The site at Towyn Burrows was acquired in 1937 and was barely higher than the high tide. To the seaward side lay Cefn Sidan, the eight-mile pale-gold beach that has wrecked ships for centuries and now serves the Ministry of Defence as one of its most-used aerial gunnery ranges. To the inland side lay Pembrey Forest, the marshes and the village. The airfield opened officially on 6 May 1940. From June that year No. 92 Squadron flew Spitfires out of Pembrey, with pilots including Squadron Leader Robert Stanford Tuck and a 19-year-old named Geoffrey Wellum, who would later write the great Battle of Britain memoir First Light. During the air battle's peak, pilots on dawn readiness slept in a tent set up next to the aircraft, ready to be in the cockpit in seconds. No. 92 returned to RAF Biggin Hill on 9 September 1940 in the thick of it.

In early 1941 No. 316 Polish Fighter Squadron was formed at Pembrey, flying Hawker Hurricanes. The Polish pilots who reached Britain in 1940 - many of them escaped from German and Soviet occupation, some on foot across half of Europe - had a fierce reputation for skill and grim purpose. They inflicted heavy losses on enemy aircraft before moving on to RAF Colerne in June. Pembrey by mid-1941 had largely handed South Wales air defence to RAF Fairwood Common and RAF Angle and was reallocated to Flying Training Command, where it became home for the next four years to the RAF's No. 1 Air Gunners School. Bristol Blenheims, Vickers Wellingtons and Spitfires trained gunners over the sands. The casualty roll grew. The churchyard at St Illtud's Pembrey holds the graves of 32 wartime RAF dead, including seven from the Polish Air Force.

Faber's landing is the kind of incident that begins as comedy and ends as intelligence coup. He believed he was in the Cotentin Peninsula in Normandy. He was in Carmarthenshire. The Bristol Channel had fooled him for the English Channel; the green coast at Pembrey for a Luftwaffe field. By the time he understood his error the duty pilot was on his wing. The intact Fw 190 was photographed, dismantled and trucked to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, where engineers stripped it down to study its construction, then test-flew it against the latest marks of Spitfire and the new Hawker Typhoon. The intelligence informed every British fighter design choice for the rest of the war. Faber spent the next year in a POW camp in Canada. His despair at having handed his country's most secret weapon to its enemies is described in the available accounts as profound.

After the war RAF Pembrey became No. 233 Operational Conversion Unit, training pilots on the new jet aircraft - de Havilland Vampires from 1952, later Hawker Hunters. The OCU's badge featured a wildcat's head; its Welsh motto was Ymlaen, forward. The Vampires displayed the badge on the cockpit panel as their only marking. There were accidents. In September 1953 a Vampire crashed at the field, killing Squadron Leader Lionel Hubert Wakeford DFC. Shortly before the station closed in June 1957, a Hawker Hunter on approach lost it at low level; Pilot Officer Frederick Jacques ejected too low for his parachute and was killed. The aircraft itself came down on Kidwelly railway station, three miles inland. Both men were buried alongside the wartime dead at St Illtud's. The OCU disbanded in September 1957 and the gates closed.

The active gunnery range survived. Pembrey Sands Air Weapons Range, run by the Defence Infrastructure Organisation, still operates four targets along the beach: three for bombing - both low-level and dive - and one strafe target with three panels for cannon practice. Forward Air Control and Close Air Defence units train here regularly, sometimes with NATO partners. The old RAF station itself was opened as a civil airfield in August 1997, taking the name Pembrey Airport, with 805 metres of the former runway 04/22 still usable. The Welsh Motor Sports Centre - the Pembrey Circuit - occupies most of the rest, hosting race meetings and rally stages where Spitfires once dispersed. From overhead today you can read all of it in one frame: the bombing pans on the beach, the track that loops through old hangars, the strip of tarmac that still takes the occasional charter, and beyond them the eight miles of sand that have been doing more or less the same job, in different costumes, since 1940.