MITCHELL ZUCKOFF

Lost in Shangri-La

Escape from a Hidden World

A TRUE STORY

For Gerry

Contents

Cover

Title Page

A Note to the Reader

A Note on the Text

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1 - Missing

Chapter 2 - Hollandia

Chapter 3 - The Hidden Valley of Shangri-La

Chapter 4 - Gremlin Special

Chapter 5 - Eureka!

Chapter 6 - Charms

Chapter 7 - Tarzan

Chapter 8 - Gentleman Explorer

Chapter 9 - Guilt and Gangrene

Chapter 10 - Earl Walter, Junior and Senior

Chapter 11 - Uwambo

Chapter 12 - ‘Chief Pete’

Chapter 13 - Come What May

Chapter 14 - Five-by-Five

Chapter 15 - No Supper Tonight

Chapter 16 - Rammy and Doc

Chapter 17 - Custer and Company

Chapter 18 - Bathtime for Yugwe

Chapter 19 - ‘Shoo, Shoo Baby’

Chapter 20 - Hold the Front Page!

Chapter 21 - Promised Land

Chapter 22 - Hollywood

Chapter 23 - Gliders?

Chapter 24 - Two Queens

Chapter 25 - Snatch

Epilogue After Shangri-La

Cast of Characters

The Filipino Regiments

Notes on Sources and Methods

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Mitchell Zuckoff

Copyright

About the Publisher

A NOTE TO THE READER

NEAR THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR, a us Army plane flying over the island of New Guinea crashed in an uncharted region inhabited by a prehistoric tribe.

In the weeks that followed, reporters raced to cover a tale of survival, loss, anthropology, discovery, heroism, friendship, and a near-impossible rescue mission. Their stories featured a beautiful, headstrong corporal and a strapping, hell-bent paratrooper, stranded amid tribesmen reputed to be headhunters and cannibals. They told of a brave lieutenant grieving the death of his twin brother; a wry sergeant with a terrible head wound; and a team of Filipino-American soldiers who volunteered to confront the natives despite knowing they would be outnumbered more than a thousand to one. Rounding out the true-life cast were a rogue filmmaker who had left Hollywood after being exposed as a jewel thief; a smart-aleck pilot who flew best when his plane had no engine; and a cowboy colonel whose rescue plan seemed designed to increase the death toll.

Front pages blazed with headlines about the crash and its aftermath. Radio shows breathlessly reported every development en route to an astonishing conclusion.

But the world was on the brink of the Atomic Age, and a story of life and death in the Stone Age was soon eclipsed. In time, it was forgotten.

I came across an article about the crash years ago while searching newspaper archives for something else entirely. I set it aside and found what I thought I was looking for. But the story stayed with me. I began doing what reporters call ‘collecting string’ – gathering pieces of information wherever possible to see if they might tie together.

News reports and official documents can talk about the past, but they cannot carry on a conversation. I dreamed of finding someone who had been there, someone who could describe the people, places and events firsthand. More than six decades after the crash, I located the sole surviving American participant, living quietly on the Oregon coast with vivid memories and an extraordinary story.

That discovery, and the interviews that followed, led to an explosion of string that wove itself into a tapestry. Among the most valuable items was a daily journal kept during the weeks between the crash and the rescue attempt. A lengthy diary surfaced, along with a trove of priceless photographs. Three private scrapbooks followed close behind, along with boxes of declassified Army documents, affidavits, maps, personnel records, military bulletins, letters, and ground-to-air radio transcripts. Relatives of more than a dozen other participants supplied more documents, photos, letters and details. Perhaps most remarkably, the trail led to several thousand metres of original film footage of the events as they unfolded.

Next came a trip to New Guinea, to learn what had become of the place and the natives; to find old men and women who had witnessed the crash as children; and to walk to the top of a mountain where pieces of the plane still rest, along with bones and belongings of some of those who died there.

As I write this, on my desk sits a melted piece of metal from the plane that resembles a gnarled human form. It’s a tangible reminder that, as incredible as this story seems, every word of it is true.

MITCHELL ZUCKOFF

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

THE EVENTS DESCRIBED IN THIS BOOK TOOK PLACE on the western half of the island of New Guinea in 1945. At that time, that portion of the island was known as Dutch New Guinea and its capital, on the northern coast, was called Hollandia. The area known at the time as Hidden Valley or Shangri-La is located approximately 240 kilometres southwest of Hollandia. Today, the former Dutch New Guinea is a province of Indonesia called Papua (not to be confused with Papua New Guinea, which is an independent country on the eastern portion of the island). Hollandia is now the city of Jayapura. Shangri-La or Hidden Valley is called the Baliem Valley.

Quoted material throughout the book has been left in its original form; in most cases, that means US spellings and units of distance and measure.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Corporal Margaret Hastings of the Women’s Army Corps photographed in 1945. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

Tents for members of the Women’s Army Corps in Hollandia. (US Army photo)

US military map of New Guinea during the Second World War. (US Army map)

Sergeant Laura Besley of the Women’s Army Corps. (Gerta Anderson photo)

Colonel Peter Prossen with his sons, David and Peter. (Peter J. Prossen Jr photo)

Colonel Ray Elsmore. (B.B. McCollom photos)

A native village photographed from the air by Colonel Ray Elsmore (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

A C-47 in flight during the Second World War. (US Army photo)

Best friends Sergeant Ruth Coster and Sergeant Helen Kent. (Dona Cruse photo)

Major George Nicholson. (John McCarthy photo)

Corporal James ‘Jimmy’ Lutgring and Private Melvin Mollberg. (Mel Lutgring photo)

Tech Sergeant Kenneth Decker. (US Army photo)

Lieutenants John and Robert McCollom. (B.B. McCollom photo)

Colonel Peter J. Prossen. (Peter J. Prossen Jr photo)

The body of Captain Herbert Good. (US Army photo)

After the crash: Margaret Hastings, Kenneth Decker and John McCollom. (B.B. McCollom photo)

The detached tail section of the Gremlin Special. (US Army photo)

Explorer Richard Archbold in 1938. (Archbold Biological Station photo)

Captain Earl Walter. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

Earl Walter with his father and namesake. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

Dani tribesmen, photographed by Earl Walter in 1945. (B.B. McCollom photo)

Dani tribesmen, photographed by Earl Walter in 1945. (B.B. McCollom photo)

Dani tribesman, photographed by Earl Walter in 1945. (B.B. McCollom photo)

John McCollom shakes hands with Wimayuk Wandik. (B.B. McCollom photo)

Margaret Hastings with a native child. (B.B. McCollom photo)

Captain Earl Walter and the members of the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo) Crew members aboard a C-47. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

Captain Earl Walter with Corporal Camilo ‘Rammy’ Ramirez and Sergeant Benjamin ‘Doc’ Bulatao. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

A native couple in a Dani village, photographed in 1945. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

A page from Margaret Hastings’ diary.

