This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Arts & Entertainment

The Fuller Brothers in World War II: Part 2

Mr. And Mrs. Arthur L. Fuller, of East Windsor, had plenty to worry about during World War II. All six of their sons were in the armed forces at the same time, with all but the youngest on active duty during the war.

After our , here is the story of the remaining four Fuller brothers who served in WWII: 

Laurence and David Fuller, both lieutenants in the US Army, served in Europe during the war and engaged in vastly different activities; nevertheless, they did cross paths on at least two occasions in Normandy, shortly following the June 6th invasion. Lt. Laurence Fuller attended OCS in Virginia for the Army, after getting a degree in chemical engineering from Yale. He originally wanted to be a Navy flyer but failed the physical due to scarring left from a severe infection that he had acquired playing basketball for the Peddie School in New Jersey. After completing OCS, Laurence Fuller was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant and assigned to the 359th Engineering Regiment of the army. It was a unit whose main task in the war was to lay down 6-inch metal pipelines to supply the army with gas, diesel, and aviation fuel – the lifeblood of mechanized warfare.

The 359th came ashore at Omaha Beach three days after the initial D-Day invasion of June 6, 1944. Offshore, they disembarked at 6:15 p.m. from the Liberty ship Empire Mace, which had to thread its way around the battleships Nevadaand Texas, which were still hurling 16 inch shells inland against the Nazis. First, they established a kind of giant filling station by creating a minor pipeline system from Huppain to Etreham and Balloy. Petroleum could be conveniently stored at the Etreham tank farm. Meanwhile, the 359th would come under periodic attack from the remnants of the Luftwaffe.  Then they proceeded west and north up the Cotentin Peninsula to the major French port of Cherbourg—still in German possession. Finally, Cherboug fell on June 27, and work on the major pipeline from there began in earnest. While in Cherbourg, men from the 359th discovered a huge, slanting concrete ramp—a launching pad for the new, improved Nazi V2 rocket that was raining death and destruction on England. Winston Churchill himself paid the 359th a secret visit after learning of this discovery.

Find out what's happening in Mansfield-Storrswith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Within one month, enough pipeline had been assembled to make the system operational. Now a huge tanker filled with gasoline could pull right into the Cherbourg Harbor and pump out its contents into a pipeline system that would immediately take the fuel inland for planes, tanks, jeeps, and trucks. It was said that at no time during the Normandy invasion was the Army delayed for lack of fuel. The 359th did their job very well. Their biggest challenge was keeping up with General George Patton’s rapidly moving 3rd Army. Patton, known for his aggressive tactics and lightning strikes never had to have his tanks wait for fuel, thanks to the 359th—the silent heroes behind the 3rdArmy’s legendary success. At times the 359th laid down as much as 50 miles of pipeline a day—sometimes working 20-hour days. By April 3rd, the unit approached the German town of Gotha, where they encountered an unforgettable sight: Jewish refugees from the concentration camp named Ohrduf—hundreds of walking corpses—and over 6,000 found executed.

One of the units that the 359th undoubtedly supplied with fuel was the 493rd fighter squadron of the 9th Air Force—Lt. David Fuller’s P-47 unit. The 493rd was located at a temporarily constructed airfield (called ALG-4) near Omaha Beach from June 18, 1944, to September 5, 1944. In fact, while based in England, his unit flew cover for the D-Day invasion at Omaha Beach. He once told me that their fighter pilots were told to shoot anything that moved in their strafing runs on D-Day. A Suffield Academy graduate, Lt. Fuller spent two years at the University of Connecticut before the war broke out. He flew 92 combat missions in his P-47 named “Mrs. Mouse” (see photo). On one mission he and his wingman attacked a German supply train and destroyed it, despite coming under extremely heavy anti-aircraft and small arms fire. On the way back to base, they received a distress call from a Major, who was leading an infantry unit on the ground. Getting permission to break off to help the infantry unit, Lt. Fuller flew low to check out the situation. A German tank had the Americans pinned down. Circling back around, Lt. Fuller attacked the tank under heavy fire with his one remaining fuselage bomb and took it out, saving perhaps over 100 lives. For this action, he received the Distinguished Flying Cross. His DFC citation read:

Find out what's happening in Mansfield-Storrswith free, real-time updates from Patch.

David P.Fuller, 0810645, 1st Lieutenant, Warehouse Point, Connecticut. For extraordinary achievement while participating in aerial flight in the European theater of Operation as a Thunderbolt pilot. While leading a flight in an armed Recon. Mission against enemy rail transportation inside German lines in the vicinity of Euskirched, Germany, on 27 September 1944, Lt. Fuller destroyed two trains and one enemy tank, attacking in the face of intense flak and small arms fire. By his outstanding leadership, skill, and disregard for his own personal safety, Lt. Fuller has reflected great credit and honor to himself and to the armed forces of the United States.

