Cybermat47's Stuff

On 7 July 1941 a Wellington bomber of the Royal Air Force was making for home after striking the German city of Münster, in the Rhineland, when it was caught by a Bf 110 night fighter. The resulting damage sustained caused a fuel leak from the starboard wing, beginning a fire at the rear of the starboard engine. The crew made a hole in the fuselage and attempted to douse the flames with extinguishers and coffee from their flasks to no effect. They were left with little option but to abandon the aircraft until a 22-year-old James Allen Ward, a sergeant pilot from New Zealand, volunteered for a last ditch effort to put out the fire. What ensued is simply incredible.

Ward climbed out of the astrodome in the roof of the fuselage - there for celestial navigation and labelled ‘1.’ in the second photograph - with a fire axe in hand. Once out of the aircraft, he put on a parachute and cutting holes in the fabric skin of the Wellington for purchase made his way down onto the wing and across to the burning engine, all while the aircraft was in flight at as best a reduced speed as could be managed. Nearly blown from the wing by the  slipstream from the propeller a few feet ahead, he managed to extinguish the fire and by removing fabric from the area later starved another fire from material to burn. With difficulty he made it safely back into the aircraft, which limped home and made a successful landing.

Lieutenant Evelyn Southwell (second from the right, with cigarette) in a letter home to his mother, killed September 15, 1916