Brian O'Keefe

🇫🇷 🇬🇧The V1 was heading toward a hospital. The Free French pilot chasing it was eight days away from his wedding. On August 3, 1944, Jean Maridor intercepted a German flying bomb threatening Benenden Hospital in Kent. The 23-year-old Free French ace flew Spitfires with No. 91 Squadron of the RAF. Credited with five aerial victories, he had also become a skilled V1 hunter. His final interception would bring his tally to seven flying bombs destroyed individually. Four years earlier, he had escaped France to keep fighting. Shooting down a V1 carried a deadly risk: get too close, and its exploding warhead could destroy the fighter pursuing it. There was another way. A pilot could slide his wingtip beneath the V1’s wing, disturbing the airflow and tipping the flying bomb off balance, without necessarily touching it. According to the Le Havre municipal archives, Maridor tried to tip the "doodlebug" but could not bring it down. With the hospital threatened, he turned to his cannons. He closed to less than 50 meters and fired. The V1 exploded. The blast destroyed his Spitfire. France’s Order of Liberation records his final attack as a deliberate sacrifice to save the hospital. Before the war, Maridor worked as a barber while learning to fly and studying to qualify for military pilot training. He earned his first pilot’s certificate at sixteen. Eight days after his final mission, he was due to marry his fiancée, Jean Lambourn, a serving officer in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. He was twenty-three. They never had their wedding. Remember Jean Maridor. Follow @Vanguard_WW2 for more stories worth remembering.