When His Lancaster Caught Fire at 20,000 Feet — One Brit Climbed Out on the Wing

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]April 26th, 1944.

[00:00:03]20,000 ft above Southern Germany. 200 mph.

[00:00:08]Sergeant Norman Jackson was crouching inside the cockpit of a burning Lancaster bomber when he made a decision that no sane man would make.

[00:00:15]He told his pilot he was going outside, not to bail out, not to escape. He wanted to climb out of the cockpit escape hatch, crawl backwards along the top of the fuselage, and step onto the wing of a four-engine bomber flying through the frozen darkness over enemy territory. The wing was on fire. A German night fighter had just raked them with cannon shells.

[00:00:36]Burning fuel was spreading across the starboard wing toward the main fuel tank.

[00:00:40]If the fire reached that tank, the aircraft would explode. Seven men would die.

[00:00:46]Jackson grabbed a fire extinguisher, stuffed it into the top of his life jacket, and clipped on his parachute. He was 25 years old. He had completed his tour. He did not have to be on this aircraft. This was supposed to be his last mission. He volunteered anyway. If you want to understand why a man would climb onto the wing of a burning bomber at 4 mi above the earth, you need to understand who Norman Cyril Jackson was before the war made him extraordinary.

[00:01:12]He was born on April 8th, 1919 in Ealing, West London. His mother gave him up almost immediately. When he was roughly a week old, a couple named Edwin and Mrs. Gunter took him in and raised him as their own.

[00:01:25]The Gunters also adopted a second boy, Geoffrey Oliver Hartley. Both boys would grow up to become decorated for gallantry in British service. One in World War II, the other during the Malayan Emergency.

[00:01:37]Their mother would later tell the press that she had adopted two of the finest sons any parents could wish for.

[00:01:43]Norman grew up in Twickenham. He attended Archdeacon Cambridge's Church of England Primary School. He left school and served an apprenticeship as a fitter and turner, a skilled trade that involved precision work on lathes and metal benches. By the time war broke out in September 1939, he was a qualified engineer working in a reserved occupation.

[00:02:03]He did not have to join up. The government had exempted men in his trade from compulsory military service because their skills were considered essential to the war effort. Jackson volunteered anyway.

[00:02:15]On October the 20th, 1939, barely 6 weeks after Britain declared war on Germany, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. His service number was 905192.

[00:02:28]His trade classification on enlistment was classified fitter 2E engines.

[00:02:33]The RAF knew exactly what to do with a man who understood machines. His first posting had nothing to do with bombers.

[00:02:40]In January 1941, Jackson was posted to the newly forming number 95 Squadron, which became operational at Freetown, Sierra Leone that spring. Flying Short Sunderland flying boats on long-range maritime reconnaissance patrols over the South Atlantic, hunting for German submarines and protecting Allied convoys. Sierra Leone in those years was known to British servicemen as the white man's grave. Not because of enemy action, but because of the tropical diseases that thrived in the equatorial heat. Malaria, dysentery, yellow fever.

[00:03:15]Jackson spent roughly 18 months there as an engine fitter maintaining the powerful Bristol Pegasus radial engines that kept the Sunderlands in the air.

[00:03:23]Then he did something that surprised even him. He applied for retraining as a flight engineer on heavy bombers.

[00:03:30]Years later, speaking to the Daily Telegraph, he admitted he could not fully explain the decision.

[00:03:35]He said he did not know why because he wanted to live. It was the kind of remark that only made sense in retrospect.

[00:03:41]By 1943, the survival odds for Bomber Command aircrew were among the worst in any branch of any Allied service.

[00:03:50]Of roughly 125,000 men who served in Bomber Command during the war, over 55,000 were killed. That was a death rate of more than 44%.

[00:04:01]Jackson returned to England in September 1942.

[00:04:04]He spent 6 months training on four-engine heavy bombers, starting with the troubled Avro Manchester before moving on to the Lancaster.

[00:04:12]He completed the specialist flight engineer course at RAF St. Athan in Wales.

[00:04:18]On June 14, 1943, he was remustered to the new aircrew flight engineer category and promoted to sergeant. He was then posted to number 1654 heavy conversion unit at RAF Wigsley, where he met the crew that would change his life.

[00:04:35]The pilot was a young man from Newfoundland named Frederick Manuel Mifflin. Mifflin was born on November the 3, 1922 in the small fishing town of Catalina on Newfoundland's eastern coast. He was 20 years old when he and Jackson first flew together. He was quiet, competent, and already building a reputation as a pilot who could bring damaged aircraft home.

[00:04:57]On July 28, 1943, the Mifflin crew arrived at number 106 Squadron, based at RAF Syerston in Nottinghamshire.