The major got his tail numbers and brought him a German motorcycle within two days as a thank-you gift. The Free French stole it from him within five days.

Lt. David P. Fuller was also awarded the Air Medal with two silver and four bronze oak leaf clusters, the European Theater of Operations Medal with four bronze stars and two gold bars. He was probably the most decorated fighter pilot from Connecticut during the war. Five years ago, I visited the 493rd monument near Omaha Beach. It stands next to the makeshift airfield used by his unit (See photo). It has an image of a P-47 engraved on it; that engraved P-47 appropriately bears the name “Mrs. Mouse”—the plane of a talented fighter pilot named David Fuller.

A world away in the Pacific Ocean on the island of Guam, two other Fuller brothers served together in the 20th Air Force: Lieutenant Walter T. Fuller and his kid brother, Sgt. Erwin E. Fuller. Like his brothers Roger and Laurence, Walter was also a graduate of the Peddie School in New Jersey and later got a degree in accounting at Bentley College. He became a commissioned officer in the Army Air Force. At first he was a flight engineer for a B-29 Superfortress. In Guam he was in charge of ground radar to protect the B-29 squadrons there. After the war, Walter briefly got a job with the Ford Motor Company in Detroit before re-joining the Air Force and becoming part of the nation’s Strategic Air Command Defense (SAC). He retired as an Air Force officer and eventually moved to Missouri, where he died about three years ago.

A graduate of the Wilbraham Academy, Staff Sgt. Erwin E. Fuller was a tail gunner on a B-29 in the 331st Bomber Wing of the 20th Air Force. His unit flew bombing missions over Japan. (Another tail gunner based on Guam with the 20th AF was Charles Bronson—later the famous “bad-guy” movie star of Hollywood.) Prior to going to Guam, Erwin Fuller was a gunnery instructor for the Army Air Force in Texas. Often grounded at Guam because of the “Sole Survivor Rule” adopted by the armed forces after the death of the five Sullivan brothers at Guadalcanal, Erwin built himself a darkroom for developing photos. His buddies would bring back film with photos taken during bombing missions. When the temperature permitted, Sgt. Fuller would develop these photos. Some of them are remarkable (see photo gallery above). One shows an in-flight shot from the tail gunner’s position looking across a formation of B-29s passing by Mt. Fuji. Another shows a shot of a B-29 flying low over a POW camp in Japan. You can see English words painted on the roof, as well as the shadow of the B-29 on the ground. I asked the sole-surviving Fuller brother what they dropped to those POWs. He said, “We dropped gumdrops by parachute—candy.” You can just imagine how grateful those guys were.

My Uncle Erwin now lives in southern Vermont after a long career as an inspector for the Aetna. Smart, talented, and resourceful, I have always thought there was nothing he couldn’t do.

Five Sullivan brothers from Waterloo, Iowa, also went off to war. They wanted to avenge the death of their sister’s fiancée, who was killed in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  All five of the Sullivan brothers were killed when their ship was torpedoed near Guadalcanal.  All five of Alben and Gunda Borgstrom’s sons of Thatcher, Utah, went off to war. Four of their five sons were killed within a six-month period during 1944; the fifth was discharged to spare the family further loss. Mr. and Mrs. Arthur L. Fuller of the Warehouse Point section of East Windsor also sent five of their sons off to war. They must have had many anxious moments of concern about their boys, particularly for Roger, who miraculously survived a torpedo attack on his ship, and for David, who flew 92 combat missions and was regularly getting shot at. Unlike the Sullivan and Borgstrom families, all five of the Fuller boys—a ship’s doctor, an engineer, a radar officer, a fighter pilot, and a B-29 tail gunner-- survived the war and had a chance to pursue their careers and to raise their families. Their families should feel blessed.

Note, Sources, and Links:

1. Advance Landing Ground 4 (Alg-4)—Dave Fuller’s airfield in Normandy—is located in Deux Jumeaux in Normandy.The airfield was 3,600 feet long and 110 feet wide and was constructed using Sommerfeldt wire-mesh. I found it with great difficulty. It is located inland about two to three miles from the west end of Omaha Beach—not too far from the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc made famous by the 2nd Ranger Battalion. It is now a cornfield. Thirty ALGs were built in Normandy.

2. One of 15 children of Lithuanian immigrants, Charles Bronson (real last name Buchinsky) from the Pittsburgh area was a tail gunner on a B-29 with the 39th bombardment group in Guam. He was wounded on a mission to Japan and was awarded the Purple Heart.

3.  The best source of information about the 359th Engineering Regiment is entitled History of the 359th Engineers; it was published in Brussels in 1945 and has 265 pages with many photos. It has never been reprinted and is quite difficult to find.       

4. The best general history of the 9th Air Force is The 9th Air Force in World War II  by K. Rust; the best edition is the 2nd revised from the early 1970s. There is a good photo of Dave Fuller’s P-47D on p.202.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?