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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.

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.

In Jules Verne's novel Robur the Conqueror, Robur rams his propeller-powered flying vessel Albatross against the slower blimp Goahead.

Ramming attacks were a tactic in air combat. The goal is to either outright ram the enemy aircraft or to destroy its controls using either the attacker's propeller or wing. It was often practised when a pilot ran out of ammunition and was still 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 Herbert George Wells's novel When the Sleeper Wakes, written in 1899, the main character, Graham, also rams the enemy's aeroplanes with his flying apparatus.

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 Trading an outdated fighter for a technologically advanced bomber was considered a good trade. In some cases, pilots who were heavily wounded 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 the 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 were still 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.

On 15 September 1940, Flight Sergeant Ray Holmes of No. 504 RAF used his Hawker Hurricanes to destroy a Dornier Do-17 bomber over London by ramming but at the loss of his own aircraft (and also almost his own life) in one of the defining moments of the Battle of Britain.

The Japanese also practiced ramming. An example is the bringing down of a B-17 Flying Fortress on May 8, 1942 — see [2]. {Reference only}

Several rammings (Bulgarian: Таран taran) were performed by Bulgarian fighter pilots defending Sofia against the Allied bombers in 1943 and 1944. The first one to do so was Senior Lieutenant (posthumously elevated to Captain) Dimitar Spisarevsky on December 20, 1943 (see http://youtube.com/watch?v=ya1PkrgS7Tg).

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 the Polikarpov I-16 had wings strengthened for this purpose.
• Direct ramming was the easiest to perform, but also the most dangerous.

During the Vietnam War, Vu Xuan Thieu, a North Vietnam pilot, is said to have rammed his Mig-21 into an American B-52, accounted for the second loss of a B-52 to an enemy interceptor (the first one was shot down by Pham Tuan). However, is it disputed if that was the fireball from the downed B-52 would have resulted in his subsequent crash. [3]

In 1981 a Soviet Su-15 fighter jet rammed an Iranian CL-44 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.

In 1988 two US naval ships, an US destroyer Caron and cruiser Yorktown were rammed by soviet naval ships inside Soviet waters in Black Sea, near port of Foros. Ships designed for ramming are also called "rams," and have been used for much of history.

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