[00:05:06]106 Squadron had one of the most distinguished records in Bomber Command.

[00:05:10]Its previous commanding officer, until March 1943, had been Wing Commander Guy Gibson, the man who would go on to lead the Dambusters raid with number 617 Squadron just 2 months later. The squadron's wartime record was formidable. Over the course of the war, it flew more than 5,800 operational sorties across nearly 500 nights and 46 days, dropped more than 17,000 tons of bombs, and lost 187 aircraft. It earned 267 decorations and one Victoria Cross.

[00:05:43]The Mifflin crew was a tight unit. Seven men who depended on each other with their lives every time they climbed into a Lancaster.

[00:05:51]The full crew consisted of flying officer Frederick Mifflin as pilot, Sergeant Norman Jackson as flight engineer, Flight Sergeant Frank Higgins as navigator, Flight Sergeant Maurice Tofft as bomb aimer, Flight Sergeant Ernest Sanderlands as wireless operator, Sergeant Walter Smith as mid upper air gunner, and Flight Sergeant Norman Johnson as rear air gunner.

[00:06:13]They were close friends as well as crewmates.

[00:06:16]Jackson would later say that 106 Squadron was probably the most memorable part of his wartime career. They were not simply a squadron, but also great friends.

[00:06:25]In November 1943, the squadron moved to a brand new airfield at RAF Metheringham in Lincolnshire.

[00:06:32]From Metheringham, the crew flew mission after mission into the most heavily defended airspace in Europe.

[00:06:38]By mid-February 1944, they had bombed Berlin 10 times.

[00:06:43]On one of those Berlin trips, flying Lancaster JB 612 on December the 2nd, 1943, they were caught by flak, attacked by a night fighter, and lost an engine.

[00:06:55]Mifflin nursed the crippled bomber back across occupied Europe and brought them home. That was the kind of pilot he was.

[00:07:02]That was the kind of crew they were.

[00:07:04]By April 24, 1944, the Mifflin crew had flown their 30th operation together, a raid on Munich. Under Bomber Command rules, a crew that completed 30 operations was tour expired. They were supposed to be posted away from frontline flying, usually to a training unit where they would pass on their experience to new crews. The entire Mifflin crew was slated for transfer to the Pathfinder Force. Their war, or at least the most dangerous part of it, was supposed to be over.

[00:07:33]Two days later, on April the 26th, the same crew was listed for one more mission.

[00:07:39]Jackson was technically one operation short with his own crew because he had once filled in with a different crew when their flight engineer fell ill. To reach 30 with his original crew, he needed one more.

[00:07:50]He volunteered.

[00:07:52]On the same day, he reportedly received news that his youngest son had been born.

[00:07:56]Consider what that means.

[00:07:58]A man whose wife had just given birth to his child. A man who had already completed enough operations to walk away from combat flying.

[00:08:06]A man who knew from hard personal experience exactly how dangerous a deep penetration raid into southern Germany could be. He had seen the empty dispersal pans on the airfield at dawn.

[00:08:16]He had attended the funerals. He had watched other crews simply vanish from the operational board, never to return.

[00:08:23]He knew the odds. He went anyway.

[00:08:26]His remark about the decision was characteristically understated. He said simply that it was his job. The crew expected him to be there, so he was there.

[00:08:36]It was a phrase he would repeat for the rest of his life in different contexts, about different decisions.

[00:08:42]It explained everything about him and nothing about the kind of courage it actually took.

[00:08:47]Now, you need to understand the target.

[00:08:49]Schweinfurt, a town in northern Bavaria set along a bend in the river Main.

[00:08:55]It was the ball bearing capital of Nazi Germany.

[00:08:58]Three factories in and around the town produced 43% of the entire German ball bearing output. Albert Speer, Hitler's armaments minister, had personally warned the Führer that the destruction of Schweinfurt would be catastrophic for German war production. Ball bearings were essential for tanks, aircraft engines, submarine motors, and artillery pieces. Everything the German war machine needed to keep fighting.

[00:09:21]The Americans had already paid a devastating price trying to destroy those factories.

[00:09:26]On August 17th, 1943, the Eighth United States Army Air Force sent 376 B-17 bombers against Schweinfurt in daylight.

[00:09:36]60 were shot down.

[00:09:38]That was a loss rate of roughly 16%.

[00:09:42]On October 14th, 1943, a date the Americans called Black Thursday, 291 B-17s returned to Schweinfurt. 60 more were lost. Over 650 men were killed or captured in a single afternoon.

[00:09:57]Schweinfurt was a name that terrified bomber crews on both sides of the Atlantic.

