Legendary fighter pilot Bobby Gibbes had a great sense of adventure

BORN 100 years ago today on his father’s small grazing property near Young, Bobby Gibbes would rise to become one of Australia’s most celebrated fighter pilots.

Bobby Gibbes, with only eight half-hour flying lessons before enlisting in the RAAF, would become one of Australia’s most celebrated fighter pilots.

IT wasn’t long before his parents realised that Bobby Gibbes, who would rise to become one of Australia’s most celebrated fighter pilots, was going to be a risk-taker with buckets of charm.

Born 100 years ago today on his father’s small grazing property near the NSW town of Young, Gibbes’ childhood exploits generally involved objects such as sticks of gelignite, detonators and beehives.

“One day we carried a newly born lamb to the house and lied greatly, saying that we had found it without a mother,” Gibbes wrote in his autobiography.

“The ewe followed up pretty smartly and we were locked in the pantry, one of mother’s methods of punishment.

“We found that, as our eyes became accustomed to the dark, we could find all sorts of goodies in there. Naturally we kept up our howling and mother never did wake up to us.”

Gibbes grew to be only five feet four and a quarter inches tall, but he could scent adventure miles away. He would join the RAAF at the outbreak of World War II where he led the famed 3 Squadron for two years and earned the DSO, DFC and Bar for his combat bravery in North Africa and the Middle East.

Squadron leader Bobby Gibbes (right) after his victorious return from a combat sortie in World War II.

But all that glory was a world away when Gibbes, as a very small boy, was transfixed by the sight of an aircraft landing in a paddock near Goulburn. Gibbes tore off in the direction of the plane, shouting “It’s mine when it falls”. His lifelong love affair with aviation had been ignited.

Gibbes was educated in Manly, with a two-year stint at boarding school in Bathurst. Eager to start on life’s great adventure, and in defiance of his mother’s hopes that he would be a doctor or a dentist, he got a job as a jackaroo on Tremearne, his uncle’s property near Orange.

Aged 20, he secured a job on Trowell Creek property near Hermidale, NSW, and was often left to run the 20,000 property on his own. He spent his 21st birthday alone, pulling dead sheep out of a dam that the drought had all but sucked dry, and building a pathway into the remaining water for those sheep that had survived.

“What a 21st I had endured,” he wrote.

With war obviously imminent, Gibbes enrolled in flying lessons at Mascot Aerodrome, which at that time was “more or less a paddock”.

RAAF Wing Leader Bobby Gibbes in his plane on Morotai Island, North Maluku (Indonesia) during World War II.

On enlistment in the RAAF, his only flying experience was eight half-hour lessons in the company of an instructor. He had never flown solo.

Gibbes’ exploits in what he called “the filth and hardships and dangers of war” are now legendary. But in his 1994 autobiography, You Live But Once, he detailed them for the first time from his own point of view.

In May 1942 Gibbes was forced to bail out of his damaged plane when it burst into flames in the Western Desert.

“I shot out, like a cork from a bottle,” Gibbes wrote. “I was in a state of terror with flames licking all around me. I watched my aircraft plunging down, a mass of flames, vertically below me. I saw it hit with a mighty burst of flame and black smoke. I was swinging gently in the world devoid of all sound, and I had no idea as to where I would land.”

Gibbes flew on operations from June 1941 to May 1943, for a total of 247 sorties and 472 flying hours. During it all, he earned the love and respect of the airmen who served with him. Men of 3 Squadron like wingman and friend om Russell still spoke of him like a brother when a plaque to commemorate the Squadron was unveiled in Canberra earlier this year.

Bobby Gibbes relaxes with a beer and the ultralight plane he is building in the lounge room of his Collaroy home in Sydney in 1986.

At Gibbes’ funeral in Sydney in 2007, Russell said in his eulogy: “Bobby Gibbes was the best leader of a fighter-bomber squadron in the Western Desert; there was none better. He could read the desert like a road map.”.”

After the war, there were many more adventures for Gibbes. He established Gibbes Sepik Airways in New Guinea. In the early years there, with no electricity, his wife Jean would light his way home with a flarepath of hurricane lamps.

After New Guinea, Gibbes sailed the Mediterranean on his yacht Billabong, often with Jean and their daughters Julie and Robyn.

Having sailed solo to Sri Lanka, Gibbes was recruited to play the British Consul in an Ursula Andress movie being filmed there.

“I was paid the large sum of $30 for my part and given two nights free at the Galle Face (Hotel), including all meals and booze,” Gibbes wrote.

The film was Slave Of The Cannibal God, and “Ursula was a very beautiful and sweet person and I enjoyed our chats between filming”.

Given his impish humour and the twinkle that never left Gibbes’ eye, it’s sure that Andress enjoyed their chats too.

Originally published as Legendary fighter pilot Bobby Gibbes had a great sense of adventure