Corporal Camilo ‘Rammy’ Ramirez, Corporal Margaret Hastings, and Sergeant Benjamin ‘Doc’ Bulatao. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

Sergeant Ken Decker in a makeshift latrine. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

Earl Walter speaking by walkie-talkie. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

The ‘headquarters’ tent at the jungle clearing. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

One of the crosses erected by the burial crew near the wreckage of the Gremlin Special. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

Two native tribesmen photographed in 1945. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

The survivors, paratroopers and tribesmen rest during their trek to the valley campsite. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

Alexander Cann (B.B. McCollom photo)

Alexander Cann filming in ‘Shangri-La’. (B.B. McCollom photo)

The Filipino-American soldiers: Camilo Ramirez, Custodio Alerta, Don Ruiz and Juan ‘Johnny’ Javonillo.

Young warriors from a different world.

A Waco CG-4A glider in flight. (US Air Force photo)

A Dani tribesman tries on a uniform. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

Captain Earl Walter and Lieutenant John McCollom examine a native jawbone they found in the valley.(C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

A native woman greets Margaret outside a hut. (B.B. McCollom photo)

Keaugi Walela wearing the necklace that Earl Walter tried unsuccessfully to obtain. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

Margaret brushes back her hair after a native salon treatment. (B.B. McCollom photo)

Regional ‘big man’ Yali Logo. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

Glider pilot Lieutenant Henry Palmer inspects a native axe. (B.B. McCollom photo)

Native tribesmen help push the Fanless Faggot into position for a snatch attempt. (C. Earl Walter Jr. photo)

A parachute used as a field marker catches on the glider’s wheel. (C. Earl Walter Jr and US Army photos)

The view from the Fanless Faggot as the Leaking Louise pulled the glider out of Shangri-La. (B.B. McCollom photo)

The three survivors of the Gremlin Special crash. (B.B. McCollom photo)

A Dani tribesman photographed in 2010. (Mitchell Zuckoff photo)

John McCollom, Ken Decker and Earl Walter in 1995. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

John McCollom and his niece, Dennie McCollom Scott, in 1998. (B.B. McCollom photo)

Margaret Hastings flanked by her sisters, Catherine and Rita.

The survivors, pilots, and paratroopers after the rescue from Shangri-La. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)

Chapter One Missing

ON A RAINY DAY IN MAY 1945, A WESTERN UNION messenger made his rounds through the quiet village of Owego, in upstate New York. He turned on to McMaster Street, a row of modest, well-kept homes on the edge of the village, shaded by sturdy elm trees. He slowed to a stop at a green house with a small porch and empty flower boxes. As he approached the door, the messenger prepared for the hardest part of his job: delivering a telegram from the United States War Department.

Directly before him, proudly displayed in a front window, hung a small white banner with a red border and a blue star at its centre. Similar banners hung in windows all through the village, each one to honour a young man, or in a few cases a young woman, gone to war. American troops had been fighting in the Second World War since 1941, and some blue-star banners had already been replaced by banners with gold stars, signifying a permanently empty place at a family’s dinner table.

Inside the blue-star home where the messenger stood was Patrick Hastings, a sixty-eight-year-old widower. With his wire-rim glasses, neatly trimmed silver hair, and the serious set of his mouth, Patrick Hastings bore a striking resemblance to the new president, Harry S. Truman, who had taken office a month earlier upon the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

A son of Irish immigrants, Patrick Hastings grew up a farm boy across the border in Pennsylvania. After a long engagement, he married his sweetheart, schoolteacher Julia Hickey, and they had moved to Owego to find work and raise a family. As the years passed, Patrick rose through the maintenance department at a local factory owned by the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company, which churned out combat boots and officers’ dress shoes for the US Army. Together with Julia, he reared three bright, lively daughters.

Now, though, Patrick Hastings lived alone. Six years earlier, a fatal infection struck Julia’s heart. Their home’s barren flower boxes were visible signs of her absence and his solitary life.

Their two younger daughters, Catherine and Rita, had married and moved away. Blue-star banners hung in their homes, too, each one for a husband in the service. But the blue-star banner in Patrick Hastings’ window wasn’t for either of his sons-in-law. It honoured his strong-willed eldest daughter, Corporal Margaret Hastings of the Women’s Army Corps, the WACs.

Sixteen months earlier, in January 1944, Margaret Hastings walked into a recruiting station in the nearby city of Binghamton. There, she signed her name and took her place among the first generation of women to serve in the United States military. Margaret and thousands of other WACs were dispatched to war zones around the world, mostly filling desk jobs on bases well back from the front lines. Still her father worried, knowing that Margaret was in a strange, faraway land: New Guinea, an untamed island just north of Australia. Margaret was based at a US military compound on the island’s eastern half, an area known as Dutch New Guinea.

Corporal Margaret Hastings of the Women’s Army Corps, photographed in 1945.

By the middle of 1945, the military had outsourced the delivery of bad news, and its bearers had been busy: the combat death toll among Americans neared three hundred thousand. More than one hundred thousand other Americans had died non-combat deaths. More than six hundred thousand had been wounded. Blue-star families had good reason to dread the sight of a Western Union messenger approaching the door.

On this day, misery had company. As the messenger rang Patrick Hastings’ doorbell, Western Union couriers with nearly identical telegrams were en route to twenty-three other star-banner homes with loved ones in Dutch New Guinea. The messengers fanned out across the country, to rural communities and urban centres including New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.

