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Oral History Recording ORAL HISTORY RECORDING ACCESSION NUMBER: S01646 TITLE: WING COMMANDER BOBBY GIBBES INTERVIEWEE: WING COMMANDER BOBBY GIBBES INTERVIEWER: KEN LLEWELYN, RAAF PR. RECORDING DATE: 12 FEBRUARY 1993 RECORDING LOCATION: COLLAROY, NSW SUMMARY: TRANSCRIBER: TRANSCRIPTION DATE: BEGIN TAPE 1 SIDE A Wing Commander Gibbes, you'd decided to join the forces and you applied to the RAAF and to the Navy and some fifty years later you're still waiting to hear from the Navy, I believe. Yes, that's correct. Monday after war was declared I sent a telegram to Fairbairn in Canberra asking when the Fairbairn air training scheme was starting and received a telegram back saying it's still in the plans. I also, on the Monday morning, went out to Rushcutters Bay and applied for the Navy because I had no particular choice, either would have suited. I still haven't heard from the Navy. Those steps probably all came out. Where did you first learn to fly when you were accepted by the RAAF? I started to learn to fly in 1939. I had been jackarooing and droving out in the bush and when I thought the war was imminent I came down and took a job as a commercial traveller, which I was not very successful at I might add, and I started learning to fly out at Mascot with Air Flight, flying an Aeronca. I had four hours flight, half an hour each time was as much as I could afford. Then when war broke out I thought, well, I'll let King George pay for the rest of it, if I get into the Air Force. How did you take to flying? Did you find it a very enjoyable experience or did you find it hard work? I was a very nervous pilot and I thought I was the only one who knew that. Later I saw my own record when I became Commanding Officer of 3 Squadron and I saw that my instructor, Alan Clancy, had recorded that I was a very timid pilot, and he was quite right. That's really extraordinary considering the ensuing events, isn't it? I don't know. I still think I'm quite a nervous pilot. I've done a fair bit of flying. I flew for twenty-seven years in New Guinea after the war and I still fly but I'm always very, very careful; I don't treat flying lightly. What do you think makes up a good fighter pilot? - and you're in a very good position to make that comment. Well, I think a good fighter pilot has to be .... His reactions for a start have to be very fast and invariably in combat you make instant decisions, and afterwards when I've been in fairly hectic combat I've thought about it later and wondered if I did the Wright thing and I've always assessed myself as having been absolutely Wright in the decision I made on the spur of the moment. I think you have to be frightened. If you're not frightened, you're going to get 1 yourself knocked down by becoming over-confident and I always very nervous but I think I hid that pretty well from my fellow pilots. It must be essential, to have great courage too, because no fighter pilot can be a good operator without having enormous physical and mental courage. I think courage and cowardice are pretty well one thing in many ways. A pilot shows courage by doing things rather than be seen by his friends for what he really is, probably half a coward underneath, and I certainly come into that category. Do you believe after a period of time as a fighter pilot you developed a sixth sense about what your opposition was going to do? I think I knew exactly what my opposition, which was mainly the Germans, that's who I was frightened of, were going to do. The Italians didn't worry us much. But I came to the decision that no German pilot could shoot me down in a Messerschmitt. I knew their tactics completely and I was ultimately shot .... The last time I was shot down was by a Messerschmitt 109. Was that a lapse of concentration? It was not a lapse of concentration. I went down to rescue one of my people. I think I got the lead 109 that was beating him up. Incidentally, his aircraft went in. When I was catching up with the formation again, two 109s, the remaining two, were picking at me and I was avoiding their attacks, evading them and climbing back up to the bomb formation and somebody up above suddenly screamed out: 'Look out down below look out!' and I had lost sight of one of these 109s and I panicked and I pulled a full circle, a 360 degree circle, and of course I ran Wright into a twenty millimetre cannon shell and went down. But I always felt that the guy who screamed out to me to look out down below actually was the one responsible for shooting me down. Did you bail out of that particular ...? No, this time I landed at high speed with the two 109s still on my hammer. I was fWrightened they might shoot me up on the ground but they didn't. I suppose I touched down. The last time I looked at it, -the air speed- I was doing over 300 when I pushed it onto the deck. I wanted to let them see that I'd had the 'Richard' and I'd started climbing out before I had come to a stop, thinking they might strafe but they were gentlemen and they flew past me and gave me either a salute or a wave. Later, of course, a Fieseler Storch came looking for me but didn't manage to pick me up. I had gone the wrong way, back towards the aerodrome which we'd been bombing and they thought I'd be making back towards home. 2 You landed wheels up obviously. Oh yes. Wing Commander, if I just go back just a year or so. What were your feelings about entering combat when you were sent across to the desert to fly Tomahawks with 3 Squadron? I remember on my first operation which was in Syria, I don't think I slept a wink that night. I was fWrightened of being fWrightened, I think and wondered just how I would take it. Next day we went and strafed Rayak and it was really a piece of cake. We had no real flack and no air opposition and from then on I viewed combat flying with a little less fear. I had made my first effort. How did you find flying the Tomahawk? They were a good aeroplane. They were not as good as the Messerschmitts which we came up against but they were a better aeroplane than the Italians had, with the exception of the Macchi 202 which was quite a comparable aeroplane. So, how did you regard the Italians and the German air crew? The Italians were very, very nice pilots. They flew well but they were very inclined to be aerobatic pilots rather than combat pilots, whereas the German was a very much more aggressive pilot than the Italian. We always felt rather relieved when we heard Italian voices over the RT rather than the Germans. But I don't want to take away from the Italians. They shot down a lot of our people in the early stages and we always treated them with a fair bit of respect but we respected the Germans more. Other pilots have always said the Italians flew with great flair. They did, they were basically good aerobatic pilots. They were a bit inclined to pull off aerobatics rather than just straight combat flying. But they did fly ... they were beautiful pilots but not aggressive. Wing Commander, can you remember your first contact with the enemy? Yes, I can. In Syria. In that show we found some JU88s over the fleet off Haifa and we went in and attacked. The Navy put up a terrific amount of flack which we had to fly through to get at the JU88s. We managed to get the four 88s, which incidentally had Italian markings. 3 Can you describe how you felt on your first combat contact? Well, I suppose I felt apprehensive and I think I made a bit of a goat of myself really because I had never been to an OTU and I knew very little about combat flying, and I didn't know much about the enemy aeroplanes which we were attacking. The JU88 was almost as fast as a Tomahawk and to get at the one I went after, as I closed on it, I wondered what all these little whispy things going by were - little smoke trails going past me - and I suddenly realised that they were bullets. I was being fired at and I thought, my God, and I eventually managed to stop that and in the attack I was covered with oil eventually but I had attacked from behind and Pete Jeffrey who was the CO (Commanding Officer) was a bit critical about that because I didn't know that they had a huge gun underneath the plane firing backwards as well. In fact I didn't know that I shouldn't attack from behind; I had never been told. The normal attack, of course, was front quarter or head on if you could but never from behind.
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