Whipped Cream Difficulties

Group Captain John A. Hemingway (RAF- ret.) died on Monday. He was 105. NYT. BBC.

Gp Capt Hemmingway was the last known survivor of the Battle of Britain. He flew Hurricanes.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

(Hattip: Borepatch, who actually beat me to an obit for once.)