[00:10:02]The RAF raid planned for the night of April 26th to 27th, 1944, was built around a new technique. Wing Commander Leonard Cheshire of No. 617 Squadron, the Dam Busters unit, had developed a method of low-level target marking using fast Mosquito aircraft.

[00:10:19]The Mosquitoes would dive to low altitude, place colored marker flares directly on the target, and the heavy bombers following behind would bomb on those markers from high altitude. The force dispatched that night comprised 206 Lancasters and 11 Mosquitoes from No. 5 Group, with nine supporting Lancasters from No. 1 Group. 215 Lancasters and 11 Mosquitoes in total.

[00:10:42]The raid would prove a tactical failure.

[00:10:44]A strong unforecast wind at altitude blew Cheshire's markers off target.

[00:10:49]Despite many fires and explosions reported by returning crews, the ball bearing factories were barely scratched.

[00:10:55]German civil records showed only two people killed on the ground. But the cost to Bomber Command was severe. 21 Lancasters were shot down. That was a loss rate of 9.3% of the attacking force. Roughly 125 aircrew were killed and 28 were taken prisoner.

[00:11:13]From Metheringham alone, five of 106 Squadron's 16 Lancasters failed to return.

[00:11:19]A sixth limped home on three engines.

[00:11:21]The squadron lost roughly 31% of the aircraft it sent that night. It was 106 Squadron's worst night of the entire war.

[00:11:30]Lancaster ME669, code letters ZN-O took off from Metheringham at 21:26 hours on the evening of April the 26th.

[00:11:40]She was a Mark I Lancaster built by Metropolitan Vickers in Manchester. She was powered by four Rolls-Royce Merlin 22 engines each producing 1390 horsepower at takeoff.

[00:11:52]She had been on operational charge with the squadron since February 1944, 10 weeks of combat flying that had left her scarred but serviceable.

[00:12:00]A Lancaster was a remarkable piece of engineering, 69 ft and 6 in long, 102 ft wingspan, empty weight roughly 36,900 lb. Fully loaded for a deep penetration raid into Germany, she could weigh as much as 68,000 lb.

[00:12:18]She carried her bomb load in a vast unobstructed bomb bay that could hold a single 4,000 lb high-capacity blast bomb, the type crews called a cookie, along with clusters of 30-lb and 4-lb incendiary bombs.

[00:12:32]Her fuel was stored in six self-sealing tanks built into the wings, three in each wing, holding a combined total of roughly 2,154 gallons of 100-octane aviation fuel.

[00:12:46]That fuel was the Lancaster's lifeblood.

[00:12:48]It was also the thing most likely to kill her crew.

[00:12:52]The route that night took them southeast across the English Channel, over the low countries, and deep into southern Germany, climbing steadily to a bombing altitude of roughly 20,000 ft. The bomber stream stretched for miles across the night sky. 215 Lancasters and 11 Mosquitoes strung out in a long procession that the German radar stations had been tracking since it crossed the coastline.

[00:13:15]Mifflin's crew dropped their bombs on what they believed was the target and began the long climbing turn out of the target area for the homeward leg.

[00:13:23]The most dangerous part of the mission was not the target itself.

[00:13:27]It was the journey home. Crews were tired. Discipline relaxed. Aircraft settled into predictable courses and altitudes, and the German night fighters, now fully alerted, were hunting through the returning bomber stream.

[00:13:42]The Lancaster was settling at around 20,000 ft on a westerly heading when the German night fighter found them.

[00:13:48]If you want to know what happened next, what Norman Jackson did on the wing of that burning bomber, please hit like on this video right now. Every like pushes this story to someone who has never heard the name Norman Jackson. He deserves to be remembered. Please subscribe.

[00:14:03]By 1944, the German night fighter force was at the peak of its killing power.

[00:14:08]The Nachtjagd, as the Germans called it, had evolved from a crude system of ground-controlled interceptions into a sophisticated machine for destroying bombers.

[00:14:17]The aircraft that found ME 669 was a Messerschmitt Bf 110 G-4, a twin-engine heavy fighter fitted with Lichtenstein SN-2 airborne intercept radar, and typically armed with upward-firing cannons in a configuration the Germans called Schräge Musik, a slang term for jazz that referred to the oblique angle of the guns. The name was bitterly ironic. The installation allowed the fighter to approach a bomber from below and behind, in the crew's blind spot, and fire devastating cannon bursts upward into the unprotected fuel tanks and wing roots.

[00:14:53]Most Lancaster crews never saw what killed them. The first warning was often the sound of cannon shells tearing through the aircraft, followed by fire, followed by nothing.

[00:15:03]The pilot was Feldwebel Günther Bar of the 3rd Staffel, Nachtjagdgeschwader 6, based at Mainz-Finthen.

[00:15:11]Bar was born on July 18th, 1921 in Neulegden, East Prussia.