Each message offered a nod towards sympathy camouflaged by the clipped tone of a military communiqué. Signed by Major General James A. Ulio, the Army’s chief administrative officer, Patrick Hastings’ telegram read:

THE SECRETARY OF WAR DESIRES ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP REGRET THAT YOUR DAUGHTER, CORPORAL HASTINGS, MARGARET J., HAS BEEN MISSING IN DUTCH NEW GUINEA, THIRTEEN MAY, ’45. IF FURTHER DETAILS OR OTHER INFORMATION ARE RECEIVED YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY NOTIFIED. CONFIRMING LETTER FOLLOWS.

When Owego’s newspaper learned of the telegram, Patrick Hastings told a reporter about Margaret’s most recent letter home. In it, she described a recreational flight up the New Guinea coast and wrote that she hoped to take another sightseeing trip soon. By mentioning the letter, Patrick Hastings’ message was clear: he feared that Margaret had gone down in a plane crash. But the reporter’s story danced around that worry, offering vague optimism instead. ‘From the wording of the [telegram] received yesterday,’ the reporter wrote, ‘the family thinks that perhaps she was on another flight and will be accounted for later.’

When Patrick Hastings telephoned his younger daughters, he did not hold out false hope about their sister’s fate. Outdoing even the Army for brevity, he reduced the telegram to three words: Margaret is missing.

Chapter Two Hollandia

ELEVEN DAYS BEFORE THE MESSENGER APPEARED AT her father’s door, Margaret Hastings awoke as usual before dawn. Already the moist, tropical heat had crept under the flaps of the cramped tent she shared with five other WACs. She dressed alongside her tent mates in the Army-issued khakis she had cut down to match her petite frame. At first, Margaret wrote to a friend back in Owego, the uniforms ‘fit me like sacks’. But after a few failed alteration efforts, she boasted in the letter: ‘I got hold of a pair of men’s trousers that were miles too big for me, and used the material. They really turned out quite well, considering.’

The date was 13 May 1945. It was Sunday, so the bugler had the day off from his usual five-thirty a.m. reveille. Not that Margaret could sleep in. The working week was seven days long at Base G, a sprawling military installation built around the town of Hollandia, on Dutch New Guinea’s northern coast. By eight o’clock, Margaret was due at her post, a metal desk with a clackety typewriter where daily she proved that war wasn’t just hell, it was hell with paperwork.

Tents for members of the Women’s Army Corps in Hollandia, Dutch New Guinea, during the Second World War.

Margaret was thirty years old, lithe and beautiful. She had alert blue eyes, alabaster skin, and long, light-brown hair she wore in a stylish, figure-eight bun. At just 1.56 metres and barely 45 kilos, she could still slip in to her high school wardrobe. Her teenage nickname, ‘Little girl’ remained an apt description. But Margaret’s size was deceptive. She carried herself with style; shoulders back and chin up, the lasting effects of drama club performances, violin lessons, and what her youngest sister called a feisty, ‘take-charge’ nature. She met strangers with a side-long glance and a half smile that dug dimples beneath her high cheekbones. Somewhere between sly and sexy, the look suggested that Margaret had a secret that she had no intention of sharing.

As a girl growing up in Owego, Margaret bicycled to the local swimming hole, hitchhiked when she wanted to explore beyond the village, did well in school, and read books under the covers late at night. As she grew older and prettier, she became one of the most sought-after girls in town. She enjoyed the attention but didn’t depend on it. Margaret considered herself an independent young woman who, as she put it, ‘drank liquor, but not too much’ and ‘liked the boys, but not too much’.

Even after her younger sisters married, Margaret held out beyond the limit of her twenties. She wasn’t interested in the men of Owego, but she didn’t blame them, either. ‘To tell the truth,’ she told an acquaintance, ‘I’m not sure I go for the kind of man who’s supposed to make a good husband.’

After graduating from high school and bouncing through several jobs, Margaret found work as a secretary at a local factory owned by Remington Rand, a company that turned steel into everything from typewriters to .45 calibre pistols. She liked the work, but it bothered her that she had never been farther from home or anywhere more exciting than Atlantic City. It sounded corny, but Margaret wanted to see the world, serve her country, and find out what she was made of. Joining the Women’s Army Corps gave her the chance to do all three.

____

As Margaret got ready for work, families across the United States were preparing for Mother’s Day. This time, though, a mother’s love wasn’t the only cause for celebration. Five days earlier, Germany had surrendered unconditionally. Reports were trickling out that Adolf Hitler had killed himself in his bunker. Other Nazi leaders were in custody. Concentration camps were being liberated, their horrors fully exposed. After a terrible toll of ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’, victory had finally arrived in Europe. In fact, 13 May 1945 marked five years to the day since Winston Churchill had uttered that phrase to the British people to rouse them for the fight ahead.

To mark the success of the war in Europe, the dome of the US Capitol building, which had been blacked out since Pearl Harbor, again gleamed under the glow of floodlights. As President Truman put it: ‘The western world has been freed of the evil forces which for five years and longer have imprisoned the bodies and broken the lives of millions upon millions of free-born men.’ House Speaker Sam Rayburn hailed the news in Europe but added two sombre notes. He lamented the passing of President Roosevelt weeks before V-E Day. Then he noted that the war wasn’t over: ‘I am happy but also sad, because I cannot help but think of those thousands of our boys who are yet to die in the far-flung Pacific islands and the Far East in order that victory may come to our armies, and that the glory of America may be upheld and peace and an ordered world may come to us again.’

News from the Pacific was encouraging, though fierce engagements continued there. For the previous six weeks, ferocious fighting had been under way on the island of Okinawa, which American generals intended to use as a springboard for an invasion of Japan. Few relished that idea, yet optimism ran high. That morning, the New York Times declared that final victory was assured, whether by negotiated surrender or outright defeat. The paper told its readers, ‘It will be a busy summer for the Japanese enemy, and Hirohito can be confident that the “softening-up” period, now started, will be followed by lethal blows.’

That confident inevitability might have been plain to editors of the Times and to policy makers in Washington. But the war in the Pacific remained a moment-by-moment struggle. Between sunrise and sunset on 13 May 1945, more than 130 US fighters and bombers would attack troops, trains, bridges, and other Japanese ‘targets of opportunity’ in south and east China. Ten B-24 Liberators would bomb an underground hangar on a dot of land called Moen Island. Nine other B-24s would bomb an airfield on a lonely speck in the northern Pacific called Marcus Island. On Borneo, B-24s would bomb two airfields. To the east, B-25 Mitchell bombers and P-38 Lightning fighters would support ground forces on Tarakan Island. The US 7th Marine Division would burst through Japanese defences on Okinawa to capture Dakeshi Ridge. In the Philippines, the 40th Infantry Division would capture Del Monte airfield, and bombers and fighters would pound targets on Luzon Island.

Those were the major events of the day, to be catalogued, analysed and recounted in countless books and films about The Big War. Another incident on 13 May 1945 would escape the notice of historians and filmmakers: a C-47 transport plane carrying two dozen officers, soldiers and WACs would disappear during a flight over the mountainous jungles of New Guinea.

US military map of New Guinea during the Second World War, with Hollandia on the northern coast at roughly the midpoint of the island. The mapmaker was unaware of a large valley some 240 kilometres southwest of Hollandia, in the mountain range that crosses the island’s midsection.

Located between Australia and the Equator, New Guinea was a largely uncharted tropical island 2500 kilometres long and nearly 800 kilometres wide at its centre. The world’s second-largest island, after Greenland, it was a gift-box assortment of inhospitable environments. Much of the coastline featured barely habitable lowlands, swamps, and jungles. In the great middle were soaring limestone mountains covered by impenetrable rainforests and topped by snow or rocky outcroppings. The New Guinea terrain was so forbidding that the most common experience for its inhabitants was isolation. Pockets of humanity carved out small places to survive, fighting with anyone who came near and often among themselves. As a result, the island evolved into a latter-day Babel. New Guinea’s natives spoke more than one thousand languages, or about one-sixth of the world’s total – despite accounting for less than one-tenth of one per cent of the global population.

Inhabited by humans for more than forty thousand years, New Guinea passed the millennia largely ignored by the rest of the world. Lookouts on European ships caught sight of the island early in the sixteenth century. In 1545, the Spanish explorer Yñigo Ortiz de Retez named the island Neuva Guinea after an African country 16,000 kilometres away, because the natives he saw on the coast had black skin. For another two centuries, New Guinea was left mostly to itself, though trappers stopped by to collect the brilliant plumes of its birds of paradise to make hats for fashionable Sri Lankan potentates. In the eighteenth century, the island became a regular landing spot for French and British explorers. Captain Cook visited in 1770. Scientists followed, and the island drew a steady stream of field researchers from around the globe searching for discoveries in zoology, botany and geography.

In the nineteenth century, New Guinea caught the eye of traders seeking valuable raw materials. No precious minerals or metals were easily accessible, but the rising value of coconut oil made it worthwhile to plant the flag and climb the palm trees along the coastline. European powers divided the island roughly in half, and the eastern section was cut in half again. Over the years, claims of sovereignty were made by Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. Nevertheless, even well-educated Westerners had a hard time finding it on a map.

After the First World War, New Guinea’s eastern half was controlled by Britain and Australia. The island’s western half was controlled by the Netherlands – and was henceforth known as Dutch New Guinea – with Hollandia as its capital. Unprecedented attention was drawn to the island as the Second World War unfolded, because of its central location in the Pacific theatre.

Japan invaded in 1942, planning to use New Guinea to launch attacks on Australia, just over 160 kilometres away across the Torres Straits. In April 1944, US troops executed a daring strike called ‘Operation Reckless’ that scattered the Japanese troops and won Hollandia for the Allies. The Americans turned it into an important base of their own, and General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific, built his headquarters there before moving on to the Philippines.

____

In New Guinea as elsewhere, Margaret Hastings and other WACs filled strictly non-combat roles, as expressed by their slogan, ‘Free a Man to Fight’. An earlier motto, ‘Release a Man for Combat’, was scratched because it was feared it might feed suspicions among the WACs’ detractors that their secret purpose was to provide sexual distractions for soldiers in the field. MacArthur was not among those critics. He liked to say the WACs were ‘my best soldiers’ because they worked harder and complained less than male troops. Eventually, more than one hundred and fifty thousand women served as WACs during World War II, making them the first women other than nurses to join the US Army.

Margaret arrived in Hollandia eight months after the success of Operation Reckless. By then, little of the war’s bloody drama was playing out in that corner of the Pacific. Thousands of Japanese troops remained armed and in hiding on the island, but few were believed to be in the immediate vicinity of Hollandia. Nevertheless, sentries patrolled the sea of tents and one-storey buildings on the Army base. WACs were routinely escorted under armed guard, and women’s tents were ringed by barbed wire. One WAC explained that the highest-ranking woman in her tent was given a sidearm to keep under her pillow, with instructions to kill her tent mates then herself if Japanese troops attacked. New Guinea natives also raised concerns, though the ones nearest Hollandia had grown so comfortable with the Americans they would call out, ‘Hey Joe – hubba, hubba – buy War Bonds.’ Australian soldiers who had received help from the natives during battles with the Japanese nicknamed them ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels’.

Some WACs thought the safety precautions’ real aim wasn’t to protect them from enemies or natives, but from more than one hundred thousand US soldiers, sailors and airmen in and around Hollandia. Some of those fighting boys and men hadn’t seen a Western woman in months.

Almost immediately upon her arrival in Hollandia, Margaret became a focus of lovelorn soldiers’ attentions. ‘I suppose you have heard about blanket parties,’ she wrote to a friend in Owego in February 1945. ‘I know I did and was properly shocked. They are quite the thing in New Guinea. However, they are not as bad as they seem and anyway, nothing can be done on a blanket that can’t be done in the back seat of a car.

‘You see, we have no easy chairs and Jeeps are not too easy to sit in. So you just take your beer, or at the end of the month when the beer is all gone, your canteen of water and put it in a Jeep and ride all around until you find some nice place to relax. The nights are lovely over here and it’s nice to lay under the stars and drink beer and talk, or perhaps go for a swim … With the surplus of men over here, you can’t help but find some nice ones. I have had no difficulty along that line at all.’

