Post by Gerhardt Abt on Feb 26, 2010 2:38:13 GMT
'cepted 
-JT
Account E-Mail: (This is needed to validate your account)
Name: Gerhardt Abt
Nationality: Prussian [Serving in Luftwaffe]
Character History:
Matthias and Angeline Abt lived in the small foresting community of Abschwangen, East Prussia. They were a poor couple who lived as many did; using the resources that Mother Nature provided them to make a living for themselves. They were simple commoners, their village almost completely obsolete to the rest of the world. East Prussia was owned by the mighty German Empire, the rising sun of the world and growing superpower. While Matthias toiled diligently in the hot summer wheat fields and Angeline shivered in winter, the only thing standing between her and freezing was the weak kiln she was baking bread in, the Kaiser and his cabinet held fancy dinners and grand strategic meetings preparing for the flood that they would soon unleash on the world. Angeline had one child previous to Gerhardt’s birth in 1913, a girl named Rossamund in 1907. Rose, to whom she was commonly referred, was a fair child, catching the eye of both the old and young with her glittering robin’s egg eyes and black hair tarnished from dirt from the fields.
Gerhardt was born in the middle of a downpour in the dank summer of 1913. His mother was attended by only one other woman, an old woman named Frau Herzog, the only trained midwife in the entire village. With the help of Angeline’s husband Frau Herzog delivered Gerhardt with little difficulty. The infant inherited the same speckled sky blue eyes and jet black hair as his sister, and his parents had hopes that he would be as attractive as her. Rose herself adored Gerhardt, holding and cradling him so her parents could work longer hours to gain the extra income to provide for an extra mouth. Rose decided that she would be a nursery woman in a big city when she was grown, tending to babies all day long for wealthy Germans. A pair of twins, Johann and Dietrich, was born in winter of 1913, but only Johann survived the freezing cold they were delivered in.
The First World War shattered the peaceful existence of Abschwangen. Germany mobilized its armies quickly, fighting hard on the Western front. The German Army recruited in the Abt’s small village, but Matthias dodged the draft with the excuse of small children depending on him to keep them alive. Ironically, this was equally true with Angeline, for she worked just as hard as her husband in the fields and bakeries. With most of the young men in their village fighting the English and French, there was a lot more money to be had and more posts to be worked. Matthias and Angeline found their lives looking up for the first time since they had been wed.
Unfortunately, the tides turned for Germany in August of 1914, when Rose was just ten and Johann and Gerhardt just breaking 12 months, the Russian military struck into East Prussia. The German forces there were almost nonexistent and were defeated easily, letting the Russians take their new land with ease. Abschwangen bustled with activity, huge convoys of troops passing through with big, shiny guns and more horses than the town had ever seen. The Russian troops, hoping to gain the favor of the Prussians, handed out bread and meat, thrilling the poor and uneducated peasants of Abschwangen. Unfortunately, the town was reaching its final days.
One balmy summer night Matthias and Angeline decided to have a romantic night for themselves. The young couple handed off their children to their grandparents and picked up their dinner from the Russian guard posted near their house. They settled down near the dirt road that led into their village, hoping to catch a glimpse of a horse or a troop of soldiers. Astonishingly, they saw something even better: an automobile. It drove lazily down the road in front of them, Russian flags flapping from its shiny black exterior. The couple dropped their beef and beer to cheer on the car, a spark of childhood shining in their eyes. They had know idea that car would bring their painful death.
Only an hour beforehand a four-man German reconnaissance group dispatched from a cavalry unit rode into the woods around Abschwangen, hoping to find a weak spot in the Russian defenses so they could recapture the Prussian town. While riding alongside the road the cavalrymen also saw the car, but they recognized it for what it actually was. They had heard rumors that an officer from an influential Russian family would be driving through the Abschwangen, but nothing had ever been confirmed. But now it was right before their eyes. The soldiers immediately opened fire on the car, flattening tires and breaking windows. The occupants of the car were immediately killed, and the Germans rode away before the Russians could retaliate.
Matthias and Angeline, who had watched the spectacle in gaping horror, sprinted away from the scene. Sadly, three Russian guardsmen had heard the commotion and stopped the Abt couple from entering back into the village. One of the Russian soldiers shot and killed Matthias immediately, believing that he had been somehow involved in the event. Two others dragged his sobbing widow into a small shack. Her body was never found. In the following moments the Russian commander shot the mayor and several other influential members of the town. Luckily, the children were safe, but not for long.
