Proud to serve

MOSES LAKE — Sometimes memory fades, sometimes things that happened a long time ago get overlaid with new experiences. Sometimes the memories remain, though.

Geb Galle turned 102 years old in mid-July, and he still remembers that Sunday morning, even though a lot of things happened afterward.

Galle is a North Dakota boy who joined the U.S. Navy in 1939, something that offered reasonable prospects for young men in a rocky economy. He got a pretty good billet, too - by 1941 he was on the USS Nevada. Battleships like Nevada were thought to be the ultimate naval weapons at the time.

So it was probably inevitable that the battleships were prime targets when the Japanese Navy struck Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Galle was belowdecks, he remembered, waiting for the launch that took crew members to church. He first learned of the attack from some shipmates, who came running in, saying something was going on — strange planes and explosions in the harbor.

Galle looked out the porthole, he said, and saw a couple of unfamiliar planes but couldn’t see their insignia. What was happening became clear all too soon.

“She got a torpedo,” he said.

Nevada was at the end of the line of battleships, known as Battleship Row. She was the only one in a condition to be cast off, and her officers and crew did not intend to sit there.

She almost made it out of the harbor. But she was badly damaged and ordered to beach herself near the entrance. She reluctantly complied.

The spot where the Nevada ran aground was renamed for her at the 75th-anniversary commemoration of the attack. Galle, as one of her last living crew members, placed the memorial plaque on the rocks.

His daughter, Lynda Palmer, said he is one of the last, and possibly the last, survivors of the Nevada from that day.

Galle signed up for the standard hitch, but the war — well, it changed things. Galle was in “for the duration,” as the saying went. He spent the entire war in the Pacific Theater.

“I was in almost every action of the whole Pacific War,” he said.

Reassigned to the cruiser Northampton, he saw the B-25s of General Jimmy Doolittle’s force take off from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet on their famous raid of Tokyo. Throughout the Northampton’s career as an escort, he saw planes that didn’t quite make it airborne, he said, and ended up in the water. Other pilots whose planes were too damaged or didn’t have enough fuel to land had to ditch alongside the carriers.

He was on the Northampton when it went down the fierce battles off Guadalcanal. As the battle raged and the Northampton had been hit, he was ordered to close the hatch behind four sailors who would’ve been trapped when the ship started to sink. When the officer who gave the order left, Galle let the men out, he recalled in an earlier interview. It was a risk; he could’ve been court-martialed, he said, maybe even executed for disobeying an order.

He never knew what happened to the four men, but was sure they survived, he said.

When peace was declared he went home to North Dakota. In 1947 he met a girl named Jean at a bowling alley, who wasn’t impressed when this guy came up and tried to tell her how to bowl.

“It just blossomed from there,” he said.

They married and had five children.

With his technical background, Galle eventually went to work for the U.S. Air Force, which led to a job at Bonneville Dam in the Columbia River Gorge.

“He liked to work on things,” his son Ben Galle recalled.

He and Jean lived in Stevenson after he retired, and he moved to Moses Lake to live with his daughter. He’s now a resident of Monroe House in Moses Lake.

“There are only a few of us left,” Galle said of the men he served with.

“I was proud of the service I was able to give,” he said.

Cheryl Schweizer may be reached at cschweizer@columbiabasinherald.com.