Far from home, Margaret indulged her adventurous impulses. ‘One night,’ she wrote, ‘six of us went out in a Jeep without any top and drove all over the island. We travelled on roads where the bridges had been washed away, drove through water, up banks, and almost tipped over about ten times.’ The letter didn’t give away military secrets, only personal ones, so it slipped untouched past the base censors.

Margaret’s great friend was a pretty brunette sergeant named Laura Besley. The only child of a retired oil driller and a homemaker, Laura hailed from a small town in Pennsylvania, 144 kilometres from Pittsburgh. She had spent a year in college before enlisting in the WACs in August 1942.

Laura was taller and more full-figured than Margaret, but otherwise the two WACs were much alike. Laura was thirty-one, single, with a reputation among her family for being a ‘sassy’ young woman who did as she pleased.

When they were not working, blanketing or joyriding, Margaret, Laura and the other WACs made their quarters as plush as possible. ‘It is really quite homelike, and I am lucky enough to be in with five exceptionally nice girls,’ Margaret wrote another friend at home. They furnished their 3.5-metre-square canvas home with small dressing tables made from boxes and burlap. They sat on chairs donated by supply officers who hoped the gifts would translate into dates. A small rug covered the concrete pad that was the floor, mosquito netting dangled over their cots, and silky blue parachute cloth hung as decoration from the tent ceiling.

Sergeant Laura Besley of the Women’s Army Corps.

A single bulb illuminated the tent, but a kind lieutenant named John McCollom who worked with Margaret’s boss gave Margaret a double electric socket. The coveted device allowed her to enjoy the luxury of light while she ironed her uniforms at night. Quiet and unassuming, John McCollom was one of a pair of identical twins from Missouri who served together in Hollandia. He was single and could not help but notice Margaret’s good looks, yet he did not try to convert the gift into the promise of a date. His good manners made Margaret appreciate it all the more.

The wildlife of New Guinea was not so unassuming. Rats, lizards, and hairy spiders the size of coffee saucers marched boldly into the WACs’ tents, and mosquitoes feasted on any stray arm or leg that slipped out from under the cots’ protective netting. Even the precautions had vivid side effects. Bitter-tasting Atabrine tablets warded off malaria, but the pills brought on headaches and vomiting, and they turned soldiers’ and WACs’ skin a sickly shade of yellow.

A lack of refrigeration meant most food came three ways: canned, salted, or dehydrated. Cooking it changed the temperature but not the flavour. WACs joked that they had been sent to the far reaches of the South Pacific to ‘Get skinny in Guinea’. To top it off, Hollandia was paradise for fungus. The weather varied little – a mixture of heat, rain, and humidity – which left everyone wet and overripe. Margaret showered at least twice a day using cold water pumped from a mountain stream. Still, she perspired through her khakis during the boiling hours in between. She relied on Mum deodorant, as well as ‘talcum, foot powder, and everything in the books in order to keep respectable’, she wrote in a letter home. ‘It is a continuous effort to keep clean over here. There are no paved roads and the dust is terrible, and when it rains there is mud.’

An American military officer described Hollandia vividly: ‘There was “jungle rot” – all five types. The first three were interesting to the patient; the next two were interesting to the doctor and mostly fatal to the patient. You name it – elephantiasis, malaria, dengue fever, the “crud” – New Guinea had it all. It was in the water in which you bathed, the foliage you touched – apparently the whole place was full of things one should have cringed from. But who has time to think when there are enemy snipers hanging dead, roped to their spotter trees; flesh-eating piranhas inhabiting the streams; lovely, large snakes slithering nearby; and always the enemy.’

Yet there was great beauty, too, from the lush mountains to the pounding surf; from the sound of the wind rustling through the leaves of coconut palms to the strange calls and flamboyant feathers of wild birds. Margaret’s tent was some fifty kilometres inland, near Lake Sentani, considered by its admirers to be among the world’s most picturesque bodies of water. Small islands that looked like mounds of crushed green velvet dotted its crystalline waters. On long work days, Margaret relieved her tired eyes by looking up from her desk to Mount Cyclops, its emerald flank cleaved by the perpetual spray of a narrow waterfall. She described the sight as almost enough to make her feel cool.

Mostly, though, Hollandia was a trial. The WACs’ official history singled out Base G as the worst place in the war for the health of military women: ‘The Air Surgeon reported that “an increasing number of cases are on record for nervousness and exhaustion,” and recommended that personnel be given one full day off per week to relieve “nervous tension.”’

Margaret’s boss took such warnings to heart, and he searched for ways to ease the stress among his staff.

____

Margaret was one of several hundred WACs assigned to the Far East Air Service Command, an essential if unglamorous supply, logistics and maintenance outfit known as ‘Fee-Ask’. Just as in civilian life, Margaret was a secretary. Her commanding officer was Colonel Peter Prossen, an experienced pilot and Fee-Ask’s chief of maintenance.

The early hours of 13 May 1945 were quiet in the big headquarters tent at Fee-Ask. Colonel Prossen spent part of the morning writing a letter to his family back home in Texas: his wife Evelyn, and their three young children, sons Peter and David, and daughter Lyneve, whose name was an anagram of her mother’s.

Prossen was thirty-seven, stocky, with blue eyes, a cleft chin, and thick brown hair. A native of New York from an affluent family, he joined the military so he could fly.

Prossen had spent most of his children’s lives at war, but his elder son and namesake knew him as a warm, cheerful man with a love of photography. He would sing ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ loudly and out of tune while his wife played flawless piano. After visits home, Prossen would fly over their house and tip his wings, to say goodbye.

In a letter to his wife a day earlier, addressed as always to ‘My dearest sweetheart’, Prossen commented on the news from home, counselled her to ignore slights by his sister, and lamented how long it took for photos of their children to reach him. He told her to save the stuffed koalas he had shipped home until their baby daughter’s second birthday. He asked her to watch the mail for a native axe he had sent home as a souvenir.

Colonel Peter Prossen with his sons, David and Peter.

