Alfred Henry Gibbs

Greatest Generation Alfred Henry Gibbs was born on August 8, 1918 in Kansas City, Kansas to Arthur Antony and Melvina Gibbs. It is hard to imagine how the world has changed during Als lifetime. At his birth, the country still was mostly agrarian. Socially and politically it was a different world. For instance, the nearest town to the farm where he grew up, Holt Missouri, was a Sundown Town. African Americans could not stay in Holt overnight, they had to be out of town by sundown! The civil rights movement was still almost half his lifetime away. Elections were far different: you couldnt vote for individual candidates, you voted straight ticket, either Democrat or Republican. You selected either a red or blue ballot and therefore everyone in town knew how you voted on your secret ballot. The technology changes in the span of his life are breath taking. Automobiles, planes and telephones had been invented but were not common and still primitive by todays standards. Interstate highways, jet engines, radar, television, computers, satellites, spacecraft, landing on the moon were all works of science fiction. As you will see in this snapshot of his life he was truly a man of his century. Early Childhood Known as Al to one and all, the only times he was called Alfred Henry was by his mother when he was in trouble! Als father, Arthur, was a telegraph supervisor in Kansas City for Western Union. Telegraphy was a highly skilled and highly paid position at that time. But with the end of the Great War came the recession of 1920-21. With about 2.5 million US troops returning to the civilian economy unemployment reached about 10 percent. The climate was terrible for businesses-from 1919 to 1922 the rate of business failures tripled. Businesses that avoided bankruptcy saw a 75% decline in profits. The Dow Jones dropped 47% during the recession. Two factors made this a particularly tough time for Western Union employees. First, the extreme reduction in business meant that the volume of telegraph messages was dramatically reduced. Second, the army had trained many telegraphers for the war effort and these doughboys came home looking for work using their new skills and willing to work at reduced wages. Western Union used this as an opportunity to lay off their most experienced employees to both save on wages and to avoid paying pensions. Als father was laid off with only one year to go until he would be eligible for a pension. Because Western Union held a monopoly on telegraphic communication, there were no other telegraphy jobs. Arthur had grown up on a farm, so with no other opportunities in sight, eventually Arthur decided to go back to farming. Life on Snake Den Hill Arthurs uncle Charles (Als great uncle but always called Uncle Charlie) found a small creek bottom farm for his nephew next to his own farm, about 40 miles northeast of Kansas City in limestone farming country. So at four years old, Als new home became a place known locally as Snake Den Hill. In later years Al said the name was well deserved with bull and rattlesnakes by the score. Here is what Al had to say in his later years: Snake Den Hill? Have you ever heard of that? I Say! Snakes grew rattles, hen eggs disappeared, but look at the bulbous body of that Black Snake. Shall I kill it? Guiltily, of course, to salvage the eggs it swallowed. Speaking of snakes, they were so plentiful when we arrived at the farm (20 acres including a rocky cliff and timbers) that we had to shake out every garment, feedbag and curtain to scare them from the door step. We often carried a long stick to probe grass and weeds before walking. Rumor had it that 300 blacks were found nesting in a hollow oak tree! Needless to say, mother was constantly on the watch for rattlers. While starting a garden patch, mom sat me in a prepared bare spot while she hoed and raked around the cabbages. margin-left:.25in;:1.5gd Childhood Memories: [I remember] when I stumbled, falling into a hive of hornets (yellow jackets). Talk about stings!! Barelegged, arms, head and neck they were merciless! Dad came to my rescue beating me from head to feet with a gunny sack! Well, I survived! While wearing a red apron, Als mother was gored by a cow. Al had to ride for life to get the doctor who operated on her on the kitchen table. Say what you will about cows being color blind, you could never convince Mama after that experience. A watermelon feast in a creek Al and Gracie sometimes were allowed to eat the hardened sugar around the large molasses tray while the neighbor slowly stirred. Deep Snow - Looking back as a kid I bobsledded over the hills through stumps and down the road calculated at a