of piloting skill. The last option might be premeditated or it might be a snap decision made during combat; either way it often killed the attacking pilot. History Early concepts Presaging the 20th century air warfare ramming actions, Jules Verne imagined an apparent aerial attack made by a heavy flying machine with a prominent ram prow against a nearly defenseless lighter-than-air craft in his science fiction work Robur the Conqueror, published in 1886. H. G. Wells, writing in 1899 in his novel The Sleeper Awakes, has his main character, Graham, rams one of the enemy's aeroplanes with his flying apparatus, causing it to fall out of the sky. A second enemy machine ceases its attack, afraid of being rammed in turn. In 1909, the airship was imagined as an "aerial battleship" by several observers who wrote about the possibility of using an extended ramming pole to attack other airships, and to swing an anchor or other mass on a cable below the airship as a blunt force attack against ground-based targets such as buildings and smokestacks, and against ship masts. World War I The first known instance of ramming in air warfare was made over Zhovkva by the Russian pilot Pyotr Nesterov on 8 September 1914, against an Austrian plane. That incident was fatal to both parties. The second ramming—and the first successful ramming that was not fatal to the attacker—was performed in 1915 by Alexander Kazakov, a flying ace and the most successful Russian fighter pilot of World War I. Sgt Arturo Dell'Oro of the Italian 83rd Squadron rammed a two-man Br.C.1 of Flik 45 on 1 September 1917. Wilbert Wallace White of the 147th Aero Squadron rammed a German plane on 10 October 1918, and was killed — his opponent survived. Polish-Soviet War As the advancing Red Army used very few aircraft in Poland, air combat rarely took place (except for interceptions of Bolshevik observation balloons). However, during the course of the war, several pilots, having depleted their ammunition and bombs, attempted to ram Soviet cavalry with their aircraft's undercarriages. This attack would allow an opportunity for an emergency landing, but it almost always ended with the destruction of, or serious damage to, the ramming aircraft. Spanish Civil War Ramming was used in the Spanish Civil War. On the night of 27–28 November 1937, Soviet pilot Evgeny Stepanov, flying a Polikarpov I-15 for the Spanish Republican Air Force,