Richard Hope Hillary

Richard Hope Hillary was born in 1919 into an Anglo-Australian family and was an undergraduate at Oxford when the war began. Commissioned into the Royal Air Force, he joined No. 603 (City of Edinburgh) Squadron in 1940 and flew Spitfires during the Battle of Britain, claiming five enemy aircraft in a week of intense fighting from RAF Hornchurch. On 3 September 1940 he was shot down in flames over the Thames estuary and suffered terrible burns to his hands and face, undergoing repeated reconstructive surgery under Archibald McIndoe as a member of the ‘Guinea Pig Club’.

During his long recovery Hillary wrote The Last Enemy, published in 1942, which became one of the most widely read airman’s memoirs of the war. Determined to return to flying despite his injuries, he retrained as a night-fighter pilot. On 8 January 1943 his Bristol Blenheim crashed during a night training flight in poor weather at Crunklaw in Berwickshire, killing both him and his radio operator, Sergeant Kenneth Wilfrid Young Fison. He was 23.