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First Light

By Geoffrey Wellum

(4)

| eBook | 9780141910345

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Book Description

'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

Two months before the outbreak of WWII, seventeen year old Geoffrey Wellum l Continue

Critics

On a wing and a prayer

Early this year, at a former clandestine aviator's memorial service, one of his daughters read a poem by John Magee about the delights of flying: a pilot could 'put out my hand and touch the face of God'. This ecstasy is now half forgotten, when trip ... (read full critics)

spectator published on Fri, 17 Sep 2010

1 Review

This is one of the few wartime pilot's memoirs that really touches me. Most of them just demonstrate the bright side of a successful wartime pilot's life. They talked about thrills of combat actions, excitements and the glory of their results, horsing around here and there, slight sorrow for lost ... (continue)

This is one of the few wartime pilot's memoirs that really touches me. Most of them just demonstrate the bright side of a successful wartime pilot's life. They talked about thrills of combat actions, excitements and the glory of their results, horsing around here and there, slight sorrow for lost friends and maybe a little doubt and fright about their own fates.
This book does not do those things. It is much deeper. It comes from the truthful reflection of a common pilot who was threw in to the Battle of Britain at the age of 19. The readers would find uncertainty, confusions, doubts, fatalism, and deep grieves for the friends and himself.
This is probably the real life of a wartime fighter pilot, not what all the aces' memoirs want us to believe.

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jhwangus said on Jul 26, 2011 about the Paperback edition | Add your feedback