Thursday, Jul. 03, 2008

Remembering the Lost Battalion

Texan Survived 'Death Railway’ in World War II

By Sarah Junek

Contributing Writer

On a recent Friday afternoon, Crayton Gordon stepped out of his home into the blazing sun to get the mail. Stepping back in, he couldn’t remember dropping some of the pieces on the front lawn.

At 88, despite two heart attacks and other health complications, Gordon, an Army prisoner of war in the 1940s and a Keller resident, gets around well but struggles with his memory. Such is the state of the story behind one of the most infamous prisoner of war experiences — construction of the Death Railway of World War II.

Though a healthy body of materials about the horrific experiences of Allied soldiers laying the Burma-Thailand railway exists, firsthand accounts like Gordon’s are fading.

"At one time I weighed 93 pounds," Gordon said. "I can’t remember a lot of that anymore. I’ve been trying to forget it all my life," he now says with a smile.

He has told his story before — how 902 American soldiers were taken prisoner when they surrendered to the Japanese in March 1942 on Java, an island in the Dutch East Indies. After capture, his unit, the U.S. Army 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery, spent 42 months with survivors from the U.S.S. Houston, a ship that sank off the coast of Java, and together became to be known as the Texas "Lost Battalion."

Gordon was one of 668 Americans sent to Burma to build the railway. It was dangerous, deadly work: 133 of those prisoners — one-fifth — died. Fearful of torture and execution, they worked 18-hour days, through starvation, ulcers and outbreaks of malaria, amebic dysentery and cholera.

Hundreds of thousands of POWs and civilian forced laborers died building the nearly 260-mile railway. Survivors were sent to prison camps throughout Southeast Asia, where communications with the outside world were lost.

Until the war ended in 1945, no one in the U.S. knew whether they were dead or alive.

Gordon was liberated from Changi jail in Singapore but remembers only fleeting details. He has told his story to a number of authors, including Robert La Forte, who compiled stories from 22 prisoners in his 1993 book, Building the Death Railway: The Ordeal of American POWs in Burma, 1942-1945. Of them, Gordon is one of three remaining.

"They didn’t believe the stories that actually happened to me," Gordon said.

Neither, perhaps, did Hollywood.

"We all laughed," Gordon’s wife, Frankie, said, recalling the reaction of her husband and other former POWs to the 1957 film about the Death Railway, The Bridge On the River Kwai.

But there is a room in the Wise County Heritage Museum in Decatur dedicated to the Lost Battalion, started by Rosalee Greg, that elicits a different response.

Just last month, for example, Arthur Clark, 86, of Abilene, saw the room for the first time. He brought his son and grandchildren and left in tears.

It’s an emotional response likely understood only by the survivors themselves.

That understanding has formed a strength and a brotherhood between them and their families that’s unexplainable, said Pat Cadenhead, who with her husband is in charge of planning the survivors’ annual reunion this year, which will be in Farmers Branch.

"Up until four or five years ago, if one of them passed away, the church was full. And if one was ill, God help the person that said, 'You’re not family,’" Cadenhead said.

But fewer than 30 survivors came to last year’s reunion, as the number of World War II veterans diminishes rapidly now, and some of their stories go untold.

"I was fortunate to come home," Gordon summarizes, "and life has been good."

When they were liberated on Sept. 7, 1945, members of Gordon’s unit were flown to Calcutta, India, to receive medical care. There, the allied POWs gathered, and after a long session of shouting, a silence was finally broken by soldiers singing their British, Dutch and American national anthems — expressions of gratitude for their freedom.

After receiving medical care at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C., Gordon made his way back to Texas and opened up a hardware store in Fort Worth.

He sold the business in 1975 and retired, moving to Keller in 1990 with his wife.