In the next hour an entire company of Russian infantry descended upon Abschwangen, burning the entire town to the ground and executing all male civilians and doing worse to the females. Gerhardt’s grandfather was beaten to death in the street, his feeble bones crunching under bayonets and rifle butts. Their grandmother managed to gather all of the children and escape into the Tannenberg forest. From there the old woman managed to hitchhike her way 30 miles to the nearby city of Konigsberg, were she knew her wealthy stepson Wilhelm Abt would take care of the three newly made orphans.
Wilhelm Abt, Gerhardt’s uncle on his father’s side, had become rich investing in the stock market. He lived in the upper part of Konigsberg, enjoying the luxury of his easily-made fortune. He had six children, all boys, and all serving in some branch of the German military. Four were in the land army, one in the navy, and eldest, Theodor, in the newly-formed air force. When Grandmother Abt arrived carrying the three homeless children, the kind man was elated to take in three extra children, along with housing the old woman who brought them.
Wilhelm cared for the three orphans all throughout the Great War, filling the void when two of his sons in the infantry were killed and the one serving in the Navy went down with his ship. Grandmother Abt died of a massive heart attack in 1916, young Rose and toddlers Johann and Gerhardt weeping as she was buried. When Germany was defeated in 1918 Wilhelm’s three sons returned home, each one offering to adopt and care for one of the three orphans. Johann and Rose were adopted by Sigmund and Hans Abt, while Gerhardt was adopted by Theodor. Theodor had become an Iron Cross recipient and had married an Austrian by the name of Ilsa during the war, and purchased a small house in the suburbs of Konigsberg. It was set up to be an ideal place to grow up, but that all ended with the economic haze that was about to descend on Germany.
With the harsh terms inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles Konigsberg dropped into poverty. Many people chose to burn money rather than use it to buy firewood, and drastic measures had to be taken to keep the four Abt families afloat. Theodor sold the recreational plane he had bought and took up hard labor, while Ilsa did laundry and delivered clothes to rich clients around the city. Unfortunately, Gerhardt’s adopted family was the most prosperous of all of them. Johann had to beg on the streets, compared to Gerhardt having to shine shoes. But the worst of all was Rose. She was forced into prostitution at the extremely young age of 14 just to be able to eat, much to the despair of her all-to-exposed 8 year old brothers. Their young minds had been polluted by the roughness of Weimer Republic Germany, already forced into the world of shady business and starvation just to remain alive.
In the year 1922, when Gerhardt and Johann were nine and Rose was fifteen, death claimed on the only surviving female Abt. She was walking home from her impious profession along the dark streets of Konigsberg when she heard the echo of footsteps behind her. When she turned around a fist caught her squarely in the jaw, and she was dragged into an alleyway. The next morning a banker found her body on his way to work, here blouse ripped and blood from her slit throat crusted over her chest. She was buried in a simple grave outside of Konigsberg, the only people attending her funeral was the Abt families and a clergyman who said a few words before she was thrown into the ground.
Gerhardt’s teenage obsession was finding the culprit responsible for his sister’s death. Although he could never prove it, his number one suspect was a Jewish veteran named Ulrich Hayes. Theodor stepped in before Gerhardt could do anything drastic, instead distracting him from his sister’s death with tales of his daring exploits during the First World War. When Gerhardt expressed real interest in joining the Weimer Air Force, Theodor started to secretly pile together money to invest in Gerhardt’s career. In Theodor’s eyes, the Air Force was the only way that Gerhardt could escape poverty and get a worthwhile career in the world.
Fortunately, when Gerhardt was nineteen, his dream of joining the German Air Force was doubled when Adolf Hitler rose to power. He reformed the entire German military, breaking the Treaty of Versailles by doubling the size of each branch. Theodor took the stockpile of money he had built up and gave it to Gerhardt for his twentieth birthday. The young man boarded a cheap train and got out of East Prussia, which was slowly wasting away in the grand scheme of the world. After stopping at Danzig and Warsaw, Gerhardt Abt arrived at the capital of Germany, Berlin. He enlisted at the nearest Luftwaffe recruiting office and was scheduled to report to a training camp outside Berlin in three months.
