Last-but-one Battle of Britain fighter ‘ace’ who downed 14 enemy aircraft, most of them when he was 19
Neil photographed by Cecil Beaton at RAF North Weald
The fighter pilot Tom Neil hated being called “Ginger”, but revelled in his other nickname, “Hawkeye”, bestowed for his unerring ability to sense the presence of enemy aircraft, identify the most vulnerable in a formation and move in ruthlessly.
It served him well throughout the Battle of Britain, a time he described as “wonderful, just perfect”. Racked with fear of being burnt alive or drowned at sea and grief-stricken by news of another comrade’s death in combat, Neil still could not contain his boyish excitement. Some 70 years later he recalled shooting down enemy aircraft, such as the Dornier, on what became known as Battle of Britain Day, September 15, 1940.
“The effect was instantaneous; there was a splash of something, like water being struck with the back of a spoon. Beside myself with excitement, I fired again, a longish burst, and finding that I was too close, fell back a little, but kept my position. Then, astonishingly, before I was ready to renew my assault, two large objects detached themselves from the fuselage and came in my direction, so quickly, in fact, that I had no time to evade . . . I suddenly recognised spread-eagled arms and legs as two bodies flew past my head.”
On another occasion he recalled the exhilaration of encountering a formation of German bombers escorted by Messerschmitt 109s, an aircraft much admired by the aviation fanatic.
“It was to be a madly exciting 20 seconds, a cavalry charge of the wildest kind with all weapons bared. I found myself going down in a thirty-degree dive towards the starboard front quarter of the bomber formation. One of a solid wedge of Hurricanes. Firing!”
The most horrific experience of Neil’s days as a fighter pilot did not take place in the air, where he shot down 14 German aircraft at the controls of his Hawker Hurricane, but on the ground.
Neil, who lived to become the much-celebrated last-but-one surviving RAF “ace” from that desperate aerial battle of 1940, was with his fellow pilots of 249 Squadron at their base at North Weald in Essex during a German bombing raid.
In the midst of the onslaught one pilot was trying to scramble his fighter into the air, but his plane was hit and caught fire as it accelerated along the runway. It then skittered out of control across the airfield and came to rest near the dispersal hut, where Neil and others rushed out to see what had happened.
Neil at home in Suffolk in 2013BEN GURR/THE TIMES
In front of them the young airman was engulfed in flames. Neil remembered watching as the pilot’s frame got smaller and smaller as he was immolated in the cockpit until he eventually disappeared. It was, as Neil recalled many years later, a “horrible sight”.
Neil had joined the RAF as a volunteer in 1938 and by the spring of 1940 he was flying Hurricanes aged 19. Along with hundreds of other young men with little flying time in their log books and precious little training, he then found himself on the front line as Britain stood alone against the threat of German invasion.
Throughout the summer and autumn of 1940 Neil flew 141 combat missions, often completing four or five missions a day when the weather was fine, and survived numerous contacts with the enemy. His aircraft was hit several times by enemy fire and on one occasion he collided in mid-air with another RAF fighter over southern England, resulting in his plane’s tail fin being torn off. Neil managed to climb out of his cockpit and deploy his parachute, but was then lucky not to have been shot by people on the ground, who thought he was a German.
After his first five kills, making him an acknowledged “ace”, Neil was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross in October 1940. He was awarded a second a month later. His status as one of the top pilots in the Battle of Britain led to a BBC interview and a visit from the society photographer Cecil Beaton, who captured Neil feigning sleep between sorties. At the height of the battle he had become something of a reluctant celebrity.
Neil acknowledged that luck had played a big part in his survival, in his many combat missions during the Battle of Britain and later during the siege of Malta, where he shot down one Italian air force fighter and survived engine failure. There was more to his success than mere chance.
A prolific writer later in life, who penned ten books about his time in the RAF, Neil remembered the thrill of engaging the enemy for the first time. “You are eager to see him and fight with him. You are not frightened, but exhilarated; let’s do it. So you launch [your plane] at them, fire, break away or dive, and reform and come back.”
He said that he rarely considered the fate of the men in the machines — it was the aircraft that they were fighting not the men inside — and he remembered watching as one of his first kills, a stricken Dornier 17 bomber, headed to oblivion in the Thames estuary. “The aircraft was dying, like an animal, it was mortally wounded — not the pilot or the men, but the aircraft,” he said.
