Peter Jackson was one of the first prewar regular officers to transfer to the Glider Pilot Regiment at its inception on February 24, 1942. This was not a calculated career move but a reflection of his determination to return to active service. Having been evacuated through Dunkirk with his regiment, the East Surreys, he found military life in England rather flat after the German invasion scare had receded.

As it turned out, he went to North Africa as a glider pilot with the 1st Airborne Division. But instead of taking part in the invasion of Sicily, he found that his piloting skill and leadership potential led to his return to England to form and lead E Squadron for the Normandy invasion.

His squadron of Horsa gliders carried the main body of the 1st Battalion Royal Ulster Rifles of 6th Air Landing Brigade to the landing zone immediately northeast of Ranville on the evening of D-Day. The brigade’s task was to relieve the 5th Parachute Brigade east of the River Orne on the extreme left flank of the Allied landings. The size of the operation can be judged by the allocation of 220 Horsa troop-carrying gliders and 30 massive freightcarrying Hamilcars to the brigade, including the 47 Horsas of Jackson’s squadron.

He was unscathed in this operation — which was considered a striking success since only 17 of the 347 gliders that flew on that first day failed to land in France.

He then returned to England to prepare for the next important airborne operation. This was Market Garden, the planned capture of the road and rail bridges over the Lower Rhine at Arnhem.

Jackson again led E Squadron on that brilliant Sunday morning of September 17, 1944. As the great air armada flew towards the Channel from their bases in the South of England, he recalled looking down to see people in the streets on their way to church stopping to stare and wave their encouragement.

Once more he was fortunate to make a safe landing in a stubble field with no interference from the enemy — those in his immediate vicinity made themselves scarce as the troops poured out of the Horsas. All the glider pilots who survived the landings fought as infantry in the bitter battle to concentrate and capture the Arnhem road bridge — without success.

With them, he was confined in the Oosterbeek perimeter until the order came for the remnants of the 1st Airborne Division to escape across the Rhine. Jackson then swam the 400 yards to reach the south bank.

His squadron lost 40 pilots killed in action at Arnhem, and many others were wounded or taken prisoner, leaving Jackson the task of re-forming and retraining the unit for operational readiness in the shortest possible time.

A large contingent of freshly qualified RAF pilots was drafted in to help replace the losses. Thanks to his determined direction, the squadron was operational before the next requirement, Operation Varsity, the airborne crossing of the Rhine on March 24, 1945.

Although it was in many respects a set-piece operation, Jackson recalled the Rhine crossing as the most difficult of the three in which he had taken part. Haze and a pall of smoke obscured the landing zone, around which the battle was already in progress.

But he got his glider down safely in the most northeasterly landing zone at Hamminkeln to discharge his payload of men of the 2nd Battalion Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.

Having been mentioned in dispatches twice, once for D-Day and again for the Arnhem operation, he was awarded the DFC after the Rhine crossing and also received the American Silver Star.

Burton Henry Peter Jackson was born in 1919, the only child of Captain Reginald Jackson, RN. Educated at Cheltenham, he was commissioned from RMC Sandhurst into the East Surrey Regiment on the eve of war in 1939 and went to France with the British Expeditionary Force.

With the future of the Glider Pilot Regiment uncertain after the war, he transferred to the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, with which he served in Kenya, the British Army of the Rhine and in England.

He followed hounds as a young man and maintained a keen interest in the countryside throughout his life. When the post of secretary of the Grafton Hunt fell vacant in 1969, he left the Army to take it up, holding it until 1982.

He and his wife also bred hunters and won the Supreme in Hand Championship with their two-year-old, Sammy Dasher, at the Horse of the Year Show in 1974.

He is survived by his wife Phoebe, née Whitehead, whom he married in 1942, and by a son and daughter.

Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Jackson, DFC, wartime glider pilot, was born on November 6, 1919. He died on October 26, 2006, aged 86.