Gallet Commander - 1940s - Black Telemeter Ring - Navigator's Chronograph - Excelsior Park 42

James Hoel was shot down over occupied Holland on the first mission he ever flew. It was the seventeenth of May, 1943, and the B-26 Bomber he was navigating came down into the river Maas. He swam clear of the wreck and reached the bank, where he was taken prisoner. On his wrist when the water closed over the bomber was a Gallet Commander, a chronograph his employer had given him before he left for the war, and it went down with everything else. What followed was two years at Stalag Luft III, the camp the world would come to know from The Great Escape, where he worked the tunnels, hiding the pale sand the diggers brought up by scattering it across the yard a handful at a time. When the escape came, seventy-six men went out under the wire. Three reached freedom. Fifty of those the Germans recaptured were shot on Hitler's order. Hoel had stayed behind, and that was why he was still alive at the end, marched west through the last winter of the war and freed when it was over.

By every law of probability the watch would have been gone for good, lost in the bed of a Dutch river far from home. Fortunately Hoel had his name and Evanston address etched into the caseback. How it came up out of the river and across the sea to England, no one can say. Decades later it surfaced there, in a drawer, among the wartime keepsakes of Tiny Baxter's late mother. Baxter had it restored, found the engraving still legible, and traced it to the navigator who had worn it. In 2003, on the bank of the Maas, on the same water that had swallowed it sixty years before, he put the watch back into James Hoel's hands. It rests today in the National Watch and Clock Museum, a short walk from the pocket watch of George Washington.

The watch offered here is that same model, the Gallet Commander, and every scale on it was made to be read in a hurry and trusted with a life. The scale around the rim, marked Telemeter, turns sound into distance, reading the range to a gun from the gap between its flash and the report that follows. The red scale spiraling through the center reads speed, wound into a snail so that it can measure something slower than a mile a minute. The register at three runs to a full forty-five minutes, longer than any wrist chronograph before it, and the small seconds turn at nine. There is nothing on the dial for decoration. It is all instrument.

Open the caseback and the watch gives up its oddest secret. Nearly every chronograph ever built runs on a round movement, because a column wheel and its train need room to turn. This one does not. Excelsior Park shaped its caliber as an oval, the only oval chronograph movement ever made, and there is nothing else in watchmaking that looks like it. It is the Excelsior Park 42, the bridge signed Gallet, seventeen jewels and wound by hand, and every round Excelsior Park chronograph that came after it grew from this one.

What sets this watch apart is the ring at the outer edge of the dial. On most examples it is white, matched to the dial. On this one it is black, the rarer of the configurations, and where almost every Commander has lost its ring to wear, this one keeps its own, whole and legible. That ring is the heart of the watch, because the telemeter is the scale the whole instrument was built around. Within it the dial has settled into a warm patina, a soft yellow cream that deepens in the light. Gallet is signed beneath the twelve and Swiss above the six, and the hours are marked in bold black Arabic numerals. The hands are blued steel, the lozenge hour and minute hands carrying a soft cream lume that settles against the warmth of the dial, while a slender blued hand sweeps the chronograph seconds from the center.

The case is stainless steel with a snap back, stamped inside Acier Inoxydable and Staybrite and numbered 776587, the crown and two flat pushers down the right side. There are scratches from years of wear, and the dial shows spotting and wear across its face, heaviest up near the ten. The crystal is a recent replacement, clean and clear. It comes on a period-correct bracelet, though whether that bracelet began life with it I cannot say. It runs, and the chronograph runs with it. Its service history is unknown.

Hoel's own Commander sits behind glass in that museum, his name still in the back of it. This is not that watch. It is the same model he wore, with the black ring almost none of them kept. For anyone who knows the story, it is as close to that watch as they will ever come.

Terms: Please review all photos carefully as they are a part of the listing. This is a vintage timepiece. Accuracy, power reserve, and water resistance are not guaranteed. Vintage watches may require periodic service. Performance can vary with wear, temperature, and position. I am happy to service any unserviced watch listed on the site, please inquire about service charges when purchasing.

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