An hour later, either the same B-17 or another just like it made another pass over the clearing. This time McCollom wasn’t taking any chances. He jumped to his feet.
“Get out the tarps!” he shouted.
McCollom and Decker raced to untie their supplies and spread out the yellow tarpaulin covers they’d salvaged from the Gremlin Special’s life rafts. The B-17, with Captain William D. Baker at the controls, was flying over the jungle at high altitude. Along with his usual crew, Baker had brought along an unusual passenger for a heavy bomber: Major Cornelius Waldo, the Catholic chaplain at the Hollandia base.
Margaret worried that the pilot would miss them again and declare that sector of the mountain fully searched, with no sign of wreckage or survivors. She begged her companions to hurry.
Just when it seemed to the survivors that the B-17 was about to fly away, Captain Baker turned the big bomber and circled back over the clearing. Still, Baker gave none of the traditional signs that he’d seen them. McCollom called to the sky:
“Come on down, come on down and cut your motors,” he cried. “Cut your motors and dip your wings.”
Margaret chimed in: “I know they see us, I know they do.”
Decker added a note of optimism: “They see us by now.”
Even though Baker was flying high above the clearing, he couldn’t mistake the survivors for any natives that might be around. One obvious distinction was that all three wore clothing. But the real giveaway was the tarp. Less than five minutes after the survivors spotted the B-17, the B-17 returned the favor. Baker raced his engines. He dipped his wings.
They’d been found.
McCollom had made the right call when he’d ordered them to leave the crash site and march down the mountain and through the icy stream. As one pilot experienced in jungle searches described it, “An airplane going into the trees makes a very small gash in a limitless sea of green.” By leading them to a clearing and laying out the bright yellow tarpaulin, McCollom had given them a shot at being rescued.
Later, a funny thought struck him: a life raft designed for ocean survival had saved them in the middle of a jungle.
UNBEKNOWNST TO THE survivors, they weren’t alone. Hiding in the nearby jungle was a group of native men and boys from a nearby village, among them a boy named Helenma Wandik. “I watched them,” he recalled. “I saw them in the clearing, waving.”
BARELY ABLE TO stand just a short time earlier, now Margaret, McCollom, and Decker jumped up and down. They danced and screamed and waved their weary arms. For the first time since they’d sat in the Gremlin Special, they laughed.
Baker wagged the B-17’s wings again to be sure they’d seen him. He logged their position by longitude and latitude, then had his crew drop two life rafts as markers as close as possible to the clearing. With a violent thunderstorm moving toward the valley, no more flights could be made at least until morning. As Baker flew out of sight, heading toward the island’s northern coast, he radioed a message to the Sentani Airstrip: three people in khaki, waving, spotted in a small clearing on the uphill side of a forested ridge, about ten air miles from the valley floor.
“We’ll probably be back in Hollandia by Sunday,” said Decker, who by then had dropped back to the ground.
“Hollandia, here I come,” Margaret replied.
She wrote in her diary that she planned a do-over for having stood up her swimming date, Sergeant Walter Fleming. In her daydream, Wally would sit adoringly at her hospital bedside, holding her hand and telling her how brave she’d been. Knowing that she’d be teased, she didn’t share that vision with McCollom or Decker.
Meanwhile, Decker displayed a dry wit. Affecting a glum tone, he told McCollom, “I suppose one of us will have to marry Maggie and give this adventure the proper romantic ending.”
McCollom joined the act. He appraised the injured, worn, and tired WAC. After looking her up and down, he delivered the punch line: “She’ll have to put on more meat before I’m interested.”
Margaret puffed herself up and defended her injured pride: “I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man in the world. I’m going to marry Decker!”
Decker, who’d been turned down by Margaret for a date weeks before their flight, wouldn’t give her the last word. But stumped for a snappy comeback, he blurted: “The hell you are!”
Relieved, they sat together on the ground and wondered how long it would take until more planes returned with supplies. Above all, Margaret wanted real food, so they could throw away “the damn hard candy.”
