Meanwhile, the glider would be towed to the valley by another plane. After releasing their Waco from the tow plane and landing in Shangri-La, the glider’s crew would erect two twelve-foot-high poles, set some twenty feet apart. From the top of one pole to the top of the other, they’d string a section of an eighty-foot-long loop made from inch-thick nylon rope. The result would resemble a pole-vault setup, with a section of the nylon loop as the crossbar. The remainder of the loop would hang down from the poles and be laid out neatly on the ground. Another nylon rope, about 225 feet long, would be attached to the ground end of the loop. Its far end would be fastened to the nose of the glider, parked fifty to one hundred feet back from the poles. When the setup was complete, the loop of nylon rope hanging from the two poles would be attached to the nylon tow rope, which would be attached to the glider.
In a successful snatch, the C-47 would swoop low over the pickup site. The steel hook at the end of the pickup arm would catch the nylon loop at the top of the poles. The C-47 would fly onward, with the pilot leaning hard on the throttles to gain altitude with the added drag of the glider. The winch operator inside the C-47 would consider speed, glider weight, and other factors to judge how many feet of steel cable to pay out from the reel to prevent the nylon rope from snapping. If he misjudged, the cable would rip off the glider’s nose, snap its wings, or worse. Glider pilots described the sensation at the moment of the snatch as comparable to being shot out of a giant slingshot.
As the C-47 climbed, the glider would be jerked into the air from its parking spot within three seconds. It would be airborne within sixty feet, and its speed would go from zero to more than one hundred miles per hour within seven seconds of the snatch. When the glider was airborne, the winch operator on the C-47 would reel in cable to draw it closer to the tow plane, so it trailed the C-47 by about 350 feet. The two aircraft would fly in graceful tandem, connected by the nylon-and-steel tether. In sight of Hollandia, the glider pilot would release his craft from the tow plane, and the Waco and the C-47 would make safe, separate landings.
That’s how the planners envisioned it. In practice, the first trial runs of the Leaking Louise and the Fanless Faggot on Wakde Island were plagued by injuries, ruined equipment, and growing doubts about the wisdom of using gliders to escape from Shangri-La.
Chapter 24
TWO QUEENS
AS JUNE 1945 wound down, so did the war.
After the bloodiest battle of the Pacific, the Allies took Okinawa. Its capture on June 21—after the deaths of twelve thousand Americans and more than one hundred thousand Japanese—provided a staging area for an air and land attack on the main islands of Japan. That is, unless Emperor Hirohito could be persuaded to surrender. Secretly, America’s leaders thought a new weapon, a bomb of unimaginable power, might accomplish that goal without sending troops to Tokyo. The bomb would be tested within weeks; if it worked, President Truman would decide whether to use it. Already, though, much of the world seemed eager to look beyond war. While the outsiders in Shangri-La awaited rescue, envoys from forty-four countries landed in San Francisco to sign a charter creating the United Nations.
WHILE THE GLIDER crews worked, Camp Shangri-La played. Before an audience of natives, Decker shaved off six weeks’ growth of beard. McCollom got a haircut from Ben Bulatao, but he and Walter kept their nonregulation whiskers. Walter told the crew of the 311, “We want to look like we’ve been someplace after we get out of here.” They ate communal meals; explored the valley; posed for Alex Cann’s camera; talked about their families; and read books, magazines, and letters dropped by the supply plane. One supply drop included a book on jungle survival techniques; it arrived so late the survivors were certain it was someone’s idea of a joke.
A native man whom the paratroopers called “Joe” oversaw daily swap meets between the natives and the outsiders. When the market was up and running, five cowrie shells could be exchanged for a stone adze, the most sought-after souvenir. Walter established a going rate for other native weaponry, exchanging eighteen shells for sixty-two arrows and three bows. At first, a pig could be had for as little as two to four shells, but inflation crept in, and the price rose to fifteen shells. This proved costly when the pigpen built by the paratroopers collapsed and eight plump, fifteen-shell swine headed for the hills. So many shells changed hands that McCollom worried that the survivors and paratroopers were ruining the local economy.