top speed of 40 to 60 miles/hour! (Where were Mum and Dad?) They had a black horse named Beauty that would buck off anyone except Al. The familys first radio - a one tube regenerative receiver. Battery operated, it did not have enough power for a speaker. So they split headphones into two separate ear pieces so that two could listen at once. They could listening at night to Chicago radio stations and to a high power broadcast station way down in Mexico. These early radios needed an external antenna wire placed as high as possible to get distant stations. However that made an excellent lightning rod! Al recalled a neighbors radio totally destroyed: Morris radio after a lightning strike!! He also recalled that digging a deep hole and lifting the heavy poles to support the antenna wire was hard work and required help from the neighbors. One time with their struggles, they forgot to attach the antenna wire! So Al kicked off his shoes and shinnied on up with the wire in tow. Sometimes it was good to be small but strong! Some folks in the area were rich (at least by Depression Era standards) from selling Missouri Mules to the British during World War I. Fifty years later Al still fondly remembered a kindly farmer driving his truck up to their one room school house to give out Christmas presents. He got a pencil box that he cherished for years. Teenage Years Life was tough during the great depression; one dollar for a long days hard work was good pay for a grown man. A small teenager like Al got much less even for tough jobs like bucking hay. With little money, a great deal of the local commerce was by barter. He recalled his dad taking the corn crop to the local miller who would grind their corn in exchange for a share. The miller removed a hardwood plug that kept the rats out of the mill! Even so, to be safe they only fed the first of the corn meal to the chickens. Al became an excellent marksman with his secondhand rifle which they got cheap because the ejector was broken. Al could only take a single shot and then had to ram a rod down the barrel to eject the shell. With such a handicap, you learned to hit the game on the first shot, or you went hungry. Al fondly remembered one particular incident: the high school agricultural teacher visited the farm and challenged Al to a shooting match. Al set up a can on a fence post and with his old beat up rifle nailed the can on the first shot. The teacher packed up his rifle in disgust and left without firing a single shot! While some of the rich farmers had automobiles and trucks, creek bottom farming at Snake Den Hill was done with a team of horses. But those with cars and trucks would occasionally attempt the steep road up the hill from the creek bottom. Al once explained that the Model T had no fuel pump. With the gas tank under the drivers seat the fuel ly just flowed to the engine by gravity feed. But if they went up a steep hill, the engine became higher than the gas tank and the engine would suddenly stop. So to get up Snake Den Hill resourceful drivers would turn around and back up the hill. Even so, if there had been a heavy rain the road turned muddy and the cars would get stuck. So Arthur broke out the horse team and towed the cars up the hill. His dad (with the background of telegraphy) must have encouraged Al in electrical and electronic pursuits. Al remembered his early attempts at building a radio. He had found diagrams of radios in magazines. Not having wire and solder he connected the components with string! At first Al and Gracie did their homework by the light of a gasoline lantern. Inventive Als solution to this is described in an article in the Prescott Arizona paper, the Daily Courier. There was a young man, much older than I, about 18 years old, and he bought a wind generator, factory built. Seeing the other fellows wind generator work, prompted young Al to build his own wind machine. Dad took me to a junk yard and I got an old 6-volt generator out of a Chevy. Cleaning up his generator, he affixed a hub to the generator shaft and added four wooden blades. I had to carve my propeller blades from flat boards with a broken bottle. The finished propeller had four 3 foot blades, which captured a lot of the high-speed winds in the Kansas City area. But the wind was too powerful. I had to take off two of the blades. Next came another trip to the junk yard for an old auto battery. In those day, 6-volt electric lamps were readily available. The trick was to wire the house with heavy-gauge wire for 6 volts. The current was much higher with very low voltage. How well did it work? We used it for a long time. Early Education Al said, My sister, Grace, and I walked 