AS THE SURVIVORS lounged and chatted in the clearing, the thought occurred to Margaret that the jungle hadn’t spontaneously stopped growing there. Someone had painstakingly cut down the trees and dragged out the shrubs. They were sprawled in a mountainside garden of sweet potato, or camote, mixed with a smattering of wild rhubarb.
Eventually, the garden’s owner or owners would come to tend or harvest it, and that could mean trouble. But returning to the stream wasn’t an option, and neither was leaving the place where they’d been spotted by the B-17. They’d hunker down and pray for the best. Maybe the gardeners lived far away and only rarely visited this particular field. They had no choice but to wait and hope.
Their wait didn’t last long.
An hour after the B-17 flew off, the jungle came alive. They heard the sounds they’d thought were the yaps and barks of a faraway pack of dogs.
“Do you hear something funny?” Decker asked.
The sounds grew closer. The creatures making them were human.
The survivors had no idea how they’d fight off wild dogs. But they preferred that prospect to the seven-foot flesh-eating, headhunting, human-sacrificing natives they’d expected to see only from the air, through the windows of the Gremlin Special.
Their assets and weaponry consisted of a lanky sergeant with painful burns and gaping head wound, an undersize WAC with gangrenous burns, and a hungry lieutenant with a broken rib and a Boy Scout knife. It wouldn’t be much of a fight.
It seemed to Margaret that more voices joined the strange chorus. The survivors told each other optimistically that maybe the yapping was the noise that native children made when they played. Or maybe the people making the sounds would continue on their way in the jungle and pass them by altogether. But Margaret worried that the rising number of voices meant that “the signal had spread that a tasty dinner was waiting in the camote patch.”
Still they saw no one, even as the sound was upon them. No longer did it seem to come from everywhere. It rose from the far edge of the garden clearing, across a gully some twenty-five yards away.
The jungle rustled and shook. As the survivors stared helplessly in that direction, their fears took human form: dozens of nearly naked black men, their eyes shining, their bodies glistening with soot and pig grease, their hands filled with adzes made from wood and sharpened stone, emerged from behind the curtain of leaves.
Chapter 10
EARL WALTER, JUNIOR AND SENIOR
GOOD NEWS RACED through the ranks at Fee-Ask.
Word that Captain Baker had spotted survivors in the jungle near the Shangri-La Valley sent Colonel Elsmore and his Hollandia staff into high gear. Baker had only seen three khaki-clad people in the clearing, but his B-17 was only over the area for a few minutes, flying at high altitude. He couldn’t communicate with the people he saw, and he didn’t spot any wreckage. There was room for optimism. If three were alive, why not all twenty-four?
Maybe Colonel Prossen had somehow been able to set down the Gremlin Special intact in an emergency landing. Maybe the three survivors that Baker saw were an advance party, and others who’d been aboard the C-47 were hurt but alive at the crash site. Or maybe they’d split up, as the Flying Dutchman survivors had done, with some heading in another direction in search of help.
Those hopes found expression in material form. Elsmore’s team assembled what one observer called “enough equipment to stock a small country store.” Supply crews attached
cargo parachutes to crates filled with essentials such as ten-in-one food rations, blankets, tents, first-aid kits, two-way radios, batteries, and shoes. Having spotted what looked like a WAC on the ground, they included less conventional jungle survival necessities including lipstick and bobby pins. Not knowing how many among the crew and passengers had survived, the would-be rescuers assembled enough provisions to feed, clothe, and temporarily house all twenty-four.
Excitement aside, Elsmore and his command staff knew they faced a serious problem: They had no idea how to reach the survivors, and worse, they had no idea how to get them back to Hollandia. If there’d been a way to land a plane in Shangri-La and take off again, Elsmore almost certainly would have done so already. He probably would have brought reporters along, to record him subduing or befriending the natives, possibly both, perhaps while planting a flag with his family crest to claim the valley as his sovereign territory.
