Damn it! I totally feel your pain. Migrating COBOL to Java has long been one of my pet peeves. The former is procedural with all variables being global and fixed-width and the later is OO (sort of) with lexical variables of variable size. The two do not mix and match well.

Trying to get away from COBOL is actually a three-way problem: technological (as we've alluded to), business (hey, we gotta stop using this shit!), and social (hey, I don't want to touch this shit!). Unfortunately, virtually every solution I've seen focuses on the business or technical issue in isolation, but ignores the others.

I've actually found a solution that solves all of the issues and would make new developers excited to work in COBOL shops, but it's on hold until some technical challenges are surmounted. Frustrating as hell!