Jack Howard Jacobs, a retired mechanical engineer and World War II airman who was shot down over Austria and later became a prisoner of war, died of kidney failure Oct. 3 at his son's Severna Park home. He was 85.
Born in Baltimore, the son of a shoemaker and a homemaker, Mr. Jacobs was raised on Pinkney Road.
He was a 1942 graduate of Forest Park High School and was studying engineering at the University of Maryland when he enlisted in the Air Force in 1943.
After being trained as an aerial gunner and navigator, he was commissioned a second lieutenant and sent to Italy, where he joined the 15th Air Force. He was assigned to the 484th Bomb Group of the 826th Bomb Squadron, where he flew as navigator aboard heavy B-24 Liberator bombers.
Called for his 15th mission in the early hours on Dec. 6, 1944, Mr. Jacobs was unable to locate his usual parachute, and in haste, grabbed another harness and chest pack chute.
"The harness was a bit large for me but I was able to make some adjustments," he wrote in an unpublished memoir. "On going out to the plane, I very unwisely did not protect the parachute from the rain."
Over the mountains of southern Austria, Mr. Jacobs' B-24 was hit by heavy enemy flak that hit an engine. As the pilot attempted to put out the fire and feather the propeller, it began to break apart, with pieces hitting the plane's fuselage.
"The pilot gave the order to abandon the plane. All this happened in a very short period of time," he wrote.
Mr. Jacobs joined his fellow crewman on the bomb bay catwalk in preparation to bail out of the ill-fated plane.
"At that point, I noticed that I was still holding my pencil in my hand. I climbed back up onto the flight deck, laid my pencil on the navigator's table and went back down into the bomb bay," he wrote.
As he jumped from the plane, he pulled the chute's rip cord.
"That was not a wise thing to do because, at that altitude, the temperature was surely well below zero. The parachute did not open. I remember being in the air, with no sensation of falling, and seeing the rip cord handle and attached wire in my right hand," he wrote.
With the ground rushing up, he made one last desperate move by giving the chute closure flap a powerful tug which finally opened the parachute.
Mr. Jacobs theorized that the chute, which had gotten wet before takeoff, had frozen because of the plane's altitude.
