Tony Hibbert (British Army officer)

Tony Hibbert, MBE MC (6 December 1917 – 12 October 2014), was a British Army officer who fought in the Second World War. During a military career that began in 1935 and ended in 1947, Hibbert saw action in the Battle of France, the North African Campaign, the Italian Campaign and Operation Market Garden. After these battles, he led a T-Force unit in Operation Eclipse, a campaign carried out by the Allies shortly before V-E Day.

In civilian life, after his time in the army, Hibbert enlarged and diversified his family's wine and spirits business. His restless first retirement, begun in the early 1970s, was followed by a 1981 retirement attempt that led his wife and him to ownership of Cornwall's Trebah Garden, which they went on to restore to its prewar splendor. In 2009, after nearly sixty years of marriage, Hibbert became a widower. Five years later, he died peacefully, at home.

James Anthony Hibbert was born in Chertsey, Surrey. Son of a Royal Flying Corps pilot, Hibbert decided to enter the British Army while he was in Germany, working as a vineyard apprentice for his family's wine business. Having seen that Germany was preparing for war, he returned to England in 1935 and applied to the Royal Military Academy. His father, who thought Germany would not go to war, after the defeat it had suffered in World War I, was upset by his decision to abandon his apprenticeship.

In January 1938, Hibbert was commissioned into the Royal Artillery. On 9 September 1939, less than ten days after the German invasion of Poland, he arrived in Cherbourg, France, with the British Expeditionary Force. In the Battle of Dunkirk, he commanded a half-battery that defended the Allies' northern perimeter for four days. On 1 June 1940, his ammunition supply depleted, he was forced to destroy his guns. Evacuated from Dunkirk on the tugboat "Sun X", Hibbert was mentioned in dispatches that described his meritorious actions in the face of the enemy and were sent to the high command.

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