Oral history interview of Robert Gordon Gibson

Collection:: Veterans History Project: Oral History Interviews
Title:: Oral history interview of Robert Gordon Gibson
Creator:: Gantsoudes, Lillian
Gibson, Robert Gordon, 1918-
Date of Original:: 2004-08-12
Subject:: Savo Island, Battle of, Solomon Islands, 1942
Rationing
World War, 1939-1945--Campaigns--France--Normandy
Cartography
World War, 1939-1945--Military intelligence
Military gliders (Aeronautics)
Parachute troops
Purple Heart
Bronze Star Medal (U.S.)
World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
Gordon, Betty
Semmes, James Lardner, 1915-1989
Purdue University
United States Naval Academy
Hornet (Aircraft carrier : CV8)
Preston (Destroyer : DD-379)
Grace Cathedral (San Francisco, Calif.)
Frankford (Destroyer : DD-497)
Location:: France, Cherbourg, 49.6425343, -1.6249565
New Caledonia, Nouméa, -22.2745264, 166.442419
New Guinea, -5.52259885, 142.087117627033
Panama, Panama Canal, 8.99797, -79.59269
Solomon Islands, Tulaghi Island
United Kingdom, England, Portland, 50.5672516, -2.4472529
United States, California, City and County of San Francisco, San Francisco, 37.77493, -122.41942
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, Georgia, Atlanta Metropolitan Area, 33.8498, 84.4383
United States, Hawaii, Honolulu County, Pearl Harbor, 21.34475, -157.97739
United States, Massachusetts, Suffolk County, Boston, 42.35843, -71.05977
United States, New York, Kings County, Brooklyn, 40.6501, -73.94958
United States, Washington, King County, Seattle, 47.60621, -122.33207
Medium:: video recordings (physical artifacts)
mini-dv
Type:: Moving Image
Format:: video/quicktime
Description:: In this interview, Bob Gibson describes his career in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He began college in Indiana and transferred to the Naval Academy where his program was accelerated due to the threat of war. The graduation date for his class had been planned for 19 December 1941, so they already had their assignments when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He recalls listening to the radio when the announcement of the attack interrupted programming. He went to the West Coast and describes the time there as a bit frightening, with all the rumors and uncertainty. He was married on 15 May and sailed overseas two days later. He sailed into Pearl Harbor in January of 1942 and describes a scene of tremendous damage. He points out that the press had been asked not to reveal the extent of the damage because if the Japanese had known how successful they had been, they may have attempted a landing in Hawaii. He felt shocked and realized what a dangerous place he was in and saw what war might be like. His ship was part of a convoy to the Pacific, where he witnessed his first casualty when a bomber crash-landed near their convoy. His ship was sunk, and he describes in great detail that ordeal, including nearly being run down by a battleship, and having oil removed from his skin with diesel fuel and salt water fire hose. After training with a new ship and crew, he escorted convoys in the Atlantic. His ship then trained for the Normandy invasion and he describes the loss of lives when a ship capsized due to the weather. He describes the order of battle going in on D-Day. They sent in a team of Army spotters to direct fire but never heard from them again. His captain recognized that the forces on the ground were in trouble, so he directed his ship in to give covering fire, for which the captain earned a Silver Star. The fire was effective and the troops were able to move up the beach. From there, Gibson's ship moved to the south of France through Gibraltar and captured a German E-boat, which had been booby-trapped; Gibson disarmed the trap. After the war, Gibson taught at the Naval Academy and attended graduate school. Following Mr. Gibson's interview, his wife describes her life as a Navy wife, including delivering their first child just as he returned from combat in the south of France.
Robert Gibson was a U.S. Naval officer during World War II in the Pacific and Atlantic theatres.
Robert G. Gibson Veterans Oral History Project Atlanta History Center With Lillian Gantsoudes August 12, 2004 [Tape 1, Side A] Interviewer: My name is Lillian Gantsoudes. We are at the Atlanta History Center. It is August 12th, 2004. We are interviewing Robert Gibson. Mr. Gibson, would you give me your name, birth date and birth place. Gibson: My name is Robert Gordon Gibson. My birth date was August the twenty-fourth, 1918. I was born in Houston, Texas, where my father was in the Army in World War One. But then, I grew up in Northern Indiana. Interviewer: All right. And let's talk about your military service. What branch of the service were you in? Gibson: I was in the Navy. Interviewer: And were you drafted or did you enlist? Gibson: I was a graduate of the Naval Academy. Interviewer: Tell us about your experiences at the Naval Academy then. Gibson: Well, I went… Interviewer: When were you enrolled? Gibson: I went into the Naval Academy in 1938 and it became an accelerated class because there was the threat of war. Normally, it's a four-year class that would have graduated in June of 1942. It was accelerated and we were to graduate in December, 1941. So happened it was the nineteenth of September. I mean of December. My Naval Academy experiences, it was a rigorous, academic and, you know, a lot of military instructions. Fortunately, I'd had two years of college or I don't think I'd been able to make it. So I had a little bit of a head start. Interviewer: Where did you have two years of college? Gibson: At Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. But we were sort of…it was a Sunday, of course, in December. We were all kind of hanging around and we did have radios. And we all were in different places and I was sitting, listening to a football game when they broke in and said, there's been an attack by the Japanese. And this was seven days, I mean twelve days before we were to graduate. And we had already had our assignments made as to the ships we were going to and I was being sent to a destroyer that was in the Java Sea. Unfortunately, it was sunk during the early part of the war. After graduation, we were sent to San Francisco, those of us whose ships had disappeared and waited until we were reassigned. So I was assigned to a ship that was in the Maryland Naval Shipyard, which is outside of San Francisco. Interviewer: What was San Francisco like when you arrived and while you were there? Gibson: It was scared to death. We had blackouts. We had news stories or radio that there was a submarine offshore gonna bombard us. Very nervous because we were there in early January, less than a month after the war started. But San Francisco being San Francisco, it still had nightlife. Interviewer: And you were young. Did you enjoy the nightlife? Gibson: Well, no. We were all