THE moment he realised he had walked into a minefield, Arthur Mitchell faced another dawning realisation: he would have to dodge the explosive devices once more on his way out.

It was only blind luck that prevented Mr Mitchell and his four comrades from stepping on an explosive as they investigated a report from teenagers that two of their friends had been killed on the slopes near to Trieste, Italy.

Mr Mitchell, now aged 82, was serving with Black Watch in 1945, as part of the Allied forces’ mopping up operations towards the end of the Second World War.

Mr Mitchell, of Birches Head, said: “We heard an explosion. There was a wooded slope above Trieste.

“Two very young local Italians came down jabbering away at us in Italian, but of course, we couldn’t understand them. One of our lads spoke a bit of French and they were saying, ‘Mort, mort’, which means ‘dead’, and they were trying to get us to go up to the hills.

“We did go up and we found two teenagers, but there was nothing we could do for them, they were already dead.

“It was then we realised it was a mined area. We had been taught mine clearance, using a bayonet, but we had no equipment with us.

“So we had to make our way back down again. Now this could be very hairy, because there were five of us, all doing our best to follow the path we had taken up. I’ll tell you, there was five very twinkle-toed, pasty-faced characters moving back down and hoping they weren’t going to set anything off.”

Mr Mitchell had been called up in 1944 to join Black Watch.

He was with a group of fellow recruits from Stoke-on-Trent sent to serve with the famous Scottish regiment.

Mr Mitchell said: “I wound up at Queen’s Barracks in Perth, having travelled over night on a crowded train, as they were in those days. We were packed in like sardines.

“We arrived early in the morning, at 6am, and we didn’t go straight into barracks because we had been told by other people, ‘Stay out because once you go in, you won’t come out again for weeks’.

“Training started and it was very traumatic. With hindsight, it did me a lot of good, but I had not been away much before and I didn’t enjoy it at the time.

“You were treated like an imbecile. Discipline was so strict.

“We were trained in all kinds of weaponry. The one that was a real bugbear was the anti-tank gun; that had a kick like a mule.

“I found myself sent out to Italy. Most of the action had gone, I never saw any action out there. They even used us in the end to help put the services back on, like water and electricity. Some of the sappers rebuilt bridges.

“You saw the effect of the bombing that had been done there.”

But Mr Mitchell and his Black Watch comrades did come to blows with a group of Yugoslavians living in Trieste, who had been causing trouble – so much so that the Black Watch troops were confined to base for two weeks.

He said: “We gave the locals a good going over. We got our own back for them giving us a hard time.”

Mr Mitchell was discharged from the army in 1947 and found work as an electrician. He got married to his wife Betty in 1952 and the couple had two children and five grandchildren.