A dozen years in the military hadn’t diminished Prossen’s tenderness to his family. He sent his wife love poems and heart-filled sketches on Valentine’s Day, and he pined for them to be reunited. Despite the harsh conditions he endured in Hollandia, Prossen commiserated sincerely with his wife about the hardships of gas rationing and caring for their children without him there.

The morning of 13 May 1945, for Mother’s Day, he wrote to Evelyn in his cribbed handwriting: ‘My sweet, I think that we will be extra happy when we get together again. Don’t worry about me … I am glad that the time passes fairly quickly for you – hope it does till I get home. Then I want it to slow down.’

Later in the letter, Prossen described a poem he had read about two boys playing ‘make-believe’. It made him wistful for his own sons. Sadness leaked through his pen as he wrote that their son Peter would take his First Communion that very day without him: ‘I’ll bet he is a nice boy. My, but he is growing up.’ Prossen signed off, ‘I love you as always. Please take good care of yourself for me. I send all my love. Devotedly, Pete.’

Lately, Prossen had been anxious about the toll Dutch New Guinea was taking on the hundred or so men and the twenty-plus WACs serving directly under him. He wrote to his wife that he tried to relieve the pressures shouldered by junior officers, enlisted men, and WACs, though he didn’t always succeed. ‘I lose sight of the fact that there is a war going on and it’s different,’ he wrote. ‘My subordinates are also depressed and been here a long time.’ He wanted to show them he valued their hard work.

Prossen wheedled pilots flying from Australia to bring his staff precious treats: Coca-Cola syrup and fresh fruit. Lately, he had been offering even more desirable rewards – sightseeing flights up the coastline. On this day, 13 May 1945, Colonel Prossen had arranged the rarest and most sought-after prize for his staff, one certain to boost morale: a trip to Shangri-La.

Chapter Three The Hidden Valley of Shangri-La

A YEAR EARLIER, IN MAY 1944, COLONEL RAY T. Elsmore heard his co-pilot’s voice crackle through the intercom in the cramped cockpit of their C-60 trans-port plane. Sitting in the left-hand seat, Elsmore had the controls, flying a zigzag route over and through the mountainous backbone of central New Guinea.

Elsmore commanded the 322nd Troop Carrier Wing of the US Army Air Forces. On this particular flight, his mission was to find a place to build a landing strip as a supply stop between Hollandia, on New Guinea’s northern coast, and Merauke, an Allied base on the island’s southern coast. If that wasn’t possible, he hoped to discover a more direct, low-altitude pass across the Oranje Mountains to make it easier to fly between the two bases.

The co-pilot, Major Myron Grimes, pointed at a mountain ahead: ‘Colonel, if we slip over that ridge, we’ll enter the canyon that winds into Hidden Valley.’

Grimes had made a similar reconnaissance flight a week earlier, and now he was showing Elsmore his surprising discovery. On his return from that first flight, Grimes claimed to have found a mostly flat, verdant valley some 150 air miles (240 kilometres) from Hollandia, in a spot where maps showed only an unbroken chain of high peaks and jungle-covered ridges. Mapmakers usually just sketched a string of upside-down ‘Vs’ to signify mountains and stamped the area ‘unknown’ or ‘unexplored’. One imaginative mapmaker claimed that the place Grimes spotted was the site of an ‘estimated 14,000-foot peak’. He might as well have written: ‘Here be dragons.’

If a large, uncharted, tabletop valley really existed in the jigsaw-puzzle mountain range, Colonel Elsmore thought it might make a good spot for a secret air supply base or an emergency landing strip. Elsmore wanted to see this so-called Hidden Valley for himself.

____

On Grimes’s signal, Elsmore pulled back on the C-60’s control wheel. He guided the long-nosed, twin-engine plane over the ridge and down into a canyon. Easing back the plane’s two throttle levers, he reduced power and remained below the billowing white clouds that shrouded the highest peaks. Pilots had nightmares about this sort of terrain. An occupational hazard of flying through what Elsmore called the ‘innocent white walls’ of clouds was the dismal possibility that a mountain might be hiding inside. Few pilots in the Army Air Forces knew those dangers better than Elsmore.

At fifty-three years old, energetic and fit enough to pass for a decade younger, Elsmore resembled the actor Gene Kelly. The son of a carpenter, he had been a flying instructor during the First World War, after which he had spent more than a decade delivering air mail through the Rocky Mountains. With the Second World War looming, Elsmore returned to military service and, when the war started, he immediately proved his worth. In March 1942, Elsmore arranged General MacArthur’s evacuation flight from the besieged island of Corregidor in Manila Bay to the safety of Australia. Later he became director of air transport for the Southwest Pacific, delivering troops and supplies wherever MacArthur needed them in New Guinea, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Borneo, Australia, and the western Solomon Islands.

Colonel Ray Elsmore.

As Elsmore and Grimes flew deeper into the canyon, they could see the walls growing steeper and narrower, steadily closing in on the plane’s wingtips. Elsmore steered around a bend, trying to stay in the middle of the canyon to maximize clearance on both sides of the twenty-metre wingspan. Straight ahead he saw a horrifying sight: a sheer rock wall. Elsmore grabbed both throttle levers. He began to thrust them forward, trying to gain full power as he prepared to veer up and away. But Grimes urged otherwise.

‘Push on through,’ the major said. ‘The valley is just beyond.’

Surveying the situation with only seconds to spare, travelling at more than 320 kilometres per hour, Elsmore chose to trust his twenty-four-year-old co-pilot. He followed Grimes’s instructions, slicing his way over the onrushing ridge and just beneath the overhanging clouds.

Safely in the clear, Elsmore saw a break in the puffy clouds. Spread out before them was a place their maps said didn’t exist, a rich valley Elsmore later called ‘a riot of dazzling color’. The land was largely flat, giving him a clear view of its full breadth – nearly forty-eight kilometres long and in places more than twelve kilometres wide, running northwest to southeast. Much of the valley was carpeted by tall, sharp kunai grass, waist-high in spots, interrupted by occasional stands of trees. Surrounding it were sheer mountain walls with jagged ridges rising to the clouds.

