Paul Caswell Powe Farnes
July 16th, 1918
July the 16th, 1940 was Paul Farnes’ birthday. He had just turned 22 years old.
It was the same day that Adolf Hitler, having smashed the blitzkrieg through France and driven the Allied Expeditionary Force back across the English Channel in a rag-tag flotilla of Royal Nazy ships, fishing trawlers and River Thames pleasure craft, was ready to finish the job. With most of Europe under control and the end of the war seemingly only weeks away, Hitler ordered the beginning of Operation Sealion.
Britain still maintained naval superiority and Hitler knew that if he was to land troops across the Channel, he would have to take out their air cover first. What was planned was a huge sweep of Britain’s air defenses, smashing them with, seemingly, sheer numbers alone.
A month earlier in one of his most famous speeches, Churchill had given the impending fight a name:
What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.
And on August 20th, 1940, he gave another, although the battle, officially at least, was still going:
The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
Paul Farnes was one of The Few
.
They weren’t all British airmen, of course, Churchill knew how to edit his speeches perfectly and ‘British, Commonwealth and Allied airmen’ doesn’t scan as well. There were Canadians, Australians, French, Durch, Norwegian, Czech, Indian, Polish, American, South African New Zealander, Belgian, Irish…. dozens of nations stood up to stop Hitler. The good comrades, as Churchill called them. Although they flew under overall British command, Britain didn’t stand alone in 1940. And it wasn't only the Royal Air Force. The Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm fought too.
To be an ‘Ace’ pilot among The Few required 5 confirmed kills and under the RAF’s very strict rules, confirmed kills required definitive proof. ‘Probable’ kills weren’t enough. Of the top 10 Aces of 1940, 5 were British, 2 from New Zealand, 1 Australian, 1 Polish and 1 Czech.
Paul Farnes, 8 kills, 2 'probables' and 11 damaged, was an Ace.
The leading Ace was Flt Lt Eric “Sawn Off” Lock, DSO, DFC & Bar, who had 26 Swastika ‘kills’ on the side of Spitfire Mk V, W3257 when he was returning from a raid over Pas-de-Calais, France on August 3rd, 1940. Spotting a column of enemy troops on a road, and with a few seconds worth of ammunition still in the wings of his aircraft, he signalled his wingman to attack. He banked hard, lined up the enemy, gave a short burst from the machine guns, then pulled back hard on the stick, climbed into a hard turn and, with a thin trail of oil smoke, the result of small arms fire from the ground, trailing behind him, neither Flt Lt Lock, nor his plane, were ever seen again.
The Luftwaffe had a sizeable advantage in numbers over the allies. It’s long been the narrative that the defense of the island of Britain was desperate, edge of your set stuff. David v Goliath. A nearly broken, ragged bunch of defenders holding out desperately against an overwhelming onslaught. The Alamo. Rourke’s Drift. Helm’s Deep.
In reality, the German plans were terrible. Their attacks uncoordinated, badly planned, poorly executed and shambolic. The Allies had superior radar cover, were far better organized and won at something of a canter. But victories are sometimes made more glorious by portraying your enemy as better than they were. Tacitus did it in Roman times, portraying the Iceni rebels in Britain as fierce, noble savages driven to war by the cruelty of Roman avarice, only to see them get absolutely smashed once the ‘good guys’ turned up. If the narrative of the Battle of Britain was that we fucking smashed ‘em, that wouldn’t seem very ‘British’ and it might be seen as something of an affront to the nature of The Few.
Chruchill didn’t call them The Few because there were so few of them. The term was relative. Never had so much been owed to so few by, in comparison, so many.
2,332 Allied pilots took part in the defense, shooting down somewhere between 2,300 and 2,600 enemy aircraft. About 40% of pilots could claim at least one kill, but of those, only about 15% could claim more than 2. Only 188 of those pilots achieved Ace status, although a further 237 went on to become Aces later in the war.
Four of them, Archie McKellar, Ronald Fairfax Hamlyn (both British), Antoni Głowacki (Polish) and Brian Carbury (New Zealander) achieved Ace status in a single day.
By October of that year, Operation Sealion was dead and the legend of The Few was set.
Paul Caswell Powe Farnes was born in Boscombe, Hampshire and educated at Surbiton County School and Kingston Technical College. He joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in April 1938.
After training he joined 501 Squadron, claiming his first victories at the Battle of France in May 1940, shooting down a Heinkel He 111. He took 5 more in August 1940 and in October was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal. By now a sergeant pilot, he was commissioned a pilot officer on 3rd December, 1940.
In February 1941, Farnes began his role as an instructor at No. 57 Operational Training Unit. By November of the same year, he had moved to No. 73 Operational Training Unit in Aden. On December 3, 1941, he was confirmed in his rank and promoted to war-substantive flying officer. In February 1942, Farnes joined No. 229 Squadron RAF in North Africa as a flight commander and flew with the squadron to Malta on March 27, 1942, where he eventually took command.
Returning to North Africa in late May 1942, Farnes was promoted to war-substantive flight lieutenant on July 26, 1942. He was then posted to Iraq, where he joined the RAF headquarters staff and remained until March 1945. During this time, he was promoted to war-substantive squadron leader on May 1, 1944. Upon his return to the United Kingdom, he took command of No. 124 Squadron RAF, a position he held until the end of the war, concluding his service with the acting rank of wing commander.
After the war, Farnes served as a liaison officer for training centers with the Air Ministry. On September 1, 1945, he was granted a permanent commission in the RAF with the rank of squadron leader. In 1948, he transitioned to the role of flying instructor and continued his service in the RAF until his retirement on June 27, 1958, holding the rank of wing commander.
His first wife was Pamela Barton, who he married in Worthing, Sussex in 1948. Pamela died in 1989. Paul was married to Cynthia from 1994 until her death in 2012. He had a son, Jonathan, and a daughter, Linda; a second son, Nicholas, died in 1954.
Paul Farnes died on 28th January, 2020 at the age of 101 in his home in West Sussex. He was the last Ace fighter pilot of the Battle of Britain.
In 2010, Paul said:
I'm very proud of having fought in the Battle of Britain, it is thought of as being a considerable achievement.
He’s right. It was.