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Wellum First Light ISBN 13: 9780471426271

First Light - Hardcover

 
9780471426271: First Light
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A World War II fighter pilot s extraordinary memoir already a bestseller in the U.K.

"Wellum s First Light deserves to be read for many years to come."
The Times (London)

"An extraordinarily gripping and powerful story."
The Evening Standard (London)

Geoffrey Wellum joined the Royal Air Force in 1939, at age seventeen. After piloting Spitfires during the Battle of Britain and flying nearly 100 missions over occupied France, he was mentally and physically exhausted an old man at age twenty–two. Now, drawing on notes he wrote at the time, Wellum re–creates his wartime experiences. The book vividly evokes the realities of wartime flying the camaraderie, the scrambles, the dogfights, the night flights, the foul weather. But it also gives us a moving portrait of a boy who anguishes over the loss of friends during training, broods over fears of failure and survives to become a battle–hardened ace, inured to death but never unaffected by it. Richly detailed, engagingly written, and emotionally resonant, First Light is a treat for military history buffs and anyone drawn to dramatic coming–of–age stories.

Geoffrey Wellum (Cornwall, UK) left the RAF in 1961 and worked for a commodities brokerage in London until his retirement.

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Review:
Surviving Battle of Britain fighter aces were thin on the ground even in 1941, so any new book more than 60 years later from a previously unknown pilot is bound to get noticed. And First Light is not just any book. It might not turn out to be a lasting classic, like Richard Hillary's The Last Enemy or Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, but it is a cut well above the bog standard wartime reminiscences of many retired military bods. For a start Wellum can write, but more than this he has an instinctive feel for a good story. He begins First Light as a fresh-faced, rather obnoxious public schoolboy keen to blag his way into the RAF in March 1939; just three years, two full tours on Spitfires, the Battle of Britain, nearly 100 escorts and fighter sweeps over occupied France and a Malta convoy later, Wellum was physically and mentally burnt out before the age of 22. An old man in a boy's body. His descriptions of the excitement, freedom and, at times, sheer terror of operating in a three-dimensional airspace are vividly powerful, but perhaps his greatest gift is to get across the way the fatigue and the emotional shutting off creeps up unnoticed.

At the start, the death of a friend leaves Wellum devastated and wondering when his turn will come; within the space of a few hundred pages, the failure of a pilot to return is dropped in almost as an afterthought. This is not the response of a man who cares too little, but of one who cares too much. Without being aware of it, he has experienced and felt too much and his mind and body have involuntarily separated. This comes into even sharper relief at the end when Wellum is stood down from active service; he is the only one not to see--quite literally, as his vision has become impaired--that his ailments are rooted in his psyche rather than his body. The only one false note is his desire to see his role as part of a bigger picture; written many years after the events he describes, Wellum sometimes interjects thoughts and feelings about the war that simply do not ring true. That aside, one is left wondering what became of Wellum the man between the war ending and the book's publication. What sense did the prematurely aged fighter pilot make of the post-war age and did he learn to love again? But that, maybe, is the subject for another book. --John Crace

Review:
"An extraordinary, deeply moving and astonishingly evocative story. Reading it, you feel you are in the Spitfire with him, at 20,000 feet, chased by a German Heinkel, with your ammunition gone." Independent

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  • PublisherJohn Wiley & Sons
  • Publication date2003
  • ISBN 10 047142627X
  • ISBN 13 9780471426271
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages370
  • Rating

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Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780141042756: First Light: Original Edition (Penguin World War II Collection)

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780141042756
Publisher: Penguin, 2009
Softcover

9780241987841: First Light: The Phenomenal Fighter Pilot Bestseller

Penguin, 2020
Softcover

9780241984345: First Light: The Centenary Collection

Penguin, 2018
Softcover

9780670912483: First Light: The True Story of the Boy Who Became a Man in the War-torn Skies above Britain

Viking, 2002
Hardcover

9780141008141: First Light

Penguin, 2003
Softcover

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