08/20/2026
FOLLOW ME
The Story of Nick Gib
By Bob Morabito
The players stood shoulder to shoulder in the crowded Lincoln High School huddle. Their mud-stained jerseys rising and falling as they tried to catch their breath. The smell of dirt, lime, and mown grass permeated the air.
Lincoln trailed Aliquippa late in the game. The ball rested near the goal line, but the Quips defense had stopped two straight attempts. One final chance remained.
Quarterback Tommy Jones called the play sent in by Coach Dutch Croft “23 Right, Guard Around.” Left halfback, Frank Kolch was to run to the right behind Nick Gib, the pulling left guard.
Kolch looked toward the line. The favored Aliquippa squad was bigger, and they had been breaking through all afternoon.
Nick leaned toward Frank and looked him directly in the eye.
“Don’t look for a hole,” he said. “Just follow me.”
Jones finished the call, “On 2,” and the Wolverines clapped in unison to break the huddle. As they came to the line, Nick lowered himself into his stance. His job was to clear the way for someone else.
The ball was snapped. Nick moved quickly to his right, low and fast. A Quip defender stepped into the gap, but Nick struck him squarely and drove him to the side. Kolch followed, slipped through the opening and crossed the goal line.
The Ellwood City crowd erupted.
Nick rose slowly from the mud. Kolch returned and slapped him on the back.
“You said there’d be a hole.”
Nick grinned.
“I told you to follow me.”
A World at War
Nick Gib graduated from Lincoln High School with the Class of 1938. Like thousands of other young Americans, he entered a world that was rapidly moving toward war.
He became Private Nick Gib, Army service number 33039582, and served with the 701st Ordnance Company (Aviation), associated with the 19th Bombardment Group in the Philippines.
The work of an aviation ordnance soldier was demanding and largely unseen. Bombs, ammunition, and weapons had to be inspected, moved, maintained, and prepared. Aircraft depended upon men on the ground long before pilots climbed into their cockpits. It was work suited to a former football guard—the man in the middle, doing the hard labor that allowed others to carry the mission forward.
On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Almost simultaneously, Japanese forces struck American positions across the Pacific. In the Philippines, American and Filipino forces were pushed into a desperate defense.
The details of Nick’s movements during those months remain incomplete. Records establish his unit and his eventual captivity, but they do not tell us precisely where he was captured. There is no official record of his being on the Bataan Death March, but a September 3, 1985 article in the Ellwood City Ledger states that he was. What is certain is that during the fall of the Philippines, Nick Gib became a prisoner of the Japanese.
He was initially reported as “Missing in Action.” The family was comforted to learn from the Red Cross on June 1, 1942 that Nick was at least alive in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp in the Philippines.
But the Japanese prison system was designed to break men. Food was scarce. Disease spread rapidly. Medicine was nearly nonexistent. Prisoners weakened under forced labor, tropical heat and brutal discipline. Men who had once been strong enough to play football or load bombs became thin, feverish, and exhausted.
Records show that Nick was eventually held at the Davao Penal Colony on Mindanao. His name appears on a prisoner roster dated April 15, 1944. By then, he had survived nearly two years of captivity.
Tenacity under such conditions did not always appear in dramatic acts. Sometimes it meant rising when every muscle resisted. It meant swallowing a handful of rice and pretending it was enough. It meant helping another prisoner stand during roll call because a man who fell might never be allowed to rise again.
We do not know the words Nick spoke at Davao. But perhaps the qualities he had shown as a young guard for Lincoln High School remained with him. Perhaps when another prisoner stumbled, Nick reached beneath his arm. Perhaps he offered the same assurance he may have once given a nervous Frank Kolch in a Wolverine huddle:
“Follow me. We will get through this together.”
By 1944, as American forces were returning to the Philippines, the Japanese began moving prisoners away from the advancing American armies. Nick and hundreds of other Americans were loaded aboard the Shinyo Maru, one of the vessels later known as “hell ships.” Prisoners were packed tightly into dark cargo holds, sometimes for weeks, with little ventilation, almost no sanitation, and severely inadequate food and
water. Dysentery, dehydration, suffocation, disease, beatings, and heat exhaustion killed many during the voyages. Survivors called the ships “floating dungeons.”
The ship carried no internationally recognized marking to indicate that Allied prisoners were aboard.
On September 7, 1944, the American submarine, USS Paddle encountered the Shinyo Maru off Mindanao. Its crew had no way of knowing that Americans were imprisoned inside. The submarine fired.
Torpedoes struck the Japanese ship. Some of the American prisoners escaped the sinking vessel. Japanese guards fired upon prisoners in the water and upon those attempting to leave the ship. Filipino civilians and guerrillas later helped the small number who survived.
Nick Gib was not among them.
He died on September 7, 1944, at the age of twenty-six. His body was never recovered. His name is inscribed on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery.
There is no grave for his family to visit in Ellwood City. No flag-draped casket came home. There was only an official notice that a son, brother, classmate, and teammate would never return, having vanished into a distant sea.
Yet heroism is not measured only by the manner of a man’s death. It is also measured by what he endures before it.
Nick Gib endured the collapse of American defenses in the Philippines. He endured capture, hunger, disease, and years of imprisonment. He remained alive through circumstances that killed thousands of others. Whatever private acts of courage or kindness he performed were not recorded. Most such acts never are.
But few men could endure more than two years in a prison camp without courage and perseverance. He does not rise morning after morning without tenacity. And he does not remain part of a suffering community of prisoners without, at some point, helping another man bear his burden.
America’s 250-year history is often told through presidents, generals, and great battles. But the country was mostly defended by young men from towns like Ellwood City—men whose names seldom appeared beyond the local newspaper, men who worked in the middle of the line and absorbed the first hit.
Nick Gib had once been a guard. A guard does not carry the ball. He clears the path. He does not ask whether the man behind him will remember the block. He plants his feet, lowers his shoulders and moves forward because others are depending upon him.
Years after the cheering stopped, Nick faced an enemy far more terrible than any he had encountered on the Lincoln High School football field. He could not know whether he would survive. He could not see the goal line. But for nearly three years, he continued forward.
Today, as America marks 250 years of independence, Nick Gib’s story reminds us that freedom has often depended upon men and women whose greatest victories were acts of perseverance unseen by the world.
The boy from Lincoln High School never came home.
But his example did.
Confident in the huddle; steadfast in captivity; unbroken through years of hardship. A young man prepared the opening to freedom before him and said:
“Follow me.”
Author’s note: The football scene, dialogue, and details of Nick’s conduct as a prisoner are literary reconstructions. The documented framework includes his Lincoln High School background, Ellwood City vs. Aliquippa on Oct 30, 1937 (although Aliquippa defeated the Blue and White by a score of 9 to 7). Private Gib’s service with the 701st Ordnance Company (Aviation), captivity at Davao, and death aboard the Shinyo Maru.
America 250 Series
This article is part of a newsletter series exploring the people and moments that shaped our nation as we approach our dinner on September 14th celebrating America’s 250th anniversary. The dinner at the Connoquenessing Country club is $40.00 per plate and open to the public. Call the Historical Society at 724-752-2021 for information and reservations by September 1st.
