French RAF Spitfire pilot

Born: August 5, 1918;

Died: August 8, 2017

COLONEL Louis Lemaire, who has died aged 99, was one of the last surviving French pilots who flew RAF Spitfires on D-Day in support of the Normandy landings.

Lemaire, at the time a lieutenant, was part of the RAF's all-French 345 Squadron - known as "Group Berry" - one of eight RAF Squadrons made up of French fighter pilots. His squadron was attached to the Air Defence of Great Britain when he flew his Spitfire Mark VA from Shoreham, Sussex, to Normandy on June 6, 1944 to protect RAF bombers and give cover to allied forces in the Channel and on the beaches.

Lemaire had, in fact, flown against the RAF and the allies two years earlier while part of the Vichy French Air Force - under the collaborative Vichy régime - notably during the allies' 1942 Operation Torch in North Africa, an event which prompted him to offer himself to the allies who badly needed fighter pilots.

On D-Day, his 22-Spitfire strong 345 Squadron's first mission at dawn was to keep Luftwaffe fighters away from the United States 4th Infantry Division as they stormed ashore on the Cotentin peninsula at what the allies had designated Utah Beach. Intense allied air cover ensured that the Americans were able to land 21,000 troops on Utah Beach at the cost of "only" 197 casualties whereas the US army suffered 2,000 casualties while landing in the Omaha Beach sector due to a series of mishaps.

Later on D-Day, from 8pm, Lemaire flew his Spitfire back to Normandy with 345 Squadron as part of Operation Mallard in support of Britain's 6th Airborne Division. The squadron gave aerial cover to a fleet of troop-carrying Airspeed Horsa gliders towed by RAF Short Stirling and Albermarle aircraft. Such Horsas had been crucial before dawn on D-Day when they landed the men who took the key Nazi-held Caen bridge, now better known as Pegasus bridge and familiar to many of us through the film The Longest Day. But the 6th Airborne Division needed to get more infantrymen ashore and the Horsa gliders, each carrying 28 troops and two jeeps, were the perfect way. Among the aircraft Lemaire's squadron helped support were heavier Hamilcar gliders carrying Tetrarch light tanks vital for pushing out from the beachheads.

By the end of the war, Lemaire had flown 152 sorties for the RAF, 98 of them against enemy ground positions and involving heavy flak or dogfights. His 345 Squadron lost 14 pilots and 27 aircraft.

During the last few months of the war, while flying in support of the allied advance through Europe, Lemaire survived three close shaves, including being shot down over Holland. On February 8, 1945, while attacking a Nazi position, his Spitfire was hit by flak which destroyed his radio and damaged his joystick but he managed to limp back to England. On February 20, while he was attacking a German munitions train, he was hit by a 20mm Nazi anti-aircraft shell but again succeeded in getting back to base. On 10 April, while attacking a

Nazi military convoy in Holland, part of his left wing was torn off by flak, forcing him to crash land in a field, luckily behind allied lines. The Spitfire was totally destroyed but Lemaire, though briefly unconscious, survived with only bruises. He was made a Knight of the Legion of Honour in June 1945 - upgraded to Commander in 1956 - and Britain awarded him the Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) in March 1946 for valour and courage while flying against the enemy.

Louis Lemaire was born in Paris in 1918 to Jacques Lemaire, an advocate in the Paris Court of Appeals, and Marthe Surcouf, a great grand-niece of famous French Indian Ocean privateer Robert Surcouf. In 1938, with the Nazi threat looming, young Louis enlisted in the French L'Ecole de L'Air and graduated as a fighter pilot with the French Air Force at the start of the war.

He was still only 21 when he decided to heed the famous July 1940 BBC radio appeal from General de Gaulle to stand up against the Nazi invasion of France. He first tried to reach England in an old bi-plane but ran out of fuel and was co-opted into the Vichy Air Force to protect France's African and Middle East colonies and found himself in dogfights with RAF fighters over Syria and Lebanon.

It was after Operation Torch, the joint US-British invasion of North Africa, that he did what he had originally wanted to do - fly for the Free French and the allies. He was first assigned to RAF Coastal Command before he was assigned to RAF 345 Squadron, newly-formed in Ayr. In May, the squadron was moved south to Shoreham, Sussex.

After the war, Lemaire was promoted to Lieutenant-Colonel and RAF 345 Squadron passed to the control of the French Armée de l'Air, in which he served in Indochina as part of the Alsace fighter group, and in Algeria.

He retired to Aix-en-Provence, in the south of France, in the 1970s.

PHIL DAVISON