Just as the Battle of Britain was getting underway in August 1940, Winston Churchill paid tribute in the House of Commons to the fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force. It was they who stood between embattled Britain and Nazi Germany, which had just conquered France and was poised to invade England. “Never in the field of human conflict,” Churchill declared, “was so much owed by so many to so few.” In that sense, he was prophetic: By inflicting enough damage on the Luftwaffe during the summer and fall of 1940, the RAF forced Adolf Hitler to abandon plans for an invasion of Britain and turn his attention east to the Soviet Union.
Now, with the death of 101-year-old Wing Cmdr. Paul Farnes on Jan. 28, those 3,000 RAF airmen who became known in popular parlance as the Few are very nearly all gone. Only two centenarians, Flight Lt. William Clark and Flying Officer John Hemingway, are known to be alive. And Farnes was the only remaining pilot who had also qualified as a wartime “ace,” having shot down six enemy planes (as well as a probable seventh) and disabled another half-dozen during the Battle of Britain and earlier fighting in France.
Farnes, who had begun as a sergeant pilot and wasn’t commissioned until later in the war, proved unusually skillful in outmaneuvering enemy aircraft. Flying a Hawker Hurricane for the RAF’s 501 Squadron, he shot down three bombers during the fighting in France and then three more, including two Stukas, during the opening weeks of the Battle of Britain. In the invasions of Poland, France, and the Low Countries, Germany’s Stuka bomber had seemed, in the words of the Guardian, “to epitomize blitzkrieg invincibility. … But it failed over England, a sitting duck for faster RAF fighters” and nimble pilots such as Farnes, who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal in October 1940.
Like many of the Few, Farnes was an unlikely hero — and, for that matter, an unlikely officer. The illegitimate son of an Australian soldier stationed in England at the end of World War I, his mother died the day after he was born, and his father abandoned him. Adopted and raised by the middle-aged midwife who had delivered him — “I had a wonderful upbringing, just she and I together,” he later recalled — he was educated at a technical college and in 1938 held an engineering job at a factory near London when, concerned about the state of the world, he decided to enlist in the Royal Navy.
A friend persuaded him that flying in airplanes would be more “fun” than serving on ships at sea, but Farnes was worried that his illegitimate status would prevent him from being able to join the RAF Volunteer Reserve. His mother wrote to the Air Ministry to explain her adoptive son’s concerns and was assured that so long as he passed the “necessary exams … [the RAF would] be glad to have him.”
The RAF’s investment was a wise one. After the Battle of Britain, Farnes was commissioned as a flying officer, and after service as a flight instructor in England and Aden (now Yemen), he commanded a Hurricane squadron in defense of Malta during the island’s long siege by the Italians and Germans. He stayed on in the RAF as a jet aircraft instructor until 1958, when he retired to enter private business.
Having begun life with a certain ambiguity and stigma, Farnes ended it on a grace note echoing into the past. At 101, he was a testament to his country’s will to survive and his generation’s selfless determination to defend its freedom. In person, he was a self-effacing link to a gallant past and a gentleman. Once, meeting a German pilot whose plane he’d just shot down, Farnes was hurt when his proffered handshake was rebuffed. He was a warrior too: “I have to admit I enjoyed it,” he told an interviewer recently. “My wife always says, ‘You shouldn’t say that,’ but I did enjoy it.”
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
