Gabby was transferred to Stalag Luft I at Barth on the Baltic Sea, north of Berlin. By then his former group commander, Colonel “Hub” Zemke, who had been shot down in October 1944, was the camp’s ranking officer.

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Gabby’s most enduring memory of the next nine months as a POW besides boredom was increasing hunger. Red Cross parcels kept the prisoners from starving, but as the war got worse for Germany, the parcels stopped coming. The winter and early spring of 1945 was a horrific period marked by subzero temperatures and increasingly inadequate sustenance. On April 30, however, Russian troops liberated the camp. Many of the captives wanted to open the gates and take off, but Zemke ordered them to stay put and wait for aircraft to fly them out to Camp Lucky Strike, near Le Havre, France.

Gabby managed a detour to visit his old unit in England and then persuaded authorities to allow him to make a flight directly to New York. He hurried to Prairie du Chien, Wis., to reunite with his fiancée Kay Cochran, whom he had courted during his days in Hawaii. They made plans for a June wedding, and Gabby went home to Oil City for a hero’s welcome and a series of public appearances selling war bonds.

Like so many veterans after World War II, Gabby didn’t know what to do next. He wanted to complete his college degree as well as continue flying. He was assigned as a test pilot at Wright Field, Ohio, but also received a job offer from Douglas Aircraft Co. as a foreign sales representative. He accepted the offer in May 1946 and toured Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Chile attempting to sell the Douglas DC-6, a pressurized version of the DC-4. The trip was not very successful, though, and Gabby found the traveling life and especially being away from his wife, now with one child and another on the way, uncomfortable. He decided to see if he could rejoin the Army Air Forces, and was pleased to be accepted in April 1947 as a regular lieutenant colonel assigned to command the 55th Fighter Squadron, flying North American P-51s at Shaw Air Force Base, S.C. “It was great to get back in the cockpit again,” he said, “and it was great to be a squadron commander in peacetime conditions. The P-51 was a beautiful airplane with a lot of range. It was a joy to fly.”

Gabby still wanted to get that degree, however, so he requested assignment to a Russian language program at Columbia University for eventual duty as an air attaché. The program was canceled after one year, but Gabby persuaded the Air Force to allow him to continue, and he graduated in August 1949 with a B.A. in political science.

His next assignment took him to Selfridge Air Force Base in Michigan to command the 56th Fighter Group, which was then transitioning to the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star, the Air Force’s first operational jet fighter. It was a great leap forward for the prop plane pilots, but the early jets had their share of difficulties. The jet engines had a voracious appetite for fuel at low altitudes, and Gabby admitted to nearly running out of gas several times. The jets also suffered from slow engine acceleration, and in addition there was the possibility of a compressor stall if the throttle was advanced too quickly.

In June 1950, the peacetime routine changed drastically for American fighter pilots when Communist North Korean forces invaded South Korea. The 56th exchanged its P-80s for North American F-86 Sabrejets, and Gabby was promoted to full colonel in March 1950, then transferred to the 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing (FIW), based in Japan with units in Korea. He embarked on his second combat career as the deputy wing commander, and could fly with any squadron he chose to learn about tactics and techniques in a new kind of war.

On June 17, 1951, Gabby took off with some trepidation on his first Korean War mission. “I searched the deep blue sky for signs of enemy fighters and began to wonder if I still had what it took to fly combat,” he recalled. “I was thirty-two years old now, and my eyesight might not be as sharp as it was in Europe. Had my reflexes slowed? Would I still have the old fire in my belly that made me want to climb up their tails before opening fire? Only time would tell.”

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