The Prince of Wales has paid a moving personal tribute to John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, the last surviving Battle of Britain pilot who has died at the age of 105.
Writing on social media, Prince William said: ‘I was sad to hear about the passing of John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway this morning, the last of “The Few”.
‘We owe so much to Paddy and his generation for our freedoms today. Their bravery and sacrifice will always be remembered. We shall never forget them. W’
In 1940 Mr Hemingway was one of the extraordinary band of brothers who stood between Britain and enemy invasion from Germany.
Sir Winston Churchill called it the country’s ‘finest hour’.
Group Captain Hemingway, who retired from the Royal Air Force in 1974, served throughout the Second World War, from the first day to the last.
He died in a care home in Dublin, modest to the last about his extraordinary achievements, sparking a wave of tributes.
Prince William also served with the RAF, training as Search and Rescue pilot in 2009, a role he held for three years.
Last night, Mr Hemingway’s son, Brian, told the Mail his father had been ‘happy’ and ‘in fighting form’ to the end at the 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.’
The airman 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.
In his last newspaper interview, with the Mail’s Robert Hardman, 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.’
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.
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 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 Mr Hardman: ‘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’.
