LONG-LOST PURPLE HEART MEDAL RETURNS TO FAMILY

There are plenty of battlefield relics inside the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 6859 on Forest Avenue. In the lounge, behind a couple tables, a lighted display case shows off combat-captured bayonets. A Nazi flag and a Japanese sword sit silent, behind glass, in a trophy case near the seldom-used front door. Someone recently donated a foot-thick scrapbook with World War II-era newspaper clippings pasted, edge-to-edge, on both sides of each yellowed page.

Looking through some of these wartime artifacts in 2014, Post Commander Joel Demers stumbled on a mystery that would take six years to unravel. In seeing it through, Demers reunited a long-lost Purple Heart with a family that had spent decades searching for the medal. He also helped that family honor and remember a man they knew was a hero -- and still grieved for -- but never knew.

His name was Royce Gibson and he was one of the 156,000 D-Day soldiers who stormed the beaches at Normandy, France, starting the Allied liberation of Europe on June 6, 1944. Gibson died three days later, during a bayonet charge near the town of St. Mere Eglise.

While giving the last full measure of devotion to the cause of freedom that foggy morning, Gibson earned the Purple Heart. Over the next 70-odd years, the medal vanished, was found and was lost again, before finally making its way back home.

The story of how Gibson's medal ended up in a Portland VFW hall lounge is an unlikely one. It's so random and coincidence-laden, some involved think there must have been a higher power at work. While that cannot be proven, the verifiable facts make for a yarn worth spinning.

Gibson's brother Archibald, a captain in the tank corps, survived WWII. Sometime after the war, he moved to York Harbor. It's believed he brought Gibson's papers and Purple Heart with him. Archibald died in 1980, with no heirs, and the medal vanished for 20 years.

In 2000, York Harbor restaurateur and designer Denise Rubin found it at an auction preview in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Rubin had gone to the affair looking for antique decor for her eatery, On the Marsh.

"There was this cardboard box. I walked over and rifled through it," she said, "and there was this Purple Heart."

As Rubin held it in her hand, her mind turned to her father, a WWII veteran, now buried in Arlington National Cemetery. He'd earned his own Purple Heart, fighting in Italy. Rubin knew how much the medal meant to her family and her heart broke. She imagined the orphaned laurel ending up on a flea market table -- or worse. Rubin knew she had to have it, to save it. Winning the medal turned out to be easy.

"Nobody wanted it. I bought the whole box for two dollars," Rubin said. "I just welled up and cried. I thought there was a whole story, somewhere. Who was he? But I had no way to get it to his family."

She checked with veterans organizations all over southern Maine and seacoast New Hampshire. Nobody had ever heard of Gibson. At a dead end in 2003, Rubin donated Gibson's Purple Heart to a war medal display at the Dover, New Hampshire, VFW hall.

That post closed in 2006. Again, the medal disappeared. How it showed up, eight years later, in Portland is unknown.

But it did -- and Demers eventually found Gibson's family through the website Find a Grave.

For decades, Drag has searched for any information he could find about Gibson. In 2005 he visited Utah Beach in France, walking the sand where Gibson fought in 1944. Later, while watching the 2010 WWII documentary "Mother of Normandy: The Story of Simone Renaud," Drag caught a glimpse of Gibson's name clearly painted on a graveyard cross in a vintage photograph taken in France.

But what he really wanted to find was the Purple Heart. Drag knew it was out there and flipped over countless medals at memorabilia shows, looking for Gibson's name. Drag trolled online auction sites, too, but never found anything.

Now he has it and Rubin -- who found the medal 20 years ago -- doesn't think it found its way to baby Royce by chance alone.

"I feel like we've completed the cycle," she said. "There was definitely a force at work here. It was meant to get back."

To read the complete article, see:
After 76 Years, a D-Day Hero's Long-Lost Purple Heart Returns to His Family (https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/09/19/after-76-years-d-day-heros-long-lost-purple-heart-returns-his-family.html)

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