Lost in Shangri-la

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Occasionally some tribesmen would discourage the explorers from traveling to the next village—placing sticks in their path, pantomiming the firing of arrows, and standing arm in arm as a human blockade. Language barriers prevented Captain Teerink or Lieutenant Van Arcken from getting a full explanation, but the acts seemed to Teerink more protective than hostile. The natives apparently didn’t want their new acquaintances to be harmed by enemies who lived in the next village.

  That pattern remained in place until an incident that involved a band of natives and the exploration team led by Lieutenant Van Arcken.

  On August 9, 1938, as Van Arcken’s patrol neared the Baliem River in the valley’s center, they were met by tribesmen “in large numbers” carrying spears and bows and arrows. “We apparently were not to be trusted because we had come from the direction of enemy territory,” Van Arcken wrote in his daily log. He defused the confrontation with a few cowrie shells. Later that night four natives came into his camp, asking to sleep among the soldiers. “These gentlemen were sent packing,” Van Arcken wrote, “after a shot in the air to scare them off.”

  The next day, Van Arcken found that the patrol’s trail had been “closed off with tree branches, behind which some youths with spears took cover.” His troops brandished their weapons, and the young natives fled. As the column of soldiers moved forward, bringing up the rear were two soldiers, one of them a corporal named Pattisina. Van Arcken wrote that two natives grabbed Pattisina from behind. When the other lagging soldier came to Pattisina’s aid, one of the natives “wanted to spear the corporal with his lance, whereupon said native was shot by the corporal.” In short, Van Arcken’s report revealed that Pattisina had killed a native, and the official version was that he’d done so in self-defense.

  Captain Teerink, the highest-ranking Dutch officer on the expedition, didn’t buy the explanation. Teerink, who was leading the other patrol, wrote a critical addendum to Van Arcken’s report that suggested he held a more humane view of the natives: “In my view, this fatal shot is to be regretted. Corporal Pattisina should have fired a warning shot first. It has been my experience that with tribes like this, a warning shot is usually sufficient. It is requested that you issue instructions to this effect to your men.”

  EVEN BEFORE HE returned to the United States, Archbold published articles about the expedition in The New York Times and elsewhere. In March 1941 he wrote a long piece for National Geographic Magazine. In it, he described a number of encounters with natives, most of them friendly though a few laced with tension. He seemed most surprised when his expedition passed villages and the natives paid them little mind: “Here the natives seemed to take our party for granted. Some stood by and watched the long line of carriers file by, while others, digging in the gardens of rich black earth, did not even look up.”

  But in none of his accounts did Archbold describe what the natives must have considered the most awful moment of the outsiders’ visit.

  Four years after the shooting, in June 1942, Archbold finally acknowledged that an incident had occurred between the natives and Van Arcken’s patrol that day near the river. But the way he described it and the publication he chose guaranteed that the significance would be overlooked. Writing in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, Archbold described how on August 10, Van Arcken’s patrol encountered a trail barricaded with branches and guarded by men with spears: “Here occurred the one incident of the whole expedition where more than a show of force was necessary.” Without stopping to explain what he meant, much less acknowledge and discuss the gunshot death of a native, Archbold forged ahead to report the time of day that the patrol reached the river and the precise width of the river’s floodplain.

  Van Arcken took an even more misleading approach when he created the first known map of the valley. On it, he drew an arrow to the spot of the August 10, 1938, confrontation and wrote: “Location where one native died due to a lance attack.” Unless a map reader knew better, Van Arcken’s note seemed to suggest that the explorers had witnessed a fatal duel between two natives.

  Elsewhere in Archbold’s report to the museum, he outlined his overall philosophy where natives were concerned. There he whitewashed the shooting entirely: “In venturing into an unknown area, the kind of reception the natives will extend is unpredictable. Certain it is that natives in general tend to be more friendly toward a large, well-armed party than toward a small, weak one. Our parties inland were usually of the former category and no unpleasant incidents of importance arose in our contacts with the people.”

