First Light

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Soon after his arrival, 92 Squadron moved from Duxford in Cambridgeshire to Pembrey in Carmarthenshire.

First Light: Dramatising the real Battle of Britain - BBC First Light: Dramatising the real Battle of Britain - BBC

Thrust into combat almost immediately, Wellum finds himself flying several sorties a day, caught up in terrifying dogfights with German Me 109s. Aged eighteen, Wellum signed up on a short-service commission with the Royal Air Force in August 1939. The problem was how to convince the audience he was actually at the controls of a Spitfire rocketing through the clouds. Disappointed to be leaving frontline service, Wellum initially found the experience to be "almost unbearable".Wellum's real achievement is to make the reader experience with him the sheer difficulty of learning to fly along with its many dangers. Wellum's account, I want to thank him for helping to make real in my mind, the stresses that war places on you.

First Light on Vimeo First Light on Vimeo

But at that time, I'm sure, as he reflects in the film, he was desperate to fight on until the bitter end. The couple divorced in 1975, and six years later he relocated to Mullion on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall. Then cutting to his point of view shot in the real Spit, we get the hair-raising images of take-off.I'm very glad that this finally found it's way to publication, and it should be regarded as one of the great personal memoirs of the Second World War.