Charles L. Fulton

WWII infantryman was shot while fighting in France.

By Jeff Werner, BucksLocalNews.com


“We had to beat the Germans,” said World War II veteran Charles L. Fulton of Newtown. “Hitler had to go – no question about it.”

For two months, Fulton fought the German war machine in the mountains of Eastern France as a member of the 103rd infantry division.

“You never knew, from one minute to the next, if you’re going to have a bullet go through your head,” said Fulton. “My whole service life was full of pure unadulterated luck.”

The mountains of France were a world away from his home in St. Paul, Minn., where he spent his childhood during the 1920s and 1930s.

Fulton was born in Minneapolis, Minn., and grew up in St. Paul. He graduated from high school in Jan. 1943 when he was still 17. When he turned 18 that April he received his draft notice in the mail.

“I had tried to enlist in the Marines with one of my friends. That was the height of World War II. Very patriotic. Everybody wanted to do their part. I was looking forward to it,” he said.

The Marines, however, wouldn’t take him because he was nearsighted in his left eye. “It’s a good thing because my friend was killed in Tarawa and I’m sure I would have been killed along with him.”

Instead, he found himself in the Army. “They took me as limited service, sending me to basic training as a medic. I never understood why medics didn’t have to have good eye sight,” he said.
His status was soon changed from limited to general service.

“I wound up with the 103rd infantry division as a PFC rifleman and took extensive combat infantry training,” he said.

The division landed in Marseilles, France, in October 1944.

“Ironies of all ironies, the 103rd was committed to combat in the Vosges Mountains on Nov. 11, 1944. Twenty-six years after the Armistice was signed to stop World War I, I was in the mountains of France committed to combat, fighting the self-same Germans in the self-same country. I never got over that irony.”

Their objective was to wipe out the Germans in the Vosges Mountains, which forms the rugged border between Germany and France.

On Jan. 11, 1945, exactly two months after landing in France, he was wounded in action along the German border as he fled machine gun fire.

“We went into a defensive position near Forbach. There was snow and unbelievably cold weather. We were told to start an attack to push the Germans back into Germany. I was second scout that time. Another buddy of mine was in front of me and we were going along a hillside and a sniper put a bullet to his helmet. I thought he was dead and I called the medics to get him out of there. Three of us started down a hillside to see if we could outflank the sniper when a German machine gun opened up on us.”

Bullets sliced through the men on either side of him, killing both where they stood.

“How they missed me, I don’t know,” he said. “I dove behind a pine tree and I can still see it. I was sitting there trying to edge out there and machine gun bullets were digging up the ground around me. A bullet hit my helmet and knocked it off. The tree starts to splinter in front of me. My rifle gets knocked out of my hand. And I decided I better get out of there.

“I stood up and took one step and a baseball smashes me in the side and the next thing I know I’m laying down and starring up at the blue sky,” he said. “I thought I was dead. I absolutely couldn’t feel anything on my left side, but I put my hand over there and my arm was there. It was full of blood, of course. I jumped up, and again by miracle upon miracle, I ran up the hill and the machine gun chased me every inch of the way. I managed to get over the hill and walked to the aid station.”

The bullet had entered his left arm, nicked a nerve and tore out his shoulder blade and muscle. A medic team transported him to a field hospital where he was operated on.

The doctor told him, “You know you didn’t have to get yourself shot. You have a touch of Trench foot. You’ve got the start of pneumonia. You would have been back here anyway.”

He was aboard a hospital ship on his way home when the war officially ended in Europe.

One of the most emotional times of his life was standing on deck and seeing the Statue of Liberty come into view. “That was really something,” he said.

Back at home, he was sent to a hospital in Spokane, Wash. He was eventually granted a 30 day leave to return home to St. Paul. He was there when the war in Japan ended with the dropping of the Atomic Bomb.

“I forever bless President Truman to this day because I was an experienced combat infantryman and there was no way that I wouldn’t have been a replacement for the thousands that would have been killed invading Japan,” said Fulton.

Following his discharged in Feb. 1945, he returned to school under the GI bill. He attended McAllister College before transferring to the University of Maryland. That’s where he met his wife, Fay.

After graduation in 1951, he worked at the naval ordinance lab in Silver Spring, Md., the Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia and the Picatinny Arsenal in New York before retiring in 1989 one year before his 65th birthday.

He documented his wartime experiences in the book, “My Draftee Life,” which he wrote for his sons.

On a return visit to France, he found the graves of the two men who were on either side of him when the machine gun started firing back in 1945. “I saw where I would have been buried. That was very emotional,” he said. “You just cry internally. There, for the grace of God, would have been me.”