Michael Gabriel Kilmartin, son of Ambrose and Eve Kilmartin, of Jarvis Brook, Sussex, was granted a commission in the Hampshire Regiment and then volunteered for airborne forces.
Lieutenant Kilmartin successfully completed his parachute training was posted to 1 Platoon, R Company 1st Battalion, The Parachute Regiment. He took part in Operation Market Garden (Arnhem).
Lt Kilmartin was killed in action, in the area of Onderlangs, Arnhem, on 19 September 1944, aged 24. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Groesbeek Memorial.
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By Rod Gibson
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"...onto the Onderlangs as far as where the Art School now
stands. Into the gardens on the left, (sloping gardens) from the back of the house on the upper road, down to the lower road of one time, at one-point I looked up.
What was that sound? I said to myself. Breaking glass and then the German fires at me whilst I’m looking up into the broken window at him. The bullet enters my pack and I slide down feigning injury, praying he believes he has got me.
Back to the path on the left. A machine gunner on the point of a grass ward opens up and hits Lieutenant Kilmartin. He is dead, another dies beside him. Another is wounded and crawls into a garden where a Rhododendron bush is and lies there. I do not know this, but it's my mate, Lieutenant Kilmartin’s batman George Dymott.
The German machine gunner who had been firing at us stands up. I cannot understand why. He had enough bandoliers of ammunition on him to hold us up for a long time, but Sergeant Barrett sees that he takes no more lives."
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