waiting for assignment. Well, we did have a drink or two, I must admit. But we had to report every day until we got an assignment and then we went off to our ships. Interviewer: And you said you were assigned to what ship? Gibson: Well, I was assigned to the USS Preston, which was a older destroyer, been built in the thirties. And from there we went to Pearl Harbor. Now during those days, there weren't satellites, there weren't news stories. No one knew what happened at Pearl Harbor except people in the service. It was all secret. And we went in the harbor out there and we knew nothing about what had happened. We knew there was an attack on it. And as we came in the entrance to the harbor, here was a battleship on its ship. Here was another one had rolled over. Here was another sitting there on the bottom with oil still pouring out of it. And it was quite a shock. Interviewer: So when did you arrive at Pearl Harbor? Gibson: It was about the end of January of '42. Interviewer: So, a month and a half after. Gibson: And the word of what really happened didn't come out for several years. It was kept completely secret because they didn't want the Japanese to know what a blow they'd made. Because they could have, if they'd had the ability, could actually have landed on Hawaii. But they didn't. Cause they weren't sure what damage they had done. Interviewer: What was your feeling when you saw Pearl Harbor? Gibson: Well, we were shocked. We suddenly realized we were in a dangerous place [laughs] and it was the first realization of what war might be like. We then ran some convoys. There was some islands south of Hawaii which they were putting, of all things, short-defense guns on, which the Army was going to do. These were tiny little islands called Christmas. And we went down there and the first real thing that we realized what was happening and seeing people who were dying…an aircraft, a bomber. They were sending bombers into Australia and they were flying across the Pacific. They weren't being shipped. And we had this one that had gotten lost. Had a very new, green crew. And they were out in the ocean and they didn't know where they were, they were running out of fuel and they started circling us and then they made a crash landing just ahead of us. And we picked up the crew and there were a couple of people very badly injured and there were two or three that were dead. And that was the first time we actually saw someone who'd been hurt by war. We stayed in Pearl Harbor for a while. We went to the Battle of Midway, except we didn't get there. The battle was over by the time we got there. Then the Japanese made a feint at the Aleutian Islands and we went up to the Aleutian Islands. But we never made contact, so we came back to Honolulu. Then a little bit later, we were put into a task force which was going out to the western Pacific. This was about the time of the Battle of Guadalcanal. Towards the end of October of 1942. And we were escorts to the big ships in most of the actions. We were with a carrier task force north of Noumeia [phonetic], New Caledonia and in that area. Or New Guinea. Actually north of New Guinea. And that was one of the big actions of the war. And we lost one carrier which we were protecting, which we didn't protect, I guess. And then there was another one that was quite damaged and there were two Japanese carriers that were sunk. Interviewer: Can you name the carrier that was damaged? Gibson: I think it was the Hornet. No, the Hornet was sunk. We sank it because it was so badly damaged that we torpedoed it. Those of us on the ships sent torpedoes over and sank it. Then we went down to Noumeia where the Navy had its main base at that time. Noumeia, New Caledonia, which was a French province, you know. And we formed up a task force. The intelligence was that the Japanese navy was gonna send a major task force with battleships down into Guadalcanal. The Japanese were in considerable trouble because they couldn't be reinforced. They couldn't get supplies. And they were sending all these merchant ships down with supplies and they were being sunk at a great rate. So the Japanese sent these big ships down to help protect it. We were in a task force of two battleships and four destroyers. And we went out. And very few of the ships at that time had radar. So we actually didn't have a radar on our ship that could be used for fire control. Interviewer: And you're on the Preston still. Gibson: On the Preston. And we were in line in front of these two battleships. And about two thirty in the morning, we made contact with this group which was coming in from the north and we were steaming sort of easterly and westerly. And the battleships had radars and they kept telling us where they were and how close they were. And then they opened fire with their big, sixteen-inch guns because they could reach out a lot farther than we could. But some of the Japanese peeled off and came around behind us and came up on our other side. We were hit by eight-inch shells from a Japanese heavy cruiser and I think we were probably hit with a torpedo. I still don't know that. And of the four destroyers that were in front of…we were in line with the destroyers in front. And of the four destroyers, three of them were sunk. And we were hit and rolled over and sank in less than a minute. So anybody below decks had no chance. About half the people on the ship were killed, drowned. Where the eight-inch shell went into the engine room, of course, everybody in it was killed. And so we ended up in the water and it was dark, a low moon. And while we're in the water, the battleships had enough sense to drop some life rafts. We were able to get to them. We were all wearing life jackets. And we had whistles. And we would whistle and we would get our people. The thing that was kind of scary is that we knew that probably there were some Japanese also floating around out there. But fortunately, we never got…the two of us never got together. But the principal thing I remember is when we did get sunk, we were directly in front of these big battleships that were doing thirty knots, which is about 35 miles an hours. And I got in the water…I was the gunnery officer and I was on the top of the ship in the director. And the ship rolled over and basically I just step out into the water. So I was in the water and we were there and I looked up and here came the Empire State Building at me. The battleship was right on line with us. And I had a life jacket on, but I broke the world record for a hundred yards with a life jacket because we had to get out of the row. And I was caught up in the bow wave and it pushed me away. But we were all scared to death because these ships were reputed, with their big propellers, if you got too near them they would pull you down. But we survived. But one of the men got hit, broke his back and died later. And we had a number of people