Joseph Raine Dixon, air gunner and POW

Joseph was born in Liverpool on 23 February 1922. Although he worked in a reserved occupation as a stoker on the railway at Lime Street, he volunteered for the Royal Air Force in 1943 and was posted as an air gunner to 49 Squadron, which was largely Australian. On 7 March 1945, his aircraft was shot down on his 13th mission. Many crew members were killed but Joseph survived, becoming a prisoner-of-war until he was liberated on 4 May 1945.

After the war, he went to work in the fuse-gear section of a large electrical engineering factory in the outskirts of Liverpool. He married his wife on the 8th of March 1947. He ended his working life in the Civil Service. He relocated to a town in Cheshire and died in 1976. He talked very little about his war experiences but did let his children look through his diary with him.

The contributor brought Joseph's diary written after the war about his experiences as a POW. It describes events in detail, including suffering injury due to walking bare-footed. He was moved between different POW camps and ended up in a hospital unit in Bavaria. It graphically describes the tragedy on April 14th 1945, when a group of prisoners being moved from his concentration camp were fired upon by allied aircraft. Joseph watched this from his upstairs window. 11 were killed and 42 wounded. The press commented: “This was one of the hazards to which prisoners were unavoidably exposed in operational areas” The contributor remembers her father recalling this incident..

There is also what appears to be the initial draft of the diary, eventually developed into the more comprehensive account written before Joseph left the Demobilisation centre at RAF Hednesford in Staffordshire.