BBC series 'First Light' recalls wartime heroics of RAF pilots

Seventy years after he helped stop a German invasion during the Battle of Britain, former fighter pilot Geoffrey Wellum still won't accept he's a hero."Of course we're not heroes, we were young men who were doing a job," says the 89-year-old sitting in a comfy leather chair at the RAF Club in London's Mayfair.

"If people like to call me a hero, I can't stop them. All I can say is there are 800 heroes who were killed in the Battle of Britain, I'm just one that happened to survive.

"We don't want medals, we don't want a thank you, but it's nice to be remembered, because that covers everybody - those that died and those that survived... that's all."

Wellum was just 18 when he joined No 92 Squadron. One of the Second World War's youngest pilots, he was taught to fly a Spitfire just weeks before the Battle of Britain began on July 10, 1940.

Wellum's story is now being told in a new drama as part of the BBC's Battle of Britain season. First Light is based on his best-selling memoir and shows how he went from being a schoolboy to dodging German bullets in a matter of months.

Walthamstow-born Wellum is played by relative newcomer Sam Heughan, 30, and the veteran himself acts as a narrator to put the action in context.

"Ever since I was knee high to a grasshopper, I wanted to fly a plane," he says. "I used to live near an airfield and watch the gaily painted fighters and thought 'I want to emulate them'. So, when I left school, I wrote to the air ministry.

"After interviews, form-filling and medicals, they finally accepted me for training. So I left school, had a fortnight's cricket and next thing I was hurtling 'round the sky in a tin."

The day after Wellum joined his squadron, his fellow pilots flew to Dunkirk to patrol the skies as the British troops escaped from France.

"They went off at first light," Wellum recalls. "That evening when I met them again, four weren't there... Even though I was young, I thought, 'This is serious, you've got to think about this, mate'."

In September the squadron were posted to famous fighter station, Biggin Hill and Wellum had his first taste of combat when he was scrambled to fend off attacks from the Luftwaffe.

"It's totally engraved in my memory. I never felt traumatised, if you did that you were dead. It was total reconciliation, I'd got where I wanted to be ever since I was a little boy, I was in a fighter squadron.

"I can remember everything about it. A bloke said, 'Look, there's an experienced pilot, you fly with him and you'll see a bit of land sticking out in the channel called Dungeness, and over the top of that, you'll see about 150 aeroplanes all with black crosses on. Have a go mate, see how you get on'. I can see them as I'm looking at you. A whole mass of gnats on a summer evening..."

Spitfires had only 15 seconds of fire power, before they ran out of ammunition.

"It's no good hanging around in a mass of black-crossed aeroplanes with no bullets. You'd do better to clear off, get re-armed, refuelled, ready for the next sortie - that's what it was all about," says Wellum, stoically.

Incredibly, Wellum survived to tell the tale. But he claims it was purely luck.

"You had to make yourself a difficult target, one that never stays still, never flies straight and level for more than 20 seconds. It seemed to pay off. I was shot badly three times, but I was never shot down, although there were big holes all over the place."

Besides the fight scenes, which use footage from the 1969 Battle Of Britain film, the most compelling moments of the drama show the pilots killing time at their base, waiting for the phone to ring to scramble them to the skies.

"That was the worst part of it. If the phone went and someone said, 'The Naafi van's got a flat battery and won't be around to give tea for another half an hour', you'd think, 'Oh God', because it's the same phone that went two minutes later and said, 'Scramble base angels 15'.

"The moment that happened, something clicked. You were committed to go up there and do your best. Once I was sitting in the aeroplane, I felt it through the seat of my pants, the vibrations, because they lived, these Spitfires.

"You felt part of the aeroplane and you didn't fly it as you were taught to, you were unmerciful with it, you chucked it around. I always thought in a Spitfire, that if I could see my antagonist, I could out-fly him."

Between sorties, the pilots would go for a pint in a local pub and close bonds grew.

"A squadron was a closely knit thing, we were in very dramatic times. It was almost a sense of love. You didn't know any other way of life, they were the blokes you'd fought with, and we were only really content in each other's company."

During the battle, Wellum also took solace in his sweetheart Grace, who he would later marry and have three children with, although their marriage didn't last.

"If you had a day off, it was very nice to have somebody other than an RAF officer to take out to dinner... dinner dancing at the Mayfair and a jug of Pimm's," he smiles.

In March 1942, Wellum joined No 65 Squadron as a Flight Commander and led eight Spitfires off an aircraft carrier to protect Malta, but he suffered severe combat fatigue and returned home to become an instructor, finally leaving the RAF in 1961.

"I never settled down after the war," he says. "I'd peaked before the age of 22, and thereafter nothing ever lived up to squadron life.

"I didn't mind instructing, but after the war, I was like a cat on hot bricks, I didn't know what I wanted. I felt totally out of context, couldn't adapt. I went for long walks on my own in Epping Forest and life went pear-shaped in more ways than one."

Writing his book, which was published in 2002, proved cathartic and turned Wellum's life around.

"My life has been transformed over the last eight years," he says. "I was at a pretty low ebb and I sat down and started to write something. It was never written for publication and I slung what I'd written in a bottom drawer. A chap came to speak to me about a book he was writing and he was from Penguin, so it was all a total fluke.

"The interest is tremendous. People suddenly realised that it was a bit of an important time," he says, modestly. "I don't know why, but I'm gratified. Let's just be remembered."

First Light, part of the BBC's Battle of Britain season, Tuesday, 9pm, BBC Two. Visit: www.bbc.co.uk/history