Lost in Shangri-la

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Chapter 5

  EUREKA!

  AT 2:15 P.M., with Colonel Peter Prossen at the controls, the Gremlin Special rumbled past the palm trees lining the runway at the Sentani Airstrip and lifted off into a clear blue sky. As the plane passed over Lake Sentani, the passengers twisted in their seats for a look at the shimmering blue waters and the green hills that rolled down to the lake’s edge. Prossen guided the plane toward the Oranje Mountains, setting a course directly toward the valley. He announced over the intercom that it would take fifty-five minutes to get there.

  A WAC sitting near the cockpit chanted, “Oh, what is so rare as a June day in May?” The WAC on the way to Shangri-La was invoking a medieval knight’s quest for the Holy Grail. Her chant quoted the sentiment if not the exact words of a century-old epic poem, The Vision of Sir Launfal, by James Russell Lowell, which asked, “And what is so rare as a day in June?” Just as appropriate were other lines of the poem, which read:

  Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how;

  Everything is happy now,

  Everything is upward striving;

  ’Tis as easy now for the heart to be true,

  As for grass to be green or skies to be blue.

  Glued to the window, Margaret looked down through puffy white clouds. She thought the lush jungle below looked as soft as green feathers that would cushion a fall from even that great height. In the distance, the passengers could see snow-topped Mount Wilhelmina, named for the Dutch queen, at 15,580 feet the highest peak in the range.

  John McCollom was more curious about the Gremlin Special’s altitude and directional heading. He estimated that they were flying at about seven thousand feet, and he learned from the crew that they were on a heading of 224 degrees, or due southwest from the base. That course would take them to the northwest end of Shangri-La, to the narrow pass through the mountains discovered a year earlier by Major Grimes.

  AS THEY CRUISED toward the valley, Colonel Prossen made a fateful decision: he unbuckled his seat belt and walked back into the cabin. The point of the trip, after all, was to let his staff know that he cared about them and their morale. This was a bonding opportunity, a chance for them to see Shangri-La together. Yet in light of the uncharted mountains, the changeable weather, and the relative inexperience of his copilot, Major George Nicholson, Prossen’s move from the pilot’s seat was ill-advised.

  Colonel Peter J. Prossen. (Photo courtesy of Peter J. Prossen Jr.)

  Both Prossen and Nicholson were making their first flights to Shangri-La. All they knew about the treacherous entrance through the mountain pass was what they’d read or heard from other pilots. By leaving the cockpit and trusting the most difficult part of the flight to his copilot, Prossen was underestimating the risks or disregarding them altogether. Moreover, with Prossen occupied by administrative tasks in his Fee-Ask job, and with Nicholson new to New Guinea, it’s not clear how often, if ever, they’d previously flown together. Perhaps most troubling of all was that Prossen disregarded Colonel Ray Elsmore’s warning, after his initial flight to Shangri-La, about the dangers that would confront “a pilot unfamiliar with this canyon.”

  The C-47 had seat belts for passengers, but when the socializing started after takeoff, at least some were unfastened. Most of the passengers were members of Prossen’s maintenance division at Fee-Ask, so they knew each other and fell into easy conversation. Prossen joined the camaraderie, standing in the narrow radio compartment that separated the cockpit from the passenger cabin.

  Looking into the cockpit, John McCollom noticed that Sergeant Helen Kent had walked forward from the cabin. The curvaceous WAC had plopped into the left-hand seat left vacant by Prossen, to enjoy an unobstructed view out the front windshield. Next to her, the copilot, Major Nicholson, was alone at the controls.

  Nearly an hour into the flight, the Gremlin Special sneaked over a ridge, dropped several hundred feet, and entered a narrow valley that was an offshoot of the main valley that was their destination. The plane flew at about sixty-five hundred feet above sea level, or some thirteen hundred feet above the valley floor. Jungle-covered mountains flanked the Gremlin Special on both sides. Nicholson eased the control wheel forward, which lowered the elevators on the C-47s tail. The tail rose and the nose tipped downward. He guided the Gremlin Special down to an altitude of about one thousand feet above the valley floor. The drop continued. Soon they were flying at less than four hundred feet over the ground.