In recent years Neil became an articulate spokesman for a generation of airmen, many of whom lost their lives or were horrifically injured — often with severe burns — and he spoke movingly at many commemorative events. On the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Britain in 2015, when he was 95, he flew for the last time in a two-seater Spitfire in the official flypast from Goodwood in West Sussex. He was photographed in the cockpit with Prince Harry, who gave up his seat for a disabled war veteran after one vintage aircraft was grounded.
Neil was gratified to receive a Christmas card from the prince later that year and even more so to find that Prince Harry had chosen a picture of him and Neil as the decoration for the card.
Prince Harry used a picture of him and Neil at a 2015 flypast as his Christmas cardKIRSTY WIGGLESWORTH/PA
Neil often said that he found hero-worship hard to deal with. In 2010 he said: “I found it hard to take because the real heroes were the 550 chaps who were killed; the real heroes are the 600 people who were badly, badly damaged, many of whom had the scars of their damage until their dying day.
“I remember them all very clearly; I remember their faces, their laughter, their silly pranks, their pipes and cigarettes, their violent games in the mess and even their naughty sayings and jokes. It’s a long time ago now and of course they were all so young and brave and full of courage — most of them only 21 — they were very young, just boys.”
A good-looking young man, Neil was competitive, determined and confident and was quickly promoted through the ranks from pilot officer to squadron leader. A tall figure who stood ramrod straight, he was polite and generous-hearted, but could also be a little too refreshing in his frankness. He was particularly outspoken, for example, about the failure of the RAF to award his South African friend Percy Burton a posthumous Victoria Cross.
Despite being mortally wounded, Burton managed to ram a German fighter-bomber over Southampton during a dogfight, ensuring that it followed his own stricken plane into the ground. Much to Neil’s indignation, Burton was only mentioned in dispatches, because another pilot from the same squadron had been awarded the Victoria Cross not long before and it was felt that there could not be a second award of that nature so soon after the first. “You got mentioned in dispatches for cleaning out aircraft,” was Neil’s disgusted reaction.
Neil was frank too about the outcome of the Battle of Britain, arguing in later life that it was less a case of the “The Few” winning that titanic struggle as much as Hitler ensuring that the Germans lost when he ordered the Luftwaffe to switch its focus to concentrate on bombing British cities.
He described the RAF as engaged in a “fleeting business” in that summer of 1940. “We weren’t very efficient at all,” he said. “We couldn’t shoot for toffee.” He liked to point out that in most cases RAF pilots at the controls of Hurricanes and Spitfires were outgunned by their German opponents who had superior calibre weapons, bigger reserves of ammunition and more manoeuvrable aircraft.
Thomas Francis Neil was born in July 1920 in Bootle, north of Liverpool, the son of Thomas Gosney Neil, a senior manager on the Northern Railway, and Florence Catherine Kelly, who was originally from Ireland.
He was a boisterous and active child who loved football and cricket. Above all he adored aeroplanes. Playing in the docklands around Bootle he would spread his arms and imagine himself in a dogfight with enemy aircraft. From the age of 12 he began dreaming of becoming a pilot and would avidly read about Amy Johnson’s solo flight from Britain to Australia in 1930 and other feats from the golden age of aviation in the magazine Popular Flying. His biggest treat was to pack some sandwiches and cycle 18 miles to Southport, where he would sit for hours and watch the De Havilland Fox Moths operating pleasure flights from the beach. He longed to be a fighter pilot, but as an only child he was cosseted and discouraged by his parents.
When he was 16 his family moved to Manchester and Neil attended Eccles Secondary School, where he was awarded an art prize for a drawing of an aeroplane.
In the summer of 1937 he was selected by his school to travel to Germany to attend a summer camp held in Wiesbaden, where Nazi ideology was being openly promulgated. He made friends with a boy called Karl-Heinz Moht, who was a member of the Hitler Youth and with whom he would sit at a campfire singing “thumping martial tunes”. “Wide-eyed, we all sat in wonderment,” he recalled. “Gosh, everywhere seemed to pulsate with an indescribable electricity. It was all most impressive.”
In Peter Jacobs’s forthcoming biography of Neil, Flying Fighting and Reflection, he described his feeling of destiny on first meeting a man in an RAF uniform. “It was the uniform and the overwhelming aura of wellbeing that influenced me the most. To me, he personified a golden future, a personal holy grail. From that moment my path was charted, irrevocably.”
Neil shot down enemy aircraft on Battle of Britain Day, September 15, 1940ALAMY
Neil wanted to attend Cranwell, the RAF officer training college, but his mother was unimpressed, having met pilots after the First World War who she concluded were all drunks. Instead he left school and began work as a trainee bank clerk at the District Bank in Gorton in Manchester. At the same time he signed up for the RAF Voluntary Reserve in October 1938 as an Airman (under training) Pilot and began flying from Barton near Manchester. The first aircraft he flew was a De Havilland Gipsy Moth.
