Gladys Knight & the Pips cousin, Edward Patten and a non-relative, Langston George in 1959. This lineup produced the group's first hit single, "Every Beat of My Heart". After the single was released on three different labels, they changed their name to "Gladys Knight & the Pips" in 1961. Langston George left the same year and Gladys Knight left in 1962 to start a family with musician Jimmy Newman. Knight rejoined in 1964 and this lineup continued until the group's disbandment in 1989. The group reached commercial success after signing with Motown Records in 1966. After a year and a half, the group recorded the
Battle of the Pips no hits. Radar was still a new and unreliable technology at that time, and weather conditions around the Aleutians were characteristically bad, with the very poor visibility normal for the area. No Japanese warships were actually within . Author Brian Garfield surmises, based on analysis by modern Aleutian fishing-boat captains, that the pips were rafts of sooty or short-tailed shearwaters, species of migratory petrel that pass through the Aleutians in July every year. Battle of the Pips The Battle of the Pips is the name given to an incident on 27 July 1943, part of the Aleutian campaign of World