Warbird Information Exchange

A reporter unearths the First World War history of a distant relative

The Star’s Ottawa bureau chief wanted to know about the First World War vet in a family photo. He discovered a war hero and a very lucky man.

By: Bruce Campion-Smith Ottawa Bureau, Published on Sun Nov 09 2014

I went in search of the fellow in the picture. I found a war hero. And a very lucky guy.

The black-and-white photo depicts a man in uniform standing on the front porch of a house. Above him hangs a large “Welcome” banner. That residence, at 16 Davenport Rd. in Toronto, is long gone. The soldier, A.K. Hibbert, has disappeared, too.

He was a distant relative on my father’s side. But his wartime exploits were never really mentioned.

So when I saw the photo, it made me curious to learn more. I uncovered the tale of a soldier who served as a signaller, whose service took him to the hell holes and highlights of the First World War, from the Somme to Vimy to Passchendaele. Along the way, he was awarded four commendations, including the Distinguished Conduct Medal, the second highest award for “gallantry in action,” just shy of a Victoria Cross. And he survived it all — the snipers, artillery shells, machine-gun fire and gas attacks — with nary a scratch.

His war experiences live on in his service records, available through Library and Archives Canada. The 37 pages of fountain pen scribbles detail Hibbert’s years at war, his honours, his leaves to England and Paris, his comings and goings.

Additional insight into his military career lies in the official war diary of the 4th Canadian Divisional Signal Company, the unit he served with, and diaries kept by others who served in the unit.

Alfred Kilby Hibbert’s path to war began in Toronto on Aug. 17, 1915, when the 30-year-old walked into a Toronto office and signed up for duty. The attestation paper was the start for all new recruits.

In a faint scrawl, Hibbert listed his mother, Priscilla, as next-of-kin, his trade as “embossing,” and that he was born in Toronto on Oct. 2, 1884, though later documents would state 1883. He signed that he did “solemnly declare” he was willing to serve in the Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force.

It wouldn’t be until the following spring that Hibbert headed for Europe. On Apr. 28, 1916, he sailed on the ocean liner Olympic, sister ship to the Titanic, from Halifax to Liverpool, England.

The soldiers were taken to Shorncliffe, in Kent in southeast England, which served as a staging base and training camp for troops headed to the Western Front.

Hibbert had originally signed on with the 83rd Overseas Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, but he was transferred to the Engineer Corps. He became a signaller in the 4th Canadian Divisional Signal Company just as the 4th Division was formed in August 1916. He joined a unit with nine officers, 209 soldiers and, eventually, about 100 horses.

Across the channel, Canadians had been in the fight for more than a year. In 1916, they were waging battle around Ypres in a fierce to-and-fro contest with the Germans over terrain at Mount Sorrel.

The 4th Division was shipped to France in mid-August, and then on to Belgium and the battlefield near Ypres. By this time, though, the front was relatively quiet “as things go,” notes Nicholas Clarke, assistant historian at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. “People still die every day, which was given the nice little cover name ‘wastage,’ through accidents, shelling, minor trench raids.”

The time in Ypres gave the novice corps valuable experience with trench warfare.

As members of the Signal Corps, Hibbert and his colleagues were responsible for the communications that linked front-line trenches, artillery batteries and headquarters.

Like so many of the countless requirements for keeping an army mobile and fighting, it was a vital but unsung role.

The signallers relied on runners who would bravely relay messages under fire, travelling on motorcycles or even horses. They also had pigeons, which were less reliable or timely. And, as the war progressed, modern wireless sets came into use.

But telephones were the real heart of the communications network, connected by cables strung through muddy, rain-filled trenches and across shell-pocked terrain.

The cables were initially buried about a metre down. But that proved vulnerable to heavier artillery, which would blow deep craters in the ground, breaking the wires. So the signallers went down to two metres to ensure the security of their lines.

“A dirtier job could not have been imposed on anyone than that of placing armoured telephone cable under seven feet of mud, in the dead of night, sometimes within 200 yards of the Hun,” reads a history of the 4th Canadian Divisional Signal Company.

War began in earnest for the 4th Division in mid-October, when soldiers were sent to France and the Somme, a name that became synonymous with the grim carnage of the First World War.

“This is where they really have their true horror, the true reality of trench warfare,” Clarke says.

The Battle of the Somme had been launched by the British on July 1, 1916, to give the Allies the offensive initiative and divert German troops from attacks on French forces on eastern sections of the front near Verdun.

