Lost in Shangri-la

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  The quotable colonel told a correspondent for The Associated Press that when the war ended, he wanted to be the first white man to step foot in the valley and make contact with, in the reporter’s phrase, the “long-haired, giant natives.” Elsmore said his plan was to land in a glider, “fully equipped with bargaining trinkets, also weapons if they won’t bargain, food and the necessary material for swiftly setting up an airstrip so that transport planes can follow in.”

  The AP story appeared in U.S. newspapers on Sunday, May 13, 1945—the same day that Corporal Margaret Hastings’s boss, Colonel Peter Prossen, began rounding up members of the Fee-Ask maintenance division for a trip to Shangri-La.

  FOR OFFICIAL PURPOSES, Prossen described the flight as a “navigational training” mission. The truth—a Mother’s Day sightseeing joyride—wouldn’t look nearly as good in a military flight log. Although he’d taken his staff on similar recreational flights up and down the New Guinea coast, this would be Prossen’s first trip to Shangri-La.

  Margaret was at her desk when the invitation came. She had a date after work with a soldier she’d been seeing regularly, a handsome sergeant from Pennsylvania named Walter “Wally” Fleming. He’d managed to get the keys to a Jeep, so they planned a drive to a secluded beach for an ocean swim. Yet Margaret had been desperate to visit Shangri-La since arriving at Fee-Ask five months earlier. Confident that she’d be back in time for her date, she leaped at Prossen’s offer.

  The letter Prossen wrote that morning to his wife apparently put him in a mood to chat about home. He stopped by Margaret’s desk and shared amusing news from his wife’s last letter, laughingly telling Margaret that the family’s new dog—a mutt that his son Peter Jr. had named Lassie—was somehow winning prizes at local dog shows.

  Margaret rushed to clear Prossen’s desk of work by noon. She wolfed down a lunch of chicken, with ice cream for dessert, abandoning her usual practice of savoring each cold spoonful.

  Prossen arranged for a truck to take Margaret and eight other WACs to the nearby Sentani Airstrip, named for the lake of the same name, while the men invited on the flight walked or hitched rides there. When the passengers arrived, they found Prossen, his copilot, and three crew members mingling outside a fully fueled transport plane, its engines warming and propellers spinning. In civilian life, the plane was a Douglas DC-3, but once enlisted in the war effort it became a C-47 Skytrain, a workhorse of the wartime skies, with more than ten thousand of them deployed at Allied bases around the world.

  Nearly sixty-four feet long, with a wingspan of more than ninety-five feet, the C-47 cruised comfortably at 175 miles per hour. At full throttle it theoretically could fly 50 miles per hour faster. It had a range of about 1,600 miles, or about five times as far as the round-trip that Prossen had planned. Most C-47s had twin twelve-hundred-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines. Some had guns, but Prossen’s plane was unarmed. C-47s weren’t flashy, and they weren’t especially fast, but they were as reliable as Buicks and stable in flight. If troops or matériel were needed somewhere, a C-47 could be counted on to get them there. Pilots spoke fondly of their signature smell, a bouquet of leather and hydraulic fluid.

  C–47 in flight during World War II. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Army.)

  Consolidated Aircraft Corporation had built Prossen’s plane in 1942 at a cost to the military of $269,276. Upon its arrival in Hollandia, the plane had been painted in camouflage colors to blend with the jungle if spotted from above by an enemy fighter or bomber. One problem: if the C-47 went down in the dense New Guinea jungle, its paint job would make it nearly impossible for searchers to spot.

  To the Army Air Forces, Prossen’s plane was serial number 42-23952. In radio transmissions, it would be identified by its last three numbers, as 952. C-47s were often called “Gooney Birds,” especially in Europe, and individual planes earned their own monikers from their captains and crews. Around the Sentani Airstrip, Prossen’s plane was affectionately called Merle, though its better-known nickname was the Gremlin Special.

  The name was ironic at best. Gremlins were mythical creatures blamed by airmen for sabotaging aircraft. The term was popularized by a 1943 children’s picture book called The Gremlins, written by a young Royal Air Force flight lieutenant destined to become a world-famous author: Roald Dahl. In Dahl’s story, the tiny horned beasties were motivated to make mechanical mischief as revenge against humans, who’d destroyed their primeval forest home to build an airplane factory.

