01/11/2026
On this day, 31st October 1940, the Battle of Britain officially ended. Churchill had called them the Few. By 1945 there were fewer still. Of the nearly 3,000 airmen who fought it, more than 1,300 were dead: 544 in the battle itself, and nearly 800 more in the years that followed.
The battle had been fought for one thing. Hi**er could not put an army across the Channel until the Luftwaffe owned the sky above it, and Fighter Command stood in the way. Through August and September the German air force went for the RAF's airfields, its radar and its pilots, then for London. It never broke them. On 17th September Hi**er postponed the invasion indefinitely.
By 31st October the daylight battle was spent. There was no ceremony and no announcement. It ended in drizzle. By the day's record, no large German formations crossed the coast. Fighter Command did not make a single interception, and lost no one. The bombers came back that night, and the Blitz went on into the spring. The dates — 10th July to 31st October, 114 days — were drawn afterwards.
Anyone who flew at least one operational sortie with Fighter Command in those 114 days is one of the Few. There were about 2,940 of them, from 15 countries: British above all, but also Poles, New Zealanders, Canadians, Czechs, Australians, South Africans, Belgians, Frenchmen, Irishmen and Americans. Most were in their late teens or early 20s.
The youngest may have been Pilot Officer Martyn King of 249 Squadron. On 16th August 1940 he was shot down over Southampton, got out of his Hurricane, and died when his parachute collapsed. His headstone says 19; his birth certificate says 18.
The most successful Allied pilot of the battle was a Czech sergeant, Josef František, flying with the Polish 303 Squadron, credited with 17 German aircraft in barely a month. On 8th October his Hurricane came down in Surrey and he was killed. The battle had 23 days left to run.
Many of the dead of 1940 were never found. They went into the Channel and the North Sea, and the water kept them. The Battle of Britain Monument counts 544 dead in the battle; the Memorial Trust's historian thinks the only safe statement is that more than 500 were killed. Nobody disputes the order of it.
Then the war went on for another 4 and a half years, and so did they — over France and Malta, the desert and Burma. Depending on whose count you take, another 791 or 795 of the Few were killed before it ended.
One of them was Brendan Finucane, a Dublin man who had flown through the battle with 65 Squadron. By 1942 he was a wing commander at 21. On 15th July 1942 ground fire hit his radiator over France, and he came down in the Channel off Le Touquet. The last thing his wingman heard was "This is it, Butch." He has no known grave.
Together, that is more than 1,330 men — nearly half of everyone who fought.
They were not the only dead of that autumn. The Luftwaffe lost about 2,600 aircrew of its own over Britain, young men on the other side of the same sky. By the end of December 1940, more than 23,000 British civilians had been killed in the bombing.
The ones who lived grew old, and every year there were fewer of them. The last was John Hemingway, an Irishman of 85 Squadron who baled out twice in August 1940, once into the sea off Essex. He died on 17th March 2025, aged 105. With him, the Few passed out of living memory. On the Embankment in London, the Battle of Britain Monument carries every one of their names.
They were the Few in 1940. By 1945 they were fewer. Now there are none. We will remember them.
