The last enemy

by Richard Hillary

Paperback, 1997

Status

Available

Genres

Collection

Robert Ames Collection

Publication

Short Hills, NJ : Burford Books, c1997.

Description

In 1918, the RAF was established as the world's first independent air force. To mark the 100th anniversary of its creation, Penguin are publishing the Centenary Collection, a series of six classic books highlighting the skill, heroism and esprit de corps that have characterised the Royal Air Force throughout its first century. The Last Enemy is Richard Hillary's extraordinary account of his experience as a Spitfire pilot in the Second World War. Hillary was shot down during the Battle of Britain, leading to months in hospital as part of Archibald McIndoe's 'Guinea Pig Club', undergoing pioneering plastic surgery to rebuild his face and hands. The Last Enemy was first published in 1942, just seven months before Hilary's untimely death in a second crash and has gone on to be hailed as one of the classic texts of World War II. The Centenary Collection: 1. The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary 2. Tumult in the Clouds by James Goodson 3. Going Solo by Roald Dahl 4. First Light by Geoffrey Wellum 5. Tornado Down by John Peters & John Nichol 6. Immediate Response by Mark Hammond… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member gocam

Poignant, sad, relevant yet devoid of sentimentality, Hillary describes in engaging terms his journey from student to RAF fighter pilot during WWII, making friends only to see so many of them perish - his journey through reconstructive surgery after a crash through to a stirring final realization

that he may in actual fact be fighting for something larger than himself. A very important read.

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LibraryThing member gibbon

Richard Hillary was a member of a privileged English elite with money and education. He grew up between the two world wars with the conviction that the purpose of being alive was to have a good time and that his university education and foreign travel, only accessible in those days to the wealthy,

were to contribute to his pleasure. At the outbreak of WW II, in common with many young men of his class, he joined the Royal Air Force with the intention of becoming a fighter pilot, which he achieved. The book tells an unforgettable story of flying the Spitfire, the fastest and the best of the propeller-driven single-seat fighting planes, of his experiences in the early days of the war and of the death of almost all his friends as one by one they failed to return from combat over the skies of Southern England and the English Channel. He was himself shot down and badly burned on the face and hands; the second part of the book tells not only of his hospital experiences and his long series of operations at the hands of McIndoe, the great plastic surgeon, but of his experiences during the nightly bombing of London and of his changing philosophical outloook after the death of his great friend Peter Pease, also a pilot. This is a memorable book by a man who had the insight to see what he had been and what he had become. He returned to flying with the RAF, some believe before his hands had healed properly, and was killed together with his observer when his Bristol Blenheim crashed during a night training flight in 1943.

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LibraryThing member michaelm42071

The Last Enemy, by Richard Hillary (1942; reprinted London: Macmillan, 1963) is a book I think I read years ago under the title Falling Through Space. Hillary begins with being shot out of the air and badly burned (on September 3rd, 1940, in the Battle of Britain, just a year to the day after the

war started) and then goes back to Oxford before the war. Hillary talks about winning a rowing race in Germany in 1938 and losing one in Hungary. The war begins and Hillary describes flight training and his friends. Then he goes back to his crash and his long convalescence. The fiancée of one of his dead buddies accuses him of stifling all his emotional reaction to what has happened. In London he helps dig a woman out of a bombed house next to the pub where he had been drinking. She looks at his face and says before she dies, “I see they got you too.” This is an epiphany for him, and he finally starts to feel the death of his friends, rage at the evil of the war, and a conviction to be a writer.

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LibraryThing member Pandaros

The Last Enemy is a must for anyone interested in how WW2 was actually experienced. Hillary spends little time writing about his battle experiences, but much more on the period before the outbreak of war and his subsequent time in hospital. He deals with the reasons why people went to war and

raises issues that have been glossed over in literature that was written after the war. The story itself is filled with poignancy in that one knows that Hillary did not live to see the outcome of the war yet saw many of his friends die. In short it captures feelings and moods that we are so sadly not witness to.

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LibraryThing member mahallett

sad, glad i don't live in a war zone,

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