[00:15:17]He was an experienced night fighter ace who had been hunting Allied bombers for nearly a year.

[00:15:22]His first confirmed victories had been a Halifax and a Stirling over Berlin on the night of August 23rd, 1943.

[00:15:30]He had since added six more including a B-17 during the American second Schweinfurt raid on October the 14th, 1943.

[00:15:39]The same town that manufactured the ball bearings had now brought him another victim.

[00:15:43]ME669 would be his 15th victory. His Luftwaffe combat records logged the engagement at 02:45 hours at an altitude of 5,800 m, roughly 19,000 ft, approximately 15 km northwest of the village of Kerschsoll.

[00:16:01]You will find accounts of this story that say the attacker was a Focke-Wulf Fw 190.

[00:16:07]It was not.

[00:16:09]That mistake goes back to rear gunner Norman Johnson who shouted a warning to Mifflin in the seconds before the cannon shells hit. In the darkness with a fighter closing at hundreds of miles per hour, nobody could tell one silhouette from another.

[00:16:22]The Luftwaffe records tell a different story. Bar's unit never flew Fw 190s. He was in a Bf 110 and the records are not in doubt. Bar's cannon shells tore into the Lancaster.

[00:16:34]The attack was devastating. Fire [snorts] erupted on the upper surface of the starboard wing between the fuselage and the inner engine directly above one of the main fuel tanks. Shrapnel hit Jackson in the right leg and right shoulder. He was thrown to the cockpit floor by the violence of Mifflin's evasive corkscrew maneuver. Jackson picked himself up. He could see the glow of the fire through the cockpit windows, orange light flickering on the starboard side. The fuel tank that sat directly beneath the burning section of wing skin held hundreds of gallons of 100 octane aviation fuel.

[00:17:06]If the fire burned through the skin and reached that tank, the explosion would tear the wing off the aircraft. A Lancaster without a wing does not glide.

[00:17:14]It does not spiral. It drops. Seven men would die in a fireball 4 miles above Germany. There would be no time to bail out. There would be no time for anything.

[00:17:25]Jackson knew the Lancaster's fuel system the way a surgeon knows anatomy.

[00:17:29]He had trained on it. He had maintained it.

[00:17:32]He had spent hundreds of hours crawling through the aircraft checking fuel lines, transfer and tank seals.

[00:17:39]He knew exactly how much fuel was in that wing tank. He knew exactly how close the fire was to reaching it. And he knew that if someone did not do something in the next few minutes, the decision would be made for all of them.

[00:17:50]He shouted to Mifflin over the roar of the engines. He told the pilot he believed he could put out the fire.

[00:17:56]Mifflin gave him permission to try.

[00:17:58]Jackson grabbed a small portable fire extinguisher and stuffed it into the top of his May West life jacket. He clipped on his parachute pack.

[00:18:07]Then he reached up and jettisoned the small escape hatch in the cockpit roof directly above the pilot's head.

[00:18:13]The air that hit him was beyond cold. At 20,000 ft, the outside temperature was far below freezing. The slipstream screaming across the fuselage at 200 mph turned the cold into something physical, a force that tried to rip him away from the aircraft the moment he pushed his head and shoulders through the hatch.

[00:18:32]Then disaster struck before he even reached the wing.

[00:18:36]As Jackson was climbing out through the narrow hatch, his parachute pack, which was never designed to be worn outside a bomber in flight, caught on the rim of the opening. The pack ripped open.

[00:18:46]The silk canopy and rigging lines spilled out and tumbled back down into the cockpit below him.

[00:18:51]In any other circumstance, this would have been a death sentence.

[00:18:55]A flight engineer climbing onto the wing of a bomber at 20,000 ft had just lost his only means of survival.

[00:19:02]But the men inside the cockpit, Mifflin, Toft, and Higgins, grabbed the silk and the rigging lines. They held on.

[00:19:09]They began to feed the parachute out through the hatch, paying out the lines like a rope, giving Jackson a tether as he edged backwards along the top of the fuselage toward the burning wing.

[00:19:18]Think about what this means. Three men inside a doomed aircraft were holding the parachute of a fourth man who was crawling along the outside of a bomber at 4 mi altitude in the dark, in the freezing cold, at 200 mph toward a fire that could detonate the fuel tank beneath him at any second.

[00:19:36]Jackson slipped before he could position himself behind the fire. He fell from the top of the fuselage onto the upper surface of the starboard wing.

[00:19:43]He managed to catch and grip an air intake on the leading edge of the wing, almost certainly the carburetor or oil cooler intake immediately behind the inner engine.

[00:19:53]He clung on with one hand. The fire extinguisher came loose from his jacket and was whipped away into the darkness by the slipstream.