1 1/2 miles each way to a country, one room school through mud and snow drifts. When they could, they took short cuts across the fields. On the way to school Al memorized poetry. He could still recite Hiawatha and The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere well into his 90s. In addition he also wrote some poetry of his own. One night they were awaken with the continuous scream of a train whistle. The engineer had seen the Holt high school burning and sounded the whistle to warn the town. So Al went to Lathrop High School instead. Al graduated valedictorian of his class and won a scholarship to Missouri School of Mines. But the family could not afford the room and board so Al had to pass up college. Leaving Home There were no jobs in depression era Missouri, so in July 1937 Al joined the Civilian Conservation Corp (commonly known as the 3Cs, a Roosevelt project to put the country to work) and was sent to Ontario, Oregon. At Camp 4788 he was set to work clearing the weeds etc from irrigation ditches while walking in the knee deep water. But the waders he was issued had holes and he developed a bad cold that turned into pneumonia. He was given library duties while he recovered and did such a good job at reorganizing and rebuilding the base library that he did not have to go back to the ditches. You could only get out of the para-military 3Cs if you had a job, which of course was hard at the height of the depression. Seeing no future in ditch digging, Al had a relative write a little white lie in June 1938 that he had a job for him in Los Angeles. Hard working Al took any job he could get, even just for a short time. He helped trucking newspapers down towards Mexico. One time the driver was so tired he was falling asleep at the wheel, so Al took over driving. The only problem was that Al had only driven once before! But not knowing how to drive a truck seemed like less of a problem than having the sleepy driver running them off into the ditch. Another job was at a pig farm. It was such horrible work and the farmer treated him so badly that Al only lasted a week. At one point things got so bad that he was sitting in McArthur Park with only 25 cents to his name wondering what he could do. But as Providence would have it, a woman walked up to him and offered room and board if he would do odd jobs. This gave him the opportunity to go to Anderson Aircraft School for 6 months learning aircraft sheet metal skills. After technical school he got a good paying job at Lockheed Aircraft Corp. from January 1939 to June 1942 welding on the newly developed P38 Interceptor, nicknamed Lightning. High skill was needed to electric arc weld continuous seams. With war looming on the horizon, there was a large backlog of orders. They needed to run the welders 24/7, but the transformers would overheat and have to be shut down. Their creative solution was to put dry ice on the transformer! Al explained that regular ice would not work as when it melted it would short out the welder, but dry ice sublimes into carbon dioxide gas. By this time Als life had turned around so well that he bought his first car, a used 1938 Buick and Al was made group leader of the welders at Utility Fan Corporation. As this was next door to Lockheed, it may be that this was a false front for secret war plane production. But Al never talked about it - when he was told not to talk about classified work, he never did, even decades later. War War broke out and Al was drafted in March 1943 into the Army Air Forces. His first month was at Fresno California for basic training where he received a marksman medal. This was no surprise as he had shot squirrels out of tall trees for the family meals. Because of this skill the Army decided he should be the radio operator/gunner on a B17, so off for two months to Sioux Falls, South Dakota for radio operator training and 4 months at Truax Field in Madison Wisconsin for radio maintenance training. mmargin-right:24.0pt;: 0in;margin-left:24.0pt; :2.0gd;: 2.0gd; From the Kansas City newspaper: ALFRED GIBBS TRAINING FOR RADIO OPERATOR - Alfred H. Gibbs, son of Mr. and Mrs. A.A. Gibbs, Route 2 Lathrop, Missouri has been promoted to Private First Class and assigned to the Technical School, Army Air Forces Technical Training Command, Sioux Falls, S.D. where he is in training as a radio operator-mechanic. mmargin-right:24.0pt;: 0in;margin-left:24.0pt; :2.0gd;: 2.0gd; He was inducted into the service March 6, 43 at Fort McArthur, San Pedro, Calif. Prior to his induction he was a welding supervisor in the employ of the Utility Fan Corporation, Los Angeles, Calif. He was graduated from Lathrop High School in 1937. Other news