The Last Enemy
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| Author | Richard Hillary |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Autobiography |
| Publisher | Burford Books |
| Released | April 1998 |
| Media Type | Paperback |
| Pages | 178 |
| ISBN | ISBN 1580800564 |
The Last Enemy is an autobiographical book by Spitfire pilot Richard Hillary.
Richard Hillary was born in Sydney, Australia, on 20 April 1919. At the earliest permissible age, Hillary's father shipped him off to Shrewsbury School in England. Always something of a rebel, by the time he was in college Hillary had become more mature than his contemporaries and became well-known for his athletic capabilities, good looks, and apparent lack of fear.
The book is an account of the author's training to fly fighters in the Royal Air Force, of his wartime experiences, of a crash in which he was horribly burned on the face and hands, and of his recovery from these injuries under the care of the great plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe.
Hillary was better at writing about action than about abstract ideas. His descriptions of flying and of life on the station are lucid, swift and exciting; they are of a different caliber from the hundreds of RAF memoirs that were published after the war. They aspire to, and attain, the status of literature.
One of the most memorable aspects of the book is the sonorous but unsentimental way in which the author records the death, one by one, of his friends. The bald statement of fact "from this mission X did not return" that runs like a doomed chorus through the highspirited action exactly reproduces the way in which such deaths were received at the time: the lost men were noted, revered, but not at the time deeply mourned. The Battle of Britain did not give space to such sentiments, and all the pilots involved, knowing that each flight might be their last, understood that.
The author wrote the book in New York, where he had gone on a propaganda mission to raise American interest in the war. He met the French pilot-writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery there and was influenced by his books, which took an exalted view of the role of the pilot. What had happened to Hillary is that, during the long months of his agonizing treatment for his burns, he had come to the conclusion that the fight against Nazism was not something that could be undertaken in the spirit he had first envisaged, but was an historic emergency with universal implications.
Hillary managed to bully himself back into a flying position even though, it was noted in the officers' mess, that he could not even handle a knife and fork. Hillary succeeded in winning permission from his superiors to pilot a hazardous night training mission. He never returned.