  “Eureka!” cried an overeager WAC.

  The passengers whirled around to the windows and saw a small native village—a cluster of mushroom-shaped huts with thatched roofs, surrounded by carefully marked, well-tended fields of sweet potato. Margaret was thrilled, but something was missing. It occurred to her that the village seemed empty. She didn’t see any natives. Not realizing that this was only a small settlement in a side valley—the huge valley of Shangri-La was another ten to fifteen miles ahead—she felt cheated.

  Turning to John McCollom, she complained, “I want to come again!”

  McCollom wasn’t listening. His head was turned sharply to the left as he stared into the cockpit. Looking through the windshield, he saw clouds dead ahead. Through the whiteness, he saw snatches of dark green jungle covering a mountain he estimated at twelve or thirteen thousand feet. In the parlance of pilots, the cloud had a rock in it.

  McCollom’s body stiffened. “Give her the gun and let’s get out of here,” he shouted toward the cockpit.

  Margaret and some of the other passengers thought he was joking. But Major Nicholson knew it was no joke; he’d already recognized the risk.

  As a licensed pilot, McCollom knew that the first rule of mountain flying was always to be in a position to turn. But this valley was too narrow for Nicholson to even try. That left only one option. Nicholson gripped the control wheel and pulled sharply back. With Colonel Prossen standing in the radio compartment, and Sergeant Helen Kent still enjoying the view from the pilot’s seat, the young major was on his own.

  Nicholson pointed the plane’s nose skyward, desperate to clear the fast-approaching ridge. McCollom watched Nicholson thrust the throttles forward, applying full power to climb. As Nicholson strained to gain altitude, McCollom spun around to look out the window by his seat. Through holes in the clouds he glimpsed trees below, their highest branches reaching up toward the belly of the Gremlin Special. He was certain that the clouds obstructed Nicholson’s view out the front windshield. That meant the copilot was not only flying without the aid of his more experienced superior, Colonel Prossen, but he was also guiding the plane blind, relying on the instrument panel arrayed before him. That, and gut survival instinct.

  NO ONE WHO wasn’t inside the cockpit could say with certainty what had brought the Gremlin Special and its twenty-four passengers and crew to this perilous moment. A mechanical malfunction—the work of gremlins—was possible, though that appears highly unlikely. More likely was a combination of factors that included Prossen leaving the cockpit, errors by Nicholson, and the inherent difficulty of flying into the valley called Shangri-La.

  Based largely on what John McCollom witnessed and what happened next, it appears that Nicholson, who’d learned to fly only three years earlier, grew momentarily disoriented or misjudged the situation when he flew low through the small valley. But the threat to the Gremlin Special might have been exaggerated by conditions beyond Nicholson’s control.

  As Nicholson fought to gain altitude, a powerful gust of wind might have swept down on the C-47. Turbulent air was common in canyons and narrow valleys. Winds rushed over one edge and raced down to the valley floor, creating downdrafts, then raced back up the other side, creating updrafts. Sudden, short-lived updrafts and downdrafts often appeared without warning. The high-altitude valleys and canyons of New Guinea were especially treacherous. One reason was the ragged terrain. Another was a tendency toward rapid changes in air temperatures, a result of jungle heat rising into the cumulus clouds that routinely formed over and around t
he peaks in mid-afternoon.

  If a downdraft did occur at that moment, the twenty-four people aboard the Gremlin Special might have been in mortal danger no matter who was at the controls. In fact, an official military account of the flight suggested that “a sudden down-draft of air current” apparently stymied the pilots’ effort to gain altitude. However, the account was incomplete. It made no mention of Prossen’s absence from the cockpit or the apparent mistakes by Nicholson.

  AS NICHOLSON STRUGGLED and McCollom worried, Margaret felt no sense of danger. She’d been so engrossed in the sight of the native huts that she hadn’t even noticed that Colonel Prossen had given his seat to Helen Kent and was standing outside the cockpit. Margaret felt the nose of the plane rise, but she was unaware that Nicholson was flying alone. She thought that Prossen was merely gaining altitude, intending to fly them through a high pass between the mountains that she’d glimpsed earlier.