During Luftwaffe training Gerhardt learned to keep his mouth shut about his tragic past. Most of the other recruits were rich boys from high class families, looking to present themselves as heroes. Gerhardt was just the opposite, joining the Luftwaffe to escape from poverty and learn how to work the great metal buzzards that his adopted father had flown so many years before. He made a few friends in training but mostly kept to himself, shaving his head to the scalp instead of the more fashionable haircuts his peers wore. He became something of a mysterious figure among his company, even his closest friends not knowing about his past. Gerhardt was an ideal student, willing to listen to his instructors and being able to keep up with the physical standards required by the Luftwaffe.
The young soldier graduated with the title of Flieger Gerhardt Abt, and was assigned as a ground crewman to a fighter squadron. Unlike most of his fellow graduates he was not given the chance to join the Officer’s Cadet Academy in Berlin, and would instead have to work to gain his commission. He did not mind getting his hands dirty, for he had done hard, grisly work for his entire life, and rather enjoyed preparing the Messerschmitts to do practice battles in the sky. He rose up the ranks extremely quickly, for in peacetime it was rather easy for a good man to gain good promotions.
After a good four years serving in the Luftwaffe he was given his commission at the age twenty-five. At the rank of Leutnant he started off in his own fighter squadron. He served with distinction in both the invasion of Poland and France, taking down the two countries’ undeveloped aircraft with ease.
Military Rank: Leutnant or higher. I know it is ambitious but I would rather aim high and not get the rank I asked for than be cheated out of a rank I could deserve.
Writing Sample:
Gerhardt Abt’s Messerschmitt BF109 stalked through the seemingly endless void of the French sky, camouflaged against the clouds by the fog that had rapidly descended on the countryside what seemed like hours ago. Just fifteen minutes after these horrendous flying conditions had descended on his three-man air squadron a group of British Spitfire aircraft had ambushed them. It had been impossible to tell where the enemy planes had come from, for the mist blinded everything except what was in a twenty-foot radius around his plane. His two wingmen had gone down. Two of the best pilots Abt had ever known, killed in a matter of seconds by an enemy to cowardly to show themselves. The veteran pilot had seen enough crashes in his years to know when they were killed either on the way down or as soon as you hit.
Gerhardt had been rather nervous after the sudden ambush, and he had attempted to turn his Messerschmitt around and head back to the Luftwaffe airfield that he had taken off from when he had realized the fog completely disoriented and confused the veteran pilot. From then on Gerhardt had tried to follow his compass back to base, but even that usually foolproof tool jolted as he flew. Abt’s radio was rendered useless, for his signal could not reach back to the airfield without being intercepted by the mist around him. He was, in short, flying blind.
The pilot scanned the control board in front of him, noticing that his fuel gauge’s ticker was twittering dangerously over the big bold E. “Scheisse…” Gerhardt whispered from under his facemask, his leather-gloved hands shaking nervously on the control stick between his legs. His robin’s egg eyes craned outside of his cockpit, looking for anything except the deadly mist around him. He really wasn’t expecting to see anything, but he was greeted with a metallic glint from below him. Gerhardt cursed under his breath and immediately began to pull up and left, away from the possibly hostile aircraft flying underneath him. His maneuver was greeted by a barrage of machine-gun fire, one round pinging against the tail of his fighter, doing no damage. The officer turned and returned fire at a British Spitfire coming quickly towards him. A few rounds landed on its wing, but Gerhardt could not tell if it had been harmed or not.
No less then thirty seconds later another Spitfire barreled in from Gerhardt’s left, giving a nice smattering of bullets on his tail. He whispered a curse and twisted, but the first British fighter came up from underneath him and fired continuously into his wing, the aileron breaking and catching fire. The usually calm pilot screamed as his plane started to do a downward dive. The pilot released his canopy and felt the icy blast of air from the outside world. Gerhardt released his security belt and flew out of the cockpit, praying to a god that he didn’t believe in that the risky attempt to save his life would be successful. As the sheer force of being pulled out into the open made him see spots before his eyes, his ears ringing as he struggled to stay conscious. His hand found the cord for his parachute and he managed to deploy it through the extreme pressure.
Leutnant Abt felt a slight pull as his parachute unfurled, and then a sharp tug on his legs and armpits as it blossomed. All that was left of his plane was a small light hurtling down through the fog, and the Spits were long gone. Gerhardt let his body go limp for a moment, taking a deep breath to assure him he was still alive. After he knew he was still of this world the pilot tensed his muscles against the cold as he drifted slowly down to earth. He shuddered as he remembered the tales he had heard of pilots who had bailed out and frozen to death high up in the air. The Leutnant tried to steer himself a little to see if he could see where he would land, but the fog was unrelenting. It looked as if he was going to have a long, long trip down.
