Fighter pilot who saved Buckingham Palace by ramming enemy bomber

The Battle of Britain was the making of countless heroes, whether in the skies fighting or on the ground keeping Londoners safe, but not much was more recklessly heroic than what flight lieutenant Ray Holmes did in September 1940. With the infamous Blitz bombing campaign commencing on September 7, 1940, London was under relentless attack from enemy aircraft, and nobody was safe from the destruction, not even the royal family.

It seems that Buckingham Palace was a target of the Luftwaffe, as between the September 8 and 13 it was bombed on multiple raids and hit directly by five of these, with King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, our Queen’s mother, in residence.

Luckily no-one was hurt, despite significant damage to the palace. However on September 15 it seemed another raid of three German Dornier bombers were heading for the palace, until Ray Holmes intervened.

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Flying his Hurricane fighter, Holmes engaged the three bombers alone, shooting down one, and narrowly avoiding a mid-air collision with another. In the process he managed to briefly tangle a German gunner’s parachute in his wing, something that sounds straight out of a Hollywood action film.

Having spotted the last bomber making a beeline for Buckingham Palace, Holmes realised his fighter had run out of bullets, he described his thought process and what he did next in 2001: “His tail looked very fragile and very inviting. So I thought I’d just take off the tip of his tail.

“So I went straight at it along him and hit his port fin with my port wing. I thought, That will just take his fin off and he’ll never get home without the tail fin. I didn’t allow for the fact that the tail fin was actually part of the main fuselage. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I found out later that I had knocked off the whole back half of the aircraft including the twin tails.”

The Dornier would crash violently near Victoria Tube station, with only the two crewmen who had already bailed out surviving. Meanwhile Holmes’ Hurricane was also terminally damaged and fell into a dive. Miraculously, the RAF pilot managed to bail out, losing his boots in the process. He came to rest in a back garden, dangling from his parachute in an empty dustbin.

Witness Jimmy Earley described what he saw to the Independent in 2011: “All of sudden there was a terrific ratatatat. We looked up and saw these planes, a small one chasing a larger one. It crashed into the bigger plane and fell from the sky and landed just 20 yards from us. It frightened us a bit, you know.”

He ran to where Holmes had come to rest: “He was still smiling. What a bloody hero – to smash into a plane all that way up. We shook his hand and there were crowds of women all holding him and kissing him.”

Ray Holmes would become a national hero celebrated by the press for his selfless act of courage and he even receiving a note from the Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands who witnessed the event. He died aged 90 in 2005, but not before he was able to see his trusty Hurricane excavated from its crash site on Buckingham Palace Road in 2004.

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