The first thing we need to emphasize is that we’re dealing with a near-infinite number of variables. Therefore, I’d argue that the best answer one can give with any degree of certainty is: ‘Well, it depends, but usually quite likely unless he was over water.’ I’m making the assumption that by ‘survival’ you mean actual long term survival and not ‘well, he survived the impact, but the aircraft caught fire and he couldn’t open his canopy so he slowly burned to death 5 minutes later while being otherwise unscathed.’

I ought to point out that crash landings weren’t common in general. Assuming that the aircraft was too damaged to continue its combat mission but not damaged enough to drop from the sky, the pilot would indeed attempt to turn towards friendly territory or (in the case of supra-oceanic combat) the friendly fleet and, if no chance for an honest-to-goodness landing presented itself, he would attempt a crash landing or ditching. I will, from now on, refer to ditching as ‘crash landing’ as well, so that there’s no ambiguity that I’m lumping them together.

Let’s look at a few different crash landing scenarios to see what dangers would present themselves to the aviators. Even though your question is specifically about pilots, I will allow myself the liberty of expanding it to airmen of various roles.

The very first factor which decided the airman’s chances was the terrain where the crash landing was to be made. If the pilot managed to find a nice flat meadow, it would be a lot more favorable than uneven ground. Ideally, you could reach your own airfield, where you’d have an even, maybe even hard, surface. Say you’re forced to crash land due to a damaged undercarriage. In such a case your course of action would be fairly straightforward, very much akin to a normal landing, and, if no other issues with the plane developed, you’d have a very good chance of getting out unscathed.

Still, a skilled pilot, with a bit of luck, was able to land even on very unfavorable ground. This is how Hans-Joachim Marseille, one of the absolute best fighter pilots of the entire war, landed his Bf 109E (W.Nr 4091) near Théville on September 28, 1940, shortly after scoring his 7th victory. The plane was declared 35 percent damaged.^[1] One of the biggest threats was that your wing would clip something on the ground and the plane would rotate viciously.

I should probably point out that at this stage of his career Marseille was quite proficient and [EDIT: at, not and] having his planes damaged or destroyed. By that point he'd already lost four Bf 109s destroyed or damaged, three of which crash landed. The other two were: W.Nr 3579 (50 percent damage on September 2, 1940, crash-landed near Calais-Marck) and W.Nr 5597: (75 percent damage on September 11, 1940, crash-landed near Wissant).

However, sometimes things went sideways even in theoretically ideal conditions. The crew of a certain B-17 Flying Fortress experienced what was surely one of the most gruesome moments of the entire air war over Europe.

a ball turret gunner was trapped in his plastic bubble underneath the plane. “The gears that rotated the ball to put the gunner in position to shoot and then return him to the position that enabled him to climb out and back up into the aircraft had been hit and were jammed. The ball-turret gunner was caught in a plastic cage.”

Just before landing, the Fortress’s hydraulic system, which was riddled with shell holes, malfunctioned, making it impossible for the pilot to put down the wheels. He would have to make a belly landing. “There were eight minutes of gut-wrenching talk among the tower, the pilot, and the man trapped in the ball turret. He knew what comes down first when there are no wheels. We all watched in horror as it happened. We watched as this man’s life ended, mashed between the concrete pavement of the runway and the belly of the bomber.”^[2]

In general, if something bad happened over land, the situation wasn’t all that bad. Sometimes you plane was able to make it back, sometimes not. You could always bail out, land under your parachute and—even if the territory was hostile—try to avoid capture or, if you were severely injured, simply surrender to the first military personnel you encountered. You had no such luxury over water.

Even in comparably small sections of water, like the English Channel, crash landing was a dangerous affair and your life usually depended on the efficiency of the rescue service (if there even was one at all) and your own endurance, as it would sometimes take days and weeks for an airman to be found on his raft. Here’s the story of another B-17 on October 9, 1942.

