Group Captain (ret’d) John Allman “Paddy” Hemingway, DFC, AE, just turned 105 years young on the 17th.
Joining the RAF at 21, he flew No. 85 Squadron Mk I Hurricanes over the beaches at Dunkirk and in the Battle of Britain. As noted by the RAF, “Paddy is the last verified surviving pilot of the Battle of Britain.”
He was one of just 3,000 Fighter Command pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain. This force included a hodgepodge of 145 Poles, 88 Czechoslovaks, 29 Belgians, 13 Frenchmen, and a single Austrian from Nazi-occupied Europe– as well as 10 Irishmen. Some 544 Fighter Command pilots lost their lives in the three-month campaign.
Speaking to Parliament on 20 August 1940, Churchill famously said, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” when characterizing the efforts of those brave young men from throughout Europe, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and the U.S. who held off the Luftwaffe and went a long way to dashing Hitler’s Unternehmen Seelöwe plans.