Lost in Shangri-la

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  The broken cable whipped around the C-47’s cabin like an angry snake, tearing through the wall of the navigator’s compartment. The slashing cable struck the winch operator, Master Sergeant Winston Howell, in the head. Only days earlier, Howell had told the AP’s Ralph Morton he was certain they’d have no trouble. The cable slashed the radio operator, Sergeant Harry Baron, across the back.

  “A shower of aluminum, wood, glass and smoke inundated the cockpit,” Samuels wrote in a self-published memoir. “I looked back to ask if the boom was retracted so we could land. All I could see was everyone lying down and much blood.” The injuries to Howell and Baron weren’t life-threatening, but both were hospitalized.

  Before the other half of the broken steel cable could slice through the Fanless Faggot, glider pilots Palmer and Allen detached the Waco and made an emergency landing. Walter Simmons and the other glider passengers and crew emerged shaken but unhurt. