OK, I’m trying to find the name of a US Army Officer during WWII who left the Phillippines after the surrender of General Wainwright and made his way across the Pacific to French-Indochina.
Once there, he reported to the French military authorities, who immediately turned him and his troops over to the Japanese. He spent the remainder of the war in Japanese POW camps.
I can remember this much of his story, but I cannot remember the name or rank of the officer!! :smack:
I can find a story along those lines from April of 1942. Supposedly the guy was a Captain, and he had five men with him. The French did NOT turn him in as far as I could find. The four enlisted men went ashore at Tourane Bay. The Japanese arrested them. The French tried to get them released to the French. But it didn’t happen.
Any help on more details.
And, as a side note, the situation was very chaotic at that point with Vichy and the Japanese and the US.
After an afternoon with my friend Google, I was able to find a name for Lt. Ralph S. Fralick. No details given, except that he and 40 men left Luzon and were turned into the Japanese by the French when they made it to French Indochina.
He retired as a Major from the Army sometime after WWII.
After some online research, it appears that Mr. Fralick is the father of David ‘Shark’ Fralick. David makes a comment about the story here: CBS interview of Shark Fralick
But that’s as much as I’ve discovered.
I would be VERY interested to read the account that you discovered as well, however.
This story is mentioned in one of the novels by WEB Griffin about WW2. He had a footnote regarding this story that covered a page or two. He also reviewed the fate of the soldiers and civilians that were captured on Wake Island at the start of the war.
I can’t find any newspaper accounts of Fralick and 40 men doing this. But I did find the one of 5 men. My guess is that Fralick embellished his tale to his son, and the tale is also embellished on the anti-French website you found by Googling. While these could be two distinct incidents, I doubt it.
I believe it’s in The Corps series. The one that deals with the attack on Pearl Harbor, probably book 1. I’ve got all his work so I’ll look it up next week. Traveling for the next 5 or 6 days.
The chapter includes this footnote and one on “Devereaux”, the officer who was in charge of the Marines on Wake Island and was forced to surrender. That name is from memory - might be close, might not.
Griffin, who writes historical fiction(although quite often based on well-researched history), appears to be offering a story based upon the oral testimony of someone. I’ll go back to searching the newspapers from the time. I would have thought that this would have been big enough to make some newspaper somewhere at sometime since 1942.
Hello,
I just finished reading Behind The Lines, by W.E.B. Griffin, and on the last page is a short mention of this incident. In the early days at Luzon, it was Lt. Ralph Fralick, later to be a major.
One thing Griffin isn’t mentioning is that it wasn’t French Indochina at the time this occurred. Japan had occupied Indochina in 1940 and the Japanese Army controlled the colony. As a matter of practicality, most French colonial officials were left in their pre-occupation posts to run the colony. So any French officials in Japanese-occupied Hanoi who tried to hide Americans would have been risking their lives just as would have happened if French officials had tried to hide Americans in German-occupied Paris.
I checked a book called Captivity, Flight, and Survival in World War II by Alan Levine for more on the Fralick story (it has sadly little more info than what is in this thread) but on the same page as the Fralick story, Levine recounts the incredible adventure of Krumbhaar Herndon, an American working in the Philippines piloting small amphibious aircraft, who escaped the island as the Japanese invaded by sailing a 45-foot Filipino batelle to Australia, manned by himself, his wife, and six Filipinos.
They left Panay on March 29, 1942 landed on the island of Negros, where Herndon was arrested as a suspected German spy. The misunderstanding was cleared up and he was able to sail on. They sailed down the east shore of Cebu, stopping in Carmen Bay for supplies, constantly being stopped and even shot at by suspicious locals. They also took on 6 Navy sailors stranded there. They barely made it out of Cebu before dawn on April 10, as the Japanese invaded (they could hear gunshots and explosions as they sailed away). The Japanese had just defeated the American and Filipino forces at Bataan. The American sailors decided to get off at Panoan Island.
On April 19, after skirting the reefs on Leyte and avoiding enemy patrols, they docked at Surigao City. There they found that the city was being bombed frequently and that the pier they were docked at was loaded with dynamite for demolition for when the Japanese arrived. They hurriedly headed out into the Pacific, into the Hinatuan Passage. They survived several squalls and the weather was so overcast they couldn’t tell where they were; Herndon’s map of the region turned out to be a Dutch advertisement for a shipping line and not accurate. On May 2 they figured out they were near Waygeo island near New Guinea, but encountered more squalls. They met some Javanese sailors who told them the Japanese had taken nearby Sorong Point, on the northeast entrance to the Seles Strait. Herndon and company made their way through Seles Strait, getting some food from friendly natives. They made their way to Adi island, just south of New Guinea, but bad weather grounded them until May 24. They had a bad experience here when some Melanesians tried to commandeer the boat, and Herndon had to drive them off with his shotgun.
On May 29, the crew, lost as always, anchored on unfamiliar territory. They walked inland and discovered kangaroo tracks, showing that they had made it to Australia. They sailed on to Cape Don and were greeted by Aborigines who who came out in a canoe. After that, they made it to Darwin safely.
That is the exact citiation I was trying to locate.