clippings say he was employed as a welder by the Lockheed Aircraft Co., Inc., Burbank, Calif. before Army induction. mmargin-right:24.0pt;: 0in;margin-left:.5in;: 2.0gd;:3.0gd;: .0001pt; From the local newspaper: Pfc. Alfred H. Gibbs, age 25, son of Mr. and Mrs. A.A. Gibbs, Lathrop, Missouri, was graduate recently from the Headquarters Technical School of the Army Air Forces Central Technical Training Command at Truax Field, Madison, Wisconsin. He was one of the honor graduates of his class...He is being assigned duties in connection with radio activities of one of the Air Force Units. Radar At the last moment they tested Als vision and found he was red/green color blind. (He could have told them that, but they never asked.) Despite the fact that a gunner has to rely on silhouettes and not color they said that he could not be a gunner. So they sent him to radar school for 5 months in Boca Raton, Florida where he made the rank of corporal. Radar personnel were so important for the bombing effort that they were flown over the Atlantic; in Als case on a B-17G in June 1944. There, as part of the 8th Air Force, he was assigned to the 482d Bombardment Group (Pathfinder), 813th Bomb Squadron at Alconbury near Peterbourgh. He was promoted to Sargent that fall. The H2X radar he worked on enabled the pathfinder planes of his squadron to drop flares to mark the target even in bad weather. Before this technology, bad weather over the target would scrub the eighth airforce missions for days on end. For his work on radar guided bombing, Al was awarded the Bronze Star. His citation read in part; mmargin-right:24.0pt;: 0in;margin-left:.5in;: 2.0gd;:3.0gd;: .0001pt; Sergeant Gibbs was in great part responsible for modifying the standard radar scope camera to fit the requirements of a newly designed radar set. He exhibited outstanding ingenuity and technical skill...This feat reflects the highest credit upon Sergeant Gibbs. But Al said that he considered his greatest contribution to the war was saving civilian lives by enabling precision bombing. His example was a raid on the sub pens in Germany. There was a civilian hospital right next to the sub pens, but with radar guided bombing they destroyed the target with no damage to the hospital. Romance While on a weekend pass to London in Sept 44 Al went to have lunch at a milk bar cafe when a young lady turned abruptly from the queue and spilled a cup of tea down his uniform! An inauspicious start, but Al always claimed he knew May was the one right from the start. He must have been right because they were married 69 years until death did they part. Wartime courtship was challenging with Al trying to get weekend passes to London and writing frequent letters. When it came time to meet Mays parents, they pulled out all the stops for Al and ignored the food rationing. Specially for him were fresh cucumbers from the garden. (The food rationing board said cucumbers have no nutritional value, so they would not issue coal for cucumber greenhouses.) Al, allergic to cucumbers, bravely ate them all and was deathly sick on the train trip back to Alconbury. With the war in Europe nearly over, Als captain pulled him aside and gave him a word to the wise; the squadron was soon to be shipped to the Pacific. If he wanted to marry May he had better get moving! They made hurried preparations for the wedding. Al took the train to Edinburgh Scotland to get whiskey where it could be found for a GI with money. Food rationing would make the wedding cake nearly impossible for Mays folks, but the Army cooks were glad to help, contributing a white wedding cake. Al started off resolutely carrying the large cake to the train station. Fortunately a kindly officer stopped and gave him a ride. But the Brits at the wedding were disappointed with the cake - English wedding cakes are supposed to be fruitcake! Clothing was severely rationed in wartime England, but the Brits had to make do. For example May had once had a winter coat made by a seamstress from a blanket. So a white wedding gown that could not be worn again was not an option for May. Instead she wore a practical blue suit. May and Al were married May 12, 1945 in her home town, Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, England. Compared to towns in the US, Hoddesdon is a old market town. It is even mentioned in the Domesday Book written in 1086. After a honeymoon at Bournemouth, May spent a few weeks at Alconbury to be near Al. But he left for the U.S. with his squadron on June 21, 1945. He sailed from Glasgow, Scotland aboard the Queen Elizabeth which was outfitted as a troop ship. Sgt. Alfred Gibbs reached home [Lathrop] the evening of July 4