A coda for the few
John Hemingway, 1919-2025
ON MARCH 17, JOHN Allman Hemingway passed away. He was the last surviving airman of the Battle of Britain. They’re all gone now. Soon every pilot will be gone, along with every trooper and tanker and Wren. One by one they go, to do their dying, to the fate which by luck or accident escaped them eighty years ago. It was always going to happen. Certainty doesn’t make their loss any less sombre, and history doesn’t need survivors. But the living strands are being cut. With them to the wind goes a tangible memory of the combat necessary to bring about the destruction of fascism. It’s an anxiety not really rooted in fact, but I fear the further distant we grow from that forbidding reality, the harder it might be to mobilise against fascism recrudescent in our own time. They knew what it was to taste blood and iron. Do we?
Hemingway was twenty years-old when war was declared. Based at Debden in Essex, he received his first order to scramble that night. “In those few moments,” as he sprinted for his Hurricane, he recalled, “I realised that I must now shrug off sentimentality of all sorts and henceforth cope at all levels entirely on my own, no matter what the circumstances.”
Sangfroid, steeliness, resolve. These were not characteristics innate to the doughty English (or Irish, or whoever) but the explicit demand of the task. Deep reservoirs were needed. Hemingway called on it over Belgium when he was first downed by ground fire. He had a piece of shrapnel prised from his knee by a Tommy who warmed a knife by a candle. Then he walked seventy miles with a refugee column to Brussels. His unit, 85 Squadron, destroyed 90 planes in an eleven-day period during the battle for France. Hemingway claimed two bombers, and a couple of damaging hits. He flew in his shirtsleeves, to move more freely in the cockpit – or get out of one in a hurry. He had to do so again, back in Britain in August, when he was shot down twice more in a single fortnight.
Lingering childhood fantasy (I include myself here, born of an air force family and raised on Biggles adventures) tends to thrill to the machinery. During the Battle, the division of labour was for the Spitfires (impossibly elegant and sleek) to engage Nazi fighters while the Hurricanes (sturdy, like pack-mules) dealt with the bombers. But the real and thoroughly unglamorous machinery was on the ground, in the “Chain Home” radar network, the Dowding System of forward observers and flight controllers, and the mechanics who had to turn around a squadron four or five times a day. And it was the advantage of fighting over home which meant airmen like Hemingway were able to return to their bases if they survived a bail-out or crash-landing. He remembered, into his hundredth year, the smell of flaming oil filling his cockpit. “Fate was not democratic,” he said. “New pilots with just a few hours in Hurricanes did not have the instincts of us more experienced pilots and were very vulnerable in combat. Many did not last long.”
Time has been a bit rude to the myths Britain has long used to armour its image of a glorious past. Events that once had their place in the national canon – often the font of an ugly nostalgia for days of imperial greatness – have been found out. Moments of glory are discovered to be more prosaic. When you lift up the carpet, passages of heroism can be more sordid than previously thought. Legends fall apart. Yet after the whole of the Second World War has been wrung through the collective rollers of revision, somehow the legend of 1940 has stayed intact. Its spirit endures, just not in the same way we once believed or hoped it might.
In those fateful days, and contrary to the popular memory, the Royal Air Force and pilots like Hemingway weren’t the “last line of defence” against conquest. France was, then Britain’s airmen, then the Navy (which was never really challenged, or challengeable). Last of all were the British isles, fast being transformed into a citadel with a society mobilising along the lines first suggested by the guerilla radicals at Osterley Park, many of them veterans of battle against fascism in Spain. In no sense “alone” in 1940, Britain could call on the vast productive and manpower weight of its Empire: India, Canada, South and eastern Africa, Australasia, the Caribbean. The United States was not yet in the war but was far from neutral as between a democratic or fascist victory. Sealion – the name Hitler gave to plans for an invasion of Britain – was a ridiculous idea that never would’ve worked even if the RAF had been beaten from the skies. It was precisely the kind of deranged fantasy on which Nazism liked to dwell but was utterly beyond its material power. Hiter’s defeat was massively overdetermined as soon as FDR issued his demand, in May of 1940, for the US to produce 50,000 aircraft per year (America ended up building close to 300,000 planes by ’45, to go along with its 99 aircraft carriers, two-dozen battleships, 377 destroyers, 90,000 tanks, two Atomic Bombs…). Defeat was made certain when the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union backed by a logistics train made up of 800,000 horses.
The only threat as pressing to Britain as the Luftwaffe in 1940 was a thick crust of aristocratic opinion active since 1933 which thought the Empire should be preserved at any cost – even peace. Some went further, dreaming that England might be ideally heaved over on the side of brother-Aryans against the “Judeo-Bolsheviks” to the east. In the face of this terrifying possibility, Churchill’s true “finest hour” was his realisation that no compromise could ever be made with fascism. Every corner of the Empire down to the last tree in the Cairngorms could and should be sacrificed to its destruction. His greatest act and insight: to defect at the crucial moment from the majority opinion of his own class.
Much blame should be laid against postwar films (Angels One Five, Battle of Britain) for giving us a plummy picture of the RAF – that tally-ho, pip-pip, pluck-and-welly style, the “jolly good show, old chum” cartoon of toffish frippery. Of the armed branches, the RAF was by far the most middle-rank and technical. But John Hemingway did come from the upper orders – though at a stranger angle. He was Irish, his father a prominent builder and developer in Dublin who thought his son might become a surgeon. The education was Catholic and private. But Hemingway’s moustache, which he wore until his death, was a lampoon of Hitler’s, grown for a bet. In that rough condescension of comradely nicknames, he was called “Paddy” in the same way that if he’d been Welsh he’d be called “Taffy.” He flew Spitfires over Italy towards the end, again being shot down and helped through German lines by Partisans. Hemingway retired, to a life in love with Beethoven and antiques, as a Group Captain with a Distinguished Flying Cross in 1974.
“I was lucky to survive the war,” Hemingway said, when he was the only one of his kind left. “This is not false modesty. It was characteristic of those times and the culture of my squadron to be resolute, realistic, and not to dramatise those very dramatic times.” Duty, formality, rectitude, discipline: viewed another way, these were not just the result of military hierarchy, or the rusty politesse of a society which tried in vain – even during a common struggle against annihilation – to bridge its stratifications of class. These qualities were a defence, a guard against despair. Every morning in the mess hall, at the breakfast table, a familiar face was often absent. Hemingway’s best friend was a wingman called Dickie Lee. He was killed over the North Sea in 1940. Terrible things happened to good people and the code of coping we would today call repression or trauma were the only means by which you could see the job through. And there was no more vital job than theirs. “During the war, all my closest friends were killed,” Hemingway said. “My memories and thoughts about them I have always regarded as a private affair.”
To what ends were John Hemingway’s sacrifice used? I know – we should know – the squalidness of Britain’s policy before the war, the sordidness of its policy after. India, Palestine, Malaya, Greece, Suez. Disasters all. The postwar settlement was compromised, only half-finished. If everyone above the rank of Hauptman had been thrown in Spandau we might’ve done a better job of de-Nazification. History has done its work on the era, and much of it comes out rancid. But those desperate days in the summer of 1940? Even if I wanted to rescue the mythology of the war from the grinder of revisionism and mythbusting, I find that it doesn’t really need salvage. Its lustre has barely dimmed. The cause – John Hemingway’s cause – was righteous. It remains righteous now.