Mervin Delbert Galland

Mervin was born in Eveleth, Minnesota to Roy and Ida (Mitchell) Galland on 20 March 1921. He was their first child, but not the eldest in the family; Ida, a widow, had a nine-year-old son named Guy from her previous marriage to Walter McLaughlin. Although both Roy and Ida were local to Polk County, Minnesota, they raised their family in Eveleth for many years; Roy worked for the town’s power company, while Ida abandoned her self-built millinery in Mentor for the role of a housewife. She would raise not only Guy and Mervin, but also Grace and Etta, before her untimely death in 1936.

The Gallands returned to Polk County not long before Ida passed away. Guy McLaughlin, who had now lost both biological parents and had never adopted the Galland surname, gave up rural life to become a cabbie in Minneapolis. The young Galland girls, Grace and Etta, went to live with their aunt and uncle Mitchell. Roy and Mervin stuck together and wound up working on a farm in Grove Park. Roy remarried in 1937; two years later, Mrs. Mae Galland gave birth to little Dorothy Jean, adding to Mervin’s network of half-siblings.

By 1940, Mervin Galland was nineteen years old. Like many young men of his time, he found work with the Civilian Conservation Corps, and was employed by the Rabideau Camp in the Chippewa National Forest. Mervin only had a year of high school to his credit, but that didn’t matter – if he needed a forestry expert’s advice, he had only to ask his father. In the Great War, PFC Roy Galland served with a forestry company in the Army’s 20th Engineers.

The combination of quasi-military life in “The C’s” and his father’s service might have influenced Mervin’s decision to join the Marine Corps shortly after Pearl Harbor. He enlisted in Minneapolis on 17 January 1942, and was shortly on his way to boot camp in San Diego. Interestingly, he gave his legal residence as Minneapolis – and his next of kin as his half-brother, Mr. Guy McLaughlin.

Private Galland completed his boot training at San Diego, and was initially assigned to Company D, First Battalion, 6th Marines for training with a heavy mortar or machine gun. In the summer of 1942, before heading overseas, Galland was transferred to Company A of the same battalion. His training did not go to waste, however; he was assigned to the company’s weapons platoon. For reasons no longer known, his buddies nicknamed him “Monk.”

Galland saw combat in the Guadalcanal campaign in January and Feburary 1943, and spent the months that followed in camp at New Zealand alternately training and going on liberty in Wellington. That October, he boarded a transport and sailed for combat once again – a very different kind of campaign than his experiences on Guadalcanal. His 2nd Marine Division was invading the tiny island of Betio in the Tarawa atoll, and anticipated being able to stroll ashore after a punishing naval bombardment. Galland’s regiment, in reserve, thought that they might miss out on the fighting altogether. This proved not to be the case, and the reserves were called upon to land in rubber boats on the evening of 21 November 1943.

The last day of Mervin Galland’s life was spent fighting a determined enemy in blistering hot equatorial weather, trading lives for an advance of a few hundred yards. That night, 1/6 dug in and prepared to resist any counterattacks that might come their way. No less than three hit their lines, climaxing in an all-out attack by several hundred Japanese troops in the early morning of the last day of the battle. At some point during one of these attacks, PFC Galland was shot in the chest and killed. His official date of death was recorded as 22 November 1943.

“Monk” was buried in a long trench alongside some thirty other Marines later that day. The temporary markers put up by 1/6 did not last long; construction of a Navy base ultimately destroyed the scrap wood crosses, and the location of the grave was lost. It would remain undiscovered until 2019, when a History Flight expedition uncovered “Row D” and brought the remains back to the United States for laboratory analysis.

Mervin Galland was identified on 11 May 2020.

CENOTAPHS
Honolulu Memorial, Tablets of the Missing

FINAL BURIAL
Rosehill Cemetery, Mentor, MN