Crawling along a flaming wing at 20,000 ft
THE bravery of the bombing crews was awesome. But few feats of courage matched that of Norman Jackson, an engineer with 106 Squadron, whose Lancaster came under German fire during a raid on Schweinfurt in April 1944.
Despite shrapnel wounds in his right leg and shoulder, Jackson volunteered to climb out on to the starboard wing of his Lancaster as it was flying at 200mph and at 20,000ft to try to put out a fire raging in one of the engines.
Taking a fire extinguisher, he clipped on a parachute, pulled the rip cord to open it inside the fuselage — then headed out of the escape hatch above the pilot’s head while the crew in the plane held on to the chute’s rigging lines, feeding them out to allow him to crawl along the fuselage to the wing.
As he doused the flames with an extinguisher, the bomber came under renewed German attack. Jackson lost the extinguisher after being severely burned and fell off the wing.
The fire leapt up again, and the captain gave the order to abandon the aircraft. The only choice was to let go of Jackson’s rigging lines.
He plummeted to earth, dragging his parachute — only partially inflated and burning in a number of places — behind him.
Jackson landed heavily, breaking his ankle before ending up as a prisoner-of-war and spending ten months in hospital recovering from his burns, which rendered his hands ‘useless’. On his repatriation at the end of the war, he was awarded the VC. ‘To venture outside, when travelling at 200mph, at a great height and in intense cold, was an almost incredible feat,’ read his citation. Four fellow crew members also survived.