August 12th, 1944.
Flight Lieutenant James Crawford was 5 seconds away from death, and he knew it.
The Messor Schmidt BF 109 on his tail had already put three holes in his Spitfire’s left wing, and black smoke was pouring from the engine cowling as he threw the stick hard right, then left, then right again in desperate attempts to shake the German pilot, who seemed to know exactly what he was going to do before he did it.
Crawford’s squadron had been escorting B17 bombers deep into occupied France when 30 German fighters dropped out of the clouds like wolves on a flock of sheep.
And now half his squadron was either dead or scattered across 50 mi of sky.
His radio was screaming with voices, some calling for help, others just screaming.
And through it all, he could hear the steady hammer of machine gun fire getting closer and closer as the Messormid closed the distance.
The altimeter was spinning down 4,000 ft.
3,000.
His engine was dying.
The controls were getting mushy.
And the German pilot behind him wasn’t making mistakes.
Crawford had been flying Spitfires for 18 months, had survived 42 combat missions, and had shot down seven German planes.
But none of that mattered now because his luck had just run out.
The Messormid fired again.
The canopy exploded.
Glass and metal fragments tore past his face as the engine seized completely and suddenly his beautiful, graceful Spitfire became a 20,000lb glider falling out of the sky.
He had maybe 10 seconds to decide.
Bail out and become a prisoner of war or try to ride this dying plane down and hope he survived the landing.
2,000 ft.
The French countryside was rushing up at him.
Fields and forests and roads all blurring together as gravity took over.
1,000 ft.
He spotted a field.
Too short, too rough, but it was all he had.
Quick thing before we continue.
Hit subscribe if you want more incredible WW2 stories like this because we’re building something special here and you’ll want to be part of it.
Crawford pointed the nose at that field and held on as the Spitfire hit the ground at 120 mph, bounced 15 ft back into the air, hit again, and plowed through 200 yd of French farmland before slamming into a drainage ditch and flipping onto its back.
When he came to, he was hanging upside down in his straps.
Fuel was dripping onto his flight suit, and he could hear German voices in the distance.
This is the story of how a British pilot shot down over France, stole a German bomber, and used it to attack the Third Reich with their own weapons.
The crash had broken two of Crawford’s ribs, and given him a concussion that made the world tilt sideways every time he moved his head.
But adrenaline and pure survival instinct got him out of the cockpit before the Spitfire caught fire.
He could see German soldiers running across the field toward the crash site, maybe half a mile away.
So he grabbed his emergency kit and ran the other direction into the treeine, moving on autopilot, despite the pain shooting through his chest with every breath.
The emergency kit contained a compass, a map printed on silk, some French currency, a few ration bars, and a pistol with two magazines, which wasn’t much to work with when you were behind enemy lines in occupied France with a Nazi manhunt forming up behind you.
Crawford spent that first night hiding in a barn three mi from the crash site, shivering in wet clothes because he’d crossed a stream and listening to German trucks driving up and down the roads as they searched for him.
His ribs hurt so badly that breathing felt like being stabbed.
And every time he closed his eyes, he saw Messmitt closing in and heard the sound of bullets punching through his Spitfire’s aluminum skin.
He knew the statistics.
Down pilots in occupied territory had about a 40% chance of making it back to England if they could connect with the French resistance.
But first you had to survive long enough to find them.
And Crawford had no idea where to start looking.
The next day he moved east, staying in the tree lines and avoiding roads, surviving on the ration bars and water from streams.
By the third day, the pain in his ribs had dulled to a constant ache, and he’d covered maybe 20 m, though he had no real plan beyond putting distance between himself and the crash site.
That’s when he heard the planes, not the high alitude drone of bombers, but the lower, closer sound of aircraft taking off and landing.
He worked his way through the forest toward the sound and found himself on a hillside overlooking a Luwaffa airfield.
It wasn’t a major base, just a small forward airfield with maybe a dozen planes, a few buildings, and a single grass runway.
