There were many tributes when John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, the last surviving fighter pilot of the Battle of Britain, died in March. Prince William said he was saddened about the death of the ‘last of The Few’ while the prime minister saluted Hemingway’s ‘extraordinary life’. There were no such statements in February on the death of Jack Harris, believed to have been the last surviving Lancaster bomber pilot.
Official indifference to those who served in Bomber Command is not new. Churchill said little about the bomber offensive in his war memoirs, seeking to distance himself politically from the widespread destruction wrought by his own decision to focus on bombing as a way of hitting back against Germany, and as a method to convince the US that Britain could fight on.
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