[The] Fortress was raked by cannon fire from Focke-Wulf 190s and lost two engines. Struggling to make it back to England, Swenson’s plane was dropping through the sky at over a thousand feet per minute. The radio operator sent out a distress signal but shore stations failed to pick it up. With the interphone knocked out, Swenson turned over the controls to his co-pilot and crawled to the rear of the plane to alert the gunners that he was going to belly-land at sea. Leaving the pilot and co-pilot alone in the front of the plane, the rest of the crew assembled in the radio room, where there was a forward bulkhead against which they could brace themselves. . . . “The water looked cold, and I remember thinking it also looked hard,” Swenson recalled. There were fifteen-to-twenty-foot-tall whitecaps, “and I had heard that when you land on water and hit a wave the effect is very much like flying into a stone wall. It was. We laid her in a belly landing, as slowly as we could, with the tail well down. But even at that we hit so hard that it threw the crew all over the ship.”

Swenson crawled out of the narrow cockpit window on his side of the plane. When he came up for air, he saw his injured co-pilot drifting under one of the wings. He swam over to him and began pulling him back toward the rest of the crew. . . . men were shouting that it would not inflate . . . The bomber sank in less than two minutes. . . . At that moment, the men in the water could not have known that they were as good as rescued. Seconds before their plane went into the sea, the machinery of the RAF’s Air/Sea Rescue service had gone into high gear. One of the bomber’s escorting Spitfires had radioed the plane’s approximate position, a mile or so from North Foreland, at the top of the Strait of Dover, and another friendly fighter circled overhead to give its exact location, which was not far from land. “Soon a small boat with a rescue crew on deck came foaming up to us.” It was the first rescue [emphasis mine] at sea of an Eighth Air Force crew.

If a bomber was in distress over Northern Europe, the crews usually preferred to try to limp back to England, rather than crash-land or parachute into German-occupied Northern Europe. Many of the bombers that failed to make it home ditched in the North Sea or in the English Channel. “Unless you have heard a man talk on the radio when he is really scared, you would not know that high-pitched vibration that edges into his voice, until he seems on the point of screaming,” an Air/Sea rescue pilot described a typical distress call. These rescue pilots knew that there was “nothing more terrifying than the sound of a man’s fear.”

The Swenson crew had been lucky. In its first year of operations, the Eighth had neither an air-sea rescue system nor a training program in ditching procedures. The inflatable dinghies and markers in its bombers were inadequate for the rigors of open sea survival, and the flares, K rations, and first aid packs all lacked waterproof protection. Nor were its bombers designed for easy egress in forced sea landings. The Eighth relied entirely on the RAF and the Royal Navy for air-sea rescue, yet failed to work closely with their deeply dedicated personnel. The result: 99 percent of its fliers who went into the sea were lost. (During this same period, approximately one-third of ditched RAF bomber crews, all of them flying night missions, were rescued.) A year later, still relying on the British, but working in unison with them, the Eighth upped its survival rate to 44 percent—and to 66 percent by the war’s end.^[3]

In the Pacific it was even more difficult. Its vastness is almost incomprehensible. However, with its European failures in the rescue field in mind, the American military set up a more efficient rescue service for the benefit of B-29 Superfortresses returning from Japan to the Marianas. B-17s with rescue kit and Catalina flying boats as well as submarines and destroyers were located along the route so that, ideally,

any pilot along the return route . . . could be reached by a rescue plane in 20 to 30 minutes, and by rescue vessels in four hours at the most. Three subs and one surface vessel were customarily spread out between Japan and Iwo Jima.^[4]

All in all, if you crash landed in the water and your plane didn’t fall to pieces upon impact, your primary concern was getting out. In fighters and small carrier-based planes with two- or three-man crews it was fairly easy, especially if you remembered to touch down with the canopy open (as it could jam). With four-engine bombers there was the added danger of the plane sinking before you could get to the hatch. In general, a plane will float pretty wall as long as it’s airtight. Battle-damaged planes, however, almost by definition, developed immediate leaks.

Notes

1. Colin D. Heaton and Anne-Marie Lewis, The Star of Africa, Zenith 2012, p. 191.

2. Donald Miller, MASTERS OF THE AIR, Simon & Schuster 2006, pp. 121–122.

3. Miller, pp. 97–99.

4. Charles R. Reyher, Memoirs of a B-29 Pilot, p. 113. Available on Google Books: https://books.google.pl/books?id=Vz3SAgAAQBAJ

How about a belly landing on the snow-covered steppes of the eastern front?