Ramming
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In warfare, ramming is a technique that was used in the air, sea and tank combat. The term originated from battering ram, which is a siege weapon used to bring down fortifications by hitting it with force, of which the momentum of the ram being sufficient to damage the target. Thus, in warfare ramming refers to hitting a target by running oneself into the target.
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[edit] History
Already in 750 BCE the main striking force of the Assyrian army was the corps of horse-drawn, two-wheeled chariots. Their mission was to smash their way through the ranks of enemy infantry. As siege weapons they used battering rams.
[edit] Air warfare
Ramming attack was a tactic in air combat. The goal is to either outright ram the enemy aircraft or to destroy its controls using either the attackers propeller or wing. It was often practised when pilot ran out of ammunition and was too eager to destroy an enemy, or his plane had already been damaged. A ramming attack is not the same as kamikaze attack since the pilot stands a fair chance of surviving, though it was very risky. Sometimes even the ramming aircraft could survive. Ramming was used in air warfare in the first half of the 20th century, in both World Wars and in the interwar period.
In Jules Verne's novel Robur the Conqueror, Robur rams his propeller-powered flying vessel Albatross against the slower dirigible Goahead.
Ramming was first used by the Russian pilot, Pyotr Nesterov on September 8, 1914, against an Austrian plane. That incident was fatal to both parties.
Ramming was also used in the Spanish Civil War [1].
In World War II, ramming (Russian: taran) became a legendary technique of VVS pilots against the Luftwaffe, especially in the early days of the hostilities in the war's Eastern Front. In the first year of the war, Soviet machines were considerably inferior to the German ones and the taran was sometimes perceived as the only way to guarantee the destruction of the enemy. Trading an outdated fighter to a technologically advanced bomber was considered a good trade. In some cases, heavily wounded pilots or in damaged aircraft decided to perform a suicidal taran attack against air, ground or naval targets, similar to kamikaze (see Nikolai Gastello).
The first taran attack in World War II was carried out by the Polish pilot, Lt. Col. Leopold Pamuła with his damaged PZL P.11c on September 1, 1939, over Łomianki near Warsaw (taran is also a Polish word).
Nine rammings took place on the very first day of German invasion of the Soviet Union. About 200 (some estimates give the number closer to 500) taran attacks were made by Soviets between the beginning of Operation Barbarossa and the middle of 1943 when enough modern aircraft had been produced to make the tactic obsolete, even if Russian fighter pilots still are trained to perform it. Lieutenant Boris Kovzan survived the record of four ramming attacks in the war. Alexander Khlobytsev made three. Seventeen other Soviet pilots were credited with two successful ramming attacks.
The Japanese also practiced ramming-example a B-17 brought down in May 8, 1942-see [[2]]. {Reference only}
[edit] Technique
Three types of taran attacks were made:
- Using the propeller to go in from behind and chop off the controls in the tail of the enemy aircraft. This was the most difficult to perform, but it had the best chance of survival.
- Using the wing to cut off the wing or tail of the enemy aircraft. Some Soviet aircraft like Polikarpov I-16 had strengthened wings for this purpose.
- Direct ram was the easiest to perform, but also the most dangerous.
[edit] After the WWII
In 1980 a Soviet MiG-21 fighter jet rammed an Iranian RF-4 Phantom II reconnaissance plane which intruded USSR airspace, resulting in the crash of both aircraft. There have been at least three other Soviet ramming attacks between the early 1970s and 1988.
