorating ingredients from the Rocky Bay Supermarket – just to be sure!
Of course, if the weather was nice, they could take a picnic down onto the beach as well.
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Quick Quiz
What do these words and phrases mean?
- a swan song
- birds of a feather
- up with the lark
- a night owl
- a cuckoo in the nest
lt’s the Weekend!
HOW TO MAKE A BALLOON LAMPSHADE
You will need a round-shaped lampshade that will fit around a ceiling lamp.
It really needs to be one that looks like a balloon.
Then you can tie a basket underneath and fill it with a teddy or two so that they can go for a flight.
Please note that the material on this blog is for personal use and for use in classrooms only.
It is a copyright infringement and, therefore, illegal under international law to sell items made with these patterns.
Use of the toys and projects is at your own risk.
©Christina Sinclair Designs 2015
Quick Quiz Answers
- a swan song – the last great thing someone does in a project or collection of work – comes from the legend that the last song a swan sings is a really beautiful one
- birds of a feather – birds of a feather flock together – similar types of people are attracted to each other
- up with the lark – an early riser/someone who gets up early in the morning
- a night owl – a person who comes to life at night because they feel like they have more energy then
- a cuckoo in the nest – someone who does not really belong in a place or with a group of people