-JT
Account E-Mail: (This is needed to validate your account)
Name: Gerhardt Abt
Nationality: Prussian [Serving in Luftwaffe]
Character History:
Matthias and Angeline Abt lived in the small foresting community of Abschwangen, East Prussia. They were a poor couple who lived as many did; using the resources that Mother Nature provided them to make a living for themselves. They were simple commoners, their village almost completely obsolete to the rest of the world. East Prussia was owned by the mighty German Empire, the rising sun of the world and growing superpower. While Matthias toiled diligently in the hot summer wheat fields and Angeline shivered in winter, the only thing standing between her and freezing was the weak kiln she was baking bread in, the Kaiser and his cabinet held fancy dinners and grand strategic meetings preparing for the flood that they would soon unleash on the world. Angeline had one child previous to Gerhardt’s birth in 1913, a girl named Rossamund in 1907. Rose, to whom she was commonly referred, was a fair child, catching the eye of both the old and young with her glittering robin’s egg eyes and black hair tarnished from dirt from the fields.
Gerhardt was born in the middle of a downpour in the dank summer of 1913. His mother was attended by only one other woman, an old woman named Frau Herzog, the only trained midwife in the entire village. With the help of Angeline’s husband Frau Herzog delivered Gerhardt with little difficulty. The infant inherited the same speckled sky blue eyes and jet black hair as his sister, and his parents had hopes that he would be as attractive as her. Rose herself adored Gerhardt, holding and cradling him so her parents could work longer hours to gain the extra income to provide for an extra mouth. Rose decided that she would be a nursery woman in a big city when she was grown, tending to babies all day long for wealthy Germans. A pair of twins, Johann and Dietrich, was born in winter of 1913, but only Johann survived the freezing cold they were delivered in.
The First World War shattered the peaceful existence of Abschwangen. Germany mobilized its armies quickly, fighting hard on the Western front. The German Army recruited in the Abt’s small village, but Matthias dodged the draft with the excuse of small children depending on him to keep them alive. Ironically, this was equally true with Angeline, for she worked just as hard as her husband in the fields and bakeries. With most of the young men in their village fighting the English and French, there was a lot more money to be had and more posts to be worked. Matthias and Angeline found their lives looking up for the first time since they had been wed.
Unfortunately, the tides turned for Germany in August of 1914, when Rose was just ten and Johann and Gerhardt just breaking 12 months, the Russian military struck into East Prussia. The German forces there were almost nonexistent and were defeated easily, letting the Russians take their new land with ease. Abschwangen bustled with activity, huge convoys of troops passing through with big, shiny guns and more horses than the town had ever seen. The Russian troops, hoping to gain the favor of the Prussians, handed out bread and meat, thrilling the poor and uneducated peasants of Abschwangen. Unfortunately, the town was reaching its final days.
One balmy summer night Matthias and Angeline decided to have a romantic night for themselves. The young couple handed off their children to their grandparents and picked up their dinner from the Russian guard posted near their house. They settled down near the dirt road that led into their village, hoping to catch a glimpse of a horse or a troop of soldiers. Astonishingly, they saw something even better: an automobile. It drove lazily down the road in front of them, Russian flags flapping from its shiny black exterior. The couple dropped their beef and beer to cheer on the car, a spark of childhood shining in their eyes. They had know idea that car would bring their painful death.
Only an hour beforehand a four-man German reconnaissance group dispatched from a cavalry unit rode into the woods around Abschwangen, hoping to find a weak spot in the Russian defenses so they could recapture the Prussian town. While riding alongside the road the cavalrymen also saw the car, but they recognized it for what it actually was. They had heard rumors that an officer from an influential Russian family would be driving through the Abschwangen, but nothing had ever been confirmed. But now it was right before their eyes. The soldiers immediately opened fire on the car, flattening tires and breaking windows. The occupants of the car were immediately killed, and the Germans rode away before the Russians could retaliate.
Matthias and Angeline, who had watched the spectacle in gaping horror, sprinted away from the scene. Sadly, three Russian guardsmen had heard the commotion and stopped the Abt couple from entering back into the village. One of the Russian soldiers shot and killed Matthias immediately, believing that he had been somehow involved in the event. Two others dragged his sobbing widow into a small shack. Her body was never found. In the following moments the Russian commander shot the mayor and several other influential members of the town. Luckily, the children were safe, but not for long.