[00:20:00]He had nothing left. No extinguisher. No tools.

[00:20:04]He beat at the flames with his bare hand. The fire was being fed from the fuel tank below the wing surface.

[00:20:10]A hand extinguisher could never have stopped it. His bare hand was useless against it, but he kept trying.

[00:20:16]Flames licked across his face, his hands, his flying clothing.

[00:20:21]His skin was burning. His right eye swelled shut from the heat.

[00:20:25]The freezing slipstream turned the tears in his other eye to ice. Then Barr came back. The Bf 110 swept in for a second pass. Cannon and machine gun fire raked the Lancaster again. Two bullets struck Jackson in the legs as he clung to the wing. The same burst or the violence of Mifflin's renewed evasive maneuver swept Jackson bodily off the wing.

[00:20:47]He was dragged backwards over the trailing edge through the flames.

[00:20:50]For a moment, he hung beneath the burning Lancaster, suspended in the slipstream, tethered only by the rigging lines of his half-burned parachute. The canopy, partly inflated by the airflow, was burning in several places.

[00:21:03]Holes were spreading through the silk.

[00:21:05]Inside the aircraft, the crew faced an impossible choice. They could try to haul him back in, which was physically impossible against the slipstream and his weight with the bomber now minutes from breaking apart, or they could release the parachute and give him whatever chance the damaged canopy could offer. They released him.

[00:21:22]Mifflin then gave the order to abandon aircraft. Norman Jackson fell from roughly 20,000 ft. 4 mi.

[00:21:30]He fell through the frozen darkness over southern Germany with a parachute that was 2/3 burned, holes in the canopy, silk still smoldering. The remnant of the chute slowed him just enough to convert what should have been lethal terminal velocity into something barely survivable. He hit the ground hard. He broke his ankle.

[00:21:50]The inventory of his injuries was catastrophic. Shell splinter wounds in his right leg and right shoulder from the first attack inside the aircraft.

[00:21:58]Severe burns to his face, hands, and clothing. His right eye completely closed. His hands, in the language of the official citation, useless.

[00:22:08]Two bullet wounds in his legs from the second strafing pass, a broken ankle from the landing. He spent the rest of the night lying in the dark where he had fallen.

[00:22:17]At first light on April the 27th, 1944, he began to crawl. Not walk. Crawl.

[00:22:25]On his knees and elbows because his hands were too badly burned to use and his ankle was broken. He dragged himself across open fields toward the nearest village near a place called Kirschenzoll in what is now the state of Baden-Württemberg.

[00:22:39]He reached a cottage. He knocked at the door.

[00:22:42]The man who answered recoiled, spat at him, and shouted the words that Nazi propaganda had taught German civilians to use against Allied bomber crews.

[00:22:51]Terrorflieger. Churchill gangster.

[00:22:54]But the man's two daughters pushed their father aside, brought Jackson inside, and began to bathe his wounds.

[00:23:01]Jackson later recalled the moment with dark humor. He said he was lying there like a lord and began to think he was pretty lucky.

[00:23:08]The Gestapo arrived shortly afterward and took him into custody.

[00:23:12]Lancaster ME669 crashed approximately 1 and 1/2 mi west of Kirschseel.

[00:23:18]It took with it the bodies of Frederick Mifflin and Norman Johnson, the rear gunner.

[00:23:22]They were buried by local authorities in unmarked graves.

[00:23:26]4 years later in 1948, RAF investigators exhumed the remains, identified them, and reinterred them at Durnbach War Cemetery in Bavaria.

[00:23:37]They lie today in adjacent graves.

[00:23:39]Mifflin was 21 years old. Johnson was 20.

[00:23:43]The four other surviving crew members, Higgins, Toft, Sandilands, and Smith, all bailed out successfully and were captured. They were taken first to Dulag Luft Oberursel, the Luftwaffe's central interrogation center for captured Allied air crew, located near Frankfurt.

[00:23:59]From there, they were sent to Stalag Luft VI at Heydekrug on the Baltic coast. As the Red Army advanced through East Prussia in the summer of 1944, they were evacuated west to Stalag 357, first at Thorn in occupied Poland, and later at Fallingbostel in Lower Saxony.

[00:24:16]Throughout their captivity, the four men carried the same unfinished thought.

[00:24:20]They had watched their flight engineer climb out of the cockpit hatch, crawl across the fuselage, and cling to a burning wing. They had held his parachute in their hands. They had released him into the darkness.

[00:24:32]They did not know if he was alive or dead. Jackson was transported through the German military medical system in a very different condition.

[00:24:40]He was taken first to a civilian hospital for initial treatment, then transferred to Dulag Luft for interrogation.

[00:24:47]From the interrogator's point of view, he was useless.

[00:24:50]Barely conscious, unable to speak clearly, his hands wrapped in bandages, his right eye sealed shut by burns. He gave them nothing beyond his name, rank, and service number. He was registered as prisoner of war number 53142 and assigned to Stalag 9C at Bad Sulza.

[00:25:10]In practice, he spent the next 10 months in a German military hospital, almost certainly the reserve hospital at Obermaßfeld in Thuringia, which was part of the Stalag 9C Lazarett system treating Allied prisoners from across Central Germany.

[00:25:24]The medical staff worked within the limits of a Reich that was running short of everything. Bandages, antiseptics, anesthetics, all were scarce.

[00:25:33]The burns on Jackson's face and hands healed slowly. The skin scarred and contracted. His ankle was set. The bullets and shell splinters were extracted one by one as his body recovered enough to tolerate the procedures.

[00:25:47]10 months is a long time to lie in a hospital bed in enemy territory, not knowing whether your crew survived, not knowing whether anyone would ever learn what you did on the wing of that Lancaster.

[00:25:57]Jackson endured it the way he endured everything. Quietly, without complaint.

[00:26:02]His hands would never fully recover.

[00:26:04]They remained permanently scarred and only partially functional for the rest of his life.

[00:26:09]Jackson said nothing to his captors about what he had done.

[00:26:12]To the German interrogators, it was none of their business.

[00:26:16]To his fellow prisoners, it was simply not his way. The full story of what happened on the wing of ME669 remained unknown to the British military for nearly 18 months. By spring 1945, the Third Reich was collapsing. Jackson, now sufficiently recovered to walk, was transferred from hospital to a working prisoner of war camp.

[00:26:37]He made two escape attempts. The first failed.

[00:26:40]The second, made as Germany fell apart in April 1945, succeeded.

[00:26:45]He made his way west and reached the lines of Lieutenant General George Patton's United States Third Army.

[00:26:51]He came home to England around VE Day, May 8, 1945.

[00:26:56]The war in Europe was over. The story of Norman Jackson's Victoria Cross only came to light because of his crew.

[00:27:04]When Frank Higgins, Morris Toft, Ernest Sandilands, and Walter Smith were liberated from Stalag 357 in April 1945, they had spent nearly a year not knowing whether their flight engineer had survived. The last they had seen of him, he was hanging beneath the burning Lancaster, tethered by the rigging lines of a half-destroyed parachute, disappearing into the darkness. They had released him and bailed out. They had been captured. They had spent months in prison camps, and through all of it, the same question had haunted them.

[00:27:36]Did Jackson live?

[00:27:37]They found out he had survived only after their own repatriation to England.

[00:27:42]Their reaction was immediate, unanimous, and forceful.

[00:27:46]All four men independently insisted that their flight engineer be recommended for the Victoria Cross, not the Distinguished Flying Cross, not the Distinguished Flying Medal, the Victoria Cross, the decoration awarded only for the most exceptional valor in the face of the enemy. Higgins, the navigator, took the lead in organizing the recommendation.

[00:28:06]All four gave detailed written statements describing what they had witnessed. Their accounts agreed in every important particular.

[00:28:14]Independent corroboration of a kind that would normally have come from a surviving captain, but Mifflin was dead.

[00:28:20]The navigator, bomb aimer, wireless operator, and mid upper gunner stepped forward in his place. The recommendation was processed up through the chain of command with unusual speed.

[00:28:30]The award was published in the fourth supplement to the London Gazette, number 37324, on October the 23, 1945.

[00:28:39]The citation referred to Jackson as Sergeant, now Warrant Officer, Norman Cyril Jackson, RAFVR, 106 Squadron.

[00:28:49]He had been promoted during his time as a prisoner. The final lines of the citation spoke with a clarity that official military language rarely achieves. It stated that this airman's attempt to extinguish the fire and save the aircraft and crew from falling into enemy hands was an act of outstanding gallantry.

[00:29:07]To venture outside when traveling at 200 miles an hour at a great height and in intense cold was an almost incredible feat.

[00:29:15]Had he succeeded in subduing the flames, there was little or no prospect of his regaining the cockpit.

[00:29:21]The spilling of his parachute and the risk of grave damage to its canopy reduced his chances of survival to a minimum.

[00:29:28]By his ready willingness to face these dangers, he set an example of self-sacrifice which will ever be remembered.

[00:29:36]The investiture took place at Buckingham Palace on November the 13th, 1945.

[00:29:41]King George VI presented the Victoria Cross. Standing beside Jackson that day to receive his own Victoria Cross was Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, the former commanding officer of 617 Squadron, the master bomber whose low-level marking technique had been used on the very Schweinfurt raid in which Jackson's Lancaster had been shot down. Cheshire, despite outranking Jackson by several grades, insisted on approaching the King together with the sergeant.