Crawford watched through the trees as German ground crews worked on a Messor Schmidt as officers walked between buildings as a fuel truck made its rounds.
He was about to move on when he saw it.
A Junker’s J88 sitting alone at the far end of the field away from the other aircraft.
The J88 was a twin engine medium bomber, faster than it had any right to be and deadly effective, the kind of plane that had terrorized British cities during the Blitz and sunk hundreds of Allied ships.
And this one appeared to be unguarded.
Crawford’s first thought was that he was looking at a trap because nobody leaves a perfectly good bomber sitting unattended on an active airfield.
But he watched for 2 hours and nobody went near that plane.
The ground crews were focused on the fighters.
The guards were patrolling the main buildings.
That J88 just sat there like forgotten furniture.
And slowly, impossibly, an idea began forming in Crawford’s concussion adult brain.
He was a fighter pilot who’d spent hundreds of hours in single engine aircraft.
He’d never flown a twin engine bomber.
He’d never flown a German plane.
He didn’t speak German, couldn’t read German instruments, and had no idea what the control layout looked like inside a J88.
But he did know how planes worked, and he knew that every aircraft operated on the same basic principles, regardless of which country built it.
The sun was setting when Crawford made his decision.
He’d either die trying to steal that bomber, die trying to walk to neutral territory, or die when the Germans eventually caught him.
At least stealing the plane gave him a chance to hit back.
He waited until full darkness, then worked his way down the hillside, moving slowly because his ribs couldn’t handle anything faster than a careful walk.
The airfield had lights, but not many, and the blackout regulations meant they were dim and spaced far apart.
He reached the fence, found a section where the wire was loose, and squeezed through, feeling something tear in his chest that made him bite down on his sleeve to keep from crying out.
The Jew 88 was 100 yards away across open ground.
Crawford took a breath, stood up, and walked toward it like he owned the place because sneaking would just make him look suspicious if anyone spotted him.
His heart was hammering so hard he thought it might burst through his broken ribs.
And every step felt like it took an hour, but nobody shouted and nobody shot at him.
He reached the bomber, climbed up through the entry hatch, and found himself in the dark interior of an enemy aircraft with absolutely no idea what to do next.
The cockpit was cramped and covered with instruments labeled in German, switches and gauges arranged in patterns that made no sense to his Spitfire trained brain.
But Crawford had grown up on a farm fixing tractors and had spent 2 years maintaining aircraft before he’d ever flown one.
So he started doing what mechanics do, tracing systems and figuring out how things connected.
Fuel selector, throttles, mitos, engine primers.
The layout was different, but the logic was the same.
Planes needed fuel, air, and spark to run.
Everything else was just details.
His hands were shaking as he went through what he hoped was the startup sequence for the port engine.
Mixture rich, the throttle cracked, fuel pump on, mags are hot.
He hit the starter.
The engine coughed, sputtered, and caught with a roar that sounded like thunder in the quiet night.
Immediately, lights started coming on across the airfield.
Crawford didn’t wait for the starboard engine.
He released the brakes and shoved the throttle forward and the J88 lurched ahead on one engine, swinging hard to the left because the asymmetric thrust wanted to spin the plane in circles.
He fought the rudder pedals, managed to get the starboard engines started while the bomber was rolling.
And suddenly both engines were screaming and the plane was accelerating toward the grass runway that he couldn’t see in the darkness.
Tracer fire started arcing across the field.
He could hear bullets hitting the fuselage.
The end of the runway was coming up fast, marked by a dim light, and he pulled back on the yolk.
The J88 staggered into the air, climbing at an angle that was barely controlled flight, and Crawford banked hard to the west because east was deeper into Germany and west was toward Allied lines.
More tracers followed him up and he could see muzzle flashes from the ground as every German at that airfield opened fire on their own stolen bomber.
But he was airborne now, climbing through a thousand ft and the ground fire was falling behind.
