[3] The son of a Royal Flying Corps pilot,[4][5][6] Hibbert decided to enter the British Army while he was in Germany working as a vineyard apprentice for his family's wine business.
[1][5][7] Evacuated from Dunkirk on the tugboat "Sun X", Hibbert was mentioned in dispatches that described his meritorious actions in the face of the enemy and were sent to the high command.
[1][5] While leading a remnant group in withdrawal from the bridge, toward nearby Oosterbeek, where the rest of the Division was still fighting,[11] Hibbert was captured by the Germans.
[3][11] Most British and Polish troops who had not been killed, captured or wounded in the attempt to take Arnhem were successfully withdrawn from the area in Operation Berlin.
[1][11] Shortly after the men crossed the Rhine, under cover of darkness, and were met by E Company, 2nd Battalion of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division,that had been sent to retrieve them, Hibbert's leg was broken, when a jeep on whose bonnet he was riding was in a collision.
"[11] Having been all but destroyed in Operation Market Garden, the 1st Airborne Division saw no action in the war's remainder, but Hibbert's own participation in the conflict continued.
[13] Swedish intelligence reports that the Red Army would violate the Yalta Agreement and advance from Germany to Denmark had prompted Operation Eclipse.
[13] By establishing Allied control of Kiel and of the German scientific bases between that city and the Danish border, Hibbert's force forestalled such a Soviet move.
[7] His advance to Kiel had required him to go north of Bad Segeberg in apparent violation of the surrender terms that had been agreed at Lüneburg Heath.
[12] Hibbert was absolved of blame the next day by his Corps Commander and released, but the arrest meant that his "rather frustrating military career", as he himself later put it, had ended with "a certain artistic symmetry.
[2] Finding "the cut and thrust of commercial life", as he put it, "as exciting as war with no prisoners taken,"[7] he turned the firm around and rose to be its managing director.
When they bought Trebah, Cornwall, they dreamt of "the quiet pleasures of retirement, mornings spent drinking gin on the terrace and summer afternoons sailing and fishing from the beach".
[18] What began as a three-year commitment on their part to restore the garden became a decades-long open-ended undertaking that gave them what Hibbert called the happiest years of their lives.
[2][5] In 2009, in recognition of the heroism of the Dutch who sheltered and aided members of the 1st Airborne Division after the Battle of Arnhem, Hibbert donated his Military Cross to the Hartenstein Museum, in Oosterbeek.