that were injured. We carried morphine, so we kept feeding them morphine. And then, the next day about…the next morning, a U.S. Army bomber came over and they had, you know, the tail guns. And I still remember that they were…we were covered with oil. I mean, they couldn't have distinguished whether it was Japanese, Afro-Americans or what we were. And here were these guys up there in this airplane who didn't know what was down there. Whether it was Japanese or…and they had the machine guns trained on us. And we kept wailing, “We're okay.” [laughs] And so, then a destroyer, about three in the afternoon, came out and picked us up. We got aboard, and as I said, the oil from a destroyer was what they call heavy bunker and it was real thick. It was almost like tar and we were all covered with it. Just, you know, an inch or two of the stuff on us. We got aboard the destroyer and they had a saltwater fire hose and diesel fuel and they scrubbed us down with diesel fuel and then hosed us off with these fire hoses, cut our clothes off of us and sent us down below to wait. And here we were, bare-assed. And about that time, the Japanese came over, aircraft came over and attacked the destroyer. Now, when you're in the fight, you're not scared because you're busy doing something. But when you're sitting down there hearing the guns trade and the guns going off and you don't have any clothes on, it was not a good feeling. Interviewer: And you'd only been out of the water how long? A couple hours? Gibson: Oh, about an hour. Fortunately, there was no damage to the ship. And then they took us into an island called Tulagi, which is north of Guadalcanal where the U.S. had a harbor and a base. Interviewer: Let me ask you, the Preston. How many men would have been onboard the Preston? Gibson: About three hundred and fifty enlisted and about twenty officers, eighteen officers. Interviewer: And how many survived? Gibson: About six officers and approximately half of the men, a hundred and eighty men. Of the officers though, I was just a brand new ensign and the captain was killed or he disappeared. We never knew what happened to him. The executive officer was right over where the gun had…the ship had been hit and he was killed instantly. The number three man on the ship was a lieutenant who was wounded badly. The next guy in line was wounded badly. He was a j.g. [lieutenant junior grade]. And there was another ensign a little senior to me, but he went into shock. So I ended up as the senior surviving officer and had to make these reports, deal with the admirals who were trying to get ideas on what happened. On the island of Tulagi, I was also in charge of getting everybody organized and back to the United States, sending them back into Noumeia either by ship or airplane and getting them back to San Francisco. So I stayed on Tulagi a couple of weeks and then I hitchhiked a ride on a old DC-3 that barely made it back to Noumeia and came back on a transport, came back to the United States. And Betty was in San Francisco. We'd been married on May the fifteen and so she was there in San Francisco when I got there. No, you were coming out. That's right. You were on your way. No, you were actually in San Francisco at that time. Interviewer: So you were married before you went to Pearl Harbor? Gibson: Yeah. May fifteenth. And we were married on the fifteenth and I sailed on the seventeenth. I hadn't seen her since. So that's sort of the one big story of what happened to me. Interviewer: Well, let me ask you. You get back to San Francisco. Your wife is there. How long were you in San Francisco? Gibson: We were there, oh a couple of weeks, I guess. And then I was sent to a ship back in Boston that was being built, under construction. In those days, there weren't many airplanes to speak of, so we took the train. I got thirty days leave and we took a train across country and stopped at her parents and my parents and then went onto Boston, which is a long story all by itself because this was when rationing was going on and we didn't have any tickets. I don't know what we ate, but… Mrs. Gibson: Macaroni. Gibson: Macaroni. And then the… Interviewer: Well, was everybody that was traveling, were they all in the same… Gibson: No, no. We scattered. And when we got to San Francisco, they were all sent to other stations, other ships. Some guys went directly to ships that were going back. A lot of them went to new constructions because now we were veterans and they wanted…a lot of young, newer people were coming in that had no combat experience and all of a sudden, we were combat-scarred veterans. Interviewer: Did your rank change? Gibson: Did my what? Interviewer: Your rank. You said you were an ensign? Gibson: Yeah, I became a junior grade [lieutenant] shortly thereafter and a few months later I was a lieutenant. Interviewer: Are you a lieutenant by the time you get to Boston? Gibson: I think it was shortly after that. Then I was sent back. The executive officer of the ship that was sunk had left the ship and had gone to new construction and he heard that I was…the ship had been sunk and that I was a survivor. So he put in a request that I be assigned to his ship which was being built in Seattle. So all of a sudden, we were in Boston for six weeks or so and I was sent back, we were sent back to Seattle. Interviewer: And is that another train ride without ration cards? Gibson: No, that was a plane ride. The military men on orders had priority. Civilians, wives and so forth had no priority. And this was a time when you flew from, you know, Baltimore to Pittsburgh to Chicago and you hopped across country. And every time we stopped, they took Betty off because she had no priority. Then she'd have to wait to see whether there was a seat. And finally she got thrown off for good in Omaha and I went on. And she fought her way across country. And if you want to get a veteran's story, you ought to hear this one sometime. Because she jumped…she got on a little plane that was flying up to Denver with lost bombers in the snow storm and eventually got to Portland and took a train up to Seattle. She got there only about twenty-four hours after I did. She had quite an experience. Then, this ship was scheduled for the East Coast. So we did training on the West Coast and went through the [Panama] Canal and then ended up running convoys, big merchant ship convoys across the Atlantic for, oh, about a year. And by this time, the submarine threat had abated. There were still submarines out there, but the German…the back of the submarine force had pretty much been broken. We did get a few scares and did some drops of depth charges. And one of the ships we were with was torpedoed, but they weren't a real threat. The only threat was the weather. The North Atlantic in winter is a very, very difficult place. Interviewer: And is this the winter of '43? Gibson: This is the winter of '43. And we would