When fighter planes were downed and ships sank by their enemies during World War II, it didn’t always result in the death of everybody on board. Sometimes, a few people managed to survive but found themselves stranded behind enemy lines. With no one looking for them, they were forced to make their own way home. Some of the people who made these journeys went through unbelievable experiences – and made it back alive.
Below are 6 incredible survival stories from World War II:
Calvin Graef, a prisoner on board a Japanese vessel, was cooking rice when he heard a load of commotion. US ships had found them, but this wasn’t the rescue he had hoped for. The US ships fired torpedoes and destroyed the Japanese ship with Graef and his fellow Americans still onboard.
Graef survived by clinging to pieces of the wreckage. Not long after, four American prisoners of war who had escaped picked him up on a lifeboat. The men made a rudder for their boat, then sailed west towards China.
Their harrowing journey took them through a typhoon and over 480 kilometers of ocean. Eventually, Chinese fishing boats took them to shore, fed them, clothed them, and then sent them back to America.
In January 1945, a bunch of Japanese soldiers were forced off Ramree Island by invading British soldiers. One thousand men escaped, fleeing through a swamp, thinking that they were making their way to safety.
However, the men had wandered into a 16-kilometer-long swamp infested with crocodiles, some weighing as much as 900 kilograms. The blood from the injured soldiers attracted these beasts, and as the men struggled through the swamp, they were picked off one by one.
The soldiers tried to keep the crocodiles at bay with their guns, but this did not deter them. By the end of the swamp, only 400 men had survived.
When Lieutenant Kuznetsov was shot down by a German pilot, he crash-landed in an open field and ran for cover as his plane burst into flames behind him.
However, the German pilot made a mistake that ultimately ended up saving Kuznetsov’s life. He flew down to the wreckage, got out of his plane, and went to get himself a souvenir.
Kuznetsov sneaked out of his hiding place, climbed into the German’s plane and took off, leaving the man who had shot him down stranded on the ground. He then flew home, having to dodge fire from his own men as he was in a German plane. Fortunately, he made it through in one piece and returned home.
When Alexsei Maresyev’s plane was taken out by Germans, he found himself trapped inside German-controlled land. He was bleeding heavily from several wounds and was quickly losing the use of his legs, but he was determined to survive.
Maresyev crawled through the forest, gradually making his way through enemy territories. His legs were so badly injured that he lost the ability to stand. It took him 18 days to pull his body across the ground and back to Soviet territory. When he made it back, he was badly injured that his legs had to be amputated.
After being given prosthetic legs, Maresyev went back to his plane and combat. He later told reporters that “there’s nothing extraordinary in what I did. The fact that I’ve been turned into a legend irritates me.”
Poon Lim was a steward on a British ship traveling to Surinam when it was attacked by Germans. Lim managed to grab a lifejacket and jump overboard just before the ship exploded, killing everyone else on board.
Lim climbed onto a raft in the wreckage and then set out on a grueling journey. After the rations on the raft were finished, he became so desperate for water and food that he tried to lure sharks to him.
At one point, he managed to kill a bird with a knife that he had made from a biscuit tin. Then he used the dead bird to attract a shark to his raft, bashed the shark’s head with a jug, and drank its blood.
Lim passed by several US and German vessels, but he was ignored by everyone. Finally, he was spotted by a Brazilian fisherman who brought him ashore after 133 days at sea.
Slavomir Rawicz spent two years in Siberia as a prisoner of war. Then, with the help of camp commandant’s wife, he and 6 others managed to escape.
The men left during a harsh blizzard and had to wander through the Siberian Arctic, living off what they could catch or find. When they made it out of the Siberian Arctic, they had to travel through the Gobi Desert and then the Himalayas in their desperate attempt to reach safety in India.
By the end of the journey, they had traveled 6,400 kilometers through some of the world’s harshest environments. Only 4 of the men survived though.
Source: listverse
