Reflections on politics of the week: coda

Eighty-five years on, we finally bid farewell to the last of the Few

One story which I meant to include in this morning’s collection of observations but forgot (and I think it’s better standing alone) was the death on Monday—St Patrick’s Day, appropriately—of Dublin-born former Royal Air Force officer Group Captain John Hemingway DFC AE. He was 105 years old.

Hemingway, known, as so many Irish-born members of the British armed forces are and were, as “Paddy”, had a distinguished RAF career as a pilot, a flight controller, a NATO operations officer at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Rocquencourt near Paris and at the Air Ministry in London and station commander of RAF Leconfield in Yorkshire, before retiring in 1969. The source of his particular significance, however, was the fact that, until his death on Monday, he was the last surviving pilot to have flown in the Battle of Britain. He was the last of the Few.

Even Hemingway’s service during those few months in 1940 was absurdly heroic. On 11 May 1940, during the German invasion of France, his Hawker Hurricane had been hit by ground fire and he had been forced to crash land in a ploughed field near the River Meuse in Belgium. He later recalled, “I was furious the Germans should do this to me”. He joined a column of refugees and walked the 70 miles to Brussels, despite two injuries to his leg: a sliver of metal had pierced his kneecap and a fellow soldier heated his knife over a candle to cut it out. Hemingway rejoined No. 85 Squadron at Lille and accompanied his unit when it retreated to RAF Debden in Essex after the fall of France. The newly arrived commanding officer was Acting Squadron Leader Peter Townsend, later an equerry to King George VI and would-be husband of Princess Margaret.

The Battle of Britain began on 10 July 1940. Five weeks later, on 18 August, Hemingway was climbing fast to intercept a group of German bombers 20 miles off the coast by Clacton-on-Sea when he was hit by enemy fire. His Hurricane stalled, inverted and went into a spin, Hemingway becoming drenched in oil in the “very smelly and very hot” cockpit. He baled out, despite his chances of survival in the North Sea being very slender, and after landing swam towards the Essex coast for two-and-a-half hours. By chance, just before he succumbed to hopeless exhaustion, a rowing boat encountered and saved him.

Eight days later he was flying again. Turning for a second pass at a German bomber, he was again hit by cannon fire from a Messerschmitt Bf-109 and had to abandon his Hurricane; he knew that Luftwaffe pilots were now targeting pilots who baled out with parachutes, so he allowed himself to free-fall for as long as possible, leaving himself with sore sinuses but landing otherwise unhurt by the Barge Inn on Pitsea Marsh. Within days, he was yet again back in the air.

At this stage Paddy Hemingway had been 21 for about a month, and had been shot down three times. (He would be shot down a fourth and final time, flying a Supermarine Spitfire in Italy in 1945.) No. 85 Squadron converted to Douglas Havoc night fighters in 1941 and Hemingway adapted to a new form of combat before becoming a flight controller, though he returned to flying duties towards the end of the war.

In one of his last interviews, Hemingway demonstrated the calm and undramatic approach to life which kept so many desperately young man able to function amid the horrors of war.

I’m alive because of luck. This is not false modesty. It was a characteristic of those times and the culture of my squadron to be resolute, realistic and not to dramatise those very dramatic times.

Over the weekend I was reading an excellent Substack piece by Luke Honey about the 1969 star-spangled epic The Battle of Britain, directed by Guy Hamilton and featuring Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Kenneth More, Trevor Howard, Christopher Plummer, Michael Caine, Susannah York, Edward Fox, Michael Redgrave, Robert Shaw, Patrick Wymark, Barry Foster, Curd Jürgens and even Ian McShane. It is an imperfect but glorious film, which I must have watched dozens of times as a child, in parts tragic and sometimes uplifting. The brave service of Polish airmen is particularly inspiring, but it does give a sense of how young and ill-prepared so many of those who became known as “the Few” really were.

Laurence Olivier is on very good form as Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the shockingly neglected head of RAF Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain. Dowding was a dry and unloveable man, known to his colleagues as “Stuffy”, but Olivier gives him a strange, almost zen-like quality, part-fatalist, part-believer in providence. There is one particularly telling moment when he expresses the extraordinary odds the British were facing.

The essential arithmetic is that our young men will have to shoot down their young men at the rate of four to one, if we’re to keep pace at all.

They did keep pace. Although the Luftwaffe’s switch from targeting RAF airfields to bombing London was a godsend for Fighter Command, the men—often boys—who took to the skies day in, day out that summer of 1940 denied Hitler any chance of aerial superiority and therefore any hope of launching Operation Sealion, the planned invasion of Britain.

Winston Churchill spoke in the House of Commons on 20 August 1940, at the height of the battle. His words have become famous but they bear repeating and re-reading.

We hope, we believe that we shall be able to continue the air struggle indefinitely and as long as the enemy pleases, and the longer it continues the more rapid will be our approach, first towards that parity, and then into that superiority in the air, upon which in a large measure the decision of the war depends. The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of world war by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

Few, then one, now none. Let us all remember Group Captain John “Paddy” Hemingway, the last of the Few.