He’d actually done it.
He’d stolen a German bomber.
Now he just had to figure out how to fly it, navigate it, and use it to hit something worth hitting.
The J88 handled completely differently from his Spitfire.
It was heavier, slower to respond, needed both hands on the yolk for any serious maneuver, and the visibility from the cockpit was terrible compared to the greenhouse canopy he was used to.
Crawford discovered he was sitting on top of a bomb load when he found the release controls.
And according to the instruments, he still had fuel from maybe 2 hours of flight time.
He’d escaped the immediate area around the airfield, but he was flying a German bomber over German occupied territory at night with no navigation lights and no way to identify himself as friendly if he made it to Allied airspace.
The idea came to him fully formed.
He was going to bomb Germany.
Not because it was smart, not because it was part of some plan, but because he was flying a loaded German bomber, and the only thing better than escaping would be making the Germans pay for shooting him down in the first place.
He checked his compass, corrected his heading to northeast, and pointed the Jew88 toward Germany proper.
The bomber had enough range to reach the Roar Valley, maybe even Berlin if he pushed it.
And Crawford figured if he was going to die doing something stupid, he might as well die doing something spectacular.
He flew for an hour, navigating by compass and dead reckoning, watching his fuel gauges drop and wondering if every German knight fighter in the Luwaffo was scrambling to intercept him.
The moon was up, providing just enough light to see the ground passing below, and he recognized the Ryan River when he crossed it, which meant he was definitely over Germany now.
He’d never dropped bombs before, had no training on the J88’s bomb site, and wasn’t entirely sure he was releasing the weapons correctly when he flipped the switches over what looked like a major railard.
But he felt the plane lift as the bombs fell away, saw explosions blooming below, and turned west toward home.
The fuel gauges were reading near empty when Crawford spotted what he thought was the front line, marked by artillery flashes and burning buildings.
He’d pushed the J88 as far as it would go, and now both engines were starting to sputter as they sucked the last drops of fuel from the tanks.
He had maybe 2 minutes before he’d be gliding again.
He spotted a field on what he desperately hoped was the Allied side of the line, put the nose down, and set up for a landing that was half controlled crash and half prayer.
The bomber hit hard, bounced, hit again, and slid to a stop in a Belgian field just as both engines died completely.
Crawford sat in the dark cockpit for a long moment, breathing hard despite his broken ribs, unable to quite believe he was still alive.
Then he heard voices approaching, and this time they were speaking English.
American soldiers found him still sitting in the German bomber, trying to explain through his concussion and exhaustion that he was RAF, that he’d stolen the plane, that he just bombed Germany.
They didn’t believe him until they checked his dog tags and saw the fresh bomb damage in the Roar Valley on their intelligence reports.
Flight Lieutenant James Crawford spent two weeks in a military hospital, then returned to England, where he tried to explain to his commanding officers how he’d gone from being shot down to stealing a J88 to bombing Germany in the span of 4 days.
The RAF gave him a medal.
The story got classified for security reasons, and Crawford went back to flying Spitfires until the war ended.
The J88 he’d stolen was salvaged for parts, and the Germans never figured out who had taken their bomber until British intelligence revealed the story years after the war.
What makes this story remarkable isn’t just the theft or the bombing run, but what it says about the kind of people who fought World War II.
Crawford could have hidden in that forest, could have tried to link up with the resistance, could have played it safe and focused on survival.
Instead, he saw an opportunity to strike back and took it.
Despite the broken ribs, despite never having flown a German bomber, despite the odds being overwhelmingly against him, he turned the enemy’s own weapon against them and lived to tell about it, which is exactly the kind of impossible story that defines the greatest generation.
Thanks for watching the story about one of the most audacious acts of the entire war.
Next week, we’re covering the American tank crew that held off an entire German division with a single Sherman.
Hit subscribe so you don’t miss it.
