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07/01/2015 08:00 AMIt’s the time of year for the flags to come out—and to stay out—from Memorial Day to the Fourth of July as the country celebrates American independence and those who fought to ensure it. Robert Fullan of Essex is one of those who did.
Before the current crisis in the Middle East, before Vietnam, before Korea, more than 70 years ago, Robert served in the United States Navy in the Second World War.
Robert, now 94, opened an aging folder filled with pictures of the ships he served on and the men he served with for a recent visitor. The pictures were fragile and faded, but Robert’s memory wasn’t. He first tried to enlist the day after Pearl Harbor in l941, but was rejected because his blood pressure was too high.
“I think I was nervous,” he recalls.
He didn’t give up. He saw a notice on a bulletin board at Holy Cross, where he was enrolled as a student, about getting a direct commission in the Navy without even having to go to preliminary officer’s training. This time when he applied, he was accepted.
The next thing Robert knew he was an ensign assigned to a minesweeper based in Staten Island. He reported for duty when another officer had just gone AWOL.
The executive officer, referring to Robert, said to the lieutenant who had reported the AWOL, “He’s green, but he’s yours.”
Robert recalls his next move: he called his mother in Queens and told her he would not be home for dinner, maybe for a while.
“I told her I might not be home for a week,” he says.
Robert served aboard the minesweeper all summer and then was permitted to return to finish college in December before reporting for duty, this time on a vessel that was both a minesweeper and an escort ship. By l943 Robert, now the officer in charge of minesweeping, was at sea aboard the USS Skylark in the South Pacific.
Minesweepers, Robert notes, have to go in before the invasion forces to clear the area.
“Where they are going, we’ve been,” he says of the landing forces.
The Skylark successfully supported landings on Renova and Vella LaVela in the Solomon Islands, Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, Guam, and Guadalcanal.
At Okinawa, the ship’s luck ran out. It hit one mine and then, incapacitated, drifted into another. Robert recalls that five men in the forward engine room of his stricken ship were killed and another 10 to 20 badly burned. The ship listed and sank as officers and crew abandoned the vessel. After about half an hour in a life raft, Robert and his companions were rescued. He never feared for his life.
“We were surrounded by the U.S. Navy,” he says.
Robert returned to the United States for 30 days survivors leave. A local newspaper, the Long Island Daily Press, did a front-page story on him with the headline, “Blown Up Twice by Mine Explosions, He Comes Home to Tell About It.” The front page also had a reminder that not everyone did come home, with a story headlined “Two Central Queens Men Killed.”
His leave over, Robert went back to the South Pacific, once again aboard a minesweeper, this time the USS Oracle, which for a time patrolled the Formosa Straits. The ship traveled to Shanghai, stopping in Sasebo, Japan, where Robert saw for himself the destruction the atomic bomb had wreaked on Nagasaki. By New Year’s Day l946, the Oracle was in Shanghai, where Robert has saved a yellowing menu from the ships’ holiday dinner: a traditional turkey meal ending with the pumpkin and mincemeat pies, followed as the menu indicated, by cigars.
By the time his tour of duty was over in l946, Robert had been promoted to a full lieutenant, senior grade.
“I served with two good captains, happy ships, well run and well disciplined,” he says.
In his professional life, Robert and his wife Ann ran their own interior decorating business for many years on Long Island. They have lived in Essex some 30 years since retirement, choosing the town because of its community of sailors as well as its location halfway between Boston and New York. Today, at 94, Robert has some physical problems, including renal failure, which necessitates dialysis three times a week. He has no sight in one eye and a botched cataract operation has left him temporarily sightless in the other. According to Robert, an upcoming second cataract operation will endeavor to restore his sight.
He enumerates four requirements for a long life: mental activity, social contact, a good diet, and exercise. He still exercises regularlym doing leg swings and lifts on his stairs. Until he was 80, he frequently skated at Connecticut College’s ice rink. He had been captain of his prep school hockey team at Canterbury School in New Milford, as well as editor of the school paper and president of his class.
As conversation ended, Robert, who wore a tie in the Navy colors of blue and gold, put his World War II clippings back in their folder and tied a string around the packet. The clippings will be filed away, but Robert’s recollections of the young officer he was 70 years ago don’t live in that folder. They live with him.
“They’re treasured memories,” he says.