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Everyday someone demonstrates uncommon valor. But for Royal Air Force Sergeant Norman Jackson it was an unnecessary choice. He had flown his required thirty missions and was home free. Yet on the night of 26 April, 1944 RAF history records Jackson insisted on flying his thirty-first mission because he loved his crew, who to a man, were one-short of their final trip into hell; night bombing runs into Germany aboard their Avro Lancaster bomber. So it was Norman Jackson zipped up his pressure suit, stained and tattered from thirty knuckle-biting missions being shot at from air and ground. His crew chided him asking, "Who could be so insane as to accept another round with fate in the night skies over Germany when they bloody hell didn't have to?"
Books describe the Avro Lancaster as England's version of America's B-17; a durable but cumbersome 4 engine bomber with dubious aerodynamics. So, on this last night's sortie Jackson was with his crew as they crossed the channel to make a bomb run on Schweinfurt. The run went routinely though Jackson's airplane was a straggler; last to bomb the target and turn home. At that stage of WWII both sides had developed crude-but-serviceable night radar. Just as the Lancaster crew settled in with images of home, a German night fighter closed in and fired 50 caliber bullets into the bomber's fuselage. Several crew members were wounded including Jackson, hit by shell splinters. Worst of all the attack had started a fire on the plane's starboard wing where it attached to the fuselage. Sergeant Jackson and his crewmates knew the fire would ultimately explode the fuel tanks obliterating what was left of the airplane.
Recovering his balance Jackson donned a parachute and asked his crew to "hold fast" to the parachute cords as he opened a hatch leading him onto the wing. He tucked a fire extinguisher into his flight jacket and crawled into the violent maelstrom of wind, flames, and fumes. Inside the Lancaster his friends clung desperately to the parachute ropes as Jackson inched farther outside the cabin toward the fire. The pilot dropped the plane's speed to the stall warning to improve Jackson's position, but that meant the bomber was still traveling at 150 miles per hour.
With crewmen hanging onto his rigging lines, the fire worsened as Jackson unsheathed the extinguisher. By now his hands and face were burned; fatigued and in pain, Jackson's heroics were played-out. The torrent of air sweeping the wings pulled him away from his hand-hold, flipping him over the trailing edge of the wing. He was last seen falling away, chute in flames and only partially inflated. At this point the pilot gave the order to abandon ship.
The crew landed in a field near a small German town, later taken to a military hospital as prisoners of war. On entering the hospital's emergency ward they were met with the shock of their lives. On a gurney with bandaged face and hands was the body of Air-Sergeant Norman Jackson. And he was alive. His flaming half-inflated parachute broke his fall; with burns and two broken ankles, Jackson crawled two miles before being taken to the hospital. After ten months of recovery and war's end, Jackson returned to England where he slowly recovered from captivity.
On 26 October, 1944 King George VI summoned Norman Jackson to Buckingham Palace where he was told he would receive England's highest honor; the Victoria Cross. To wit the startled Jackson replied, "What the bloody hell for?" Years and heroes come and go. It's the natural order of things. Air Sergeant Norman Jackson would be the first to agree, he only did what was required.
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