They Shot Down His Spitfire — So He Hijacked a Ju-88 and Bombed Berlin
August 12th, 1944.
Flight Lieutenant James Crawford was 5 seconds away from death, and he knew it.
The Messor Schmidt BF 109 on his tail had already put three holes in his Spitfire’s left wing, and black smoke was pouring from the engine cowling as he threw the stick hard right, then left, then right again in desperate attempts to shake the German pilot, who seemed to know exactly what he was going to do before he did it.
Crawford’s squadron had been escorting B17 bombers deep into occupied France when 30 German fighters dropped out of the clouds like wolves on a flock of sheep.
And now half his squadron was either dead or scattered across 50 mi of sky.
His radio was screaming with voices, some calling for help, others just screaming.
And through it all, he could hear the steady hammer of machine gun fire getting closer and closer as the Messormid closed the distance.
The altimeter was spinning down 4,000 ft.
3,000.
His engine was dying.
The controls were getting mushy.
And the German pilot behind him wasn’t making mistakes.
Crawford had been flying Spitfires for 18 months, had survived 42 combat missions, and had shot down seven German planes.
But none of that mattered now because his luck had just run out.
The Messormid fired again.
The canopy exploded.
Glass and metal fragments tore past his face as the engine seized completely and suddenly his beautiful, graceful Spitfire became a 20,000lb glider falling out of the sky.
He had maybe 10 seconds to decide.
Bail out and become a prisoner of war or try to ride this dying plane down and hope he survived the landing.
2,000 ft.
The French countryside was rushing up at him.
Fields and forests and roads all blurring together as gravity took over.
1,000 ft.
He spotted a field.
Too short, too rough, but it was all he had.
Quick thing before we continue.
Hit subscribe if you want more incredible WW2 stories like this because we’re building something special here and you’ll want to be part of it.
Crawford pointed the nose at that field and held on as the Spitfire hit the ground at 120 mph, bounced 15 ft back into the air, hit again, and plowed through 200 yd of French farmland before slamming into a drainage ditch and flipping onto its back.
When he came to, he was hanging upside down in his straps.
Fuel was dripping onto his flight suit, and he could hear German voices in the distance.
This is the story of how a British pilot shot down over France, stole a German bomber, and used it to attack the Third Reich with their own weapons.
The crash had broken two of Crawford’s ribs, and given him a concussion that made the world tilt sideways every time he moved his head.
But adrenaline and pure survival instinct got him out of the cockpit before the Spitfire caught fire.
He could see German soldiers running across the field toward the crash site, maybe half a mile away.
So he grabbed his emergency kit and ran the other direction into the treeine, moving on autopilot, despite the pain shooting through his chest with every breath.
The emergency kit contained a compass, a map printed on silk, some French currency, a few ration bars, and a pistol with two magazines, which wasn’t much to work with when you were behind enemy lines in occupied France with a Nazi manhunt forming up behind you.
Crawford spent that first night hiding in a barn three mi from the crash site, shivering in wet clothes because he’d crossed a stream and listening to German trucks driving up and down the roads as they searched for him.
His ribs hurt so badly that breathing felt like being stabbed.
And every time he closed his eyes, he saw Messmitt closing in and heard the sound of bullets punching through his Spitfire’s aluminum skin.
He knew the statistics.
Down pilots in occupied territory had about a 40% chance of making it back to England if they could connect with the French resistance.
But first you had to survive long enough to find them.
And Crawford had no idea where to start looking.
The next day he moved east, staying in the tree lines and avoiding roads, surviving on the ration bars and water from streams.
By the third day, the pain in his ribs had dulled to a constant ache, and he’d covered maybe 20 m, though he had no real plan beyond putting distance between himself and the crash site.
That’s when he heard the planes, not the high alitude drone of bombers, but the lower, closer sound of aircraft taking off and landing.
He worked his way through the forest toward the sound and found himself on a hillside overlooking a Luwaffa airfield.
