Lost in Shangri-la

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Colonel Ray T. Elsmore. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

  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 sixty-five-foot 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, traveling at more than two hundred miles per hour, Elsmore chose to trust his twenty-four-year-old copilot. 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, framing the vista like a heavenly vision. 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 thirty miles long and more than eight miles wide at its widest point, running northwest to southeast. Surrounding the valley were sheer mountain walls with jagged ridges rising to the clouds.

  At the southeastern end, a river entered the valley by cascading over a cliff. The cocoa-colored river, more than a hundred feet wide in spots, snaked through the valley, interrupted by occasional rapids. At the valley’s northwestern end, the river disappeared into an enormous hole in a mountain wall that formed a natural grotto, its upper arch some three hundred feet above the ground. Much of the valley was carpeted by tall, sharp kunai grass, waist-high in spots, interrupted by occasional stands of trees.

  Even more remarkable than the valley’s physical splendor were its inhabitants: tens of thousands of people for whom the Stone Age was the present day.

  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 marveled.

  Men and boys roamed naked except for hollowed-out gourds covering their genitals; women and girls wore only low-slung fiber skirts. 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 brown dogs lazing about.

  A native village photographed from the air by Colonel Ray T. Elsmore. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

  At the edges of large, open fields, Elsmore noticed spindly towers made from lashed-together poles rising some thirty feet 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 fifteen feet long leaning against those huts.

  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,” Elsmore wrote afterward.

  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 two hundred miles 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, America’s top airman in the Pacific during World War II. 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 entrance 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 a mile above sea level, surrounded by mountains reaching thirteen thousand feet 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. That fit Elsmore’s plan perfectly. “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’d seen. By contrast, he described the natives at Ifitamin as “pygmy type.”

  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 seven feet tall. Soon the natives were said to be headhunters and cannibals, savages who practiced 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 pinup girls in soldiers’ barracks, especially the exotic, sarong-wearing actress Dorothy Lamour, whose hit movies included “The Jungle Princess.” The only difference was that the valley women were described as “Dorothy Lamours in blackface.”

  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 a hundred and fifty miles 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 couldn’t 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 far as the U.S. Army was concerned, then, Colonel Ray T. Elsmore was the Christopher Columbus of Hidden Valley, while Grimes’s role was downgraded to “co-discoverer.”

  As the stories spread, sightseers clamored to see Hidden Valley with their own eyes. Overflights became a perk for officers, WACs, and enli
sted 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 150-mile trek through almost impenetrable rainforest-type jungle to reach the Pacific coast in the north, or would encounter 150 miles of impassable, unexplored swamp extending between them and the Arafura Sea to the south.”

  After describing all he’d 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.”

  COLONEL ELSMORE MADE frequent flights over the valley, photographing it from every angle and making observations and suppositions about its inhabitants. On one flight he saw more than three hundred natives assembled on a grassy field. Divided into two groups, they were armed with spears, bows, and arrows, their bodies slathered with ceremonial war paint. Elsmore pushed the control wheel forward, forcing the plane into a dive, and buzzed low over the field. The warriors ran off, suspending their battle at least temporarily.

  The press got wind of the valley, and Elsmore agreed to a flyover by two veteran war reporters, 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 swashbuckling 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 was blown out of a car seat by a German bomb. He’d shot pheasants with England’s King George VI, spent eighteen months with the British Eighth Army, and qualified as a paratrooper with the U.S. 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’d 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 100 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.” Wrote Patterson: “He thinks that after they settled in this mountain paradise an earthquake or some tremendous upheaval trapped them in the valley.”

  As impressed as they were by what they’d seen, Lait and Patterson were disappointed by the name Hidden Valley. Determined to rechristen 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 spiraling toward 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 defense 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 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 neighbors. 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 Patter
son bestowed a new name on New Guinea’s Hidden Valley: they called it Shangri-La.

  Chapter 4

  GREMLIN SPECIAL

  THE VALLEY’S NEW name took hold.

  Elsmore’s unit formed a “Shangri-La Society” for pilots and passengers fortunate enough to fly over it. Each society member received a comically ornate certificate on parchment paper that looked like a hard-earned diploma, complete with blue-and-yellow ribbons affixed by a gold foil seal. Signed by Elsmore and one of his subordinates, the certificates were personalized with the society member’s name and the date of his or her special flight. The certificates also included the valley’s precise longitude and latitude, so society members could find their way back, unlike visitors who left Hilton’s Shangri-La.

  Reporters couldn’t get enough of Elsmore—one dubbed him the “leading authority on the valley and its people”—and the colonel lapped it up. After Lait and Patterson, other correspondents clamored to visit the valley, and Elsmore usually obliged. Some who didn’t see it for themselves but interviewed Elsmore or Grimes took flights of fancy. One desk-bound reporter gushed about the valley’s beauty and called it “a veritable Garden of Eden.” Then he interviewed Elsmore about fears of headhunters. The colonel played up the danger, with a wink. Elsmore told the reporter that he might drop a missionary into the valley by parachute to show that “we come as friends and mean no harm. But I’m afraid it would more likely be a case of ‘head you lose.’ ”