IN FACT, THE outsiders’ use of cowrie shells as a kind of coin represented the natives’ first tentative step toward a money-based economy. Although they had long traded shells with people from outside their villages to obtain twine, feathers, or other goods that weren’t readily available, the natives didn’t treat shells as a universal currency among themselves. In their communal villages, there was nothing to buy from each other. They used shells and shell necklaces primarily to cement social bonds. At a funeral, for instance, mourners would briefly drape the dead body with gifts of shell necklaces. As a highlight of the ceremony, a village leader would redistribute those necklaces, creating obligations to him and shared remembrances of their previous owner.
A Dani tribesman tries on a uniform. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)
McCollom’s worry about the local economy was only the half of it. By tossing around shells as though their only value was as a means of trade, the outsiders risked undermining the glue that kept the community together.
Although most natives were willing to provide pigs, adzes, bows, and arrows in exchange for shells, some felt trepidation about the deals. “We’d never seen so many shells. Our parents were telling us to be careful, don’t take the shells,” said Lisaniak Mabel. He and his friends heeded the warning. “The white guys got frustrated that we were rejecting the shells they were offering.”
ONE DAY, THE native trader the paratroopers called Joe brought three women to the camp. Confused at first, Alex Cann and the paratroopers concluded that they were being offered the women in exchange for shells.
“Walt, you’ve got to be careful,” Cann told Walter, “because he wants to sell you the women.”
“Hell, I’ve got enough trouble,” Walter replied. “I don’t want a bunch of women running around!” Walter’s men cracked up when they heard that.
Walter wrote in his journal: “He [Joe] is quite a money monger, and by the looks on the women’s faces, they were little impressed by us.” The feeling was mutual. Walter wrote that it would take him “a few years, plus the realization that we would never get out of here, plus a ton of soap, before they would be even presentable as far as I am concerned.” Walter waved off the deal.
THE MAN THE outsiders called “Joe” was Gerlagam Logo, a son of the chief named Yali Logo and a warrior with a fierce reputation. Many years later, tribe members remembered Gerlagam as having been friendly with the outsiders. But they doubted that he ever tried to sell them women. Gerlagam had a wife and two daughters. Perhaps, they said, he wanted his new acquaintances to meet his family.
EACH DAY WHEN the supply plane flew overhead, Walter and McCollom placed orders for food and provisions. Sergeant Ozzie St. George, a reporter for the U.S. Army magazine Yank who covered the mission alongside civilian journalists, made a sport of tracking the cargo drops. Among the items he recorded were: twenty pairs of shoes; three hundred pounds of medical supplies; fourteen .45-caliber pistols with three thousand rounds of ammunition; six Thompson submachine guns; knives; machetes; tents; cots; clothes for the survivors; seventy-five blankets; camp stoves; gasoline; canteens; water; seventy-five cases of ten-in-one rations; rice; salt; coffee; bacon; tomato and pineapple juice; and “eggs that landed unscrambled.” St. George claimed that Margaret received “scanties,” but she insisted that the underwear never arrived.
Walter continued his amateur anthropology. He searched for signs of religion, with no luck. “They’re believers in mankind and that’s about all the religion they seem to have,” Walter told Major Gardner by walkie-talkie.
While h
iking with his men and some natives near the Baliem River, Walter arranged a footrace on the riverbank to test their speed. Earlier he’d recorded his disappointment with their potential as porters, complaining in his journal that they tired more quickly than the Filipino bearers he recalled from his boyhood. The race did nothing to improve his view. “Natives not very fast,” he wrote, “as we outran them with equipment on.” He didn’t record whether the Dani men might have been amused, confused, or both by the notion of running full speed when they weren’t chasing a lost pig or escaping a deadly enemy.
During one hike, Walter and the survivors found corpses from recent warfare. “One warrior had been shot through the heart with an arrow,” Margaret wrote. “Another had died from a spear driven through his head.” Separately, Walter and McCollom found the skeleton of a man they thought must have stood more than six feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds. It was the closest they ever came to seeing one of the “giants” they’d heard so much about.