  AT TWO O’CLOCK in the afternoon it was time to go. As the passengers lined up outside the Gremlin Special, Prossen told them to expect a three-hour tour.

  “Let the girls in first,” Prossen said, “and then fill it up with any enlisted men and officers who want to go.”

  One enlisted man, especially keen to see Shangri-La, grumbled, “Hey, that’s showing partiality.” Prossen ignored the soldier’s complaint.

  One after another, the nine WACs climbed into the plane through a door near the tail, with Margaret first in line. Once inside, she found bucket seats with their backs against the inner walls of the cabin, so the passengers on one side of the plane would look across a center aisle at the passengers on the other side.

  Like a child playing musical chairs, Margaret ran up the aisle toward the cockpit. She plopped into the bucket seat closest to the pilots, certain she’d picked a winner. But when she looked out the window, she didn’t like the view. The C-47’s forward cabin windows looked down onto the wings, making it difficult if not impossible to see directly below. Determined to make a full aerial inspection of Shangri-La, Margaret jumped up, did a quick about-face, and ran back down the aisle toward the tail. She grabbed the last seat on the plane’s left side, near the door she’d used to come aboard. The view was perfect.

  Close behind Margaret was her close friend and double-date partner, Laura Besley. The attractive sergeant sat directly across from Margaret, in the last seat on the plane’s right side. The center aisle of the plane was so narrow that the toes of their shoes almost touched. Margaret caught Laura’s eye and winked. They were certain to have quite a story to tell at their next blanket party.

  Sitting next to Laura Besley was Private Eleanor Hanna, a vivacious, fair-skinned farm girl from Montoursville, Pennsylvania. At twenty-one, the curly-haired Eleanor had an older brother in the Army Air Forces and a younger brother in the U.S. Navy. Her father had served in the ambulance corps in World War I, and had spent time in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Eleanor had a reputation around Fee-Ask for singing wherever she went.

  “Isn’t this fun!” she yelled over the engines.

  On Eleanor Hanna’s wrist dangled a decidedly nonmilitary adornment: a souvenir bracelet made from Chinese coins strung together with metal wire. She owned at least two others just like it.

  Also on board was Private Marian Gillis of Los Angeles, the daughter of a newspaper publisher. An amateur pilot, she’d already lived a whirlwind life, including fleeing from Spain with her mother at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Nearby was Sergeant Belle Naimer of the Bronx, the daughter of a retired blouse manufacturer. She was still grieving the death of her fiancé, an Army Air Forces lieutenant killed months earlier when his plane went down in Europe.

  Another WAC searching for a seat was Sergeant Helen Kent of Taft, California. A widow, she’d lost her husband in a military plane crash. Bubbly and fun-loving despite her loss, Helen had joined the WACs to help relieve her loneliness. Her best friend at the base, Sergeant Ruth Coster, was supposed to accompany her on the flight, but Ruth was swamped with paperwork for planes that General MacArthur wanted flown to the Philippines. Ruth had urged Helen to go ahead and, upon her return, tell her what it was like. Ruth would join the “Shangri-La Society” another day.

  Best friends Sergeant Ruth Coster (left) and Sergeant Helen Kent goofing around for the camera. Ruth wanted to join Helen aboard the Gremlin Special but had too much work. (Photo courtesy of Dona Cruse.)

  Three more WACs climbed aboard: S
ergeant Marion W. McMonagle, a forty-four-year-old widow from Philadelphia with no children; Private Alethia M. Fair, a divorced fifty-year-old telephone operator from Hollywood, California; and Private Mary M. Landau, a single thirty-eight-year-old stenographer from Brooklyn.

  Behind them came Colonel Prossen, trailed by his copilot, Major George H. Nicholson Jr. of Medford, Massachusetts. Nicholson was thirty-four, a student of the classics who’d graduated from Boston College, then received master’s degrees from Harvard, in the arts, and Boston University, in education. After several years on the home front in the infantry reserve, during which he taught junior high school, Nicholson joined the Army Air Forces to earn his silver pilot’s wings. He’d only been overseas for four months, during which he’d served under Lord Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander in Southeast Asia, before transferring to Dutch New Guinea.