get into these huge storms. And a destroyer rolls a lot. And they had a thing called an inchronometer [phonetic], which shows you how much you roll and there was a red mark on it. When you hit that mark, the chances were you were gonna roll over. And I was on the bridge one night, and we rolled within one degree of that. So that was another exciting event. Interviewer: Tell me the name of this destroyer you were on. Gibson: This was the Frankfurt. And of course, known as “The Hotdog”. After a number of trips back and forth, we were assigned . . . we were sent to Europe, southern England, to be a part of the invasion force. We trained, a dummy run for the invasion on the southern coast of England on the beaches there. So it was training exercise getting ready. Interviewer: Tell me about the training exercises. Gibson: Well, they were actually dry runs of going into a beach under . . . actually we weren't under fire, but they did dummy fire. You know, the dummies, blank fire. But they'd send them in on pretty rough seas so that they'd get used to the idea. And there was one training exercise that was a disaster, which a number of people died. I think it was a couple, three hundred. The storm was so bad it did what happened at Normandy. A lot of them capsized. And then, we worked with the Army. We were supposed to have spotters who went ashore who would direct our gunfire. The destroyers all have five-inch guns, which were pretty good, you know, something like an Army hundred and fifty-five millimeter or close to it. And we were . . . briefings and briefings and briefings. And we had . . . the operation order had been worked and worked on for years. And it was this thick for us and if you piled it all up for all the units, it was . . . Interviewer: When you say, “this thick,” you're saying about twelve inches high? Gibson: It was twelve to fifteen inches high, plus a lot of annexes which were not part of the main. But it was a plan for the invasion, in great detail and the follow-up. You know, how do you keep it logistically supported. And one of the things that they gave us were these beautiful maps showing as if you were in the water looking at the shoreline, in color and just beautifully done. And in secret. And the National Geographic did a story on it about a year or so ago and they reproduced the maps. And if you needed to back up, find that article cause it's a wonderful article of the cartography and the intelligence and how they were done. And I had one of those. I kept one and my daughter now has it on her wall up near San Francisco. But we actually made a [inaudible]. We started out for the invasion, actually before the invasion was made because we started out and were halfway across the channel, escorting some ships. And we got this urgent message, “Turn around. Come back.” So there was an actual start to the invasion a couple days before it actually took off. Because we left Plymouth, or Portland, I guess it was along the south coast of England, just at sunset. So we went all night. Interviewer: Couple of days before? Gibson: The day before. The night before. And so we went all night at pretty slow speeds because we had slow things with it and got into the area off Omaha Beach about three in the morning. And then at that time, the aircraft that were carrying the gliders and the paratroopers were going overhead. But we were to open fire, I think, “H” hour was six o'clock. I've kind of forgotten. But it was still just daylight. Interviewer: What was the mood on the destroyer? Gibson: Well, scared to death. I mean, we were all very tense because we had no idea how strong the Germans were. We were much concerned about the aircraft. The Germans still had a pretty good Air Force. But it was quite surprising. They weren't effective. They did not make too many attacks. And after the first couple of days, they didn't show up at all, which is one of the things I've never understood. Interviewer: Where were you stationed on the destroyer that morning? Gibson: I was the navigator. I was on the bridge and that's where this came in, the map I have up here, came into play. I had a table, which was a navigator's table, where I did calculations and I had the navigational maps. Am I running out of time? Okay. There are detailed navigational maps. But this was an area map. It's not used for navigation. It was just . . . and if you want to put your . . . I'll just quickly go through what's on this chart. Interviewer: Okay. Gibson: The reason for the dark area is that I had it folded and this was on my table up in the bridge for almost thirty days. And this was the reason it's so dirty. The coast, Omaha Beach was in here. Utah Beach was over there towards the left and up to the left is the Cherbourg Peninsula. The Germans, of course, had this heavily fortified as they did along here. Then the British were to the right over here. These were the American beaches and the British were over in this direction, Juno and Gold. This was the plot which we had stationed and there were little buoys planted the night we were coming in ahead of us. Guys came in early and dropped these buoys and then these were the lanes where we came in. Because this was all heavily mined. The minesweepers came in first, ahead of us. And frogmen had come in and were trying to blow up or cut the underwater obstacles that the Germans . . . the T-bars that you see. You know, the great, big things. But the destroyers formed a screen along this outer line and down the left. We were the screen commander and we were up in that upper left-hand corner as you face it. Interviewer: So, we're looking at a grid and the grid, the far left-hand corner is where your destroyer was. Gibson: We were stationed there because we were the screen commander and there were destroyers all along this line. And you see, we were pretty far from the beach. We could see it, but we were pretty far out there. And down the left side, that diagonal line, were torpedo boats. Cause that water in there is pretty shallow in that area. So when daylight broke and there was a tremendous, you know, shore bombardment. The battleships came in. The destroyers fired. Cruisers. But we still were out here pretty far. The landings started at around six o'clock. And here the landing craft, you know, there were transports. Big ships had to come in here and anchor and dropped off the landing craft. Interviewer: When you say, “big transports were out here”, how far from shore? Gibson: Oh, quarter of a mile. Half a mile, maybe. Interviewer: So the big transports are a half a mile out. Gibson: Yeah, there in a . . . Interviewer: And the destroyer, you're a little further out. Gibson: We actually were a little further out. Interviewer: Okay. Gibson: But we were to move in for our shore bombardment. We left . . . see, we didn't get to that point. We came down one of these channels to come in to do some shore bombardment