Good story and lucky on the recovery: Had that been me, I would have set a depth record for plowing a plane into the ground
I have couple of similiar stories one with the 262 and the other in a 152:
262: I was up to about 30K trying to catch up with a huge buff mission. I was able to get one kill before I was going to run out of fuel. On the way down, I was compressing big time, had to cut engines, do the trim and lots of cursing (mixed with laughing) and finally was recover.
152: I was about 14K or so and harassing set of buffs. I forgot the 152 goes into a nasty spin at times like the Mossy. I was going vert and end up going into flat spin. I was using rudder, trim, anything I could think of. FInally I was able to get the nose sideways, kicked out my gears and able to get control of my plane at about...1K.