A Raid Over Berlin

“I could see that still no one had been able to get out from the cockpit. It must have been at this moment that I thought I was going to die because I became remarkably calm.”

Trapped inside a burning Lancaster bomber 20,000 feet above Berlin, airman John Martin consigned himself to his fate and turned his thoughts to his fiancée back home. In a miraculous turn of events, however, the twenty-one year old was thrown clear of his disintegrating aeroplane and found himself parachuting into the...