  Archbold apparently had no interest in determining whether the natives considered the Grand Valley’s first fatal gunshot to be “unpleasant” or an “incident of importance.”

  ARCHBOLD’S EXPEDITION AND his writings about the valley went unnoticed by Colonel Elsmore. When initially told about Archbold after the crash of the Gremlin Special, Elsmore brushed it off, certain that his Hidden Valley, his Shangri-La, was distinct from Archbold’s Grand Valley. After all, New Guinea was so huge and unexplored, who could say how many isolated, undiscovered valleys might still exist?

  But Grand Valley and Shangri-La were one and the same. And the first known contact between its natives and the outside world had been marked by blood.

  Chapter 9

  GUILT AND GANGRENE

  AFTER SEEING THE native footprint, the three survivors spent what Margaret called “this aching, miserable night” on the sloped, muddy banks of the mountain creek. Soggy and exhausted from their repeated rolls into the cold water, they woke in the dim predawn light on Wednesday, May 16, to resume their trek toward the clearing that McCollom had spotted farther down the slope.

  As Margaret tried to stand, pain racked her body, and with it came fear. Overnight, her joints had stiffened, and the burned skin on her legs had tightened around her muscles. The burns choked off blood flow, starving healthy flesh. It hurt to even think about walking and sliding farther downstream. She couldn’t straighten up. She wrote in her diary, “My legs were so stiff they were a sickening sight.”

  A quick inspection showed that infection had set in. She downplayed the gory details in her diary—the oozing pus, the blue-black hue of dead tissue. But she had a sickening idea of the causes and the dangers of what she described as “big, evil-smelling, running sores.”

  New Guinea teemed with bacteria, and the microscopic organisms were feasting on the stagnant blood in her poorly dressed wounds. The combination of burned flesh, unsanitary conditions, and swarming bacteria was a recipe for gangrene. Unless treated, the dread condition meant the death of a damaged body part and ultimately an entire body. Gangrene comes in two varieties, wet and dry. Both are awful, but wet gangrene is worse. Dry gangrene usually appears gradually as a result of blocked blood flow through the arteries. Decades of smoking might lead to dry gangrene and the slow death of a smoker’s feet. That wasn’t Margaret’s worry. Her infected injuries were ripe for fast-moving, fast-killing wet gangrene. The longer her wounds went untreated, the greater the chance that her legs would have to be amputated. Even that radical step might not be enough. Wet gangrene can lead to the blood infection called sepsis. In the jungle, sepsis is fatal. The only question is whether it takes its victim in hours or days.

  Margaret steeled herself and struggled upright onto her tender feet. She walked in agony, back and forth on the inclined bank, trying to loosen her joints and get limber enough to continue the journey. She glanced at Decker, knowing that he must have been in at least as much pain. She admired how stoic he remained.

  McCollom looked at his two companions. He felt responsibility for them, but more than that. Respect and growing admiration. Affection, too. During all the walking, all the sliding downstream, all the discomforts, Decker hadn’t complained once about his gaping head wound or his other injuries. And this petite WAC corporal—by now McCollom thought of her affectionately as Maggie—had turned out to be much tougher than he’d expected. Not only was she soldiering on with g
angrenous wounds on her legs and hand, but the burns on the left side of her face had darkened. It occurred to him that other WACs he’d known, as well as some male soldiers, wouldn’t have survived half of what she’d already been through.

  Yet as their injuries worsened and infections took hold, McCollom could see his companions’ strength ebbing. He felt certain that both already suffered from full-blown wet gangrene, and he feared that if the search planes didn’t find them soon, he’d be the only one left alive.

  McCollom wouldn’t reveal it to Margaret or Decker, but he was fighting back fear. Later he explained, “We were in what was thought to be headhunter territory, we had no medical supplies, no shelter. We were in the middle of nowhere. I knew my twin brother was dead in the wreckage. I had to take care of the others. I didn’t want to think about being out there all by myself, so I did what I could as much for myself as for them.”

