In March 2025, the last surviving pilot of the Battle of Britain died at the age of 105. He had been shot down four…

In March 2025, the last surviving pilot of the Battle of Britain died at the age of 105. He had been shot down four times. He survived a burning cockpit, the sea, a parachute that snagged in a tree, and a fall behind enemy lines. When he died, the last of Churchill's "Few" was gone forever. This is the story of Paddy Hemingway..🧵1/6

⠀🧵 2/6 John Allman Hemingway was born in Dublin in 1919. Everyone knew him as Paddy. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1938, and by the time the Second World War broke out he was a fighter pilot with No. 85 Squadron, flying the Hawker Hurricane. His war began before the Battle of Britain. In May 1940, as the German army smashed through France and the Low Countries, Hemingway flew over the retreating British army as it fell back toward the beaches of Dunkirk. He shot down a German bomber and shared in destroying another, before his own Hurricane was hit by anti-aircraft fire and he was forced down near Maastricht. His squadron was mauled in the fighting over France. They came home to Britain with only a handful of working aircraft and many of their pilots dead, wounded, or missing. There was no time to rest. The Germans were already turning their attention across the Channel. Hitler intended to destroy the RAF, win control of the skies, and then invade Britain. The only thing standing in his way was a few hundred young fighter pilots. Paddy Hemingway was one of them.

🧵 3/6 The Battle of Britain began in July 1940. Day after day, German bombers and fighters came across the Channel, and the outnumbered pilots of RAF Fighter Command rose to meet them. Hemingway's orders were to go for the bombers. His Hurricane carried only about 14 seconds of ammunition in total, so he learned to hold his fire and shoot in short, precise bursts to make every round count. In a single eight-day stretch in August 1940, he was shot down twice. On August 18, a day of fighting so intense it became known as The Hardest Day, his Hurricane was hit by return fire from a German bomber he was attacking. He bailed out over the Thames Estuary and came down in the sea, where he was pulled from the water by the crew of a lightship. Eight days later, on August 26, he was shot down again by a German fighter and bailed out over the marshes of Essex, landing unhurt. He simply climbed into another Hurricane and kept fighting. That was what the Few did. There was no one else to do it.

🧵 4/6 The cost was terrible. Hemingway's closest friend, a pilot named Dickie Lee, was killed on August 18, 1940, the same day Hemingway himself was shot into the sea. Decades later, when people asked Hemingway about the battle, he did not talk about glory. He talked about the empty chairs at the breakfast table, and the friends who never came back. He always said the loss of those friends was his greatest regret. He never thought of himself as a hero. Years later he said simply, "I don't think we ever assumed greatness of any form. We were just fighting a war we were trained to fight." But the danger was not finished with him. He survived the Battle of Britain only to keep cheating death. On his way to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross from the King, the aircraft carrying him crashed on takeoff and he had to scramble clear. Another time he bailed out of a night fighter at just 600 feet when his instruments failed in bad weather. He broke his hand on the tail of the aircraft, and his parachute failed to open properly, only for it to snag in the branches of a tree and save his life.

🧵 5/6 By 1945 Hemingway was in Italy, now flying Spitfires. In April of that year his aircraft was hit by ground fire and he was forced down for the fourth time, behind enemy lines. Italian partisans hid him, disguised him as a farm labourer, and a young girl, the daughter of a partisan leader, led him on foot back to the safety of Allied lines. Four times shot down. Four times he walked, swam, or climbed away from it. After the war he stayed in the RAF and eventually retired as a group captain. He lived a long, quiet life and rarely spoke about what he had done, until he gradually realized that he had become something remarkable. Not because of medals, but because of time. One by one, the pilots of the Battle of Britain passed away, until only Paddy Hemingway was left. The very last of the men Winston Churchill had immortalized in 1940 with a single sentence. "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

🧵 6/6 In 2019, something extraordinary happened. The wreck of one of Hemingway's Hurricanes, the one he had bailed out of over the Essex marshes in 1940, was dug out of the ground after 79 years. When investigators recovered the control column, they found the gun button still set to "fire," nearly eight decades after his last dogfight in it. Hemingway, then 99 years old, watched the recovery on a live television feed from his home in Ireland. On March 17, 2025, St Patrick's Day, John "Paddy" Hemingway died peacefully in Dublin at the age of 105. The Royal Air Force called it the end of an era. With him went the last surviving pilot's memory of the Battle of Britain. The last man who had flown in it, in the summer of 1940, when a few hundred young pilots stood between Nazi Germany and the conquest of Britain. The Few are all gone now. But because men like Paddy Hemingway climbed back into their cockpits again and again, the rest of us are still here. This was the story of Paddy Hemingway, the last of the Few. I post a story like this every single day. Most people never see them. Follow so you don't miss the next one.