first. And then we were sent back to set up the screen after the invasion, the landing started. But our fire control party, the army that was supposed to communicate with us and tell us what to shoot at, was killed or their equipment wouldn't start up. We never did hear from them. So we couldn't do anything. We couldn't see anything. So the captain of the ship, who was twenty-nine years old, said, “I have to do something.” And we had the commodore, as he was called, and we were under his command. And the captain didn't ask him. He said, “Commodore, I gotta go in.” And he said, “Okay.” Interviewer: Do you remember the captain's name? Gibson: Yeah. Jamie Sanders. Interviewer: Who was the commodore? Gibson: Oh, I can't remember his name. Interviewer: That's okay. Go on. Gibson: Jamie Sanders was from an old Navy family. Anyway, you know, most of us . . . I was twenty-six, I guess, twenty-five. So we could pretty well tell from the radio traffic that something terrible was happening over here. We couldn't see too much. So as we came in, we came in over here. We left the area and came in over here. Interviewer: And what beach is that? Gibson: This was Omaha. All of our activity was on Omaha. Utah was not a cakewalk, but it was not difficult. The Germans just didn't defend against it. So they had taken their beach by the end of the day. It was all over. But this, they couldn't get off. These are bluffs that come up here. Fairly steep bluffs. And these men were pinned down right along here. And the Germans had batteries, one oh five primarily, that were down the beach and they were just killing people, you know, any time they popped up or they'd shoot the ships. I mean, the landing craft. They'd sink them before they got there. And the kids were wearing so much gear, they'd drown. They couldn't get ashore. So we got in here and we now then had gotten to the point where we could see what was happening. And the destroyer has a range-finder which is a quite powerful optical system. And they could pick up this gun or these guns. And so we start . . . we moved in and the captain says, “I gotta really get in there.” I was the navigator, so I was the one responsible for telling him whether he had enough water under him and I kept saying, “Captain, you got three feet left. Captain, you got two feet left.” And he said, “Well, we're gonna do it if we have to go aground.” But at that point we turned and started firing and get down here and then we backed up. And our fire control equipment couldn't figure out what the . . . we were doing. You know, they understood the ship was going this way, but they didn't understand going backwards. Well, we got out here and we could see this gun and we open fire on it and we got an extremely fortunate hit right through the slip and hit the gun. And we blew it up. And that, now other guns were firing and another destroyer, part of our group, also came in with us and they hit another gun. But these people were actually lying down in the surf and the tide was coming in. And the tide here is about ten feet. So the beach basically disappeared. But they managed. We did enough damage to the guns, that they finally started moving up the slopes. There's an article that was in Naval Proceedings, was written by one of the men on the beach, who remembered the number on our destroyer. And he wrote a story about the destroyer that saved the day. I have a copy of it here. It's in Naval Proceedings in 1998. Interviewer: What's the number? Gibson: Huh? Interviewer: Remember the number on the destroyer that he saw? Gibson: Yeah. It was ours. Two ninety-seven. Interviewer: Two ninety-seven. Gibson: So, then we could finally see them starting up the slope, but of course, there were some people being killed. But they were managing to get up there and some of them got to the top that afternoon. And the next day, they started moving out. Of course, that's a story that . . . what is it . . . Ambrose has written in detail and he actually talks about our activity in his books. So we sat and we worked. We had torpedoes. Germans sent torpedo boats down from Cherbourg and we had a couple of scuffles with them, but nothing . . . I mean, we either scared them away or I think we sank one. And then one night, the Germans had a embryonic infrared system on their guns, so they could tell [from] the heat, at least they could get a bearing where the heat sources were, like on a ship, there was an awful lot of heat. So we were sent up to go in toward Cherbourg, towards the peninsula up there until we got shot at. So we could spot the guns. [laughs] So we were decoys. Fortunately, I think they were all asleep because we kept going in, going in. Nothing happened. But that didn't make it any less tense. Interviewer: So how long are you in the channel here? Gibson: About fifty days. Then we went back briefly to Plymouth to refuel, get new ammo and came back out and were there for another couple weeks. Interviewer: When you were there, what . . . if you're just patrolling the channel, what are you doing day in and day out? Gibson: Being pretty bored. You know, keep doing exercising, training and you know, we stood watch. We had eight hours of watch a day and then we had to do our regular work. You know, there's paper work and if you're an officer you did all that kind of stuff. Interviewer: And you did some paperwork. I mean, you had . . . Gibson: Oh, yeah. Interviewer: . . . a report on this. Gibson: Well, not on this activity. Interviewer: Oh, I'm sorry. Gibson: Not on Omaha. That was written by the captain. I wrote some notes as exec. I was executive officer by that time. But I don't have that. Interviewer: What our the handwritten notes that you gave us a copy of? Gibson: The handwritten notes are for the activity in Southern France, when we moved for the invasion down there. So we were there, went to England for a little while, then they sent us through Gibraltar and the invasion of Southern France had been planned as a secondary movement after this invasion so that they could come in from both directions. And we were there on that invasion and it . . . the Germans by this time had pretty much left. There were some. But that invasion, very few people killed, little damage. Interviewer: What's the date of this invasion? Gibson: It was in August, I think. I don't even remember. It would have been— Interviewer: August of '44? Gibson: Yeah. My handwritten notes . . . yeah. It was in August of '44. I wrote this . . . I forget. I don't have a date on it. But it was towards the end of '44. But we had . . . the main activity we had down there is the Germans had some E-boats based in La Spaitsia [phonetic] on the Italian coast. And they sent them out hoping to torpedo some of the ships that were in the invasion force. And they didn't know we had radar. So we saw them a long time before they had any idea where we were. And we opened fire on them and