FORT MOORE — As a boy, Jack Gibson hung by his grandfather’s side and affectionately called him “Papa.” Whenever his grandfather spoke, Gibson noticed people around him stopped what they were doing to listen. The World War II veteran became Gibson’s hero.
The two worshipped together in the same Catholic church in the Cleveland, Ohio, area and visited each other’s homes often, sharing meals and playing cards. Gibson could count on seeing his grandfather, Jim Shalala, with his parents in the stands at his football and basketball games. The pair were alike, both self-assured and friendly.
As he got older, Gibson learned Shalala served with the storied 2nd Ranger Battalion during the allied invasion of Europe. He collected black-and-white photos of the young soldier in newly liberated Paris. The two resembled each other.
Gibson wanted to know more. But Shalala rarely talked about the war, according to his family, probably because of his humility and maybe because he had been traumatized by combat. Gibson remembers his grandfather teared up the one time he spoke with him about combat.
And then Shalala was suddenly gone, killed in a car wreck at 84. With him went his memories of the war and other major historic events, memories Gibson had long sought. Their important conversations were unfinished.
But Gibson found other ways to learn about his Papa, even ways to become more like him. Gibson graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point before beginning his active duty service in the Army. Then he deployed to the war in Afghanistan. Twice.
Now, 80 years after his grandfather helped liberate Europe, Gibson is preparing to join a massive commemoration of D-Day. Next month, Gibson will set foot in France for the first time. And he will do it as a Ranger, an achievement that has helped him understand the extraordinary tests his grandfather endured. Being a Ranger like his grandfather, Gibson said, helps him “feel closer to him. Or maybe I understand him a little better.”
“He probably didn’t know much about what he was getting into,” said Gibson, 36, a University of Georgia Law School graduate stationed at Fort Moore. “In some ways, I think it made him who he was. But I think in other ways it revealed to the world who he was.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Rudder’s Rangers
The son of Catholic immigrants of Lebanese descent, Shalala was born in Connellsville, Pennsylvania. The family moved to the Cleveland area after Shalala graduated from high school. His father supported the family as a candymaker. His mother worked in the family business, too. Together, they raised nine children, five of whom served in the U.S. military during WWII. Gibson has a black-and-white photo of those brothers, all in uniform, huddling with their grinning mother.
Credit: Family
Credit: Family
After he was drafted in July of 1943, Shalala volunteered for the 2nd Ranger Battalion, an elite Army unit that was organized at Camp Forrest near Tullahoma, Tennessee. The battalion got its nickname, Rudder’s Rangers, from its hard-charging commander, James Rudder. He is described as “stocky, tough-talking and no-nonsense” in Douglas Brinkley’s book about the battalion, “The Boys of Pointe du Hoc.”
Brinkley wrote that Rudder, a Texas A&M graduate, cared deeply about his Rangers and told them: “I am going to work you harder than you’ve ever worked. In a shorter time than you can imagine, you’re going to be the best fighting unit in this man’s army.”
To prepare for D-Day, the trainees endured 24-mile hikes, scrambled through obstacle courses and boxed, with or without gloves, according to Brinkley, who added the “unbearable Tennessee humidity caused many of them to throw in the towel.”
The Rangers learned to speak German and trained how to use captured Nazi weapons. They traveled to the British Isles, where they prepared for the invasion by scaling rocky cliffs. Finally, on June 6, 1944, they headed across the English Channel for what Brinkley wrote was “essentially a suicide mission.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Pointe du Hoc
On D-Day, Rudder’s Rangers were assigned to scale Normandy’s 100-foot cliffs and capture Pointe du Hoc, a strategic promontory. Their mission was critical to the success of the invasion. Up top, the Germans had captured a battery of 155-mm French howitzers they could use to wreak havoc on the arriving U.S. troops below.
From the start, the mission went awry, according to Brinkley’s book and a report published by the U.S. military. Many of the Rangers were sick with food poisoning. One of their landing vessels overturned, and four Rangers drowned. A supply craft also sank, killing most of those on board. Bailing water with their helmets, the remaining Rangers despaired when they realized their climbing ropes were soaked, making some of them useless.
The strong current sent them about 3 miles off course. They came under German sniper fire while they got back on track. Five more Rangers were killed or wounded. As the survivors finally began to climb the sheer cliffs, the Germans dropped grenades on them, fired machine guns at them and cut their ropes. Eventually, the Rangers captured Pointe du Hoc and disabled the howitzers.
Out of 225 Rangers in the unit, only 99 survived the amphibious assault, according to Brinkley.
Shalala joined the battered Ranger unit as a replacement in Normandy, 12 days after D-Day, according to documents Gibson recently obtained. From there, he participated in battles and campaigns in northern France, Rhineland, Ardennes and central Europe, his honorable discharge records show.
Gibson wonders what went through his grandfather’s mind in combat. Did he believe he would survive? What was it like liberating rural villages across Europe and interacting with the newly freed civilians? What did he do to pass the time between his harrowing missions?
Credit: Family photo
Credit: Family photo
At some point during the war, Shalala was wounded in action, according to an official 52-page report he wrote about his unit’s experiences. The document provides no details. However, his youngest son, Patrick Shalala, said his father was hit in the back by shrapnel. Gibson said it’s possible his grandfather was wounded in the bloody Battle of Hürtgen Forest, which started in the fall of 1944.
Shalala’s report about the war features a vivid passage about the Rangers camping deep in the snowy forest and keeping warm by lighting cans of soil saturated with gasoline. Eventually, the order came for them to advance.