  Though determined to save Margaret and Decker, McCollom made a private resolution: if the searchers gave up before spotting them, he would somehow find a navigable river and build a raft, or if need be, keep walking. He’d float or walk all the way to the ocean a hundred and fifty miles away, if that’s what it took to get out of there. He’d return to Hollandia, and after that to his family. He couldn’t save his brother, but he was determined to save himself and keep watch over his brother’s infant daughter.

  He’d do everything in his power to help Decker and Margaret. But if gangrene got the best of them, McCollom would go it alone.

  BREAKFAST WAS WATER and more Charms, still their only food on the third day after the crash. They separated the candies by color, eating the red ones until they tired of them, moving on to yellow, and so on. Decker jokingly called the color-by-color approach a good way to vary their diet. They had cigarettes, but McCollom’s lighter was dry and their matches were wet. As they prepared to resume their trek, rolling their supplies into the yellow tarpaulins, their thoughts turned to coffee.

  “I’d love to be back in the mess hall having some of that delicious battery acid,” Decker said.

  “Me, too!” Margaret said. She didn’t understand why, but despite not eating since her lunch of chicken and ice cream three days earlier, she didn’t feel especially hungry.

  The stream bank was too steep for them to walk on, and the jungle foliage gave no quarter. They gingerly stepped down the eight-foot bank, back into the mountain stream, to resume their soaking march. Again they clambered over fallen logs and slid on their bottoms down waterfalls.

  “By this time my feet, my leg and my cut hand were infected,” Margaret wrote in her diary. “We were all in the last stages of exhaustion, and now the nightmare of yesterday commenced all over again.”

  Tears filled her eyes as Margaret fought to keep up. Her feet throbbed with each step. Decker hung back with her. McCollom marched on, eager to reach the clearing. He got so far ahead they lost sight of him.

  Margaret teetered on the edge of panic.

  “McCollom has gone off and left us, and he’s got all the food,” she cried to Decker. “And we’re going to starve to death.” She plopped down in the stream. It was the closest she’d come to giving up since the thought of surrender flickered through her mind in the burning plane.

  Decker, usually the quiet man among the three, had heard enough. He wheeled around like a red-faced drill sergeant. Margaret wouldn’t quote his full tirade to her diary, but she sheepishly admitted that he called her “a piker” and “a quitter.” Whether he did it as a motivating technique or in real anger, Decker had found the exact right words.

  “I got so mad I wanted to kill him,” she wrote. “But I got on my feet and stumbled downstream once more. Pretty soon we caught up with McCollom.”

  Margaret wasn’t someone who easily admitted that she was wrong, but almost immediately she felt regret. McCollom had been steadfast and strong, guiding and helping them even as he suppressed his emotions about his brother’s death, which Margaret suspected hurt more deeply than her burns. She told her diary: “It shames me to the core to think that even in hysteria, I doubted him for a moment.”

  BACK IN HOLLANDIA, the Gremlin Special’s failure to return to the Sentani Airstrip had sent shock waves through Fee-Ask headquarters. The plane’s absence and the lack of radio communication almost certainly meant a crash, and a crash meant a search. From the outset, the mindset at Fee-Ask was a rescue mission, aimed at finding survivors, as opposed to a recovery effort, aimed at returning remains to families.

  As a unit on a large air base, Fee-Ask had almost unlimited access to pilots and planes. The fact that the missing crew and passengers were colleagues, friends, and subordinates of the Fee-Ask brass made it doubly certain the search organizers would have whatever they needed. Raising the ante further were nine special circumstances: the WACs on board.

  There’s no evidence to suggest that Colonel Ray Elsmore and the other officers at headquarters would have been any less aggressive if everyone aboard was male. But transport planes crashed regularly during the war with no notice from the press. Elsmore, savvy about the ways of reporters, must have known that the WACs aboard the Gremlin Special would attract special interest.

