Bert Martin

Till We Meet Again Bert Martin

In "Till We Meet Again" Bert Martin, Gunner 943454, 67th Medium Regiment, Royal Artillery, tells his story from his departure from England in 1941 on the troop ship, the Rangitiki, to his return to his wife in the village of Claydon, Suffolk in 1945.

Bert was captured at Tobruk. He managed to acquire notebooks to start writing his diaries, using "camp money" allocated to the PoWs. He then documented life in PoW camps in North Africa, Italy and Germany, and the horror of Dresden after the firebombing.

This is the true, unheroic, but moving story of a PoW and his comrades in the Second World War. The diaries present an insight into life in a PoW camp, the fears, the boredom, the hunger and the comradeship.

Bert and his comrades were moved from camp to camp as the Nazis retreated. They finally gained their freedom outside Dresden as the war neared its end, and made their way through the chaos of a disintegrating Germany to the Allied lines.

Now, more than 70 years after Bert wrote his diaries, their publication enables this story of an ordinary soldier living through extraordinary times to be told.