Battle of Britain pilot Paddy Hemingway, who served from the first day of the Second World War to the very last and was shot down four times, said he was just a ‘lucky Irishman’
John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway was just 21 when he wondered if his Irish luck was finally up, as he plummeted through the air while bullets from Luftwaffe guns whizzed past him.
The young pilot officer had just bailed out of his RAF Hawker after it had been hit by a fleet of German Dornier 215s over London on the afternoon of August 26, 1940.
Jumping into a sky swarming with enemy aircraft as his stricken plane tumbled to earth, he knew he’d be killed if he used his parachute at 18,000ft, so decided to fall as far as he could before pulling the cord.
It worked – with seconds to spare – and Paddy landed safely on farmland next to The Barge pub at Pitsea Marshes in Essex. The rapid 10,000ft descent left him with terrible sinus pain for days, but didn’t stop him embarking on his next mission – a dogfight over Dover – just two days later.
Incredibly, it wouldn’t be the closest he would come to losing his life – or the last time he would find himself falling through gunfire-torn skies. But Paddy, who served from the first day of the Second World War to the very last, managed to always survive. But he never considered himself a hero or wanted praise for his incredible achievements, instead insisting he was just a “lucky Irishman” who was doing his job.
Even he, though, probably wouldn’t have imagined he would end up being the very last of “The Few”, as Winston Churchill described Britain’s hero pilots who defended the nation from German invasion during the Battle of Britain. But on Monday the last living link to the extraordinary men who faced down and defeated the Nazis in our skies was finally lost as Paddy, aged 105, passed away peacefully at his Dublin care home.
His son Brian said he had been “happy” and “in fighting form” right to the end – but typically modest to the last. “He never felt that there was anything special about him,” he 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.”
Millions were doing both yesterday, including Prince William, who also served with the RAF. Writing on social media, he 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.”
PM Keir Starmer also paid tribute, saying “his courage, and that of all RAF pilots, helped end World War II and secure our freedom. We will never forget their bravery and service.”
Born in Dublin just after the First World War, Paddy joined the RAF and became a pilot officer aged just 19 on March 7, 1939, just before the Second. His 85 Squadron was scrambled on the very first night of the war and despatched to France a week later, where the teenager first saw action, and also registered his first kill when he destroyed a German Heinkel He 111 airliner.
But a day later his plane was hit by enemy flack near the city of Maastricht in the Netherlands, and Paddy crash-landed in a field before walking for three days back to his base. But by the end of the month, he was back in the air providing cover for the British retreat from Dunkirk, where 50,000 British troops were captured or killed.
He said: “It was chaos on the beaches. I later learned my own uncle, Major Baynard Allman of the Royal Ulster Rifles, was there. He was one of the lucky ones.” But his own band of brothers was decimated. By the time France fell, his squadron had just three serviceable Hurricanes left, while 13 of the original pilots were dead, wounded or captured.
Months later, Paddy faced his greatest test yet, as 85 Squadron, now back at RAF Debden near Saffron Walden, Essex, and under a new commander Peter Townend, had to defend wave after wave of deadly Luftwaffe attacks during the Battle of Britain.
That fight in the skies about southern England between July and October 1940 was a crucial turning point in the war, forcing Hitler to abandon his plans for invading the British Isles. But for the brave young aircrew the cost was greater than ever, with 544 British pilots killed, while the average life expectancy of a Spitfire pilot tragically went down to just four weeks.
It was a fate that nearly befell Paddy on numerous occasions during that three-and-a-half month battle. On August 1 – “the hardest day” when around 100 German and 136 British aircraft are believed to have been destroyed or damaged – John’s plane was hit while flying off the Essex coast and began to spin.
He later remembered: “Everything in the cockpit was covered in oil, but the hood opened easily, and I could then see enough to regain control, at about 9,000ft. I set course for England, but my engine stopped. I had no wish to bail out, on the other hand I remembered that Hurricanes tipped up and sank when landed in the sea. In the event, I tried to climb out on the wing… but everything was so slippery I was blown straight off. My parachute opened perfectly, and I landed in the sea.”
John began to swim frantically “among jellyfish” until “a lifeboat bumped into me”. In fact, they had been searching for him for an hour and a half, and, deciding he could not survive the cold water, had turned back, only then knocking into him “rolling in the waves”. Incredibly, John still managed to help them row back to shore.
Again, he returned back to base two days later ready to take to the skies again – but found that many of his friends were gone, including his close pal Flight Commander Dickie Lee. He later remembered: “If anything affected me seriously, it was that. He was a wonderful person, I still say it, I still think it. And it was – you just did not believe. No, he was going to turn up. But he never did of course.”
Just eight days later Paddy had to bail out again when his squadron was scrambled to attack an enemy formation of 15 Dorniers flying up the Thames.
By the time Hitler realised he wouldn’t conquer the British skies and stopped the onslaught, there was virtually no-one left alive in Paddy’s squadron and it was withdrawn. But the pilot was still volunteering to be in the thick of the action, and still emerging from near-death experiences almost unscathed.
When his instruments failed during a night patrol in a Havoc night fighter in May 1941, he bailed out at just 600ft, broke his hand as he hit the tail and failed to open his parachute properly. Luckily, the chute caught on the branches of a tree, which slowed his descent and he landed in a pile of manure in the garden of the poet Walter de la Mare.
In September 1942, he escaped unharmed from the wreckage of a Bristol Blenheim plane that crashed on take-off while giving him a lift to pick up his Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) from the King. And as squadron leader in April 1945, just a month before the end of the war, Paddy’s Spitfire was hit several times by anti-aircraft fire over Northern Italy. He parachuted down into enemy territory and had to run through an orchard while being shot at by soldiers.
He was saved by Italian partisans who smuggled him to safety dressed in peasant’s clothing, with a ten-year-old girl called Carla walking him through a German checkpoint. “For all those hours I was scared as hell, not for my life, I’m Irish,” he later recalled. “But I was terrified of becoming the cause of the death of that brave little girl.”
Last year Paddy finally got to meet the daughter of the girl who saved his life, Lina Volpi, after he put out an appeal to find her. Carla had died ten years earlier but he told Lina: “All I can say is that I owe her the world”. Indeed, it was the pilot’s last brush with death. After the war he married wife Bridget, who died in 1998, and the couple had three children and seven grandchildren.
He continued to serve as an officer in the RAF in the Middle East and France before retiring in 1969, and after several years living in Canada returned to Dublin. Five years ago he became the last living Battle of Britain pilot following the death of Terry Clark aged 101.
But Paddy always insisted he was just doing his job. “We were just shooting Germans before they shot us. It was just me, doing what I was meant to do – and on the tenth of every month, you get paid for doing it,” he said. But he did admit he had been lucky. “The main skill was luck,” he once said. “I had bags of luck and here I am. It’s either being Irish or being lucky. If you are both you are really lucky.”
