page_title: Lost Battalion (Pacific, World War II)
section_title: Burma railway
hierarchical_section_title: Lost Battalion (Pacific, World War II) / Burma railway
caption_attribution_description: English: "Death Railway"
context_page_description: The Lost Battalion (Pacific, World War II) was the 2nd Battalion, 131st Field Artillery, 36th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army. The men of the battalion, plus the survivors of the sunken Cruiser USS Houston, were captured by the Japanese on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies in March 1942. It is called the lost battalion because the fate of the men was unknown to the United States until September 1944. They were prisoners of war for 42 months until the end of World War II.
  534 soldiers from the battalion and 368 survivors of the Houston were taken prisoner. Most of the men were sent to Thailand to work on the Burma Railway, the building of which is portrayed in the film The Bridge on the River Kwai. Of the 902 soldiers and sailors taken captive, 163 died in captivity. Most of the prisoners of war were from western Texas.
  Sergeant Frank Fujita was a notable survivor who was a POW for three and a half years. He went on to write the memoir Foo: A Japanese-American Prisoner of the Rising Sun.
context_section_description: The captured American soldiers and sailors were held for seven months in a prison camp on Java along with thousands of Dutch, British, and Australian soldiers.  In October 1942, they were taken to Singapore and 668 of them then continued onward to Moulmein, Burma.  In Singapore about 140 of the Americans with industrial skills were separated from the main body and sent to Japan to work there.
  The Americans were part of a group of about 300,000 workers, mostly Southeast Asians but including 66,000 POWs, put to work building the railroad that would cross the mountains for a distance of 258 miles (415 km) between Burma and Thailand. Before World War II, the British had contemplated building the railway, but had rejected the idea.  For more than a year, the Asian laborers and POWs worked on the railway using only hand tools. It was completed on October 23, 1943.
  Conditions during the construction were brutal.  The POWs and other workers suffered from insufficient food, poor medical care, murderous guards, and heavy work quotas.  Tens of thousands died during the construction, including 133 Americans, 19.6 percent of the total number of American POWs who worked on the Burma railway.  By the end of the construction only about 40 of the Americans were still capable of manual labor.
  After the completion of the railroad, the survivors of the Lost Battalion were separated, some remaining to maintain the railroad, others being assigned to work in Thailand or Vietnam, and some sent to Japan to labor in coal mines on Hokkaido.  18 Americans were killed on June 24, 1944 when an American submarine sank the Japanese freighter on which they were traveling en route to Japan.
caption: Map of the Burma Railway
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