  Four days earlier, George Nicholson had skipped a “Victory in Europe” party at the Fee-Ask Officers’ Club. He spent the night alone in his tent, writing a remarkable letter to his wife, Alice, a fellow schoolteacher he’d married days before reporting for active duty.

  In neat script, with a historian’s sense of scale and a poet’s lyric touch, Nicholson marked the Allied victory over Germany by composing a vivid fifteen-page narrative of the war in Europe and Africa. His words swept armies across continents, navies across oceans, warplanes across unbounded skies. He channeled the emotions and prayers of families on the home front, and the fear and heroism of soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen on the front lines. He tracked the American military’s rise from a hodgepodge of ice-cream-eating schoolboys to a juggernaut of battle-tested warriors. He moved Allied men and machines through crushing blows at Dieppe, in France, and the Kasserine Pass, in Tunisia. He roused them to victory on North African soil against the hardened German tank units in the battle of El Guettar. He drove them on to Salerno and “Bloody Anzio,” in Italy.

  Nicholson gained momentum, just as the Allies had, as he approached the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. He wrote as if he’d been there: “Then the morning twilight was stabbed by the flashes of ships’ guns pounding the invasion coast, and the air was rocked by the explosions of shells from the guns and bombs from the planes. Rockets traced fiery arcs across the sky. The choppy waters of the Channel made many of the troops seasick in the assault boats. German artillery plowed into the water, plowed often into assault boats and larger vessels, blowing them to destruction. Mines exploded with tremendous shock. Beach and boats drew closer. Fear gripped the men but courage welled from within them. The ramps were let down, the men waded through obstacle-strewn water, they reached the beaches. The invasion had begun.”

  Major George H. Nicholson. (Photo courtesy of John McCarthy.)

  Four pages later, Nicholson described American troops crossing the Rhine into Germany, American flyers driving the feared pilots of the Luftwaffe from the sky, and Allied forces squeezing the Third Reich by the throat to force its surrender. “We may have been soft, but we’re tough now,” he wrote. “The battle is the payoff. We beat them into submission.”

  Only at the very end did the letter turn personal, as Nicholson expressed his guilt and questioned his own manhood for not having served in Europe with the U.S. Eighth Air Force. Addressing his wife directly, Nicholson confessed: “This is illogical, I admit, but a man is scarcely a man when he does not desire to pitch in when the combat involves his country and his loved ones. Do not think harshly of me, darling. The proof lies in action; I would have liked to go to the Eighth, but I never requested it.”

  Having unburdened himself, Nicholson signed off: “Darling, I love you.” Then, for the first time in fifteen pages of commanding prose, he repeated himself. “I love you.”

  ALONG WITH PROSSEN and Nicholson came the plane’s three other crew members, Staff Sergeant Hilliard Norris, a twenty-three-year-old flight engineer from Waynesville, North Carolina, and two privates, George Newcomer of Middletown, New York, a twenty-four-year-old radio operator, and Melvin Mollberg of Baudette, Minnesota, the assistant engineer.

  Mollberg, known to his friends as “Molly,” was a muscular, handsome twenty-four-year-old farm boy with thick blond hair and a crooked grin. He was engaged to a pretty young woman from Brisbane, Australia, where he’d been stationed before arriving in Hollandia a month earlier. Mollberg was a last-minute substitute on the Gremlin Special crew. The assistant engineer whose name initially came up on the duty roster was Mollberg’s best friend, Corporal James “Jimmy” Lutgring, with whom Mollberg had spent nearly three years in the Fifth Air Force in the South Pacific. But Lutgring and Colonel Prossen didn’t get along. The source of the tension wasn’t clear, but it might have traced back to Lutgring believing that Prossen had played a role in denying him a promotion to sergeant. Lutgring didn’t want to spend his Sunday afternoon flying on the colonel’s crew, even if it meant missing a chance to see Shangri-La. Mollberg understood. He volunteered to take his pal Jimmy’s place on the flight.

