Several of their gliders broke up, and the ones who took to their parachutes were later found dead as skeletons with their flesh stripped off them by the hail, possibly having been up and down in the cu-nim for a considerable time.
I remember a wonderfully quaint and rambling semi-autobiography from the fifties that, for precisely this reason, advised against the ripcord until you had tumbled
out of the CB and were in sight of the ground below.
Short shrift I suppose if you didn't get visual until it was too late (or ever.)
The author also advised the carriage of a suitable scraping tool to chip a spyhole in the ice that inevitably formed INSIDE the canopy when cloud soaring.