  At the controls, Nicholson couldn’t make the plane bend to his wishes. The Gremlin Special began to shear the tops of giant tropical evergreens, their limbs and leaves scratching and smacking and cracking against the plane’s camouflage-painted, sheet-metal skin. Even if Prossen grasped what was happening, as he surely must have, he had no time to race back to his seat, evict Helen Kent, and take over.

  Still, Margaret remained calm. Her confidence in her boss was so complete that for a split second she thought that Prossen was showing them some fancy maneuvers. She figured that he’d buzzed the treetops to give his passengers a thrill—flying “flat on the deck,” as pilots called it.

  John McCollom knew better. He grabbed Margaret’s arm.

  “This is going to be darn close,” he told her, “but I think we can get over it.”

  His optimism was misplaced. Shortly after three o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday, May 13, 1945, Major George Nicholson’s desperate struggle to gain altitude ended. The distance between the C-47 and the unforgiving terrain closed to zero. To the ear-splitting din of metal twisting, glass shattering, engines groaning, branches snapping, fuel igniting, bodies tumbling, lives ending, the Gremlin Special plunged through the trees and slammed into the jungle-covered mountainside.

  THE CABIN CRUMPLED forward toward the cockpit. The walls of the fuselage collapsed as though sucked inward. Both wings ripped away. The tail section snapped off like a balsa-wood toy. Flames shot through the wreckage. Small explosions rang out like gunshots. Black smoke choked off the light. The air grew bitter with the stench of burning metal, burning leather, burning rubber, burning wires, burning oil, burning clothes, burning hair, burning flesh.

  One small mercy was that Nicholson had managed to point the nose of the plane skyward in his attempt to clear the ridge, so the C-47 hit the mountain at an upward angle instead of head-on. As a result, although fire rushed through the cabin, the Gremlin Special didn’t explode on impact. Anyone not immediately killed or mortally wounded might stand a chance.

  When the plane burrowed through the trees, John McCollom flew across the center aisle, from the left side of the plane to the right. He lurched forward by momentum, turning somersaults as he fell. He momentarily blacked out. When he came to, he found himself on his hands and knees halfway up the cabin toward the cockpit, surrounded by flames. Driven by instinct, he searched for an escape route. He saw a flash of white light where the tail had been. The roof of the cabin had flattened down like a stepped-on tin can, so he couldn’t stand. He crawled toward the light, landing on the scorched earth of the mountain jungle, disoriented but with barely a scratch.

  McCollom began to comprehend the horror of what had happened. He thought about his twin brother and the twenty-two others on board—all trapped inside and dead, he believed. As he rose to his feet outside the broken plane, he told himself: “This is a heck of a place to be, 165 miles from civilization, all by myself on a Sunday afternoon.”

  WHEN THE GREMLIN SPECIAL HIT THE MOUNTAIN, Margaret bounced through the cabin like a rubber ball. Her first impulse was to pray. But that felt like surrender, and Margaret wasn’t the surrendering type. She grew angry. She knew it wasn’t rational, but as she tumbled she took it personally, indignant that her dreamed-of trip to Shangri-La had been spoiled by a plane crash. And she still hadn’t seen any natives.

  When she stopped tumbling and regained her senses, Margaret found herself lying on top of a motionless man. Her fall had been cushioned by his body. She tried to move, but before he died the man had somehow wrapped his thick arms around her. Whether he’d tried to save her or simply grabbed on to whatever was closest to him wasn’t clear. Either way, Margaret was locked in a dead man’s grip. She felt flames licking at her face, feet, and legs. The air filled with the acrid scent of sizzling hair. Again Margaret thought of relaxing, giving up. Then her fury returned, and with it her strength.

  She pried loose the man’s hands and began to crawl. She had no idea whom she was leaving behind or which way she was heading—back toward the missing tail or ahead toward the crushed cockpit and into the inferno. As she crawled toward her hoped-for salvation, she didn’t see anyone else moving or hear anyone speaking or moaning inside the burning cabin. Whether by luck or divine intervention, she chose the right direction for escape.

  Margaret stumbled out the torn-open rear end of the fuselage onto the jungle floor.

