John Martin

John Martin joined the Royal Air Force in 1941, trained as a wireless operator and flew with a Lancaster crew in Bomber Command. On the night of 30 January 1944, only his third operation, the aircraft was attacked above Berlin at 20,000 feet, went into a dive with its controls gone, and broke up. He was thrown clear, his parachute opened, and he landed in German territory, where he was taken prisoner and held until British troops reached the camp in the spring of 1945. Home again, he married Adelaide, a WAAF flight mechanic he had met at a local dance in 1943. His account of all this, A Raid Over Berlin, was published by the Welsh press Parthian in 2018, when he was in his late nineties. It reached the Sunday Times bestseller list and brought him onto the BBC's The One Show. Martin settled at Tanygroes in west Wales, and in March 2021 he recorded his testimony for the West Wales Veterans Archive.