Captain C. Earl Walter Jr. and Lieutenant John McCollom examine a native jawbone they found on a hike. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)
After a walk with Alex Cann, Walter estimated the valley’s population at five thousand and concluded that the natives belonged to “a dying race.” He based that assumption on his observations of few children and some overgrown sweet potato fields. In fact, Walter’s population estimate was about one-tenth to one-twentieth the actual number, and he didn’t know that the Dani people left old fields fallow to regain their nutrients. However, Walter was onto something about children. Because Dani women abstained from sex for up to five years after childbirth, the birthrate wasn’t as high as in some other native populations.
The natives reached mistaken conclusions about their guests, as well, beyond their belief that the visitors were spirits. Decades later, several old men who were boys and teenagers in June 1945 swore that they’d witnessed a strange miracle. As they described it, after the paratroopers ate pig meat, the animals emerged whole and alive when the men defecated. Narekesok Logo said: “You could see where the cuts were on the pig” after its rebirth.
DURING HIS WEEKS at the base camp, Alfred Baylon—“Weylon” to the natives—made regular medical calls in the nearby hamlets. The sergeant earned the natives’ trust by treating minor wounds, pig bites, and a variety of skin ailments, including a form of athlete’s foot. He treated their dandruff, too. “In the Army, they say to make the most of what you have,” Baylon told a reporter. “So I smeared their heads with mosquito repellant. It seemed to work surprisingly well.” When a woman with an infection on her breast began to heal within days of treatment, Baylon became the tribespeople’s favorite outsider. The feeling was mutual. “They are a wonderfully carefree people,” he said. “Living in a land of perpetual summer, they never worry about their next meal.”
Walter encouraged the sergeant, to a degree. When a local woman went into labor, the natives came running for Baylon. “But the captain forbade it,” Margaret wrote in her diary, “fearing that if anything happened to the woman or the baby, the natives might turn on all of us.”
Before the others reached the valley, Baylon usually visited the village alone or with Sergeant Velasco, who became relatively adept at the native language. Now, Alex Cann, Walter, and the three survivors joined the sergeants on their rounds. But as they headed toward the nearest village, an old man blocked their way.
“He was a man of dignity and authority,” Margaret wrote. “He knew and liked Sergeants Velasco and Baylon, and there was no ill will and nothing threatening in the chief’s attitude. But he made it abundantly clear that he didn’t want his village invaded all the time.”
When a pantomime negotiation went nowhere, Margaret tried a charm offensive: “I pouted as prettily as I knew how and I batted what few stubby little eyelashes had begun to grow back after the originals were singed off in the plane crash.”
“Aw, Chief, don’t be mean,” she told the native leader.
Margaret laughed about it in her diary: “Walter, McCollom, Decker and the sergeants stared at me as if I had lost my mind. But it worked. Right before our eyes, the old chief melted.”
Still, the native leader had limits. He allowed the two sergeants, Margaret, and Alex Cann into the village, but he turned away Walter, McCollom, and Decker. Rather than risk an incident, Walter and the two male survivors returned to camp.
That day, Margaret met a woman in the village whom she described as “regal in manner.” Based on her belief that the woman was a village leader’s wife, or at least one of his wives, Margaret called her “the queen.”
THE MEETING AND its aftermath revealed a profound change in Margaret since the crash. She’d flown aboard the Gremlin Special hoping to see strange creatures she believed were “primitive.” During her time in the jungle clearing, she came to see them as people. Since reaching the base camp, her views had evolved further. No longer did she describe natives in her diary as savages or childlike, for instance. Upon getting to know “the queen,” Margaret’s outlook took an evolutionary leap. Any remaining hint of superiority vanished. In its place came respect.
“The queen and I liked each other immediately,” she wrote. They spent long stretches together: “All we lacked, from the American point of view, was a front porch and a couple of rocking chairs.” Margaret described their ability to communicate as “a case of understanding the heart, for neither of us was ever able to understand a word of the other’s language.”
