大象传媒

Looking back sixty years to VE Day I recall my one small claim to military fame...as possibly the last man to be shot in the war against Hitler's Germany.

It happened at the roadside near Klangenfurt in Austria, five days after the European ceasefire. A few days earlier, following a dawn crossing of the River Po with the British 78th Division, we had already celebrated the end of the war. We were feted with vino, music and dance in the village square at Udine in Northern Italy.

The celebrations were cut short by orders to hurry north into Austria to cope with hordes of German troops. They were pouring south to surrender to the British rather than Russians, from whom they apparently feared short shrift.

As they streamed past in their hundreds, my platoon relieved them of their weapons. I was reaching up to receive a pistol from a German officer, towering above me on a huge white horse, when the weapon went off. The bullet whistled down past my left ear, shattered my left thigh bone and came out behind my knee.

I ended up stretched out on a table in a roadside hut. I remember the same officer - still on horseback - bending his head down and round the hut door to make what I took to be apologetic noises in German.

That ended my active service, though it was another fifteen months before I was fit to march into civvie street in my demob suit.

The only other time I was hit by any kind of missile during six years in the army was from so-called "friendly" fire. Some months earlier I was the platoon officer directing mortar fire from an observation post (OP) in the mountains north of Florence when a shell exploded nearby. Shrapnel flew past, one piece nicking a slice from the shoulder of my leather jerkin, before coming to rest beside me. The shrapnel, still warm when I picked it up, was part of the driving band which identified the shell as a 25 pounder fired by our own Royal Artillery gunners somewhere in the valley behind!

I took the fragment back to the farmhouse HQ I shared, among others, with the artillery OP officer. I showed him the shrapnel and the suggested he raised his gunners' sights in future to make sure of clearing the crest of the hill where we both had our OP posts!

I kept the shrapnel as a souvenir but it went astray when my kit was scrambled together to follow me home after my close encounter with that German cavalry officer in May 1945.

Ex Lieutenant Frank Dixon
2 College Gardens
Worthing
West Sussex
BN11 4QQ

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