Raymond Towers Holmes was a British Royal Air Force fighter pilot during the Second World War who is best known for an event that occurred during the Battle of Britain.
23 Facts About Ray Holmes
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Ray Holmes became famous when he reportedly saved Buckingham Palace from being hit by German bombing by ramming his Hawker Hurricane into a Dornier Do 17 bomber over London.
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Ray Holmes was feted by the press as a war hero for saving the Palace.
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Raymond Towers Holmes was born on 20 August 1914 in Wallasey, Cheshire.
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Ray Holmes attended Wallasey and Calday Grange Grammar School and worked as a crime journalist at the Birkenhead Advertiser before joining the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in 1936 as their 55th volunteer.
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Ray Holmes attacked the second Dornier, causing a crew member to bail out.
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Ray Holmes then spotted the third Dornier apparently making directly for Buckingham Palace.
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Ray Holmes quickly climbed ahead of it, to avoid any machine-gun fire, then swung around to make a head-on attack.
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However, he ran out of ammunition, so Ray Holmes decided to ram the bomber.
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Ray Holmes' plane began to dive to the left, and was no longer responding to the controls.
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Ray Holmes watched the Dornier crash near Victoria tube station.
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Ray Holmes landed in a narrow back garden, and ended up dangling inside an empty dustbin.
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Ray Holmes was feted by the press as a war hero for his saving of Buckingham Palace.
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Ray Holmes then flew PR Spitfires with 541 Squadron from February 1945.
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Ray Holmes had two daughters with Elizabeth before she died in 1964.
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In 1966, he married Anne Ray Holmes and went on to have a son and a daughter.
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Ray Holmes provided eyewitness testimony of the Battle of Britain in the "Alone" episode of The World at War.
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Sixty-five years later, the wreckage of Ray Holmes' Hurricane was discovered and excavated from the streets of London.
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Ray Holmes was awarded the Freedom of the Borough of Wirral in January 2005.
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Ray Holmes died on 27 June 2005, aged 90 at Hoylake Cottage Hospital after a two-year battle with cancer.
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The story that Ray Holmes deliberately crashed into the Dornier and that the German plane was attempting to bomb the palace has been challenged - notably by Alfred Price and Stephen Bungay.
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Ray Holmes's Dornier attracted a swarm of fighters and was damaged.
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Ray Holmes's Dornier was therefore unmanned when Holmes rammed it.