At the southeastern end, a river cascaded over a cliff to enter the valley. More than thirty metres wide in spots, it snaked through the valley, interrupted by occasional rapids before, at the valley’s northwestern end, the cocoa-coloured river disappeared into an enormous hole in the mountain wall that formed a natural grotto, its upper arch some ninety metres above the ground.

Even more remarkable than the valley’s physical splendour were its inhabitants: tens of thousands of people who lived as their ancestors had since the Stone Age.

____

Peering down through the cockpit windows, Elsmore and Grimes saw several hundred small, clearly defined native villages. Surrounding the native compounds were carefully tended gardens, with primitive but effective irrigation systems, including dams and drainage ditches. ‘Crops were in full growth everywhere and, unlike the scene in most tropic lands, the fields were literally alive with men, women, and children, all hard at work,’ Elsmore marvelled.

Men and boys roamed naked except for hollowed-out gourds covering their genitals; women and girls wore only low-slung fibre skirts. As he flew on, mesmerized by the scene below him, Elsmore watched the natives scatter at the sight and sound of the roaring airplane, ‘some crawling under the sweet potato vines and others diving into the drainage ditches’. Pigs wandered around the compounds, and Elsmore caught sight of a few black dogs lazing about.

At the edges of large, open fields, Elsmore noticed spindly towers made from lashed-together poles rising some nine metres or more above the valley floor. Each tower had a platform for a sentry near the top, and some towers had small grass roofs, to shelter the sentries from the sun. Elsmore pushed the control wheel forward, to guide the plane lower for a better look. He guessed, correctly, that they were watchtowers to guard against marauding enemies. As the C-60 flew on, the thrumming noise of its twelve-hundred-horsepower engines bounced off the valley floor and mountain walls. Frightened sentries abandoned their posts, climbed down the towers, and ran to nearby huts. Elsmore saw wooden spears more than four metres long leaning against those huts.

A native village photographed from the air by Colonel Ray Elsmore.

Elsmore snapped a few photographs, focusing on the people and their huts, some of them round like toadstools or thatched-roof ‘igloos’, he thought, and others long and narrow like boxcars. ‘The panorama of these hundreds of villages from the air is one of the most impressive sights I have ever seen,’ he wrote afterwards.

He and Grimes had a mission to complete, so Elsmore pulled back on the control wheel and roared up and out of the valley. He pointed the plane southeast and flew some 320 kilometres to another potential site for a landing strip, in an area called Ifitamin.

____

Several days later, Elsmore wrote a secret memo on his findings to his commanding officer, General George C. Kenney. The memo described the survey flights and paid special attention to the valley and the people in it. Major Grimes had called his discovery ‘Hidden Valley’, but in the memo Elsmore referred to it in less poetic terms. He called it the ‘Baliem Valley’, using the name of the river that flowed through it.

One concern Elsmore expressed to General Kenney about building a landing strip was the reaction of the natives. ‘There is no access into this valley … except by air, and for that reason very little is known of the attitude of the natives. It is known that there are headhunters in many of the adjacent regions and there is a suspicion that the natives in the Baliem Valley may also be unfriendly,’ he wrote. Also in the memo, Elsmore issued an ominous warning to fellow pilots who might follow him there. He described at length how treacherous it could be to fly through the cloud-covered pass into the valley, especially ‘for a pilot unfamiliar with this canyon’.

As it turned out, by any name Hidden Valley or Baliem Valley was unsuitable for a military landing strip. At 1600 metres above sea level, surrounded by mountains reaching 4000 metres and higher, it was too dangerous and inaccessible. Also, there was a better alternative. Elsmore learned that an Australian missionary had found the natives at Ifitamin to be friendly and eager to be put to work. This was more suitable for Elsmore’s plan. ‘Not only were we anxious to avoid incidents and bloodshed’ – believed to be a strong possibility with the natives of Hidden/Baliem Valley – ‘but we wanted to employ native labor on the construction project.’

Although the valley could serve no military purpose, news of its discovery spread quickly around Hollandia and beyond. Interest heightened when Elsmore began telling people that he thought the valley’s inhabitants looked much taller and larger than any other New Guinea natives he had seen. Elsmore’s impressions contributed to fast-spreading stories, or more accurately, tall tales, that Hidden Valley was populated by a previously unknown race of primitive giants. Some called them black supermen – handsome models of sinewy manhood standing over two metres tall. Soon the natives were said to be headhunters and cannibals, savages who practised human sacrifice on stone altars. The pigs the natives raised were said to be the size of ponies. The bare-breasted native women were said to resemble the curvaceous pin-up girls in soldiers’ barracks, especially the exotic, sarong-wearing actress Dorothy Lamour, whose hit movies included The Jungle Princess.

In time, the stories multiplied, largely because no one could contradict any claim, no matter how outlandish. And it seemed as though the stories would remain unchallenged. No one in Hollandia had any reason to hike 240 kilometres, past untold Japanese troops in hiding, over mountains, and through swamps and jungles. And no planes could safely land in the valley – the ground was too soft, uneven and grassy for a natural runway – and helicopter blades could not generate enough lift in the thin, high-altitude air to clear the surrounding mountains. Above all, the soldiers at Base G had a war to fight, not an anthropological expedition to mount.

Still, the valley captivated Elsmore. He asked around among Dutch and Australians whom he considered to be experts on New Guinea and found no evidence that any outsider had ever set foot in the valley.

____

As the stories spread, sightseers clamoured to see Hidden Valley with their own eyes. Over flights became a perk for officers, WACs, and enlisted men. Some returned with exciting stories of natives firing arrows and throwing spears at their planes. The more adventurous among them dreamed of touching the valley floor, even if it meant crash landing. ‘I suppose I would have regretted it,’ a lieutenant named William J. Gatling Jr wrote to his family in Arkansas, ‘but I feel I would have liked to have been forced down simply to get a good first-hand idea of the whole area. Flying over was like holding candy just out of reach of a baby.’