It wasn’t a major base, just a small forward airfield with maybe a dozen planes, a few buildings, and a single grass runway.
Crawford watched through the trees as German ground crews worked on a Messor Schmidt as officers walked between buildings as a fuel truck made its rounds.
He was about to move on when he saw it.
A Junker’s J88 sitting alone at the far end of the field away from the other aircraft.
The J88 was a twin engine medium bomber, faster than it had any right to be and deadly effective, the kind of plane that had terrorized British cities during the Blitz and sunk hundreds of Allied ships.
And this one appeared to be unguarded.
Crawford’s first thought was that he was looking at a trap because nobody leaves a perfectly good bomber sitting unattended on an active airfield.
But he watched for 2 hours and nobody went near that plane.
The ground crews were focused on the fighters.
The guards were patrolling the main buildings.
That J88 just sat there like forgotten furniture.
And slowly, impossibly, an idea began forming in Crawford’s concussion adult brain.
He was a fighter pilot who’d spent hundreds of hours in single engine aircraft.
He’d never flown a twin engine bomber.
He’d never flown a German plane.
He didn’t speak German, couldn’t read German instruments, and had no idea what the control layout looked like inside a J88.
But he did know how planes worked, and he knew that every aircraft operated on the same basic principles, regardless of which country built it.
The sun was setting when Crawford made his decision.
He’d either die trying to steal that bomber, die trying to walk to neutral territory, or die when the Germans eventually caught him.
At least stealing the plane gave him a chance to hit back.
He waited until full darkness, then worked his way down the hillside, moving slowly because his ribs couldn’t handle anything faster than a careful walk.
The airfield had lights, but not many, and the blackout regulations meant they were dim and spaced far apart.
He reached the fence, found a section where the wire was loose, and squeezed through, feeling something tear in his chest that made him bite down on his sleeve to keep from crying out.
The Jew 88 was 100 yards away across open ground.
Crawford took a breath, stood up, and walked toward it like he owned the place because sneaking would just make him look suspicious if anyone spotted him.
His heart was hammering so hard he thought it might burst through his broken ribs.
And every step felt like it took an hour, but nobody shouted and nobody shot at him.
He reached the bomber, climbed up through the entry hatch, and found himself in the dark interior of an enemy aircraft with absolutely no idea what to do next.
The cockpit was cramped and covered with instruments labeled in German, switches and gauges arranged in patterns that made no sense to his Spitfire trained brain.
But Crawford had grown up on a farm fixing tractors and had spent 2 years maintaining aircraft before he’d ever flown one.
So he started doing what mechanics do, tracing systems and figuring out how things connected.
Fuel selector, throttles, mitos, engine primers.
The layout was different, but the logic was the same.
Planes needed fuel, air, and spark to run.
Everything else was just details.
His hands were shaking as he went through what he hoped was the startup sequence for the port engine.
Mixture rich, the throttle cracked, fuel pump on, mags are hot.
He hit the starter.
The engine coughed, sputtered, and caught with a roar that sounded like thunder in the quiet night.
Immediately, lights started coming on across the airfield.
Crawford didn’t wait for the starboard engine.
He released the brakes and shoved the throttle forward and the J88 lurched ahead on one engine, swinging hard to the left because the asymmetric thrust wanted to spin the plane in circles.
He fought the rudder pedals, managed to get the starboard engines started while the bomber was rolling.
And suddenly both engines were screaming and the plane was accelerating toward the grass runway that he couldn’t see in the darkness.
Tracer fire started arcing across the field.
He could hear bullets hitting the fuselage.
The end of the runway was coming up fast, marked by a dim light, and he pulled back on the yolk.
The J88 staggered into the air, climbing at an angle that was barely controlled flight, and Crawford banked hard to the west because east was deeper into Germany and west was toward Allied lines.
More tracers followed him up and he could see muzzle flashes from the ground as every German at that airfield opened fire on their own stolen bomber.
