Farewell to the last of The Few… we shall not see their like again | UK | News

The death of John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway represents nothing less than the closing of a chapter in this nation’s history. None of the 2,937 airmen – mostly British, but including nearly 700 from the Common­wealth and Allied nations – awarded the Battle of Britain clasp for flying against ­the Luftwaffe in the summer of 1940 are now with us. In May, we mark the 80th anniversary of VE-Day but it’s fair to suggest that, without the Battle of Britain and the bravery of such men as Paddy Hemingway, there might have been no victory and no VE-Day to celebrate.

Hemingway remained utterly modest about his own contribution, but it is a matter of record that he flew with the RAF on the first day of the Second World War and was still serving when Germany surrendered, having flown both Spitfires and Hurricanes during some of the nation’s most fateful days.

Born in Dublin, after leaving school his father Basil spotted an advert for the RAF and they travelled to London where he was given a short service commission before being posted to 85 Squadron at RAF Debden, Essex, in December 1938 to fly Hurricanes. He finally retired aged 55 as a Group Captain for a peaceful retirement, ­initially in Wiltshire. “I am here because I have had some ­staggering luck,” was how he put it. Indeed, having been shot down four times and survived a plane crash, there’s little to doubt his good fortune. But in truth, it was the nation that was lucky to have men such as Paddy to heed the call when it came.

When, in the 1970s, I began researching the lives and stories of the men whom Winston Churchill had famously described as ‘The Few’ (from the PM’s famous speech where he so powerfully remarked: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”) there were then a good many survivors of the battle still living.

I interviewed more than 100 of them across the decades. Many became friends. Others I met at reunions, book launches, memorials and events such as museum openings.

Paddy however was not among those who participated in such things. Indeed, had one tried to seek him out back in the 1970s and 80s via the Battle of Britain Fighter Association, a blank would have been drawn. He was not a member. For the most part, survivors of The ‘Few’ joined the association. It was their own very exclusive club. But it was not for Paddy. My late colleague, historian and author Dr Alfred Price, found this out when he attempted to contact Paddy while researching a detailed history of August 18, 1940, known ever since as the ‘Hardest Day’ for the ferocity of the fighting. It was a day which had seen Paddy shot down by the Germans during the hardest-fought day of the battle and forced to bail out of his stricken Hurricane.

Alfred later told me: “I fear he must have passed away as I just cannot find him”. The truth is, Paddy didn’t particularly want to be found. He was happy living in anonymity. In more recent years, as various Battle of Britain pilots passed away, one or other of their number would be singled out as the likely last man standing in what became a rather mawkish final roll call. It was only then, somehow, that Paddy was found. He was living quietly in retirement in a nursing home in his native Ireland, the nation where he was born on July 17, 1919. As he approached his centenary, he finally embraced being celebrated and feted as ­the last surviving Battle of Britain pilot ­when he – although perhaps still a little reluctantly – accepted the recognition he so richly deserved.

His modesty and desire to stay out of the limelight aside, it was his former commanding officer, the late Group Captain Peter Townsend, who explained to me in the 1990s: “Hemingway was vital to me when I set about re-forming No 85 Squadron at RAF Debden in the spring of 1940 after the Battle of France. “He was one of the most tested of pilots, and one of my most trusted. His experience was crucial in forming a cohesive and effective fighting unit for the battle to come.”

Townsend, with whom I was then working on a book project about the men of No 85 Squadron in 1940, was writing thumbnail biographies of the men under his command. Sadly, he never completed his piece on Paddy before his own death in 1995. But he told me: “He was solidly reliable. In a scrape, I knew he would have my back, and his skill and Irish luck would likely get us out of it.”

I suspect the fact that Group Captain John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway DFC, as he became, finally passed away in Ireland on St Patrick’s Day at the ripe old age of 105 would have tickled them both. Experience when fighting in France had been invaluable for Paddy and others like him who survived those desperate battles leading up to Dunkirk. Nothing counted more than real ‘hands on’ air fighting. It could not be learned from textbooks or from simulated dogfights and, as much as anything, it was about learning how to survive.