they never got a chance to . . . they were gonna come out with torpedoes. But they never really had a chance and we hit it and they abandoned ship. So I was sent over as the head of the boarding party, since I was the number two person on the ship. We got over there and we went aboard and they had opened the seacocks [phonetic]. You know, they were trying to sink it and there was water coming into it. Across the line, there was a line that led across the stern. It looked like it had tangled on something. So I cut it. And it was a booby trap. They had tried to . . . when they got in the water, they were gonna pull this line and set off a booby trap which would blow up the boat. And fortunately, I didn't pick it up and pull it. [laughs] So we got back. We took it in tow, but it got so much water in it, it finally just broke the line and sank. Interviewer: How many Germans on the boat? Gibson: We had about . . . I think there were about fifteen or sixteen. There's a little story in my other book that I have here called “The Hotdog Goes to War.” And they were . . . most of them were real young and the skipper was a dedicated Nazi. He demanded that he eat with us in the wardroom, in the officer's country. He wasn't a prisoner of war. He was a Nazi commanding officer. So he ate in the wardroom with us. We did pump them and got quite a bit of information out of them. One of them was so disgusted with the war, he took his Nazi emblem and cut it in two. [laughs] But that was pretty much the end of my activities in a combat situation, cause we came back to the United States not too long after that and the war was approaching the end. By that time, I was due to be transferred and so that was the end of my seagoing days. I was sent to Annapolis and was an instructor there for a while. Then went off to graduate school in the Navy. Interviewer: Let's take just a minute and I'm going to move the camera. Gibson: Okay. Interviewer: Let me get your wife to tell us about her experiences, her traveling experience. All right. Mrs. Gibson: On my way to Seattle? Interviewer: On your way to . . . well, or even . . . what was San Francisco like when your husband was overseas, then traveling back and seeing your parents, tell me about getting married, just something about what your experience was. Mrs. Gibson: Well, getting married . . . we had wanted to get married and things were in such a flux. So finally, he came back and we decided we'd better get married if we were gonna get married. So we were married at the cathedral in [inaudible], Knot Hill, San Francisco. Gibson: The Grace Cathedral. Mrs. Gibson: Grace Cathedral. And he left two days later. Interviewer: Was your family there? Mrs. Gibson: My mother was on her way, but she didn't make it. But we couldn't—we had no choice. It was either then or who knows when. And we had been engaged for two years. So we were anxious. Anyway, the trip from Boston to Seattle was unbelievable. They took me off in Omaha. When we packed from Boston, we only could take two pieces of luggage and I was going to be in three different climates, winter, spring and summer. So we put all my clothes in these two bags that would carry me through and Bob had the travelers checks in his name. I had about five dollars in my purse. So he goes off in Omaha. I have five dollars and only one bag of luggage, which didn't have any underwear in it. Anyway, so they said if I could get on this little commuter plane that came from Cheyenne and it would come as soon as they found the twelve Army bombers that were lost in the snow storm. This was January, I believe. Something in the winter. If I got to Cheyenne, the plane from Chicago will have missed a lot of passengers and there would be a seat. So one of the United designers of some sort, in the United Airline, was trying to get there also. So finally the plane arrived and we get on this little bitty thing and of course, I'm too young to know that it was probably the most dangerous thing in the whole world. We get on this plane, take off, the door flies open, the pilot comes back, reaches out, closes the door. Then he says, “You want an orange?” Anyway, we land and then a car meets us there, United Airlines car meets us and takes us to a hotel, which is in Cheyenne, and I had never seen a hotel that had one single door on the street with stairways going straight up. And I thought, “Oh, my goodness. What am I getting into?” Well, it was a lovely hotel and they said they'd call me when the plane was going . . . from Chicago was going to arrive. They didn't know when. I only had one pair of stockings, so I rinsed them out. And they called me about three o'clock in the morning saying the plane is going to be here in about an hour. Well, my stockings are soaking wet, it's freezing cold outside. So I put them on the light, the lamp to dry and of course, they burned. I had no stockings. So anyway, we get to Cheyenne or we leave Cheyenne and we go to a fuel stop in the southern part of Idaho, I believe it was, which was desert. There is nothing anywhere that you could see for miles around. It was flat. And there was a large Quonset hut that had the fuel and they told me I had to get off. That I couldn't go any further. And there wasn't even a railroad within sight. There was nothing. And I stood there and cried just like a baby. And the pilot felt so sorry for me that they literally took a garbage can full of gas out and let me get on. And that's how I got to Portland. Interviewer: And then were you in Portland? Did you stay in Portland? Mrs. Gibson: No, they said that there was a mail plane I probably could get on going to Seattle. I said, “No thanks. I have enough money to buy a coach ticket from Portland to Seattle.” I was gonna go that way. Interviewer: So while Robert is in Seattle, you all are together. When he leaves and heads to Europe, do you stay in Seattle? Mrs. Gibson: No, no. They were going to . . . we stayed with another couple in Seattle cause housing was very scarce and she had a car and the ship was going to go from Seattle to San Diego. So we drove to San Diego and met them there. And then, I think I went home. Gibson: Yeah, you went home. Mrs. Gibson: I went back to St. Louis to stay with my mother while he was on his way to Europe. Yes, that was right because my mother, who had no inkling of what the war was about, absolutely none, woke me one morning and said, “Oh, they've invaded Europe and not a shot was fired.” [laughs] That's my experience. Interviewer: So that was your experience with D-Day. Not a shot was fired. Mrs. Gibson: That's right. Interviewer: When did you find out that yes, a shot was fired? Mrs. Gibson: Oh, right away. I mean, the radio. Gibson: The newspaper. Mrs. Gibson: Yes, oh yes. Yes. Interviewer: Did you all correspond? I mean, were there letters back and forth? Mrs. Gibson: Yes, rarely but they came. Yes. Then I went on to New York, cause that was