IN ONE of the celebrated episodes of the Battle of Britain, sergeant pilot Ray Holmes became something of an overnight hero when he rammed a Dornier bomber over London to prevent it, as he had reason to believe, from dropping its bombs on Buckingham Palace. On the morning of September 15, 1940, Holmes had taken off from Hendon with other Hurricane pilots of 504 Squadron, to intercept a formation of 36 Dornier Do17s which had been reported to be closing in on Central London.
Acting as tail-end Charlie for his squadron, Holmes was keeping a weather eye open for German fighters as the aircraft approached the German bombers. He attacked two Dorniers, seriously damaging the first and causing its crew to bale out. The second sheered off as he fired at it. A third Dornier appeared to Holmes to be making directly for Buckingham Palace, but as he lined up on it — aiming to shoot through its cockpit window in a head-on attack — and pressed his gun button, the hiss from his breechblocks told him that he had run out of ammunition.
Holmes made the split second decision to prevent the enemy reaching its objective by ramming the Dornier, aiming to clip the left hand edge of its twin-rudder tailplane with his left wing. In fact he sliced the whole tailplane off and the Dornier, with its outer wings also ripped off by the violence of the impact, plunged to earth in the forecourt of Victoria station. As Holmes later recalled of the impact: “There was a bit of a bump but nothing much. I thought I had got away with it. But immediately the plane went into a spiral dive and I couldn’t pull out of it.”
Holmes took to his parachute at a desperately low 350ft and came down by the side of a house on Ebury Bridge Road, ending up with his parachute lines snagged on a drainpipe, suspended comically over a dustbin in the back garden. “I undid the parachute and stepped out. There were two girls in the next garden, so I vaulted over the fence and kissed them both,” he recalled.
Meanwhile, his Hurricane had crashed in Buckingham Palace Road at 400mph, burying itself many feet below the surface. The Dornier pilot had managed to bale out but subsequently died in hospital from his injuries. Mercifully, there were no casualties on the ground from either the Dornier or the Hurricane crash.
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Holmes was taken by rescuers to the Orange Brewery in Pimlico Road, where he was steadied with a fortifying brandy before being taken to Chelsea Barracks, where he was checked over by an army medical officer. Thereafter, he was returned by taxi to RAF Hendon, where it was “business as usual” .
Raymond T. Holmes (always known as “Arty” because of his initials), was born and raised on the Wirral, where he was educated at Wallasey and Calday Grange grammar schools.
After leaving school he went into journalism, beginning work as a reporter on the Birkenhead Advertiser. He was also one of the early recruits to the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, joining it in 1936 as its 55th volunteer and completing his aircrew training. By the time the Second World War broke out he was already an experienced pilot, and he joined 504 (City of Nottingham) Squadron, flying Hurricanes.
As it happened, the intense airfighting over London on September 15, 1940, marked the virtual culmination of the Battle of Britain. Thereafter the German bomber offensive continued at night.
When Fighter Command went on to the offensive in the spring of 1941, Holmes flew fighter sweeps over occupied France. Subsequently he was sent to Murmansk to instruct Soviet airmen in the Hurricanes that were being delivered to them via the Arctic convoys, also escorting Soviet bombers on air raids over German occupied territory. On his return from Russia, he qualified as an instructor and spent two years at the Central Flying School.
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Later in the war he specialised in photographic reconnaissance, joining 541 Squadron and flying high-altitude Spitfires over Germany to get high resolution pictures of targets. Such missions took him to the Ruhr, Berlin and Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden. Towards the end of the war he was flying dispatches for Winston Churchill as King’s Messenger. He had in the meantime been commissioned, and he ended the war with the rank of flight lieutenant.
Demobilised in October 1945, he resumed his prewar career in journalism, specialising in agricultural photography and developing colour photographs in his own lab. He also had his own news agency which concentrated on covering Liverpool law courts for local and national newspapers.
As it happened, Holmes had not seen the last of his trusty Hurricane. After many years of research to pinpoint the remains of the aircraft, an excavation was carried out in Buckingham Palace Road in May last year, and parts of the Hurricane were recovered, the latter part of the operation being shown live on television. The remnants were given on loan to the Imperial War Museum, but parts of the engine casing that had been shattered beyond effective restoration were used to cast some miniature Hurricane sculptures, one of which was presented to its pilot.
A supremely modest man, Holmes lived life to the full, and was playing tennis well into his eighties. He was granted the freedom of the Wirral last year.
Holmes is survived by his wife, Anne, by their son and daughter, and by two daughters of his first marriage to Elizabeth, who died in 1964.
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Ray Holmes, Battle of Britain fighter pilot, was born on August 20, 1914. He died on June 27, 2005, aged 90.