Loring Fullerton was born May 24, 1908, in Huntington, New York, the
son of well-known Long Islanders Hal B. and Edith Loring Fullerton.
He earned a B.A. degree in landscape design at the Michigan State
University School of Forestry. In the early 1930s, he moved to
Middle Island where he lived with the family of his sister and
brother-in-law, Eleanor and Donald Ferguson. The Fergusons had a
large fruit farm, Rainbow Ranch, on Middle Country Road. Fullerton
established a small nursery on a section of the farm, and Rainbow
Nursery was just beginning to thrive when the U. S. entered World
War II. He enlisted in the Navy on February 13, 1942, two months
after Pearl Harbor, and was married the following day to Dorothy
Betsch of Union City, NJ. With no idea when or if he would return to
Middle Island, he sold all his nursery stock to nurseryman Ernest
Whitbeck from Patchogue.
He
spent four months at the Naval Training Station at Newport, Rhode
Island and was then sent to the RCA Radio School in New York for
three months. In September 1942, he was sent to the Atlantic Fleet
School at Norfolk, Virginia. At Norfolk, he was among the first U.S.
servicemen to be trained in radar, which was then a new technology.
He says in a letter, “Radar is a mystery and we are a new class of
25. They just got the equipment working. It’s a tough course about
which I know little and will tell less, except that it is very, very
bad news for the Germans and Japanese.” In January 1943, he was sent
to Miami, Florida, where he attended Submarine Chasing School.
He
was assigned to the Amphibious Force as a Radioman 3rd
Class in the Fourth Naval Beach Battalion. In April 1943, the unit
was sent to Fedalla Bay near Casablanca in French Morocco. While in
Africa, Fullerton wrote that he was pleasantly surprised to see a
load of potatoes in bags marked “Long Island Potatoes, Riverhead.”
The unit first saw combat as part of the amphibious landing forces
in the invasion of Gela in Sicily. He said of Gela, “It is inhabited
by people who just came back from Detroit, Brooklyn or Newark, or
who have a cousin named Joe living in Flushing.” He said that the
people of Sicily did not like Mussolini, and they hated the Germans.
The next combat operation for the Fourth Beach Battalion was the
invasion of the Italian mainland near Salerno. They landed in the
second wave at Blue Beach, near Agropoli. Unknown to the invading
force, there were German tanks behind the dunes, but the tanks did
not fire a shot until four waves of American troops had landed. Then
with heavy fire from the tanks, as well as mortar, artillery and
machine gun fire on both sides, the Germans kept the men pinned down
in foxholes on the beach, and prevented further waves from landing.
The ships moved farther up the coast before sending more troops
ashore. For more than nine hours, the unit was under heavy fire from
all directions except seaward. They were unable to raise a radio
antenna, because it immediately became a target of intense fire. The
ships returned to the area, and not having received any
communication from the men on the beach, assumed that they had been
killed or captured by the Germans, and began shelling the entire
area, including the beach. This left the unit trapped in crossfire
between the Allied destroyers and the German tanks. Finally, one of
the radiomen found a sheltered spot where he could semaphore to the
ships, telling them to stop shelling the beach because the American
troops were still there. Meanwhile, Fullerton was thrown against a
stone wall by a shell blast and injured his neck. The men later
found out that everyone in their unit had been officially declared
missing in action, and articles to that effect were printed in many
of their hometown newspapers. Fullerton was the subject of one of
the newspaper articles but, fortunately, he had been able to write
to his wife before it was printed. The Fourth Beach Battalion later
received a unit commendation for “gallantry and bravery under fire”
at both Gela and Salerno.
After two weeks at Salerno, the unit was withdrawn to North Africa.
Fullerton was promoted to Radioman 2nd Class and was then
sent back to the States for officer training. After receiving his
commission as a Lieutenant (j.g.), he was sent to communications
school at Harvard for four months of further training. He was then
shipped to Guam in the Pacific Theater as a Top Secret
Communications Officer. He handled communications among the highest
ranking officers, including General MacArthur, Admiral Halsey and
Admiral Nimitz. He was, of course, unable to tell his family
anything about his work, but he said in a letter, “It is
interesting, a little like gazing into a crystal ball and seeing
things to come.”
While in the Pacific, Fullerton’s old neck injury from Salerno
became aggravated. He was treated at the Guam Fleet Hospital and the
Naval Hospital at St. Albans, New York, and eventually received a
medical discharge. Fullerton was awarded an American Theatre
Campaign Ribbon, European-African-Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Ribbon
with 2 Bronze Stars, and the World War II Victory Medal.
Fullerton achieved the rank of Lieutenant before he was discharged
on June 1, 1947. After his discharge, he and Dorothy moved to
Somerville, New Jersey, where he worked as a landscape architect
until his death in 1973.
Written by,
Mrs. Anne Nauman
August, 2006