MacArthur's Airmen - Ozzie D. Dixon
 Ozzie DeMerritt Dixon was born April 13, 1913, one of four children, in Roxboro, NC. He was living in Danville, VA, when he enlisted in the U.S. Army in the years before World War II. Dixon was assigned to the Army Air Corps and assigned to duty as a mechanic with the 3rd Pursuit Squadron in the Philippines.
Dixon and the 3rd Pursuit Squadron were based at Nichols Field until July 1941 when they were ordered to Clark Field for training. From there, the squadron was sent on to smaller Iba Field. The Japanese attack on December 8, 1941, found the men of the 3rd Pursuit still at Iba Field, where they were all but destroyed, with 17 men of the squadron being killed and dozens more wounded. After the attack on Iba ended, the survivors of the 3rd were given the task of taking the wounded personnel from the air field to Nichols Field, arriving there in time to endure the Japanese attack on that airbase.
After the second attack, the squadron lost cohesion and the locations of many of its men – including Ozzie Dixon – is lost to history. The surviving planes of the squadron were flown to Australia on Christmas, but many of the remaining personnel were absorbed into ad-hoc infantry and artillery units on Bataan and Corregidor. The majority of the 3rd Pursuit personnel joined a number of orphaned sailors and Marines to form a provisional infantry division on Bataan. However, years later none of the survivors of the 3rd Pursuit Squadron recalled Ozzie Dixon as being with this force on Bataan.
 When the forces on Bataan surrendered on April 9, 1942, Dixon was apparently not among them, or if he was, he was not with any others from his unit. One of his friends recalled years later that, since he was a mechanic with no aircraft left to work on, Dixon had been assigned as a truck driver before the surrender, evacuating wounded men from the front and thus was indeed not with any of his Air Corps comrades at the time of the surrender. It is also possible that he somehow found his way to the island of Corregidor, off the Bataan coast in Manila Harbor, as he was officially listed as “Missing in Action” dating to May 7, 1942 – the date of the surrender of Corregidor. That date was probably selected though as the date of the end of organized resistance in the Philippines.
For the next three years, Dixon’s mother and sister in Norfolk, VA, used every effort to locate Ozzie. Letters were sent almost weekly to the War Department and the Red Cross hoping for information. However, no information was coming, other than that Dixon was MIA and that the Japanese had not provided lists of personnel captured in the Philippines.
In October 1945 a telegram from the War Department was received by Dixon’s mother advising that Ozzie’s remains had been found in Manila, at last providing some closure to the family’s search. However, his brother and sister continued to correspond with veterans of the 3rd until the 1980s, hoping to find someone who knew what had happened to their brother.
 Officially, it was determined that Dixon – by then a Staff Sergeant – had died July 2, 1942, while a prisoner of war. Identification of his remains was made using Bilibid Prison Camp hospital records, which suggests that Dixon was held there. However, the exact circumstances of his death were never uncovered, as none of his surviving comrades could conclusively recall having seen Dixon either on the infamous Bataan Death March or in Bilibid or any other prison camps. A fire decades after the war destroyed much of the Army’s personnel records, including SSgt Dixon’s entire file – thus whatever information the Army had concerning his death was lost. He was eventually laid to rest in the U.S. Armed Forces Cemetery in Manila, where he rests today, although a memorial stone was also placed in the family cemetery in Roxboro, NC, shortly after the war.
Sgt. Dixon’s burial flag and other papers are on exhibit in MacArthur’s Airmen.
Papers of Sgt. Ozzie Dixon, 3rd Pursuit Squadron, U.S. Army Air Corps, USAFFE.
Letter to Mrs. Effie D. Dixon dated 8 April 1948 - Reference to the burial location of the remains of your son, the late Staff Sergeant Ozzie D. Dixon.
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