  “My God! Hastings!” called John McCollom, who’d come out the same way less than a minute earlier.

  Before Margaret could answer, McCollom heard a WAC scream from inside the plane: “Get me out of here!”

  The Gremlin Special was now fully aflame. McCollom doubted it would explode, but he wasn’t sure. Without hesitating, the Eagle Scout–turned–Army lieutenant scrambled back inside, crouching beneath the smoke and fire, avoiding and ignoring the heat as best he could. He inched his way along, following the WAC’s pleading voice.

  “Give me your hand!” he ordered.

  A moment later, Margaret watched as McCollom led out her friend Laura Besley. McCollom placed the WAC sergeant on the fire-seared ground, turned around, and headed back inside the burning fuselage.

  He fought his way through the smoke toward Private Eleanor Hanna, who’d sat next to Laura Besley, directly across from him and Margaret. Eleanor had been badly burned, far worse than Margaret or Laura. Her hair still crackled with burning embers when he carried her out.

  By now, McCollom’s hands were scorched and his hair was singed from rescuing the two WACs. Otherwise, remarkably, he remained unhurt. Still, he couldn’t go back for a third rescue mission—the fire raged higher and hotter, and one explosion after another echoed from inside the wreckage. He doubted anyone inside could still be alive.

  Startled by a movement, McCollom looked up and saw a man walk woozily toward him from around the right side of the plane. Any hope that it was his twin brother quickly faded. He recognized Sergeant Kenneth Decker—McCollom supervised Decker’s work in the drafting room of the Fee-Ask maintenance department. Decker was on his feet, but dazed and badly hurt. Margaret saw a bloody gash several inches long on the right side of Decker’s forehead, deep enough to expose the gray bone of his skull. Another cut leaked blood on the left side of his forehead. Burns seared both legs and his backside. His right arm was cocked stiffly from a broken elbow. Yet somehow Decker was on his feet and moving zombielike toward them.

  “My God, Decker, where did you come from?” McCollom asked.

  Decker couldn’t answer. He would never regain any memory of what happened between takeoff at the Sentani Airstrip and his deliverance into the jungle. Later, McCollom would find a hole on the side of the fuselage and conclude that Decker had escaped through it, though he also thought it possible that the sergeant had been catapulted through the cockpit and out through the windshield.

  As he walked unsteadily toward McCollom and Margaret, Decker repeatedly muttered, “Helluva way to spend your birthday.”

  Margaret thought he was talking gibberish from the blows he’d taken to the head. Only later
would she learn that Decker was born on May 13, 1911, and this really was his thirty-fourth birthday.

  Turning back to the three surviving WACs, McCollom saw Margaret standing fixed in place, apparently in shock. He set aside his hollowness, his feelings of unspeakable grief at being alone for the first time in his life. The situation was clear. McCollom was the least injured among the five survivors, and though he was only a first lieutenant, he outranked Decker and the three WACs. McCollom steeled himself and assumed command.

  He snapped: “Hastings, can’t you do something for these girls?”

  Laura Besley and Eleanor Hanna were lying next to each other on the ground where McCollom had placed them. Margaret knelt by Eleanor. The bubbly young WAC private from rural Pennsylvania didn’t seem to be in pain, but Margaret knew it was too late to help her. The fire had seared off all her clothes, leaving Eleanor with vicious burns over her entire body. Only her cherubic, fair-skinned face was unscarred.

  Eleanor looked up with pleading eyes and offered Margaret a weak smile.

  “Let’s sing,” she said. They tried, but neither could make a sound.

  Laura Besley was crying uncontrollably, but Margaret and McCollom couldn’t understand why. She seemed to have suffered only superficial burns.

  McCollom heard someone yell. He scrambled around the right side of the plane to a spot where he could see Captain Herbert Good lying on the ground. McCollom knew that he was the reason that Good was aboard the Gremlin Special. That morning, McCollom had bumped into Good at the base in Hollandia. Affable as always, McCollom asked Good, a member of General MacArthur’s staff, whether he had afternoon plans. Good was free, so McCollom invited him to join in the fun on a trip to Shangri-La.