“Into the dark, black forest, the men, clinging to each others’ belts in order to keep contact, staggered to the road and boarded the trucks that were to shuttle them to their unknown destination,” Shalala wrote, adding they observed burned-out tanks and dead Germans along their route.
Shalala finally finished his journey toward the end of 1945 in Czechoslovakia.
Credit: Family photo
Credit: Family photo
Resilience and compassion
After the war, Shalala moved back to the Cleveland area and married. Together, he and his wife, Patricia, raised eight children, including Gibson’s mother. Shalala earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in sociology and taught at John Carroll University before starting his own tool and die business.
Credit: Family photo
Credit: Family photo
His children remember him as a prankster with a creative sense of humor. From wood, he fashioned a replica of a king-size Nestlé Crunch candy bar his wife kept in her bedside drawer. When she wasn’t looking, he put the wrapper on the replica and swapped it for her treat.
“We heard her rip the drawer open. And then she said, ‘Oh, my God, Jimmy!’” Shalala’s daughter, Maureene Gibson, recalled. “And he just laughed and laughed and laughed.”
His daughter also remembers his compassion. When a family friend was grievously burned in a fire, Shalala visited him every day in the hospital and recited the rosary with him until the man passed away, said Maureene Gibson.
“I believe Jack learned compassion watching my dad,” she said.
Shalala emphasized the importance of punctuality and resilience, both critical for surviving combat.
“He had a hard time comprehending how anyone could not handle some of the challenges in life that you are posed with,” Patrick Shalala said of his father. “He was of a mindset that you deal with it, handle it, be OK and don’t panic.”
He also had his limits. Patrick Shalala recalled a conversation he had with his father about the debut of “Saving Private Ryan,” a film featuring graphic combat scenes.
“I said, ‘Dad, are you going to see that?’ And he goes, ‘Why in the hell would I want to relive that? I did that so I would never have to have anyone else do that. I don’t think any of us want to relive that,’” his son remembered.
In 2006, Jim and Patricia Shalala were killed in a car wreck. Their 11-year-old granddaughter, Halle, died later from injuries she sustained in the crash. At the time, they were traveling home from Louisiana, where they had gone to see off Gibson’s older brother, the family’s first West Point graduate, before he deployed with the U.S. Army to Afghanistan. Hundreds attended their memorial service, according to a Cleveland Plain Dealer article, and the line of cars headed to the cemetery stretched for miles through Shaker Heights.
Credit: Family photo
Credit: Family photo
Following in his footsteps
The year before he died, Shalala gave Gibson the red and black Ranger insignia he wore on his uniform during WWII. He gave it as a gift after Gibson was accepted into West Point. Gibson keeps it in a frame and shows it to visitors. Following his graduation, Gibson deployed to Afghanistan with the 3rd Infantry Division and then a second time with the 101st Airborne Division.
He met his wife, Meredith, while studying at UGA to become an Army lawyer. As he entered Ranger School in 2019, Gibson felt torn about being away from his wife, who was pregnant with the first of their three children. Completing Ranger School wasn’t necessary for Gibson to have a successful career in the military. But he remembers thinking: “Maybe being a Ranger could be something my kids — and their kids, God willing — could look at and be proud of. And, hopefully, it would keep my grandfather’s legacy fresh in our family history.”
It wasn’t easy. Ranger School candidates train to exhaustion, patrolling in missions in the mountains and in a swamp under extreme mental and physical stress. Many don’t graduate. Gibson got lost while leading a night patrol and had to repeat that part of the school, also called the “Darby” phase. Whenever he had second thoughts about pressing on, Gibson thought of what his grandfather endured.
“His formative years in 2nd Ranger Battalion made him the man he was. And maybe if I do this, I could be like him in some way,” Gibson recalled thinking. “That is what really kept me going more than anything else.”
When he successfully repeated the Darby training, his wife visited him, carrying a pink balloon signifying their baby was a girl. They named her Georgia Darby. Their youngest daughter’s middle name is Shalala.
Almost two years after he graduated from Ranger School, Gibson completed the Ranger Assessment Selection program, another intensely demanding test that allowed him to join the 75th Ranger Regiment. A major, Gibson now serves as the unit’s regimental judge advocate. He deployed with his fellow Rangers to the Middle East in 2022.
Next month, he will help commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day by parachuting into Normandy with other U.S. service members. Many of his relatives are traveling to France to witness the event as well as a change-of-command ceremony for Shalala’s battalion. Gibson can’t wait to see the country his grandfather helped liberate.
“I feel like I understand him more now,” Gibson said. “Just being able to walk in his footsteps, literally, is going to be an emotional and revealing experience for me.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Georgia Casualties in World War II
- About 320,000 Georgians served in the U.S. military during World War II.
- 5,701 U.S. soldiers from Georgia were killed during the war.
- More than 200 U.S. military personnel who entered service in Georgia are memorialized at the Normandy American Cemetery in France. Of those, 18 died on D-Day.
Sources: New Georgia Encyclopedia, Georgia National Guard History Blog, U.S. Army Center of Military History, the American Battle Monuments Commission and the National World War II Museum.
About this article
Jeremy Redmon visited Fort Moore and consulted the National Infantry Museum, National World War II Museum and the U.S. National Archives. He also reviewed Jim Shalala’s military records and a report Shalala wrote about his Ranger unit’s history during the war. And he read Douglas Brinkley’s “The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion.”
