'Lost Battalion’ bypassed Pearl Harbor to POW camp

ACTON, Texas (AP) — Ten days out of Pearl Harbor, the Texas soldiers were steaming across the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, headed for a classified location known only to them as “Plum.”

The ship’s loudspeaker came to life the morning of Dec. 7.

“Now hear this, all hands! A state of war now exists between the United States and Japan. Govern your actions accordingly and good luck.”

The 558 men of the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery, a National Guard outfit with men from Decatur, Bridgeport, Jacksboro, Wichita Falls and neighboring towns, didn’t know anything else about the sneak attack and wouldn’t for weeks.

Nothing about the sinking of four battleships, the deaths of 1,177 men aboard the USS Arizona, nothing about the destruction of hundreds of aircraft at Wheeler Army Air Field.

“There was no news about the war,” said Frank Ficklin, who was then a 19-year-old staff sergeant in the battalion’s headquarters battery.

That would end up being typical for that battalion for virtually the entirety of World War II, one of the least-known stories of Texas history.

Ficklin’s battalion, sent to the Far East before the war, became trapped at the apex of Japanese strength, lost contact with the War Department and spent 42 months in hellish captivity. It became known as “the Lost Battalion.”

Ficklin’s parents in Wichita Falls did not know what happened to him until the middle of 1944. He didn’t get back home until late 1945, only to discover then that his half brother had died in Europe during the war.

Ficklin remembers well what he thought on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941.

“We all thought it was going to be a short war, maybe three or four months,” he said.

Sixty-eight years later, only 38 men of the Lost Battalion are believed to be living.

Ficklin, 87, is a retired petroleum engineer and has lived in DeCordova Bend Estates in Hood County since the late 1960s.

The men of the Lost Battalion have met annually for 65 years straight.

“I’ve heard them say they’re closer than brothers,” said Susan Ficklin, Frank’s daughter and a retired Navy captain. “Some of them have better relationships with their buddies than they did with their families. Their experiences made them become brothers. They support each other through everything, even today.”

Ficklin joined the National Guard in 1939 when he was 17 and still in high school. His mother took in laundry for money, and his stepfather worked as a custodian.

“I needed the money,” he said about why he joined the military.

To prepare for what looked like a coming war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called up several National Guard divisions in late 1940, among them the 36th Infantry Division in Texas. The soldiers trained at the “new” Camp Bowie outside Brownwood.

In autumn 1941, the 2nd Battalion was separated from the rest of the division and sent to the Philippines, although the men didn’t know that then. They pulled into Hawaii less than two weeks before the attack.

Content not to be rolling in the seas — “I was miserable. All of us were sick,” Ficklin said — they mostly stayed on the ship before leaving Pearl Harbor in late November.

“We had about six hours of liberty,” he said. “But we hadn’t been paid in a couple of months, so we didn’t have any money to do anything.”

The attack on Pearl Harbor sent the ship on a detour to Australia, rather than the Philippines. The men spent Christmas in Brisbane, where Ficklin said the Texans were treated exceptionally well and treated to many beers, dances and good meals.

Even then, Ficklin said he had no idea the extent of the damage to America’s Navy or to the nation’s sense of security.

All he knew was that they were headed to someplace called Java, one of the islands now in Indonesia but were then the Dutch East Indies, to reinforce a group of Dutch and British soldiers. They found a B-17 bomber squadron there that had escaped from the Philippines before it fell.

By early February, the Japanese were launching daily air raids, and Ficklin finally knew what real war meant.

“There was utter confusion, and we were all scared to death,” Ficklin told a historian about the first air attack he experienced.

Still Ficklin, like the other men, just knew that it would be a matter of time before they were reinforced or rescued.

“We thought the Americans were coming to fortify us,” he said. “We always knew there was a bigger force on the way.”

The Japanese landed on Java on Feb. 28, 1942, and the Dutch who were in command of the Allied troops surrendered March 8. Weeks went by, though, before Ficklin ever saw a Japanese soldier.

“I was on guard duty one day when a Japanese officer with his men came to our camp,” he said. “He demanded that we give him two vehicles to transport his soldiers. ... That was the first time I’d ever seen one. He spoke perfect English.”

A total of 534 men from the Lost Battalion surrendered, and 89 of them died in the 42 months of captivity, surprisingly few considering the inhumanity and cruelty visited on them by the Japanese, the Korean guards and occasionally, Ficklin said, by the British officers.

He, like other men, worked on the Burma-Siam “railway of death,” made famous by the book “The Bridge Over the River Kwai” and the film made from it, and he contracted beriberi that almost killed him. He had half his stomach removed in a crude hospital in Singapore and weighed 94 pounds when he was liberated.

He ate whatever he could — dogs, rats, mongooses, cats — to survive, since rice alone led to starvation.

“When I was a kid, he used to see a cat and say, ’There’s some Java chicken,’ and I never knew what he meant,” his daughter said.

The men, their friendships forged in the cotton and oil fields of Depression-era Texas, carried on with the knowledge that they would someday be freed.

“Whatever day it was, we always thought they’d be coming for us two or three months from then,” he said. “Our freedom was always two or three months away. That’s how we did it.”

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