But he was airborne now, climbing through a thousand ft and the ground fire was falling behind.
He’d actually done it.
He’d stolen a German bomber.
Now he just had to figure out how to fly it, navigate it, and use it to hit something worth hitting.
The J88 handled completely differently from his Spitfire.
It was heavier, slower to respond, needed both hands on the yolk for any serious maneuver, and the visibility from the cockpit was terrible compared to the greenhouse canopy he was used to.
Crawford discovered he was sitting on top of a bomb load when he found the release controls.
And according to the instruments, he still had fuel from maybe 2 hours of flight time.
He’d escaped the immediate area around the airfield, but he was flying a German bomber over German occupied territory at night with no navigation lights and no way to identify himself as friendly if he made it to Allied airspace.
The idea came to him fully formed.
He was going to bomb Germany.
Not because it was smart, not because it was part of some plan, but because he was flying a loaded German bomber, and the only thing better than escaping would be making the Germans pay for shooting him down in the first place.
He checked his compass, corrected his heading to northeast, and pointed the Jew88 toward Germany proper.
The bomber had enough range to reach the Roar Valley, maybe even Berlin if he pushed it.
And Crawford figured if he was going to die doing something stupid, he might as well die doing something spectacular.
He flew for an hour, navigating by compass and dead reckoning, watching his fuel gauges drop and wondering if every German knight fighter in the Luwaffo was scrambling to intercept him.
The moon was up, providing just enough light to see the ground passing below, and he recognized the Ryan River when he crossed it, which meant he was definitely over Germany now.
He’d never dropped bombs before, had no training on the J88’s bomb site, and wasn’t entirely sure he was releasing the weapons correctly when he flipped the switches over what looked like a major railard.
But he felt the plane lift as the bombs fell away, saw explosions blooming below, and turned west toward home.
The fuel gauges were reading near empty when Crawford spotted what he thought was the front line, marked by artillery flashes and burning buildings.
He’d pushed the J88 as far as it would go, and now both engines were starting to sputter as they sucked the last drops of fuel from the tanks.
He had maybe 2 minutes before he’d be gliding again.
He spotted a field on what he desperately hoped was the Allied side of the line, put the nose down, and set up for a landing that was half controlled crash and half prayer.
The bomber hit hard, bounced, hit again, and slid to a stop in a Belgian field just as both engines died completely.
Crawford sat in the dark cockpit for a long moment, breathing hard despite his broken ribs, unable to quite believe he was still alive.
Then he heard voices approaching, and this time they were speaking English.
American soldiers found him still sitting in the German bomber, trying to explain through his concussion and exhaustion that he was RAF, that he’d stolen the plane, that he just bombed Germany.
They didn’t believe him until they checked his dog tags and saw the fresh bomb damage in the Roar Valley on their intelligence reports.
Flight Lieutenant James Crawford spent two weeks in a military hospital, then returned to England, where he tried to explain to his commanding officers how he’d gone from being shot down to stealing a J88 to bombing Germany in the span of 4 days.
The RAF gave him a medal.
The story got classified for security reasons, and Crawford went back to flying Spitfires until the war ended.
The J88 he’d stolen was salvaged for parts, and the Germans never figured out who had taken their bomber until British intelligence revealed the story years after the war.
What makes this story remarkable isn’t just the theft or the bombing run, but what it says about the kind of people who fought World War II.
Crawford could have hidden in that forest, could have tried to link up with the resistance, could have played it safe and focused on survival.
Instead, he saw an opportunity to strike back and took it.
Despite the broken ribs, despite never having flown a German bomber, despite the odds being overwhelmingly against him, he turned the enemy’s own weapon against them and lived to tell about it, which is exactly the kind of impossible story that defines the greatest generation.
Thanks for watching the story about one of the most audacious acts of the entire war.
Next week, we’re covering the American tank crew that held off an entire German division with a single Sherman.
Hit subscribe so you don’t miss it.