Dutch and Australian authorities, who’d been in contact with Elsmore throughout the search, offered help and expertise outfitting an overland trek. But that idea was nixed when it became apparent that such an expedition would require scores of native bearers and an undetermined number of troops to defend against hostile tribes and thousands of Japanese soldiers hiding in the jungles between Hollandia and the survivors. Even more problematic than the cost in manpower and equipment, it might take weeks for marchers to reach the valley, and by then any survivors might be dead from their injuries or at the hands of natives or enemy troops. Even if the crash victims survived the wait, they might lack the strength for a month-long march over mountains and through jungles and swamps back to Hollandia.
Helicopters were raised as a possibility, but were almost as quickly shot down. As far as the Fee-Ask planners knew, helicopters wouldn’t be able to fly at the necessary altitudes—the air was too thin for their blades to generate the necessary lift to carry them over the Oranje Mountains.
Still under consideration were rescue pilots from the U.S. Navy who could land a seaplane on the Baliem River. Also on the drawing board were plans worthy of Jules Verne involving lightweight planes, blimps, gliders, and U.S. Navy PT boats that could operate in shallow water and might reach the interior by river. If a submarine had been available or remotely feasible, someone on Elsmore’s team no doubt would have suggested that, too.
But every idea had logistical flaws, some worse than others, so a rescue plan would have to wait. Elsmore’s immediate concern was getting the survivors help on the ground. Presumably some were wounded, so they needed medical care. Equally urgent, considering the stories about the natives, the survivors needed protection. One solution would be to drop in a team of heavily armed paratroopers, soldiers as well as medics, who wouldn’t mind—or at least wouldn’t fear—being horribly outnumbered by presumably cannibalistic native “savages.”
One challenge would be finding volunteers for such a mission. A bigger problem would be availability. Infantry-trained paratroopers were in the thick of the fight. As far as Elsmore and his staff knew, none were anywhere near Hollandia.
The Southwest Pacific region hosted two storied airborne units, the 503rd and the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiments. Both had played major roles in the Pacific war, most notably and heroically in the Philippines. Three months earlier, in February 1945, the 503rd had recaptured the island of Corregidor and helped General MacArthur make good on his promise to return to the Philippines. That same month, on the island of Luzon, the 511th had carried out a lightning raid twenty-four miles behind enemy lines that freed more than two thousand American and Allied civilians, including men, women, and children, from the Los Banos Internment Camp.
Both airborne regiments were still committed to combat in the Philippines, and winning the war took precedence over fetching a handful of survivors from a sightseeing crash in the New Guinea jungle.
When it looked as though they’d run out of paratrooper options, an idea struck one of Elsmore’s planners, a bright young officer named John Babcock.
Before the war, Babcock taught biology and chaired the science department at a private military high school in Los Angeles. When the United States entered the war in December 1941, he traded his chalk for the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. His science background led to his assignment as Fee-Ask’s chemical warfare officer.
A few weeks before the crash, Babcock learned that one of his former students was based in Hollandia. Babcock knew two things about this particular young man: C. Earl Walter Jr. First, he’d been expelled from school as a troublemaker, and second, he was now an infantry-trained paratrooper, frustrated about being stuck in Hollandia.
C. EARL WALTER Jr.’s boyhood revolved around his father, C. Earl Walter Sr.
Most of that boyhood was spent in the Philippines, where the elder Walter had moved his wife and toddler son from Oregon to take a job as a lumber company executive. Before the boy was nine, his mother fell ill with malaria. She returned to the United States for treatment, but she so missed her husband and son that she took the next boat back to the Philippines. She died several months later.
