Holy crap! What an amazing story!
There was so much stuff flying around in WWII that there are occasionally these stories of things that seem like they'd be impossible.
There are others I remember reading, like one in Fork-Tailed Devil, by Caiden. Pilots were at an airfield when they heard the whine of a P-38 in a very high-speed dive. They knew this noise was not a good sign, as it was in the days where the P-38's mostly didn't have dive brakes, and such a high-speed dive and the noise of it was an indication that the plane was in compressibility and probably was going to smack into the ground or break apart. They looked up to see the P-38 come apart in mid air -- but miraculously a chute opened, and the pilot was parachuting down. When he got down, though, they found that the pilot was dead of a gunshot wound and based on the wound suspected that the pilot had already been dead even before reaching the airfield.
There was one story of Hub Zemke (in Zemke's Wolfpack, by Zemke) of his last flying mission. He was flying a P-51 through a thunderstorm on his way back from a mission, when the plane encountered heavy turbulence and went into a spin. He recovered, but was going very fast by the time he got out of it. He pulled g's to get the plane out of the dive when the plane disintegrated (an airframe failure abrupt enough to seem like an explosion). Zemke was knocked unconscious and came to while falling through the air strapped in his seat. He unstrapped and pulled his rip cord, to drift down and get captured by the Germans.
