And then there were none.
The last of ‘The Few’ has now flown to his maker.
In 1940, John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway was one of that extraordinary band of brothers who were all that stood between Britain and enemy invasion during what Winston Churchill called our ‘finest hour’.
Now, with both sadness and gratitude, the Daily Mail announces that the last of the ‘fighter boys’, the youthful victors of the Battle of Britain, passed into history yesterday at 5.45pm at the age of 105.
It is no exaggeration to say that a very great chapter in the history of this country – and the wider world – has now drawn to a close.
Last night, Mr Hemingway’s son, Brian, told the Mail his father had been ‘happy’ and ‘in fighting form’ to the end at the Dublin care home which had been his home for the last few years.
‘He never felt that there was anything special about him,’ Brian said. ‘He thought the special ones were the friends who never returned. And now he is back with his squadron. It is very sad but his is a life to be both celebrated and mourned.’
Group Captain John Hemingway DFC, as he was by the time he retired from the Royal Air Force in 1974, served all through the Second World War, from the first day to the last, emerging from an astonishing series of near-death experiences almost unscathed.
The last of ‘The Few’, John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, has died aged 105
His passing is a punctuation mark of our national history, Robert Hardman writes
The war hero believed his efforts during the Battle of Britain in 1940 were simply part of the job
In his last newspaper interview, with the Mail, Mr Hemingway told me he attributed his grand old age to being ‘a lucky Irishman’. That he departed this world on St Patrick’s Day seems entirely in keeping with the extraordinary story of his life.
He was shot down four times, survived a plane crash and was even saved by a tree when his parachute failed to open. There is no question that he enjoyed more than his share of good fortune.
Scrambled on the very first night of the Second World War and despatched to France a week later in September 1939, he saw his squadron decimated even before the start of the Battle of Britain ten months later. All through those bloody months of 1940, he was one of that small number of exhausted and impossibly brave young men defending Britain from wave after wave of enemy attacks. Even at the end of the battle, he was still only 21.
After most of his contemporaries had either made the ultimate sacrifice, suffered dreadful burns or deservedly moved on to other duties, ‘Paddy’ Hemingway was still volunteering to be in the thick of the action. His last brush with death came right at the end of the war in April 1945, when he was shot down over Italy, evaded capture and made it back through enemy lines, dressed as a peasant, with the help of a ten-year-old Italian girl.
During the war, he flew both Hurricanes and Spitfires, refusing to take sides in that age-old dispute over which was the better plane. He called the former a ‘marvellous’ aircraft, ‘a gentle old lady, comfortable and old-fashioned’ and a ‘very stable platform for combat’. He would always be among the first to point out that this was the workhorse of the Battle of Britain, destroying more enemy planes than any other. The stronger, faster Spitfire was ‘wonderful – except you had to be very careful landing. If you were not careful with a Spitfire, you would get into all sorts of trouble’.
As for aerial combat, the Hemingway advice to fighter pilots was clear: ‘Stay busy amongst the enemy bombers, shoot as many targets as possible and don’t wait to confirm any results beyond the most immediately obvious ones.’
Tributes will now start pouring in from around the world. There was a similar sense of collective loss after the death of Harry Patch, the last fighting ‘Tommy’ of the First World War, in 2009.
Such moments are the punctuation marks of our national history, a time to pause, reflect and pay tribute.
He retired from the RAF in 1974 as a Group Captain, having also been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross
A life-size statue of Mr Hemingway, ready for action and looking to the sky, will be on display at the Kent Battle of Britain Museum next month
John Hemingway’s family will remember a much-loved father of three, a grandfather and a great-grandfather who was always faintly bemused by any fuss. He was not remotely religious, to the extent that he had no wish for a funeral ceremony. His response to those, like me, who might ask about his life was a genuine note of surprise. ‘Is anyone remotely interested?’ he would reply. The Kent Battle of Britain Museum at Hawkinge certainly was. Their new, life-size statue of Mr Hemingway (ready for action and looking to the sky) will be on display when the museum reopens next month.
A memorial service, however, will be held in due course. As with the passing of Harry Patch, that should be a moment to thank and honour not just Mr Hemingway but all his comrades, in this case all 2,927 airmen – mostly British but including nearly 700 from the Commonwealth and Allied nations – who were awarded the Battle of Britain clasp.
Come May, we will mark the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe – VE Day. Were it not for those who fought the Battle of Britain five years earlier, there would have been no VE Day in the first place.
One by one, they have left us and so it is Mr Hemingway who goes down in the annals as the very last of those whom Churchill exalted in one of the most famous lines of the 20th century: ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’
Not that Mr Hemingway remembered it quite that way, of course. ‘Just doing the job,’ he would say – though he was touched by Churchill’s sentiment.
As he put it to me: ‘When all your friends who love you most are gone, and somebody says that, it means something.’
His commitment to ‘the job’ never faltered. In 2019, a team of aviation historians recovered the wreckage of a Hurricane from a stretch of coastal mud in Essex. It was the aircraft from which Mr Hemingway had bailed out in August 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain, after his engine was hit and caught fire. Not only were the Browning machine guns still operational (and had to be decommissioned) but the control column was still in one piece. The gun button, the recovery team discovered, was still set to ‘FIRE’.