"Allied Pilots 'Rammed' Nazi Missiles Out of the Sky" Topic

…What was even more ideal was destroying the V1s before they ever reached populated areas, and that meant intercepting them midflight. The RAF's workhorse, the Supermarine Spitfire, could reach the necessary altitude within a minute after takeoff, and with a top speed of 370 mph, it was capable of intercepting an incoming flying bomb as long as it approached from a dive of at least 5,000 feet…

Military: link

Obviously written by a Spitfire fan boy.

Tempests and Mosquitos were faster as well as a few other aircraft and they shot down V1s as well.

Anti-aircraft guns shot down more V1s than the fighters.

For a fuller story read the following Wikipedia article.

link

One of my favourite biographies is by a navigator of a Mosquito Intruder called, "Terror In The Starboard Seat" all about his tour and one of his best accounts is of being directed by ground radar to intercept V1s over the Channel at night. To summarize:

Ground Radar intercept vectors us on to a target. We chase and realize that this one is doing over 450mph and lost it. The pilot vows it will never happen to him again. He gains ten thousand feet and swears to dive on the next target.

Ground control gives another interception vector and altitude and this time the pilot comes diving on full power only to overfly the target by 150mph because the Germans altered the speed and altitude of each launch. The pilot gets more bitter and determined to get the next one. So again he gains altitude and decides to do more of a controlled dive speed until he can get behind the next one.

Ground control gives them a third interception vector and altitude and the pilot does a controlled shallow power dive to get as close behind the V1 as he can before he lets go with the four 20mm hispano and four .303 brownings all at once.

Of the course the navigator writing of this encounter years later describes the view of the exhaust of th V1 as burning flame and bigger than the Sun because the pilot has approached so close to it by now. The pilot fires a burst and the V1 explodes and both are temporarily blinded.

They eventually land before daylight, get whisked away in a jeep to debriefing and breakfast. While eating breakfast the crew chief comes in and hustles them wordlessly back into the jeep and drives them out to their Mosquito where every bit of paint on the wings and fuselage were burnt off. Stunningly no iother damage but one very upset crew chief.

I was under the impression that rather than 'ramming'- which would seem to be a kamikaze option, some pilots would fly parallel to the VI and slide a wing tip under the rocket's stubby 'fin' in order to flip it over, upsetting it's stabilising mechanism [insert correct term], and send it earthwards. Ideally over open country.

Yes. The didn't ram them, but aimed to wing flip them. Raymond Baxter, who used to present Tomorrow's World, did that when he was a pilot in WW2. Flipping was a lot safer than shooting cannon at close range at a flying bomb.