"Lost" battallion of Texans slaves for Japanese
THIS WEEK IN TEXAS HISTORY

On Dec. 14, 1941, a troop ship carrying more than 500 fighting men from Texas was a week out of Hawaii on the way to Australia and the Second World War.

National Guardsmen from Wichita Falls, Abilene, Lubbock and other towns throughout northwest Texas were drummed into federal service in November 1940. The stroke of a pen turned the weekend warriors into regular Army and lumped them together in 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery Regiment, 36th Infantry Division.

The rigorous regimen at Camp Bowie near Brownwood whipped the citizen soldiers into shape. But basic training was a picnic in paradise compared to two miserable months of tropical warfare maneuvers in the swamps of Louisiana.

When the overseas orders came through, those that preferred stateside duty were permitted to stay home. The vacancies were filled by volunteers with a myriad of motivations.

A busboy from Amarillo jumped at the all-expenses-paid chance to see the world, while the promise of promotion persuaded a Wichita Falls roofer. Enlistment gave a Lubbock laundry worker the perfect patriotic excuse for bailing out of a bad marriage.

The battle-ready battalion boarded a westbound train on Nov. 10, 1941 and 11 days later sailed from San Francisco for a secret destination code-named PLUM. At Honolulu their transport rendezvoused with a ten-ship convoy for the next leg of the long voyage across the Pacific. But a week out of Hawaii, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

PLUM turned out to be the Philippines, which was quickly overrun by 56,000 enemy invaders. The convoy changed course picking up provisions in the Fiji Islands en route to Brisbane, Australia. The homesick soldiers spent a melancholy Christmas on the kangaroo continent before hitching a ride to the Dutch East Indies aboard a merchant vessel.

The men of the 2nd Battalion went ashore at Java and marched inland to an isolated airstrip. Their mission was to provide ground support for a beleaguered B-17 bomber group that had beaten a hasty retreat from the Philippines. A score of obliging foot soldiers even filled in for crew members left behind in the last-minute escape.

Two Japanese armies landed on opposite ends of the 500-mile long island trapping the vastly outnumbered Allies in the middle. The Texans gamely stood their ground and in the process became the first Americans ever to fight alongside Australian troops.

Facing certain annihilation, the Dutch commander capitulated on Mar. 8, 1942 leaving the 2nd Battalion with no choice but to do the same. In a matter of days, 538 Texans fell into the hands of a cruel foe, who would earn international condemnation for his mistreatment of helpless prisoners of war.

The captives were soon joined by 350 survivors from the USS HOUSTON sunk in the Battle of the Java Sea on Feb. 28. Though they would not have wished their fate on anybody, much less fellow Texans, the distinctive drawl of the sailors was a pleasant and morale-boosting surprise.

Shortly before their surrender, several soldiers had wired money home to their families. When weeks went by without word of their whereabouts, the wife of the battalion adjutant contacted Congressman Sam Rayburn. The Speaker of the House, easily the most powerful politician in Washington, reported back to her that according to the War Department no American troops were on Java.

Thelma Fillmore snapped that she knew for a fact the 2nd Battalion had been on that very island as late as February. "I told him," she recalled half a century later, "I suppose you've lost them."

The tight-lipped military ignored repeated appeals from worried relatives of the missing members of the "Lost Battalion." For nearly two years, their loved ones were kept completely in the dark and not even informed if they were dead or alive.

Meanwhile, the malnourished and abused POW's slaved for their Japanese captors on forced-labor projects from Singapore to Manchuria. Many toiled on the Burma-Thailand railroad later popularized by a post-war book and the motion picture "The Bridge on the River Kwai."

Eighty-nine men, one out of six, perished during the 42-month nightmare, which did not end until the atom bomb finally brought peace to the Pacific. Those that endured the ordeal emerged from the liberated POW camps sick and emaciated, little more than walking skeletons whose health was permanently impaired.

What was the secret of their survival? When that question was put not long ago to an elderly veteran of the "Lost Battalion," he answered, "The thing that brought most of us through it was the comradeship we showed for each."

Texans survived, as they had done before and since, by sticking together through thick and thin.

Bartee Haile welcomes your comments, questions and suggestions at haile@pdq.net or P.O. Box 152, Friendswood, TX 77549. And don't forget to visit www.twith.com!