In the next hour an entire company of Russian infantry descended upon Abschwangen, burning the entire town to the ground and executing all male civilians and doing worse to the females. Gerhardt’s grandfather was beaten to death in the street, his feeble bones crunching under bayonets and rifle butts. Their grandmother managed to gather all of the children and escape into the Tannenberg forest. From there the old woman managed to hitchhike her way 30 miles to the nearby city of Konigsberg, were she knew her wealthy stepson Wilhelm Abt would take care of the three newly made orphans.
Wilhelm Abt, Gerhardt’s uncle on his father’s side, had become rich investing in the stock market. He lived in the upper part of Konigsberg, enjoying the luxury of his easily-made fortune. He had six children, all boys, and all serving in some branch of the German military. Four were in the land army, one in the navy, and eldest, Theodor, in the newly-formed air force. When Grandmother Abt arrived carrying the three homeless children, the kind man was elated to take in three extra children, along with housing the old woman who brought them.
Wilhelm cared for the three orphans all throughout the Great War, filling the void when two of his sons in the infantry were killed and the one serving in the Navy went down with his ship. Grandmother Abt died of a massive heart attack in 1916, young Rose and toddlers Johann and Gerhardt weeping as she was buried. When Germany was defeated in 1918 Wilhelm’s three sons returned home, each one offering to adopt and care for one of the three orphans. Johann and Rose were adopted by Sigmund and Hans Abt, while Gerhardt was adopted by Theodor. Theodor had become an Iron Cross recipient and had married an Austrian by the name of Ilsa during the war, and purchased a small house in the suburbs of Konigsberg. It was set up to be an ideal place to grow up, but that all ended with the economic haze that was about to descend on Germany.
With the harsh terms inflicted by the Treaty of Versailles Konigsberg dropped into poverty. Many people chose to burn money rather than use it to buy firewood, and drastic measures had to be taken to keep the four Abt families afloat. Theodor sold the recreational plane he had bought and took up hard labor, while Ilsa did laundry and delivered clothes to rich clients around the city. Unfortunately, Gerhardt’s adopted family was the most prosperous of all of them. Johann had to beg on the streets, compared to Gerhardt having to shine shoes. But the worst of all was Rose. She was forced into prostitution at the extremely young age of 14 just to be able to eat, much to the despair of her all-to-exposed 8 year old brothers. Their young minds had been polluted by the roughness of Weimer Republic Germany, already forced into the world of shady business and starvation just to remain alive.
In the year 1922, when Gerhardt and Johann were nine and Rose was fifteen, death claimed on the only surviving female Abt. She was walking home from her impious profession along the dark streets of Konigsberg when she heard the echo of footsteps behind her. When she turned around a fist caught her squarely in the jaw, and she was dragged into an alleyway. The next morning a banker found her body on his way to work, here blouse ripped and blood from her slit throat crusted over her chest. She was buried in a simple grave outside of Konigsberg, the only people attending her funeral was the Abt families and a clergyman who said a few words before she was thrown into the ground.
Gerhardt’s teenage obsession was finding the culprit responsible for his sister’s death. Although he could never prove it, his number one suspect was a Jewish veteran named Ulrich Hayes. Theodor stepped in before Gerhardt could do anything drastic, instead distracting him from his sister’s death with tales of his daring exploits during the First World War. When Gerhardt expressed real interest in joining the Weimer Air Force, Theodor started to secretly pile together money to invest in Gerhardt’s career. In Theodor’s eyes, the Air Force was the only way that Gerhardt could escape poverty and get a worthwhile career in the world.
Fortunately, when Gerhardt was nineteen, his dream of joining the German Air Force was doubled when Adolf Hitler rose to power. He reformed the entire German military, breaking the Treaty of Versailles by doubling the size of each branch. Theodor took the stockpile of money he had built up and gave it to Gerhardt for his twentieth birthday. The young man boarded a cheap train and got out of East Prussia, which was slowly wasting away in the grand scheme of the world. After stopping at Danzig and Warsaw, Gerhardt Abt arrived at the capital of Germany, Berlin. He enlisted at the nearest Luftwaffe recruiting office and was scheduled to report to a training camp outside Berlin in three months.
During Luftwaffe training Gerhardt learned to keep his mouth shut about his tragic past. Most of the other recruits were rich boys from high class families, looking to present themselves as heroes. Gerhardt was just the opposite, joining the Luftwaffe to escape from poverty and learn how to work the great metal buzzards that his adopted father had flown so many years before. He made a few friends in training but mostly kept to himself, shaving his head to the scalp instead of the more fashionable haircuts his peers wore. He became something of a mysterious figure among his company, even his closest friends not knowing about his past. Gerhardt was an ideal student, willing to listen to his instructors and being able to keep up with the physical standards required by the Luftwaffe.