the place and got an apartment there. Interviewer: So were you in New York when Robert comes back? Mrs. Gibson: Yes, um-hmm. Yes. Interviewer: So you were there to meet him? Mrs. Gibson: Yeah. Interviewer: How exciting was that? Gibson: She was really there to meet me. Mrs. Gibson: Yes. Gibson: You were in the hospital. Mrs. Gibson: Oh, yes. When he came back I was delivering our first child. [laughter] [Tape 1, Side B] Interviewer: We are restarting the videotape. Thank you. And you're in the hospital. Mrs. Gibson: Yes. Diane had started to arrive, so I called a taxi and went to the hospital. Interviewer: What day is this? Mrs. Gibson: October third, nineteen forty… Gibson: Four. Mrs. Gibson: Four. In the middle of my labor, Bob arrives. Interviewer: Did you know that he was arriving [inaudible]? Mrs. Gibson: Yes. Well, no, not really. Communications on ships was very, very secret and you never talked about where your husband was, even if you knew. But nobody knew, really. It was terribly secret. Interviewer: So, Mr. Gibson, when you get off of the boat, do you know that your wife is in the hospital? How do you know to get to the hospital? Gibson: You know, that's a good question. I think you must have . . . there must have been some way that you told me that. Of course, I knew that you were pregnant. But it may have been someone at the apartment. Mrs. Gibson: It could have been one of our friends. Gibson: Cause I went to the apartment. It could have been somebody there that told me that she was over at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. Interviewer: So you're at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. Gibson: Yeah. Hospital. Interviewer: What is delivery like at this . . . what's going on in the hospital while you're delivering? Mrs. Gibson: Oh, they had obstetricians. I mean, it was a family care hospital. The Navy was very, very good with their hospital care for dependents. Extremely good. Interviewer: But is there anyone with you? I mean, has your family come? Mrs. Gibson: Oh, no. Travel during the war was near impossible, so you just didn't do it. Interviewer: Were you alone? Mrs. Gibson: Yes. But I'm . . . I mean . . . Interviewer: Doing what you're supposed to do. Delivering the baby. Mrs. Gibson: I was very . . . when you're living alone in the world and you're single or married but single, you become very independent and very much in charge and I was very much . . . the only thing that sort of was funny is the taxi driver dropped me at the hospital and I paid him. And I had . . . I'll say the fare was fifteen dollars. Well, I gave him twenty and I stood there and waited for my change and he said, “You're not in a big hurry, are you?” [laughs] Anyway, but everything was just, you know, as far as I was concerned, you have to remember, I was very young and not experienced in this sort of thing. So, I wasn't . . . I mean, I was not, you know, I just took it in my stride. Whatever came, came. Interviewer: So, tell me . . . so were you still in labor when your husband walks into the hospital? Mrs. Gibson: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yes. Interviewer: That must have been an amazing sight. Mrs. Gibson: [laughs] Well, he was not too . . . I mean, he was not prepared for this large woman [inaudible] in bed, screaming her head off. [laughter] Gibson: It wasn't the lady I left. [laughter] Interviewer: Oh, well, tell us about your other children. Is this . . . you said this was your first daughter? Mrs. Gibson: Yes. We have four. But the others were . . . Interviewer: Well, tell me their names and when they were born. Mrs. Gibson: Well, then Barbara was born two years later and then Robert was born about ten years later and Nancy, my last [inaudible] was born two years after that. Gibson: Fifty-five. Mrs. Gibson: Fifty-five. It was . . . Gibson: They're scattered. Mrs. Gibson: Yes. Interviewer: All right. Is there anything else that you would like to contribute about civilian life, civilian life or military life, the wife of a Naval man during the war? Mrs. Gibson: Well, in San Francisco it was kind of interesting. I thought it was unusual. All the wives of this particular task force, which were the battleships, the cruisers, the destroyers and so forth, all lived in San Francisco. And there were about thirty of us that lived in this one apartment building. And since our husbands were gone and we were all about the same age, in our very early twenties, late teens, had dinner together every night. And we all had these one bedroom or no bedroom apartments. And we would cram thirty people into this little living room. And there'd be like two of them would take charge of dinner and they were in charge of buying dinner, which meant twelve cans of beans or whatever they decided to serve or tuna fish salad. And they would have the grocery checks and it might add up to maybe eight dollars and forty-five cents. Well, they divided by thirty and then everybody would put in their twelve cents worth or whatever it was dinner cost. And we did that every single night. Because most of us had jobs or did something during the day and then we'd get together at night. But when he did come back from . . . I guess it was one of your trips in the Pacific. Gibson: When I came back from being sunk. Mrs. Gibson: No, this is when the destroyers came in under the bridge. Gibson: Oh, that's right. Mrs. Gibson: One time he came back and we had no idea where they were, you know. And we were in one of my friend's, who had another apartment elsewhere up on the top of the hill that overlooked the bay. And we were up there playing poker, doing something, and one of them looked out and said, “Oh, there's a destroyer coming in.” And I didn't think anything of it. You know, there's thousands of destroyers to me [inaudible]. So then we went down to the pancake place to have dinner and somebody came running in and said, “Your husband's home.” Well, you never saw anybody fly faster in your life. I ran out in the middle of the street. There was a cab stopped with somebody in it. I hopped in it and I said, “Sorry, we're going to such and such place.” It was . . . what? Where did we live on . . . Gibson: Five Sixty-Five Gary. Mrs. Gibson: Five Sixty-Five Gary. “We're going there.” And the man was so nice, he let me go. I mean, they took me home. But anyway, I just dropped everything and ran. Interviewer: Oh, that's a wonderful story. Gibson: This is before we went out to the Far West. Mrs. Gibson: You were convoying, I think. Gibson: Yeah, we had come back to San Francisco, a couple months after we were married. Mrs. Gibson: Yeah, this was the first time he came back. Interviewer: All right. I'm going to turn the camera back. We've got about five or six minutes. And I just wanted to ask if there was medals. I see that you have two Bronze Stars, Purple Heart. Where did you get the Bronze Starts and Purple