John "Paddy" Hemingway fell asleep quietly on Monday, reports the British Air Force – which describes it as "the end of an era".
He became 105 years old.
Hemingway was one of the pilots who defended Britain against Nazi Germany's almost daily air raids in 1940, when the Nazis tried to take control of British airspace and knock out the British Air Force.
The then Prime Minister Winston Churchill's immortal quote – "never in the history of war have so many owed so much to so few" – referred to Hemingway's and his colleagues' sacrifices during the battle.
Hemingway was born in Dublin in 1919 and enlisted in the British Air Force in 1938, the year before the war broke out in Europe. On D-Day in June 1944, which led to Nazi Germany's capitulation, he was the flight leader for the British fighter planes.