[00:30:08]Jackson later recalled that Cheshire had said, "This chap stuck his neck out more than I did.

[00:30:13]He should get his Victoria Cross first."

[00:30:16]The King, of course, had to keep to protocol, but Jackson never forgot the gesture.

[00:30:21]A press photograph taken outside the palace that afternoon shows the two men standing side by side, both in uniform, both blinking in the pale November light. It is now held in the National Portrait Gallery collection. A Group Captain and a Warrant Officer. One had dropped 4,000-lb bombs on German cities from the cockpit of a Mosquito. The other had crawled onto the wing of a burning Lancaster with a fire extinguisher.

[00:30:46]Both had earned the same medal, the highest military decoration in the British Commonwealth.

[00:30:52]Norman Jackson's hands never fully recovered. He could not return to his pre-war trade as a fitter and turner.

[00:30:59]The precision grip that metalwork demanded was beyond his scarred fingers.

[00:31:03]Instead, he became a traveling salesman.

[00:31:06]He worked first for a brandy company before being recruited by the Distillers Company to sell Haig whisky.

[00:31:12]He was good at it. He kept that job for the rest of his working life. He and his wife Alma raised seven children, four sons and three daughters, in a house at Hampton Hill in West London.

[00:31:24]Jackson built much of that house himself, working around his damaged hands with the help of a friend.

[00:31:29]He was haunted by nightmares of the burning wing, episodes of darkness that he attributed openly to his brush with death.

[00:31:37]But the war had also left him with a profound faith. He once told an interviewer that nobody prayed harder than he did before they took off and after they landed. So did all the rest of them, though nobody mentioned it.

[00:31:48]He rarely spoke about his Victoria Cross.

[00:31:51]When pressed, his answer was always the same, the same words he had used since 1945.

[00:31:57]It was his job as flight engineer to get the rest of the crew out of trouble.

[00:32:01]He was the most experienced member of the crew and they all looked to him to do something.

[00:32:06]His mother, Mrs. Gunter, the woman who had taken him in as a 1-week-old baby in 1919, offered her own assessment when reporters came calling.

[00:32:15]She said that the only other outstanding thing he ever did was to ride in a procession through Twickenham on the smallest bicycle ever made. Norman Cyril Jackson died at his home in Hampton Hill on March 26, 1994.

[00:32:29]He was 74 years old. After the death of his wife Alma, the terms of her will required the family's medals to be sold at auction.

[00:32:37]The Jackson family had hoped to donate them to the Royal Air Force Museum at Hendon. That was not possible.

[00:32:43]On April 30th, 2004, the medal group, including the Victoria Cross and seven campaign and service medals, was auctioned by in London.

[00:32:53]The RAF Museum was outbid. The successful buyer, at a price of £235,250, including commission, was Lord Ashcroft, the British businessman and military historian who has described Jackson's exploit as arguably the greatest single act of gallantry in the entire history of the Victoria Cross.

[00:33:12]The German pilot who set ME 669 on fire survived the war.

[00:33:17]Gunther Bar went on to become one of the leading aces of the night fighter arm, eventually credited with 37 victories, 36 of them at night. On a single night in February 1945, he shot down seven RAF heavy bombers. He was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on March 28th, 1945.

[00:33:38]After the war, he rejoined the West German Air Force in 1962 and retired in 1975 as a major.

[00:33:45]He died on April the 29th, 2009 in Wacken, Schleswig-Holstein.

[00:33:50]He was 87. He and the man whose Lancaster he set on fire never met.

[00:33:55]Jackson's story asks a question that the comfortable and the safe rarely have to answer.

[00:34:00]What would you do?

[00:34:02]Your aircraft is on fire. Your crew is going to die. There is a fire extinguisher in the cockpit and a fire on the wing. The temperature outside is far below freezing. The wind is 200 mph.

[00:34:14]You're 4 miles above enemy territory.

[00:34:17]Even if you reach the fire, even if you put it out, you cannot get back inside the aircraft. Your parachute has already ripped open. Your chances of survival are, as the official citation stated, reduced to a minimum.

[00:34:30]Do you stay inside and hope for the best? Do you bail out and save yourself?

[00:34:35]Or do you climb out onto the wing? There is no correct answer. There is only the answer Norman Jackson gave. He went out.

[00:34:43]The mathematics of his story are different from those of men who held positions or charged enemy lines.

[00:34:49]Jackson did not kill 98 men or hold a hill for 6 hours.

[00:34:54]He tried to save an aircraft that could not be saved. He failed. The fire won.