The native woman invited Margaret into the long hut the village women used as a communal cookhouse. She fed Margaret hot sweet potatoes, declining the butter that Margaret brought with her from the base camp. Margaret, too, hesitated to abandon her traditional ways. The native woman tried to persuade her to strip down to what Margaret called a “G-string of woven twigs worn by herself and her ladies in waiting.” Margaret demurred: “I just clutched my khaki tighter around me.” The queen didn’t seem to mind.
The native woman Margaret called “The Queen” greets her outside a hut. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)
After a few days, the native woman was so eager for Margaret’s visit that she met her halfway between the camp and the village. “Occasionally the trail was rough or we would have to cross small streams with precarious log bridges,” Margaret wrote. When Margaret feared she’d fall, she’d appeal to the nimble-footed woman for help: “She always knew what I meant. The queen would take my hand in hers and give me an assist along the way.”
When the sergeants teased Margaret for slowing their pace en route to the village, the queen sensed that the men were making sport of her friend. “She turned on them, and there was no mistaking the fact that they were getting a royal dressing down, for such unseemly behavior toward a royal guest.” The same tongue-lashing befell a group of native girls and young women working in the sweet potato gardens who giggled when the two women walked past.
Walter noticed Margaret’s growing connection. With a combination of envy and admiration, he told the men in the supply plane: “The natives will take stuff from her, but they won’t take anything from the rest of us.”
The more Margaret came to appreciate the locals, the more she admired them for refusing the paratroopers’ goods. “The natives of Shangri-La are a wise people,” she wrote. “They are happy. They know when they’re well off. They are too smart to permit a few chance visitors from Mars to change the rhythm of centuries.”
Walter, meanwhile, tried repeatedly to trade machetes, knives, and other modern conveniences for an ornate necklace of small shells arranged in vertical rows on a strip of rawhide that hung from the wearer’s throat to his breastbone. Each time he failed.
The necklace belonged to a man named Keaugi Walela. In later years, Keaugi became a chief with ten wives. When Keaugi died, his son Dagadigik inherited the necklace. One day in battle it fell from his neck. An enemy warrior retrieved it, and the necklace became a spoil of war, in Dani terms a “dead bird.”
Keaugi Walela wearing the necklace that Earl Walter tried unsuccessfully to obtain. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)
SOON WALTER HAD bigger worries than souvenirs. Reports on the glider snatch tests, delivered via walkie-talkie, sounded grim.
After the pickup equipment was installed in the Leaking Louise, snatch pilot Major William Samuels, copilot Captain William McKenzie, glider pilot Lieutenant Henry Palmer, and a second glider pilot, Captain G. Reynolds Allen, agreed on what sounded like a straightforward plan. First, they’d make a few practice runs on Wakde Island to test the gear, get in sync with each other, and hone the glider and pickup crews. Then the Leaking Louise would tow the Fanless Faggot halfway across New Guinea to Mount Hagen, a large, accessible valley at the same mile-high altitude as Shangri-La. If they tested it there, they thought, the first high-altitude Waco glider pickup snatch wouldn’t involve crash survivors as guinea pigs and reporters as witnesses.
The plan unraveled almost immediately. On the first trial run on Wakde Island, Samuels came in too low with the Leaking Louise. No one was hurt, but the snatch failed. Worse, the C-47’s propellers severed the nylon tow rope, and the radio compass mast was knocked off the underside of the plane. After repairs, Samuels tried again. On the second effort, the steel tow cable broke, destroying the winch. No one was hurt, but replacing it caused more delays. Then calamity struck.
The Tribune’s Walter Simmons had flown to Wakde Island to witness the tests. Despite the danger, Simmons volunteered to be one of eight passengers aboard the Fanless Faggot for the third trial run. Just after the snatch, the steel cable inside the Leaking Louise again snapped as the crew tried to reel in the glider. “The winch just blew up,” said McKenzie, the copilot.
Lost in Shangri-la Page 25