At the outbreak of war he was called up to full-time service and was sent to Scotland where he trained on Hawker Hart and Hawker Fury biplanes. He also described his first flight in a Spitfire, taxiing across the grass and feeling his stomach churn. “There were no half measures about that aircraft. With the howl of a dervish, the Spitfire set off across the grass like an electric hare, the acceleration alarming.”
He finished his training early in 1940 when he was posted to 249 Squadron, then at Church Fenton in Yorkshire. It was then that Neil began flying the Mk 1 Hawker Hurricane, which, “even though it did not have the legs of a Spit, nor its sprightly acceleration in a dive,” was still impressive.
After his service in the Battle of Britain and in Malta, Neil became tactics officer for 81 Group in 1942, then served with 56 Officer Training Unit and was commanding officer of No 41 Squadron. During the latter part of the war he became RAF liaison officer to the US 9th Air Force’s 100th Fighter Wing and during that posting became the first Allied pilot to land in France after D-Day.
He also acquired an abandoned Spitfire in France, which became his personal aircraft for several months and which was the subject of his book, The Silver Spitfire, a reference to the fact that he had all the paint stripped from the airframe. His posting with the Americans led to the award of the Bronze Star.
A portrait of Neil aged 19 from 1940. He took part in more than 140 combat missions during the Battle of BritainBEN GURR/THE TIMES
Neil married Eileen Hampton in June 1945. The daughter of an army officer, she worked in the RAF throughout the war and had been a “plotter” during the Battle of Britain, working at an underground operations room at RAF Kenley, moving the symbols for each squadron around the table.
The couple had met in 1942 and Neil wrote of their blissful meetings between missions, such as when they drove into the Kent countryside with some friends. “As we all lay on our backs with eyes closed, savouring the sun, we talked endlessly about trivial things, laughed at each other’s harmless jokes and vastly enjoyed an ambience in which there was seemingly no war, no stress or hurt, no flying accidents or death, no responsibilities or anything else, in fact.”
They promised each other that they would marry as soon as the war was over. She reached the rank of pilot officer. She died in 2014 after 69 years of marriage. They had three sons who all survive him. Terence was a helicopter pilot in the Royal Navy and then flew commercial helicopters; Patrick was the independent chairman of child social services in Oxfordshire and Ian was also an RAF pilot who then became a pilot for Bahrain Royal Flight.
Eileen was the rock on which Neil built his career. “She was the most beautiful and talented women I have ever come across,” he said after she died. “She did nothing but good. The air force was her life and she endured all the bombing and moving around with me.”
After the war Neil made his career in the RAF, first as a lecturer at the School of Land/Air Warfare and then as a test pilot at RAF Boscombe. During this period he was seconded to an American project to take part in the first high-altitude pressure suit testing exercises, the precursor to the Nasa space programme.
In 1953 he took command of 208 Squadron, stationed in Egypt and flying Meteors, and was awarded the Air Force Cross in 1956. His final posting was at the Joint Services Mission, based at the British Embassy in Washington.
He retired from the RAF in 1964 at the rank of wing commander. He then led a British consultancy company in Boston, returning to Britain in 1967 and settling in Norfolk, where he became the director of a shoe company. He also served as the secretary of his local chamber of commerce
On his retirement in the early 1980s he was able to devote the rest of his life to writing highly acclaimed books about his wartime experiences. In addition to The Silver Spitfire, Neil’s books about his adventures included Scramble!, which was came out in 2015. Neil published ten books in all. His 1987 memoir Gun Button to Fire was cited by Sir John Grandy, his commanding officer during the war and the former Marshal of the Royal Air Force, as the best book he had read on the Battle of Britain.
The book is as notable for the descriptions of how he cheated death on several occasions and for the searing accounts of how he sent Dorniers and 109s diving to the ground with a trail of black smoke. It also describes the bravery and patriotism that moved Winston Churchill to pronounce after the Battle of Britain: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
“Everything in slow motion,” wrote Neil. “Then, aircraft! In the middle of all the puffs, Huns! Oh, God! Masses of them! ‘Tallyho!’ My eyes glued to them. Fascinated. Growing closer. Large ones in the front and in the middle. Others like flies, stepped up and behind. Thousands, it seemed. And there were only 12 of us.”
Wing Commander Tom Neil, Battle of Britain ace, DFC and Bar, AFC, was born on July 14, 1920. He died after heart surgery on July 11, 2018, aged 97
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