Captain C. Earl Walter Jr. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)
That left just C. Earl Walter, senior and junior. Neither cared for the name Cecil, so both went by Earl. In the midst of the Depression, father and son lived on the southern Philippines island of Mindanao, in a big house with a full-time cook and a couple of native houseboys who saw to their every need. The younger Earl Walter had a small horse and his own little boat, and lots of friends who lived in the barrio near his home. He was smart, but with so many distractions and a busy father, school was a low priority. So low, in fact, that for two years Earl Junior didn’t attend. He preferred to go with his father into the wild reaches of the island on lumber surveying trips. His favorite boyhood memory came from one of those trips.
“We had been hiking all day, and we found this little glade in the forest, and there was a little creek that had formed a pool,” Walter recalled. “So he and I took our clothes off and we got in the water and splashed around just to get rid of the sweat. We were both naked, and when we got out of the water, it was so funny because the natives were standing two or three deep around the pool. Dad asked our guide what that was all about, and he said, ‘They’re just curious to see if you’re white all over.’ ”
By the time he was fourteen, the tall, handsome white boy with wavy brown hair, blue-gray eyes, and a well-off father was even more of a curiosity, especially among the local girls. And vice versa. “At that age you’re old enough to wonder about women,” Walter explained. “You wonder what it’s like.”
Walter’s father saw where things were headed, and he didn’t like the direction. Above all, he worried that his only child wasn’t getting much of an education. He had remarried after his wife’s death. His new wife’s mother, who lived in Portland, Oregon, was willing to take charge of Earl Junior. Among other benefits, the move would give the boy a chance to catch up to his American peers in school. It’s possible that Earl Senior had other concerns, too. Even before Pearl Harbor, the elder Walter feared a Japanese invasion. “When I was growing up with Dad, he used to say, ‘I’m going to put a machine gun over there, and a machine gun over there, and when the Japs come, we’ll be ready for them.’ ”
Earl Junior returned to the States, first to his stepgrandmother’s house and then to the care of his paternal grandmother, who did her best to spoil him. His father decided that a firmer hand was needed: “I think Dad felt that I needed a military school to go to, and that might straighten me out.”
Earl Junior shipped out to the Black-Foxe Military Institute in Los Angeles, a high-toned private academy complete with a polo team. Located between the Wilshire Country Club and the Los Angeles Tennis Club, Black-Foxe provided a useful place for movie stars to stash their wayward sons. At various times, the Black-Foxe student body boasted the sons of Buster Keaton, Bing Crosby, Bette Davis, and Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin’s son Sydney once described Bl
ack-Foxe as “a sleep-away school for the sons of Hollywood rich people.”
There, Earl Junior grew into his full height of six-foot-four and became an All-American swimmer, backstroking his way onto a record-setting relay team. One class he especially liked was biology, which meant that he skipped it less often than the others. His biology teacher was a future U.S. Army lieutenant colonel named John Babcock.
For the most part, Earl Senior’s get-tough plan backfired. Earl Junior wasn’t a malicious teen, but he found endless ways to avoid studying: “It didn’t straighten me out. In fact, I learned more bad habits there than I did anywhere.”
His stepmother had made the mistake of setting up a generous allowance to ease the transition into a new school. Black-Foxe administrators controlled the money, but Earl found a clever way around that barrier. Drawing on his school account, he spent lavishly at the school store on notebooks and other supplies. Then he’d sell them for half price to other students, for the cash. Even with the discounts, “I had more money than I knew what to do with.”
“What kind of trouble did I get into? Well, I was always looking for female companionship,” the younger Earl Walter recalled. “I had a bosom buddy named Miller, and we’d go to downtown Los Angeles, just hitchhike down to the bars. If you had money in those days and you were tall enough, they served you liquor. So I’d always have a couple of gin drinks. There was one area of L.A. where the burlesque shows were. Miller and I liked to look at naked women, so that’s where we’d go.”
Black-Foxe decreed that young Earl was a “bad influence” on the other boys and kicked him out. He returned to his grandmother’s house and finished high school in Portland. By then he was nearly twenty. “I heard that quite a few parents told their girls to stay away from Earl Walter because, what the hell, I was old enough to chase women and liked it.”
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