Henry George Gilbert, Jr. Full Narrative

Henry George Gilbert, Jr. was born on September 23, 1919, in Temple, Cotton County, Oklahoma. His father was an Engineer is the Marine Division so young Gilbert spent some of his early childhood years in Panama before moving to Lovell, Wyoming. Gilbert graduated from Lovell High School in 1936 and began his post-secondary career at New Mexico State University for the 1937 to 1938 academic year. He transferred to Washington State College (WSC) in 1938, but left in March 1940 to enter the Navy Air Corps as a flying cadet. He was commissioned an Ensign in the United States Naval Reserves and joined the Flying Tigers, American Volunteer Group (AVG) as a Wingman. Gilbert was the youngest of the Flying Tigers at age twenty-two. The Flying Tigers fought the Japanese in Burma (now Myanmar) and China during 1941 and 1942, using P-40 fighters with painted shark faces on the nose of the planes.  On December 23, 1941, two waves of Japanese bombers accompanied by fighters approached Mingaladon, Burma. Fourteen P-40’s and 16 Brewsters of the Royal Air Force (R.A.F.) went to meet the attack, including Ensign Gilbert. He “dived on one of the bomber formations, shooting out bursts and striking two of them but without hitting vital spots. In the attack, his P-40 was hit by a cannon shell and screamed out of the battle to crash into the jungle below. There had been no parachute, and Henry Gilbert was the first Flying Tiger to die in combat.” Gilbert is buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (Punchbowl) in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is memorialized on the WSU Veterans Memorial as well as with a memorial marker in his hometown of Lovell, Wyoming.