Lost in Shangri-la
Page 1
LOST IN
SHANGRI-LA
A TRUE STORY OF
SURVIVAL, ADVENTURE,
AND THE MOST INCREDIBLE
RESCUE MISSION OF
WORLD WAR II
MITCHELL ZUCKOFF
For Gerry
Contents
Cover
Title Page
A Note to the Reader
Chapter 1 - MISSING
Chapter 2 - HOLLANDIA
Chapter 3 - 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 - WIMAYUK WANDIK, AKA “CHIEF PETE”
Chapter 13 - COME WHAT MAY
Chapter 14 - FIVE-BY-FIVE
Chapter 15 - NO THANKSGIVING
Chapter 16 - RAMMY AND DOC
Chapter 17 - CUSTER AND COMPANY
Chapter 18 - BATHTIME FOR YUGWE
Chapter 19 - “SHOO, SHOO BABY”
Chapter 20 - “HEY, MARTHA!”
Chapter 21 - PROMISED LAND
Chapter 22 - HOLLYWOOD
Chapter 23 - GLIDERS?
Chapter 24 - TWO QUEENS
Chapter 25 - SNATCH
EPILOGUE: After Shangri-La
Cast of Characters
Notes on Sources and Methods
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
Credit
About the Author
Also by Mitchell Zuckoff
Copyright
About the Publisher
A NOTE TO THE READER
NEAR THE END of World War II, a U.S. 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 bone-through-the-nose 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’d be outnumbered more than a thousand to one. Rounding out the true-life cast were a rogue filmmaker who’d 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 nagged at 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 can’t carry on a conversation. I dreamed of finding someone who’d 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 U.S. 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 feet 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’d witnessed the crash as children; and to hike to the top of a mountain where pieces of the plane still rest, along with the 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
Chapter 1
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. Just outside downtown, he turned onto McMaster Street, a row of modest, well-kept homes shaded by sturdy elm trees. He slowed to a stop at a green, farm-style 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 U.S. 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 center. Similar banners hung in windows all through the village, each one to honor a young man, or in a few cases a young woman, gone to war. American troops had been fighting in World War II since 1941, and some blue-star banners had already been replaced by banners with gold stars, signifying a loss for a larger gain and 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, his 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’d 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’d 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 U.S. Army. Together with Julia, he reared three bright, lively daughters.
Now, though, Patrick Hastings lived alone. Six years earlier, a fatal infection had 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’s window wasn’t for either of his sons-in-law. It honored his strong-willed eldest daughter, Corporal Margaret Hastings of the Women’s Army Corps, the WACs.
Corporal Margaret Hastings of the Women’s Army Corps, photographed in 1945. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)
Sixteen months earlier, in January 1944, Margaret Hastings had 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 U.S. 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, he
r 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 U.S. military compound on the island’s eastern half, an area known as Dutch New Guinea.
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 300,000. More than a 100,000 other Americans had died noncombat deaths. More than 600,000 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’s 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 including Shippenville, Pennsylvania; Trenton, Missouri; and Kelso, Washington, and to urban centers including New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.
Each message offered a nod toward sympathy camouflaged by the clipped tone of a military communiqué. Each was signed by Major General James A. Ulio, the U.S. Army’s chief administrative officer. Patrick Hastings held the pale yellow telegram in his calloused hands. It 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. In mentioning the letter, Patrick Hastings’s 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 didn’t sugarcoat the news or hold out false hope about their sister’s fate. Outdoing even the military for brevity, he reduced the telegram to three words: Margaret is missing.
Chapter 2
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 tentmates in the regulation khakis she’d 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.”
Tents for members of the Women’s Army Corps in Hollandia, Dutch New Guinea, during World War II. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Army.)
The date was May 13, 1945. It was Sunday, so the bugler had the day off from his usual 5:30 a.m. reveille. Not that Margaret could sleep in. The workweek was seven days long at Base G, a sprawling U.S. 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.
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 under five-foot-two and barely a hundred pounds, she still fit her high school wardrobe and her teenage nickname, Little Girl. But Margaret’s size was deceiving. 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 sidelong 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. Being single at thirty didn’t bother her, but it made her unusual: the average marrying age for women of her generation was twenty-one. 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-caliber pistols. She liked the work, but it bothered her that she’d 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—the fourth time the holiday had fallen during World War II. 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, May 13, 1945, marked five years to the day since British prime minister Winston Churchill had uttered that phrase to rouse his countrymen for the fight ahead.
To mark the once-improbable success of the war in Europe, the dome of the U.S. Capitol building, which had been blacked out since Pearl Harbor, again gleamed under the glow of floodlights. Congress unanimously endorsed President Truman’s declaration of May 13, 1945, as not just Mother’s Day but also “A Day of Prayer.” As 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 somber 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, if necessary. 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 May 13, 1945, more
than 130 U.S. fighters and bombers would attack troops, trains, bridges, and other Japanese “targets of opportunity” in southern and eastern 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 U.S. 7th Marine Division would burst through Japanese defenses 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, analyzed, and recounted in countless books and films about the Big War. Another incident on May 13, 1945, would escape the notice of historians and Hollywood: a C-47 transport plane carrying two dozen officers, soldiers, and WACs would disappear during a flight over the mountainous jungles of New Guinea.
AFTER ENLISTING, MARGARET spent nearly a year in basic training, at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia, and at Mitchel Field on Long Island, New York. She learned to march in formation, abandon ship, wear a gas mask, read a map, scrub a latrine, maintain proper hygiene, and live by endless military rules. In December 1944, having risen from private to corporal, she shipped out to New Guinea, a place as different from Owego as imaginable.
Located between Australia and the equator, New Guinea was a largely uncharted tropical island roughly twice the size of California. At fifteen hundred miles long and nearly five hundred miles wide at its center, it was the world’s second-largest island, after Greenland. On a map, New Guinea resembled a prehistoric bird taking off from Australia or a comedian’s rubber chicken. But resemblances can be misleading; there was nothing funny about the place.