Gatling’s letter continued:

Quite a number of us were skeptical of what we had heard before we made the trip but our skepticism had all vanished by the time we returned. Some will and some will not believe this story … Beyond what has been observed from the air, it is believed nothing first-hand is known of these primitive people and their habits and customs. Sealed as they are in their Hidden Valley, they appear to be wholly self-supporting and self-sufficient. It is possible, of course, that they have some hidden footpath out of there, but such has not been located from the sky. Even if they could leave their valley, they would face a one-hundred-fifty-mile trek through almost impenetrable rainforest-type jungle to reach the Pacific coast in the north, or would encounter one-hundred-fifty miles of impassable, unexplored swamp extending between them and the Arafura Sea to the south.

After describing all he had seen during his flight, Gatling concluded his letter home with a philosophical thought: ‘Probably after the war the Dutch government will send an expedition into the valley or missionaries may penetrate it, so until then the natives … will know nothing of the white man except that he flies a big bird that makes lots of noise. Who knows, maybe they are much better off the way they are. At any rate, I am sure if they knew of the turmoil in which we are now engaged, they would be much happier to stay ignorant of the “civilized” world.’

____

The press got wind of the valley, and Colonel Elsmore agreed to take two veteran war reporters with him on one of his frequent flights over the valley, George Lait and Harry E. Patterson. Lait, in particular, had a lot to live up to. His father was Jack Lait, the pugnacious editor of the New York Mirror, who as a reporter in 1934 had filed an exclusive, on-scene story describing how the FBI gunned down bank robber John Dillinger. At thirty-eight, George Lait was on the way to matching his old man. As a swash-buckling correspondent for the International News Service, he palled around with legendary reporter Ernie Pyle and gossip columnist Walter Winchell; he was knocked out cold in London when shrapnel hit his helmet during the Blitz; and he had been blown out of a car seat by a German bomb. He had shot pheasants with King George VI, spent eighteen months with the British Eighth Army, and qualified as a paratrooper with the US Army’s 11th Airborne. Another reporter once said of him: ‘As a war correspondent, George was an inspired writer, fighter and souvenir collector. Where other correspondents might liberate a pistol or a helmet, George liberated machine guns, bazookas, tanks, and once had to be persuaded not to put the snatch on a Messerschmitt. It was a big war, George said, and he wanted something big to prove it.’

A man on his way to having seen it all, George Lait admitted that he had never seen anything quite like the valley. After returning from the flight with Elsmore, he filed a dispatch rich in description though tinged with racial and cultural condescension:

Skimming less than one-hundred feet over the valley floor, one was able to identify among the native crops banana trees, a water plant (swamp taro), extensive patches of the native sweet potato or yam, and a waist-high plant closely resembling tobacco.

Of animals, only a few dogs and pigs were seen. The pigs, staple meat food throughout New Guinea and religiously revered by most natives of the island, appeared exceptionally large and well kept, and of two varieties – an all-black or dark brown species, and a black and white variety, the latter growing to immense size.

When the plane first roared over the valley, crowds of natives ran from their houses and vanished into the standing crops or clumps of trees. But after flying down the valley several times, their child-like curiosity seemed to overcome their fear of the motors – they cautiously emerged to watch the soaring plane.

Harry Patterson’s story of the flight emphasized drama and intrigue: ‘Even today, weeks after the discovery that has the whole South Pacific buzzing with speculation, no white man and probably no regular native has set foot in the lost valley … It is pretty well-known in this part of the world that most of the New Guinea savages were either cannibals or head hunters.’ Patterson quoted Colonel Elsmore describing the valley natives as ‘taller, more finely built and lighter-skinned than the usual New Guinea fuzzy-wuzzies’.

The colonel, fancying himself an amateur geologist as well as a cockpit anthropologist, speculated that the natives’ ancestors came to the valley ‘hundreds or thousands of years ago’. ‘He thinks that after they settled in this mountain paradise an earthquake or some tremendous upheaval trapped them in the valley,’ Patterson reported.

As impressed as they were by what they had seen, Lait and Patterson were disappointed by the name Hidden Valley. Determined to re-christen it, they thought back several years to the Frank Capra movie, Lost Horizon, and its source, a 1933 James Hilton novel about a mysterious, peaceful utopia isolated from a war-weary world.

Hilton’s story revolves around the crash of a small plane into a Tibetan mountain. The survivors, one of them a woman, are rescued by monks who guide them to a bucolic valley where the inhabitants’ lives are long and happy, a land where moderation and tolerance reign supreme. In time, the survivors must choose whether to remain forever in the valley or return to the outside world, knowing that they might never be able to return.

Often read as an adventure tale, Hilton’s book is really a meditation on finding peace and preserving humanity in a world spiralling towards self-destruction. Hilton saw ‘civilization’ trapped in a ruinous cycle, careening from one war to the next, each more deadly and destructive than the last. In a long exchange between two main characters, Lost Horizon anticipated a global war of unimaginable proportions. More than a decade before the first atom bomb, Hilton feared a future in which ‘a single-weaponed man might have matched a whole army’.

Describing one especially wise character, Hilton wrote: ‘He foresaw a time when men, exultant in the technique of homicide, would rage so hotly over the world that every precious thing would be in danger, every book and picture and harmony, every treasure garnered through two millenniums, the small, the delicate, the defenseless – all would be lost.’

Hilton’s frightening prediction didn’t escape notice. President Roosevelt quoted that passage from Lost Horizon in a 1937 speech in Chicago. Four years before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt used Hilton’s horrifying vision to warn that, in defence of civilization, America might find itself forced to quarantine aggressive nations bent on unleashing a global storm. Roosevelt’s warning had proved prescient.

It’s no wonder, then, that a pair of veteran war correspondents looked wistfully on a fertile valley, sealed from the outside world, its natives ignorant of war, Nazis and kamikazes, and thought of the name that Hilton had given his fictional paradise. Never mind the reports of headhunters and cannibals, of spears and arrows, of watchtowers and sentries and battles among neighbours. Never mind the possibility that the native world glimpsed by Colonel Elsmore and Major Grimes wasn’t peaceful at all, but a window into a shared human inheritance, one that suggested that the very nature of man was to make war.

Those questions could wait for another day, perhaps until someone from outside entered the valley and met the natives. In the meantime, George Lait and Harry Patterson bestowed a new name on New Guinea’s Hidden Valley: they called it Shangri-La.

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