done to make this deplorable product worthy for war or fit to meet those jeopardizes, which confront our gallant crews." On the night of 19 September 1942, just before he was to be made group captain, Marks stepped in at the last moment to take over an aircraft whose pilot was unable to fly on a raid against Saarbrücken. On the return flight, his plane was attacked from below by a Bf 110. The Halifax was struck at the mainplane, and fuel cells 5 and 6 were set ablaze. The fire soon engulfed the fuselage. Marks stayed at the controls while he instructed his crew to bail out. Said one of his crew members: "I was the last to leave the plane, and when I passed the captain on my way to bailout he was having to fight terrifically to keep the aircraft in any sort of trim. I felt as soon as he left the controls the aircraft would have gone so haywire so as to make bailing out for him impossible." He kept the plane in the air long enough for three of his crew to parachute out. They were interned and survived the war. Marks was the first commanding officer of the four founding Pathfinder bombing squadrons to lose his life. At the time of his death he was just 24 years old. The Halifax problem lay in its undersized tail-plane rudder. Their small control surfaces led to rudder overbalance when power was lost. When the problem was finally identified, Handley Page initially did not want to disrupt aircraft production to make the change. Upon Cheshire's insistence the design was changed to a larger, trapezoidal-shaped vertical tail surfaces which solved the control deficiencies. The entire force of Halifaxes had to be stood down for a month while the planes were being modified. On 19 September 1992, the 50th anniversary of the mission that cost him his life, a memorial to Marks and his crew was unveiled at Blesme in France, near the site where his plane went down. The unveiling ceremony was attended by the city mayor and the sole living survivor of his last flight, Flight Engineer William G. Higgs. For his fallen captain, Higgs offered "Jimmy Marks was a brilliant pilot, a wonderful leader, and a man this country could ill afford to lose." Cheshire wrote an article after the war about his early days