Eduardo Martínez Alonso (1903-72): gallant surgeon who undertook special operations

Eduardo Martínez Alonso was of Spanish and Uruguyan extraction and was born in Vigo in Galicia in 1903. Due to his father's occupation, he was educated in the UK and qualified from the University of Liverpool. He returned to Madrid to practise and during the Civil War he found himself in the Republican zone where his connections with the Royal Family brought him under suspicion. Threatened with execution, he escaped to serve as a surgeon in the Nationalist Army. Being bilingual, he was medical adviser to the British Embassy during World War II; because of his allegiance to this country and acting from humanitarian motives, he became a ringleader in a plot to smuggle fugitives from Nazi-occupied Europe across a pro-Axis Spain to safety. When the Gestapo was closing in on him, he was smuggled to the UK via Portugal. He underwent training as a potential undercover agent should Franco take Spain into the war but, when hostilities ceased, he returned to Madrid and became a leading thoracic surgeon.