[00:35:00]The Lancaster crashed. Two of his closest friends died. The Schweinfurt raid itself was a tactical failure that barely dented German ball bearing production.

[00:35:09]Nothing Jackson did that night change the outcome of the mission, the battle, or the war.

[00:35:15]And yet his Victoria Cross stands at the extreme edge of what an unaided human being can do in the pursuit of duty. He went out onto the wing knowing that success meant being stranded on a burning aircraft with no way back inside. He went out knowing that his parachute was already damaged. He went out because the alternative was watching his crew die without trying.

[00:35:36]The Lancaster crews of Bomber Command lived with a particular kind of fear.

[00:35:40]Their war was fought in darkness, at altitude, in machines that burned. A Lancaster carried over 2,000 gallons of high octane aviation fuel in its wings.

[00:35:51]A single incendiary cannon shell could turn the aircraft into a flying torch.

[00:35:55]The average life expectancy of a Bomber Command crew in 1944 was roughly 14 operations. A full tour was 30. The mathematics were brutal.

[00:36:06]For every two crews that started a tour, roughly one would not finish it.

[00:36:10]The men knew this. They knew the numbers.

[00:36:13]They had seen the empty chairs in the mess hall at breakfast, the beds stripped and remade before lunch, the names quietly removed from the duty roster. They flew anyway. The bomber offensive against Germany remains It's of the most debated campaigns of the war, whether it shortened the conflict, whether the cost in air crew lives was justified, whether the destruction of German cities was morally defensible.

[00:36:35]These are questions that historians and ethicists have argued over for 80 years.

[00:36:40]The men who flew the missions rarely engaged in that debate. They had volunteered. They had been given a job.

[00:36:46]They did it. 55,000 of them never came home. Their average age was 22.

[00:36:53]Jackson's story sits within that large tragedy, but also apart from it.

[00:36:57]He did not die over Germany. He did not add to the bomber offensive's grim arithmetic of destruction. He tried to save his aircraft, his crew, and his friends. He failed. And yet his action, measured not by its outcome, but by its intent, represents something that transcends the arguments about strategic bombing. A man saw a fire. A man knew his friends would die.

[00:37:18]A man went out onto the wing. Norman Jackson was one of only 10 members of Lancaster air crew to receive the Victoria Cross during the war. He was the first flight engineer in the history of the Royal Air Force to receive the decoration.

[00:37:32]His name appears on the Victoria Cross Memorial in the porch of St. Clement Danes Church in the Aldwych, the central church of the RAF.

[00:37:40]It appears on the Bomber Command Memorial in Green Park, unveiled by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on June 28th, 2012.

[00:37:49]A children's center at 50 Windmill Road in Hampton Hill bears his name. A street in Insworth, Gloucestershire, Jackson Crescent was named in his honor.

[00:37:59]He was adopted at 1 week old by a family in Twickenham.

[00:38:02]He left school and learned to work with metal.

[00:38:05]He volunteered for a war he did not have to fight. He flew to Schweinfurt on a mission he did not have to fly. He climbed out onto a wing he did not have to reach. He fell 4 miles with a burning parachute and survived. He crawled across a German field on his elbows because his hands were destroyed. He spent 10 months in a hospital, escaped, walked to freedom, came home, built a house with scarred hands, raised seven children, sold whiskey for a living, and never once made himself the center of the story. His Victoria Cross sits today in the Lord Ashcroft Gallery. A small bronze cross inscribed with two words, for valor. It was earned at 20,000 ft on a burning wing over Germany on the night of April the 26th, 1944.

[00:38:50]It was presented by a king. It was sold at auction because a widow's will required it. It was bought by a man who called it the greatest single act of gallantry in the history of the decoration.

[00:39:01]Norman Jackson would have disagreed. He would have said it was his job. That is the story. Now you know it. But most people do not.

[00:39:10]Most people have never heard the name Norman Jackson. That is where you come in. Hit that like button right now. Not for us.

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[00:39:29]We dig through archives, through official records, through Victoria Cross citations to find men like Jackson. Men who were forgotten.

[00:39:37]Men whose stories sat in filing cabinets for decades while the world moved on.

[00:39:41]We pull them out. We tell their stories every week. Drop a comment. Tell us where you are watching from. United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa. We have viewers on every continent. Every one of you is part of this. Every comment, every share, every like keeps these stories alive. Tell us if someone in your family served. Tell us their name. Tell us their branch.

[00:40:09]Tell us their regiment.

[00:40:11]This comment section is not just a comment section. It is a roll call. And every name matters. Thank you for watching. Thank you for staying until the end, and thank you for making sure that Warrant Officer Norman Cyril Jackson finally gets the audience he earned on the wing of a Lancaster over Germany 80 years ago.