From the very outset of his combat experience, Paddy learned fast. It was one reason he survived to the end of the war and VE-Day. Over Flanders on May 10, 1940, the day Germany launched its Blitzkrieg in the west, Paddy was in ­the vanguard of RAF defenders countering the Luftwaffe’s air assault and succeeded ­in shooting down one ­of the bombers, a Heinkel 111. As it happened, it would be the only confirmed ­victory he was credited with, although he would claim a Heinkel 111 “probably destroyed” on the night of May 3, 1941, and another one “damaged” on the night of May 7, 1941. These, at least, are the only confirmed victories recorded on his official Air Ministry ‘score card’ – although subsequent research ­has him as having shared in the destruction of a Dornier 17 on ­May 11, 1940, and having damaged ­a Messerschmitt 109 on August 31, 1940.

But then, by his own admission, Paddy was never much of a one for keeping scores. By the end of August 1940, though, he had already been shot down three times during the Battle of Britain: first, having a forced landed after flak damage on May 11, 1940, and then having bailed out on August 18, and once again taken to his parachute ­on August 26. (The wreck of this latter Hurricane was recovered ­in recent years and is being rebuilt with a view to flying again – a remarkable tribute to the last of The Few).

As if he had not had a sufficient fill of adventure and misadventure, he and two colleagues then ran into bad weather on September 22, 1940, during a patrol and had to make forced landings.

Of his ‘kill’ score, he was not an ace (five victories were required for that sobriquet) but he had a more than impressive record when compared to a good many other Battle of Britain pilots who would never score a single victory. Nevertheless, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in July 1941 for his prowess; this, during his spell as a night fighter pilot. Paddy was posted to ­command a Spitfire squadron (No 43, ‘The Fighting Cocks’) in Europe during 1945 and on April 23, 1945, he was again forced to bail out after being hit by ground fire.

Paddy had been fighting the Germans from the very first day of their 1940 offensive in the west, almost right up to the last days of Hitler’s Reich. As such, he had every reason to be proud of his service and his achievements, and yet he chose not to dwell on them or even talk about them and was even a little ambivalent as to his reasons for fighting. He was a man of few words and of great modesty. In his view, he was “just doing a job” as he said in one of his last interviews.

“I wasn’t fighting to defend anything, I was fighting Germans. It was about doing a job for which I’d been trained. I had no crew, it was just me, a single fighter doing what I was meant to do and on the 10th of every month, you got paid for doing it.” The passing of Paddy Hemingway sees the last living link to those who flew and fought in the Battle of Britain now gone, in much the same way that the death of ‘The Last Tommy’, Harry Patch, closed the curtain on the lived experiences of the First World War.

For those, like me, who have been immersed in research of the subject across many decades, that loss of a tangible connection to 1940 is, somehow, an epoch-making event. The last of The Few may no longer be with us, but memory of the achievements of men like ‘Paddy’ will live forever.

We are the poorer for the passing of ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, but to quote George S Patton, when he spoke of men who had fallen in battle: “It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived.”

By Leo McKinstry, Express Columnist and Historian

A poignant landmark has been reached. The last of the Battle of Britain heroes has gone. Sorrow at Paddy Hemingway’s passing is mixed with awe at his courage. In this country’s most perilous hour, he and his fellow RAF pilots were all that stood between national survival or Nazi subjugation. United by their valour in the face of daunting odds, they emerged triumphantly from their epic test.

The cause of freedom owed a colossal debt to Hemingway and the rest of “The Few”, as they became known after Winston Churchill’s tribute, though some airmen joked that when they had first heard the Prime Minister’s words about “so much owed by so many”, they thought he had been talking about ­their bar bills. In the same spirit of self-deprecation, Hemingway refused to take credit for his remarkable war record, in which he fought right from 1939 to 1945 and was shot down four times, twice in the space of a fortnight during the Battle of Britain.

He called himself “a lucky Irishman” but there was far more to his achievements than luck. He was ­also skilled, resourceful, tough and determined. Shot down in Belgium in May 1940, he walked more than 70 miles to rejoin his squadron, despite serious wounds to his legs. During the Battle of Britain, he had to bail out over the Essex coast when his Hurricane was hit and spent more than two hours in the freezing waters before he was rescued. He was truly a remarkable man – and, as part of a unique, chivalrous fraternity, he changed the course of history.