The young soldier graduated with the title of Flieger Gerhardt Abt, and was assigned as a ground crewman to a fighter squadron. Unlike most of his fellow graduates he was not given the chance to join the Officer’s Cadet Academy in Berlin, and would instead have to work to gain his commission. He did not mind getting his hands dirty, for he had done hard, grisly work for his entire life, and rather enjoyed preparing the Messerschmitts to do practice battles in the sky. He rose up the ranks extremely quickly, for in peacetime it was rather easy for a good man to gain good promotions.
After a good four years serving in the Luftwaffe he was given his commission at the age twenty-five. At the rank of Leutnant he started off in his own fighter squadron. He served with distinction in both the invasion of Poland and France, taking down the two countries’ undeveloped aircraft with ease.
Military Rank: Leutnant or higher. I know it is ambitious but I would rather aim high and not get the rank I asked for than be cheated out of a rank I could deserve.
Writing Sample:
Gerhardt Abt’s Messerschmitt BF109 stalked through the seemingly endless void of the French sky, camouflaged against the clouds by the fog that had rapidly descended on the countryside what seemed like hours ago. Just fifteen minutes after these horrendous flying conditions had descended on his three-man air squadron a group of British Spitfire aircraft had ambushed them. It had been impossible to tell where the enemy planes had come from, for the mist blinded everything except what was in a twenty-foot radius around his plane. His two wingmen had gone down. Two of the best pilots Abt had ever known, killed in a matter of seconds by an enemy to cowardly to show themselves. The veteran pilot had seen enough crashes in his years to know when they were killed either on the way down or as soon as you hit.
Gerhardt had been rather nervous after the sudden ambush, and he had attempted to turn his Messerschmitt around and head back to the Luftwaffe airfield that he had taken off from when he had realized the fog completely disoriented and confused the veteran pilot. From then on Gerhardt had tried to follow his compass back to base, but even that usually foolproof tool jolted as he flew. Abt’s radio was rendered useless, for his signal could not reach back to the airfield without being intercepted by the mist around him. He was, in short, flying blind.
The pilot scanned the control board in front of him, noticing that his fuel gauge’s ticker was twittering dangerously over the big bold E. “Scheisse…” Gerhardt whispered from under his facemask, his leather-gloved hands shaking nervously on the control stick between his legs. His robin’s egg eyes craned outside of his cockpit, looking for anything except the deadly mist around him. He really wasn’t expecting to see anything, but he was greeted with a metallic glint from below him. Gerhardt cursed under his breath and immediately began to pull up and left, away from the possibly hostile aircraft flying underneath him. His maneuver was greeted by a barrage of machine-gun fire, one round pinging against the tail of his fighter, doing no damage. The officer turned and returned fire at a British Spitfire coming quickly towards him. A few rounds landed on its wing, but Gerhardt could not tell if it had been harmed or not.
No less then thirty seconds later another Spitfire barreled in from Gerhardt’s left, giving a nice smattering of bullets on his tail. He whispered a curse and twisted, but the first British fighter came up from underneath him and fired continuously into his wing, the aileron breaking and catching fire. The usually calm pilot screamed as his plane started to do a downward dive. The pilot released his canopy and felt the icy blast of air from the outside world. Gerhardt released his security belt and flew out of the cockpit, praying to a god that he didn’t believe in that the risky attempt to save his life would be successful. As the sheer force of being pulled out into the open made him see spots before his eyes, his ears ringing as he struggled to stay conscious. His hand found the cord for his parachute and he managed to deploy it through the extreme pressure.
Leutnant Abt felt a slight pull as his parachute unfurled, and then a sharp tug on his legs and armpits as it blossomed. All that was left of his plane was a small light hurtling down through the fog, and the Spits were long gone. Gerhardt let his body go limp for a moment, taking a deep breath to assure him he was still alive. After he knew he was still of this world the pilot tensed his muscles against the cold as he drifted slowly down to earth. He shuddered as he remembered the tales he had heard of pilots who had bailed out and frozen to death high up in the air. The Leutnant tried to steer himself a little to see if he could see where he would land, but the fog was unrelenting. It looked as if he was going to have a long, long trip down.