  SEVERAL HUNDRED U.S. women had already died in World War II, but the numbers are fuzzy in part because some were civilians working with the Red Cross and other relief organizations, and some died in transit to war zones and in accidents on U.S. soil. Of the women who died serving noncombat military roles, many were nurses, including decorated heroes such as Lieutenant Aleda Lutz, a U.S. Army flight nurse who took part in nearly two hundred missions. In November 1944 she was aboard a C-47 hospital plane evacuating wounded soldiers from a battlefield in Italy when it ran into rough weather and crashed, killing everyone aboard. Thirty-eight U.S. military women who died were members of the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, the WAFS, and the Women Airforce Service Pilots, the WASPs, who flew military aircraft on noncombat missions to keep male pilots fresh and available for battle.

  Each death of a woman in World War II drew attention, but in most cases the deaths came singly or in pairs. Exceptions included six nurses killed by German bombing and strafing of a hospital area during the battle on Anzio. And just two weeks before the Gremlin Special crash, six nurses were among twenty-eight crew members killed when a Japanese kamikaze pilot slammed into the U.S. Navy hospital ship Comfort off Leyte Island, between Guam and Okinawa.

  The base at Hollandia had suffered only one previous WAC death, in February 1945, when a private from West Virginia drowned while swimming in the Pacific. On the day before her burial, her distraught friends wanted to honor her by flying the WAC flag—a banner of gold and green satin, with a fringe at the edge, its center adorned by the profile of the Greek war goddess Pallas Athena. No such flag existed anywhere in New Guinea. As one Hollandia WAC put it, the materials needed to make one were “as out of their reach as a handful of icicles.” Regardless, a group of WACs stayed awake past four in the morning, fashioning a flag from Australian bedsheets, colored with dyes made from yellow Atabrine antimalaria tablets and red Merthiolate antiseptic ointment pilfered from the infirmary. For the image of Pallas Athena, they used green India ink from the drafting department. For a fringe, they used old parachute cords. Bleary-eyed, they finished in time for the funeral. They ignored their flag’s blotchy colors and irregular size, its makeshift fringe and rough edges, saluting proudly as it waved in the warm breeze for their lost friend.

  That was the reaction to the death of one drowned Hollandia WAC. Now nine Hollandia WACs were missing and feared dead in the island’s wild interior.

  AFTER THE GREMLIN SPECIAL missed its estimated return time, calls were made to Allied landing strips throughout the region to see if Colonel Prossen and Major Nicholson had unexpectedly landed the C-47 elsewhere. That proved fruitless, so Fee-Ask planners hauled out their admittedly inadequate maps and divided the island into sectors where the pilots might have made what they euphemistically called “a forced la
nding.”

  Though hampered by incessant rain, airborne searchers spent three days scouring those sectors. In all, twenty-four planes took part—a squadron of C-47s, a C-60 transport plane, and a flock of heavy bombers, including B-24 Liberators, B-25 Mitchells, and a B-17 Flying Fortress. A volunteer crew member on one of the search planes was Corporal James Lutgring, hoping against hope that he might rescue his best friend, Melvin Mollberg, who’d taken his place on the Gremlin Special.

  Overseeing the rescue effort was Colonel Elsmore, who knew the area around the Shangri-La Valley better than anyone else in the U.S. military.

  AT AROUND ELEVEN Wednesday morning, May 16, after five hours of trudging through the stream, McCollom climbed up the eight-foot bank.

  “Come on,” he called, “this is it.”

  Decker scrambled up, dragging Margaret behind him. On flat ground at the top, she fell face-forward onto the earth, unable to take another step. Decker and McCollom went ahead while she crawled after them on her hands and knees. A half hour later, she reached the spot fifty yards from the stream where Decker and McCollom lay panting on the ground. Margaret sprawled next to them, catching her breath. Feeling the warmth of the sun’s rays, she noticed that for the first time in days she could see a wide expanse of sky. They’d reached their goal, a clearing in the rain forest atop a small knoll.

  Within minutes, the survivors heard the roar of four powerful engines. They looked up to see a B-17 bomber, its unmistakable shape silhouetted high overhead against the blue sky. The trio waved to draw its attention, but the pilot of the Flying Fortress flew away without spotting them. They rested and ate what passed for lunch, disappointed by the near miss but heartened by the sight of the plane.