Soon after the troop ship Arawa arrived in the UK, Martin left the NZEF and joined the Royal Naval Reserve, a contingent of skilled seamen drawn from those serving on merchant ships and fishing boats. His first posting was to the armed merchant cruiser HMS Celtic, operating in the Irish Sea.
He transferred to HMS Brighton, a steamship used for carrying troops and as a hospital, then was given command of HMS Lobster, one of 200 specially ordered "X craft".
Designed as landing vessels, the small craft were built at shipyards in northeast England and Scotland. The 33m boats had a spoon-shaped, drop-down bow designed for running up steeply sloping beaches. The unarmed 120-tonne craft puttered along at 5-7 knots.
Martin's boat, launched as X-42, was refitted as a fuel tanker, renamed Lobster and assigned to support the North Russian campaign.
The campaign, from May 1918 to October 1919, was an allied intervention which followed the withdrawal of Russia from the war after the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917.
Fearful that the collapse of the Russian Government meant Germany could draft large numbers of troops to the Western Front and lay claim to huge stockpiles of arms and munitions in the northern ports of Murmansk and Archangel, an allied force was organised to resist the Red Army advance.
A key figure in the campaign was Lieutenant-Colonel Edmund Ironside, known as Tiny because of his immense size. He wrote of his final instructions from Whitehall: "Your business in North Russia is to hold the fort until the local Russians can take the field. You are to prepare for a winter campaign. No joke that."
John Martin is remembered on the Hokianga Arch of Remembrance.
War Secretary Winston Churchill claimed the aim was "to strangle at birth the Bolshevik State" but the mission became increasingly unpopula dr in Britain. In January 1919 the Daily Express said, "the frozen plains of Eastern Europe are not worth the bones of a single grenadier".
That same year Martin's vessel was towed to the White Sea and Murmansk from the Shetland Islands. Allied forces were in retreat and the Murmansk fleet was supporting the withdrawal.
The Admiralty told Lieutenant Martin's wife in November that he was missing, presumed drowned, confirmed a short time later when it emerged that the 32-year-old New Zealander had slipped on the deck of his craft and fallen into the freezing Murmansk waters, the fourth crewman to have slipped off Lobster and died in just four months.
John Martin is remembered in Britain on the Chatham Naval Memorial and, near his birthplace, on the Hokianga Arch of Remembrance. Source: Naval historian Gerry Wright
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