Helldiver Pilot Lt. (j. g.) Alvin E. Levenson survived a 1,200 foot Plunge Feet Into the Pacific, returned to duty
“The Battling Beasts was the nickname of the squadron, derived from its insignia and the fact that the SB2C airplane was affectionately called The Beast by the pilots who drive it around.”
JERUSALEM POST from the government website: Jewish Post, Indianapolis, Marion County, 10 August 1945
Plunging 1,200 feet in the Pacific when his parachute failed to open did not ended the flying career of Lt. (j. g.) Alvin E. Levenson. The young Helldiver pilot back on duty on his second combat flight, hit and probably sank a medium sized freighter.
His squadron was divebombing a tiny island north of Saipan on the day he took the terrifying plunge. After releasing his plane’s bombs, he pulled out and started to climb . . . only to crash smack into another Helldiver. “THE CRASH dazed me,” he said, ‘‘and the next thing I knew I was falling, spinning around and around sideways like a top. I yanked the ripcord about twenty times and the chute broke out but failed to open. It flapped around me like a silk banner. Debris from the exploding planes was falling around.”
Levenson had just about given himself up for dead, and was thinking about his wile and the three year old son he’s never seen, when he hit the water —in a sitting position. He thinks the streaming parachute must have slowed up his fall. The sea was rough, too, and he may have hit the top of a wave and coasted down, which would have broken the force of impact. Levenson ripped off his parachute harness. He struggled to the surface. It was a day when the inanimate world just seemed to be working against him—because his Mae West only inflated part of the way. FOR THREE HOURS the flier remained afloat, Worrying about sea birds. “Ive got a phobia about chickens or fowls and can’t go near them,” he explained. The birds kept
Sea birds made runs on him and one of them hit him ht the eye. “I pulled out my knife,” he related, “and began screaming and making passes myself, but they didn’t seem worried and kept circling, waiting for me to the. So I made up my mind—I wouldn’t die.” A patrol boat rescued him at last, and he was hospitalized with burns, lacerations, severed leg tendons, injuries to his left arm muscles. “I HAD THOUGHT in my mind all of the time,” he said, “that I should give up combat flying.” But, considering himself lucky to be alive, he took an assignment aboard another carrier. He admitted that he was scared when he started flying again, and he still wakes up once in a while out of a nightmare screaming at his gunner. “Don’t get me wrong,” he observed. “I’m not scared—just nervous.”
Issue PDF (17.40 MB) Contributed by IUPUI University Library, by permission of The Jewish Post & Opinion
For a deeper dive from Task and Purpose: