As a military flight navigator and former prisoner of war, Robert Fulkerson, who died April 13 on his 84th birthday, saw humans at their most abhorrent and at their noblest.
Born in Rocky Ford and a graduate of Denver’s South High School and the University of Denver, Fulkerson spent his career as a dentist after graduating from the University of Missouri School of Dentistry.
Like most of his peers, he put his undergraduate education on hold to enlist for World War II. Fulkerson joined the Army Air Corps (now the U.S. Air Force) and trained to navigate a B-17, a four-engine bomber.
On July 29, 1944, he was on his fourth mission, bombing refineries in Merseburg, Germany, when German shooters knocked out two of his plane’s engines. One in his crew spotted water below the plane, and everyone jumped.
He and seven mates crowded onto two rubber dinghies.
They had canned water but no food during the four nights they spent adrift. On the fifth day, they spotted what they hoped was the tip of England.
Instead, they stepped onto the beach of Ameland, a Frisian island occupied by the Germans, who were waiting for them.
The Germans installed Fulkerson and the rest of the crew with about 10,000 other prisoners of war in Stalag Luft III, the Nazi POW camp that inspired “The Great Escape,” the 1963 Steve McQueen thriller about 76 Allied airmen who tunneled under the camp walls to freedom. Their escape occurred just prior to Fulkerson’s arrival at Stalag Luft III.
As the Russian army advanced, the Germans moved Fulkerson to Nuremberg, where he endured the harrowing experience of nearly being bombed by Allied forces.
The Allied army drew close to Nuremberg two months later, and the Germans moved the prisoners again, sending them on a 75-mile nighttime march to a train that brought them to Moosburg, near Munich. Not long afterward, Gen. George Patton liberated the Moosburg prison. Fulkerson never forgot the first sight of the U.S. flag there.
“When I see the American flag at baseball games, I still remember it being raised at Moosburg,” he told The Denver Post in 1985.
Fulkerson’s months as a POW colored the rest of his life. The viciousness he witnessed then made him kinder and more tolerant – qualities particularly welcome in a dentist.
“I was able to see people at their … I don’t know if I should say ‘worst,’ but when people were stripped of their rations, I saw what made people tick,” he said in 1985. “There were people who would share food with you, and you never forgot that.”
Survivors include his wife, Micheline Fulkerson of Littleton; stepdaughter Dominique Heene of Littleton; stepson Eric Sorenson of Windsor; and six grandchildren.