The 4th Division was thrown into battle quickly to take Regina Trench, a strategic stretch of territory south of the French city of Arras.

“They’re just pounding this thing with artillery, the Germans are firing back,” says Clarke. “It’s a slaughter.”

It took three separate assaults by the 4th Division, but they finally took the trench the night of Nov. 10. A week later, they took the trench behind it.

At that point, the Battle of the Somme was over. The grinding warfare has consumed lives on a staggering scale, with Canadians suffering about 25,000 casualties, 4,300 of them from 4th Division.

It was during that time that Canadians confronted another adversary — the weather. For several days in early November, the small diary of Sgt. G.R. Coulthard, a fellow signaller, contains a single scribbled word: “Rain.”

After an already wet summer, the rains of October and November turned the ground into a sea of mud. “We think of Passchendaele as a muddy nightmare,” says Clarke. “The Somme in October and November is the dress rehearsal.

“Soldiers talk of mud to the ankles, mud to the knees. It’s so cold in November that some guys can’t even hold their rifles.”

By the end of the month, the official diary of the 4th Canadian Divisional Signal Company notes “men becoming fewer on account sickness and many casualties.”

In February 1917, Hibbert was awarded his first of three medals for acts of bravery. There is no official citation for the commendation, but the Toronto World newspaper wrote that Hibbert was award the medal by then Lt.-Gen. Julian Byng, commander of the Canadian Corps, for keeping communications open during one 35-day stretch at the front.

The story cites a letter from Hibbert in which he reflected on his good fortune: “I must have a horseshoe some place as I came out without a scratch, but I had a great many close calls.”

Also during this period, an account in the Toronto Daily Star — as this newspaper was then called — details how Hibbert wrote a friend about going out “under fire to look for a lost comrade.” After a two-hour search, Hibbert and a fellow soldier found the man dead and buried him.

Through the winter of 1917, the 4th Division signallers moved to the area northwest of Arras and began preparing for the Canadian assault on Vimy Ridge. In the run-up to the battle, the division laid and buried more than 500 kilometres of cable.

The attack began at 5:30 a.m. on Apr. 9, 1917, as some 15,000 Canadian soldiers, backed by some 1,000 artillery pieces, stormed the German-held ridge.

The war diary for the Signal Corps proudly notes their accomplishment that day. “Communications by phone and telegraph never broken throughout the attack. Buried cable hit in many places but withheld the shelling and was not broken in any single case.”

The author adds: “Depth of seven feet believed to be just the correct depth.”

Despite that defining victory, the Canadian Corps would have to endure another 18 months of fighting through the muddy of horrors of Passchendaele in the fall of 1917 and the Battle of Amiens in August 1918.

In the war’s closing days, Hibbert was awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal. The citation in the London Gazette says it was given to him for “conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty” while he was in charge of forward signal communications for the battalion. He maintained contact by telephone under “extremely trying conditions” and even though the area was “continuously shelled and swept with machine-gun fire.”

On Nov. 11, 1918, the diary for the 4th Canadian Divisional Signal Company has a single succinct entry for the day: “Hostilities cease at 1100. Nothing to report.”

The corps remained in Belgium until April 1919. In June 1919, Hibbert sailed home on the R.M.S. Mauretania. Upon his return to Toronto, he was discharged from “his majesty’s service.”

He was extraordinarily lucky. His war honours attest to daring acts under fire. Yet Hibbert survived it all without serious injury.

“Here’s a guy who wins multiple medals for bravery and is in the thick of it and nary a scratch does he receive, which in itself is stunning,” Clarke says.

From there he picked up his life, part of a remarkable generation who went abroad, fought a war and then came back to pick up as best they could, without fanfare or fuss.

Hibbert married, had a family — two daughters and a son — and settled in Grand Rapids, Mich., where he worked as a pressman at a local label maker.

He never really talked much about his wartime experiences, son Bill Hibbert, 87, recalled Saturday.

“He was pretty close-mouthed about it all. I think he had been through an awful lot,” Hibbert said in a telephone interview from his home in Wyoming, Mich.

“If someone asked, he might open up. He would not bring up the subject himself,” the son said.

But his valour was known to the family. Bill Hibbert read from a newspaper story that told how his father received one of his commendations from the Prince of Wales, who commented that he had never seen a more highly decorated sergeant.

To his family though, Hibbert is remembered as a “great guy” with the infectious laugh.

Hibbert, who had survived physically untouched by war, died of a heart attack at age 68.

Posted:
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014 ... ative.html