  Corporal James “Jimmy” Lutgring (left) and his best friend, Private Melvin Mollberg, who replaced Lutgring on the crew of the Gremlin Special. (Photo courtesy of Mel Lutgring.)

  Next came the ten male passengers: two majors, a pair of captains, three lieutenants, two sergeants, and a corporal.

  Among the enlisted men was Tech Sergeant Kenneth Decker of Kelso, Washington. A wiry, laconic draftsman in the command’s engineering department, Decker had worked in his father’s furniture store before the war. He’d been in New Guinea for several months, after being stationed in Australia for more than two years. The flight was a special treat for Decker: he was celebrating his thirty-fourth birthday. On the other hand, seeing Corporal Margaret Hastings on the plane wasn’t necessarily a pleasure for Decker. Weeks earlier, Decker had asked her on a date, only to get shot down. A flight over Shangri-La separated by a few seats seemed about as close to Margaret as he’d ever get.

  Tech Sergeant Kenneth Decker. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Army.)

  Another passenger was Herbert F. Good, a tall, forty-six-year-old captain from Dayton, Ohio. Good had survived service in World War I, after which he’d married and returned home to life as an oil salesman and a leader in his Presbyterian church. Then war called again, so again he went.

  At the end of the line were identical twins, John and Robert McCollom, twenty-six-year-old first lieutenants from Trenton, Missouri. They were nearly indistinguishable, with sandy blond hair, soulful blue eyes, and lantern jaws. One small difference: John was five-foot-six, and Robert was a shade taller, a fact that Robert used to tease his “little” brother. Known to friends and family as “The Inseparables,” the twins had clung to each other as toddlers after their mother left them, their older brother, and their father. As eight-year-olds, they’d dressed in matching outfits and idolized aviator Charles Lindbergh for his solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic. When the twins came home from third grade and gushed about their teacher, Miss Eva Ratliff, their father, a railroad station manager, decided to meet her. John, Robert, and their older brother soon had a stepmother.

  The McCollom twins had become Eagle Scouts together. They’d been sports fanatics together, though they were better rooters than players. They’d joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps together and roomed together as aerospace engineering students at the University of Minnesota, where they’d worked long hours to pay tuition while managing the school’s hockey team. They could only afford one set of books, so they’d shared them. Though alike in most ways, Robert McCollom was quieter, more introverted, while John was the outgoing twin. Robert was always known as Robert, while John was often called “Mac.”

  Twins John and Robert McCollom sharing a scooter as toddlers. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

  The McCollom twins’ first test apart had come two years earlier, on May 5, 1943, when Robert married a young woman he’d met on a blind date, Cecelia Connolly, known by her middle name, Adele. In a wedding photo published in a local newspaper, bot
h McColloms are in uniform; the only way to tell them apart is by Adele’s winsome smile in Robert’s direction. After the wedding, Robert, Adele, and John became a threesome, spending evenings together at the Officers’ Club. The McColloms earned their pilot’s licenses together in the service, and with the exception of a brief period apart, were stationed together at several bases stateside. Six months before the flight to Shangri-La, they were sent overseas together to New Guinea.

  Six weeks before the Mother’s Day flight, Adele McCollom gave birth to a girl she and Robert named Mary Dennise and called Dennie. Robert McCollom had yet to see his new daughter.

  Lieutenants John (left) and Robert McCollom. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

  The McCollom twins wanted to see Shangri-La through the same window of the Gremlin Special, but they couldn’t find two seats together. Robert McCollom walked toward the cockpit and slipped into an open seat near the front. John McCollom saw an empty seat next to Margaret Hastings, the second-to-last spot on the plane’s left-hand side, near the tail.

  Margaret knew John McCollom from his regular visits to Colonel Prossen’s office. She also remembered how months earlier he’d outfitted her tent with a double electric socket.

  “Mind if I share this window with you?” he asked.

  Margaret shouted her assent over the engines.

  The Gremlin Special was full. On board were twenty-four members of the U.S. military, most of them from the Fee-Ask maintenance division. Nine were officers, nine were WACs, and six were enlisted men. As the door closed, Margaret noticed that the soldier who’d complained about Prossen’s WACs-first rule wasn’t among them.