The final moments of a Japanese dive bomber, after being hit by the gunners of the USS Hornet, 1945
A Japanese plane caught squarely by antiaircraft fire leaves a trail of smoke and flame as it falls toward the ocean. The pilot might have already been dead by the time the bomber was going down; getting knocked out would probably be a small mercy compared to being burnt alive or drowning.
There’s a passage from an autobiography of a Second World War British bomber crew member called “In for a Penny, in for a Pound”: he describes that if they were to survive a crash but find themselves completely stuck in a burning wreck, they were instructed to stick their face in the flames and breath in. Their lungs would be incinerated from the heat, making them pass out, allowing a quicker and less painful death than being burned alive.
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