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Start giftingFirst Light
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn morePenguin presents the audiobook edition of First Light by Geoffrey Wellum, read by Andrew Brooke.
Two months before the outbreak of the Second World War, eighteen-year-old Geoffrey Wellum becomes a fighter pilot with the RAF...
Desperate to get in the air, he makes it through basic training to become the youngest Spitfire pilot in the prestigious 92 Squadron. Thrust into combat almost immediately, Wellum finds himself flying several sorties a day, caught up in terrifying dogfights with German Me 109s.
Over the coming months he and his fellow pilots play a crucial role in the Battle of Britain. But of the friends that take to the air alongside Wellum many never return.
Geoffrey Wellum was born in Walthamstow, and educated at Forest School, Snaresbrook. Aged seventeen, he joined the RAF on a short-service commission in August 1939 and served with 92 Squadron throughout the Battle of Britain. In March 1942 he went to 65 Squadron at Debden as a Flight Commander and from there to Malta later that year. He led a group of eight Spitfires off HMS Furious to Luqa during Operation Pedestal.
Returning to England, Wellum became a test pilot on Typhoons at Gloster Aircraft. He later became a gunnery instructor until the end of the war. He stayed in the RAF after 1945, serving in Germany as a staff officer, followed by a four-year tour of duty with 192 Squadron. Wellum left the RAF in 1961 to take up a position with a firm of commodity brokers in the City of London until his retirement to Cornwall. He died in July 2018, aged ninety-six.