Archie Jackson with Bob Cardin
(Project Manager on the
"Glacier Girl" expedition)
Archie “Gil” Jackson was born in Kansas in 1917 and raised on a farm near Louisburg in Miami County. He attended Pittsburg (Kansas) State College, where he majored in chemistry, and after graduating became the state’s Chief Chemist. Gil had a yearning to fly, however, and enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) in the fall of 1941. The U.S. entered the war soon thereafter, and he was allowed to transfer to the USAAC in January 1942, joining its aviation cadet program.
Gil’s Preflight training was at Santa Ana, California, following which, in March, he began Basic flight training at the Rankin Aero Academy in Tulare, California. A member of Class 42-I, he won his wings and his commission as a second lieutenant at Luke Field, Arizona, in September 1942. Lieutenant Jackson then received P-38 training at Muroc Army Air Base in the California desert before being sent to England, where he learned to fly the famous British Spitfire.
In January 1943, with a B-25 and a B-17 as “guides,” fifteen USAAF pilots, including Gil Jackson, flew P-38s from England to North Africa (Algiers) via Gibraltar, delivering their planes and themselves to the 1st Fighter Group, which had been fighting there for two months. Due to a more urgent need for aircraft than pilots at that time, the group C.O. ordered them back to England to procure some more Lightnings.
Thus, the following month those same men ferried another batch of P-38s, from the Lockheed air depot at Langford Lodge in Northern Ireland to Casablanca. They then finally joined the 1st FG in mid-March, at Chateau-dun-du-Rhumel, Tunisia. Lieutenant Jackson was assigned to its 94th (“Hat-in-the-Ring”) Squadron, with which America’s top WWI ace, Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, had served 25 years earlier. (In early May 1943, Rickenbacker visited the squadron in North Africa and while there gave each of its pilots a Hat-in-the-Ring pin made from a silver coin. They were pinned on them by the legendary General Jimmy Doolittle, then C.O. of the Northwest African Strategic Air Force.)
Gil Jackson’s combat exploits soon earned him a Distinguished Flying Cross, which he was awarded at the end of March. As of mid-June he was on temporary detached duty (TDY) with General Doolittle’s staff near Tunis. His main job there was courier pilot, flying messages to various Allied air commands in the Mediterranean Theater, but he was also part of General Eisenhower’s fighter escort while “Ike” was on a secret mission to Sicily and Malta. Gil checked out General Doolittle in the P-38 before he returned to the 1st Fighter Group, now based at Mateur, Tunisia.
Lieutenant Jackson flew an unusual mission to Sicily on July 16, when he and his squadron commander were ordered to deliver what turned out to be a set of invasion maps to Seventh U.S. Army Headquarters there. They managed to land on an airstrip that had been bulldozed out of one of the island’s beaches and then were driven to the HQ. In September Gil was TDY briefly with the Royal Air Force (RAF) in Egypt.
By the time he completed his combat tour in October 1943, First Lieutenant Jackson had flown 72 missions. Late in his tour he flew as both squadron and group leader on occasion and was 94th Fighter Squadron Operations Officer (second in command).
Gil’s first stateside assignment after his return from North Africa was to the School of Fixed Gunnery and Rockets on the Matagorda Peninsula off the coast of Texas. He was then a P-38 gunnery instructor at Ontario Army Air Field in Southern California from December 1943 to July 1945, when he was released from active duty and returned to his old job with the State of Kansas.
Gil was recalled to active duty in July 1948 and for the next year attended a meteorological school and the Nuclear Chemistry School at the University of California in Berkeley. He was then sent to the island of Guam in the Pacific, where he was a member of the team of chemists who discovered the timing of Russia’s first nuclear detonation.
Gil Jackson retired from active duty once again in May 1950 but remained a USAF Reserve meteorological officer based at March Field, California, until January 1977, when he retired as a lieutenant colonel with just over 34 years of military service. Simultaneously, he enjoyed a successful career as a civilian chemist, working for Sunkist Growers in Ontario, California, and then as Chief Chemist and Director of Manufacturing for Hawaiian Punch in Fullerton, California. He retired for the last time in 1985, to his home in South Laguna, California.
Colonel Jackson was married for 54 years to the former Priscilla Brigden and was the father of two children and the grandfather of four. Archie passed away in September of 2008.