Heart? Gibson: Well, the Purple Heart was I did get banged up when I left the ship when it was sunk. Actually, it was not enemy. It was not directly enemy action but I got trapped under the gun, I mean under the director and scraped up my leg pretty bad. You know, it wasn't direct but they gave Purple Hearts for that. Interviewer: And then the Bronze Stars. Gibson: The Bronze Star, one was for the event with the torpedo boats, when I went [inaudible] you know, I had not done anything too dumb. The other one was actually for being in the invasion of Normandy. You know, there's a hierarchy of medals and so what they do in the command structure, they give the Legion of Merit to the top commander and the captains of the boats or the ships would get something like a Silver Star. Then I was at the Bronze Star level [laughs]. We had to have done something, but it was . . . so those were the two. That was sort of a routine thing. The one with the E-boat was somewhat unique. Interviewer: When you were engaged in battle, D-Day, or at any other point, did you realize how big this event was, how historic it was? Did you have any perception of how this would change the world? Gibson: The invasion, definitely yes. Because Eisenhower had sent out . . . essentially that says, “You're going to be getting involved in one of the biggest things in history. And don't foul it up.” Sort of. The one in the Pacific, we were, at that time, we were struggling to not get overrun by the Japanese. We had been [hit] pretty badly and we were struggling back. So I don't think we saw much there which said, “Hey, this was a big event.” And actually, it turned out in history books as a sort of little paragraph. D-Day is written about forever. So it was pretty obvious to us that we were in something that was quite historical. Interviewer: When you pulled into Pearl Harbor for the first time, did you know that that was historic? Gibson: Well, we knew enough about Pearl Harbor that, we knew there was damage. The Navy had sent out some things that said . . . but they didn't give you any particulars. It just said that there were . . .and they, there were two destroyers in dry dock that got hit and blew up. You know, it's pretty hard to hide that. And so, there were things about what we'd lost and how many been killed. So it was just the size of the damage or the breadth of it that was shocking to us. And you can say, “Hey, the battleship got sunk.” But that doesn't mean anything to you unless you go in there and see this thing all beat up and oil pouring out of it. Interviewer: Is there anything that you want to add? Any part of the story that you haven't told? Gibson: Probably about two hours worth, which I'll think of after we leave. But I think . . . you know, there is one thing I wanted to go through. Let me see if I can find it. The thing that I think was different about the war is everybody knew what we were doing. We knew what the objective was. It didn't make any difference whether it was the admiral or the first kid, you know, enlisted out of Kentucky the first time he had shoes on. But, we tended to form pretty cohesive teams. If you were on a ship or you're in the Army or in an Air Force, Army Air Force squadron, because you knew you were going to be together for a while. And it's . . . but I have a little poem here that . . . a young kid came aboard who was almost illiterate. Came out, I believe, the hills of Kentucky. And he was always getting in trouble because he wasn't very smart. Let me, I want to make sure I find it. Just give me a minute to see if I can find it here. Interviewer: I'm gonna pause the machine. Gibson: Okay. Yeah. Why don't you, while I dig for this thing. Unknown Voice: While that's on pause, did you ever find out why they stalled the first Normandy invasion? You know, the false . . . [tape stop] Interviewer: We're starting back up after a brief pause. And if you want to read the poem? Gibson: The question of . . . if I had something more to say and I was pointing out that we knew the objective in World War Two and we tended to be in organizations that lasted for some time, so we became a team. And a young man on the ship that I was on was almost illiterate from schools in Kentucky. And we had a reunion some fifty years later and he brought this poem with him which he'd written. He said, “This is where I grew up, where I lived from seventeen to twenty-one. This was my high school, my teacher and my peers. This was my home, my job, a new life of sorts. This was my library, my theater, my ticket to worldly ports. She was both beautiful and deadly and the only one of her kind. She was a sleek and fast little bit of molten mother earth. She carried me across the ocean to a world beyond my dreams and to a store of memories to cherish as long there are seas.” Interviewer: Well, that makes me cry. [laughter] Gibson: Anyway, he became a very successful man. Interviewer: What's his name? Gibson: I don't know. Interviewer: Do you know? Gibson: Have no idea. Interviewer: Thank you very much. Is there anything else? Gibson: Well, I was just thinking . . . Interviewer: I have two minutes on the tape. Gibson: Two minutes. Well, I thought maybe if you . . . I just wanted to quickly to go into Southern France. Do you want to stop it while I find this? You were asking about the torpedo boat. Okay. It was . . . you can start it again. It was sunk the morning of August the eighteenth, 1944. And they had, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight [voice trails off] . . . fourteen people were aboard. One officer, Ernest Swenson, who was the captain. Twenty-two years old. The rest of them were all younger than he, except for one mechanic named Wolfgang, who was twenty-six. These were the people who were left in Germany to fight the war. Interviewer: Thank you so much. [end of tape] Notable Pages: p. 2—graduating from Naval Academy in 12/41 p. 3—entering post-attack Pearl Harbor p. 6—sinking of the Preston p. 7—out-swimming a battleship p. 8—rescue, tar removal and second attack p. 9—new ensign becomes high-ranking surviving officer p. 11—hopping planes cross country p. 12—merchant ship escort in North Atlantic p. 13—training for the invasion p. 14-20—D-Day invasion p. 17—the Frankfurt breaks line to take out gun battery above Omaha Beach p. 21—invasion of Southern France p. 22—boarding a booby trapped U-boat p. 23—German prisoners onboard p. 24-32—Mrs. Gibson tells her wartime story p. 27—welcome home present p. 32—Bronze Stars, Purple Heart p. 35—Ode to a Ship p. 36—I have seen the enemy, and he's a kid.
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Extent:: 1:00:23
Original Collection:: Veterans History Project oral history recordings
Veterans History Project collection, MSS 1010, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center
Holding Institution:: Atlanta History Center
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