Addressing the British House of Commons in August 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill paid tribute to the pilots of the Royal Air Force who were staving off an impending German invasion of the British Isles in what would be known as the Battle of Britain.
“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” Churchill proclaimed.
When John A. Hemingway died in Dublin on Monday at 105 — the Royal Air Force announced his death — he was the last known survivor of the “few,” nearly 3,000 pilots and crew who saved Britain in the early stages of World War II.
Mr. Hemingway, who was known as Paddy, piloted Hurricane fighters in the battle, which took place in the skies above Britain between July 10 and Oct. 31, 1940.
Hitler had planned a September 1940 invasion of the British Isles, known as Operation Sea Lion. But he postponed it indefinitely when the R.A.F. — vastly outnumbered at the height of battle, with 749 fighter aircrafts compared with the Luftwaffe’s 2,550 — beat back German bombers and fighters, foiling his quest to establish the air supremacy that Germany needed to support invading ground troops. However, the Blitz, Germany’s bombing of London and other British cities, extended into the spring of 1941.
“Britain, facing a Continent dominated by her enemies, prepared for a fight to the death,” The New York Times had reported that June.
Flying over France, Britain and Italy in World War II, Mr. Hemingway was shot down four times between 1940 and 1945. He received Britain’s Distinguished Flying Cross in July 1941 for downing and damaging German planes.
“During the war, all my closest friends were killed, and my memories and thoughts about them I have always regarded as a private affair,” Mr. Hemingway told the British newspaper The Telegraph on the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of Britain.
“But being the last of the Battle of Britain veterans has made me think of those times,” he said. “Fate was not democratic. 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.”
John Allman Hemingway was born on July 17, 1919, in Dublin. After attending St. Andrew’s College there, he enlisted in the R.A.F. in 1938 and graduated from flight school.
He first saw combat in the spring of 1940 when he flew in support of the British Expeditionary Force’s ultimately futile quest to turn back the German invasion of France. He shot down a German bomber in May, but the next day he had to make a forced landing when his plane was hit by antiaircraft fire.
The British Army, routed by the Germans, returned home in the storied evacuation from the French port of Dunkirk in late May and early June. France capitulated to Hitler with the signing of an armistice on June 22.
Flying afterward in defense of Britain, Mr. Hemingway was intercepting German bombers over the English Channel on Aug. 18 when his Hurricane was shot up.
“Somebody clobbered me,” he told The Daily Mirror in 2018. “They hit me in the engine. It covered the inside of the cockpit with oil, and things got very smelly and hot. I had no hope of getting to England, so I bailed out and landed in the sea.
“There were jellyfish everywhere,” he continued. “I started swimming. Two hours later, a rowboat from a lightship bumped into me.”
He climbed aboard, grabbed an oar and helped the crew return with him to England.
Later in August, Mr. Hemingway survived a third close call, this time while pursuing a German bomber over southeastern England. As he told The Daily Mirror: “I got a Dornier in my sight and started to pull around and have a second go. That was it — ‘bang, bang’. There was smoke everywhere.” He bailed out. “I landed in the Pitsea marshes, where I faced the local Home Guard,” he said.
He added wryly, “I could speak reasonable English, so they didn’t shoot me.”
Mr. Hemingway was an Allied flight controller during the D-Day invasion of Normandy in June 1944. The next year, in April, he was a squadron commander in Italy when his Spitfire fighter was downed by the Germans. He bailed out again and was rescued by farm workers, who disguised him in peasant clothing and smuggled him to the British lines.
After the war, Mr. Hemingway held posts with Britain’s Air Ministry and its delegation to NATO in Paris. He retired from the R.A.F. in 1969 as a group captain, the equivalent of an American colonel, and lived in Britain and Canada before returning to Ireland in 2011.
The Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund, which assists current and former R.A.F. personnel and their families, announced on May 8, 2020 — the 75th anniversary of V-E Day, which marked Germany’s surrender — that Mr. Hemingway had become the last living veteran of the Battle of Britain after the death of William Clark a day earlier at 101.
“We owe so much to Paddy and his generation for our freedoms today,” William, the Prince of Wales, said on social media on Tuesday, paying tribute to Mr. Hemingway.
In its statement, the R.A.F. said of Mr. Hemingway, “He never saw his role in the Battle of Britain as anything other than doing the job he was trained to do.”
Mr. Hemingway’s survivors include three children, Susan, Michael and Brian. His wife, Bridget, died in 1998. He died in a nursing home in Dublin.
“I am here because I had some staggering luck and fought alongside great pilots in magnificent aircraft with ground crew in the best air force in the world at that time,” Mr. Hemingway told The Irish Independent in September 2020. “It was just a matter of taking each day at a time. Others write the history — we were doing our job.”
Lynsey Chutel and Ash Wu contributed reporting.