Thread by @ChrisCardsFan, On November 24, 1944, Colonel Hurley E. Fuller assumed command of the [...]

On November 24, 1944, Colonel Hurley E. Fuller assumed command of the 110th Infantry Regiment, 28th Infantry Division, after his predecessor, the highly regarded and popular Col. Ted Seely, was wounded in the Hurtgen Forest.

Fuller, a fifty year old career soldier whose first taste of combat had come in 1918 as a platoon commander in the AEF 9th Division, was neither the obvious or—in the eyes of the 110th—the preferred successor to the beloved Col. Seely.

At 50, Fuller was older than the average division commander in the US Army (47), and knew well many of the general officers leading American forces in Northwest Europe in 1944. One of those men, Maj. Gen. Troy Middleton, commanding US VIII Corps, was an old AEF comrade.

It was Middleton who would rescue Fuller from the shame of having been sacked from his first regimental command in Normandy six months earlier; Fuller had broken down under the stress of combat and been summarily dismissed by V Corps commander Maj. Gen. Leonard Gerow.

Fuller was an eccentric officer. As commander of the 23rd Inf. Regt., 2nd Infantry Division, he had managed to equip his entire unit with WWI-vintage M1903 Springfield rifles, when the rest of the division was armed with the standard issue M1 Garand semiautomatic rifle.

As historian John C. McManus notes, it wasn’t just the man’s choice of shoulder weapon that harkened back to the Argonne Forest where he had learned his soldier’s trade; his preference for costly frontal attacks showed that he “was not much of a tactical innovator” either.

Fuller would find himself in a predicament where the tactics had been sorted out for him. Strung out along the Our River, the 110th RCT occupied isolated “strongpoints,” situated in small towns like Hosingen, where companies of bored GI’s kept watch on the enemy across the way.

Fuller badgered 28th ID commander, Maj. Gen. Norman Cota, about the precarious position occupied by his unit. Fuller’s reputation as something of a worrier preceded him, and his alarms were paid little heed.

When the German attack came before dawn on December 16, 1944, the order from 28th Division HQ instructed the 110th RCT to “hold at all costs,” an order Fuller was compelled to obey by the necessity of the situation: one by one, his strongpoints were isolated by the enemy.

Hold up in his HQ at the Claravallis Hotel in Clerveaux, Fuller listened to the sounds of battle growing closer and closer, as communications with his spread out companies dimmed. On the evening of the 17th, the end came.

As German armor began pouring fire directly into the Claravallis Hotel, Fuller was nearing the end of his last fraught exchange with Div HQ on the other end of a failing line. A loud explosion. Asked what the racket was, Fuller laconically replied, “German tanks.”

Fuller and a handful of HQ personnel made a hasty exit from the building. Captured the next morning, Fuller spent the rest of the war as a POW.

Fuller was released from captivity the following February, and although weakened from illness, wasted no time in writing his report.

In his report, he wrote movingly of the sacrifice made by his men—emblematic of that given by all US troops in the Bastogne Corridor—in those early days of the Ardennes Offensive. The full report is here and describes the battle better than I can.

https://history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs/wwii/bulge/110thInfRegt/Fullerltr.htm

His full, official report of operations of the 110th RCT covering 16-18 December 1944 can be found here. It is also worth reading.

https://bloodybucket.eu/colonel-hurley-e-fuller-report-of-operations-110th-infantry-combat-team/

Prof. John C. McManus’s ‘Alamo in the Ardennes’ covers 28th ID’s battle in great detail.

#WWII #SWW #History

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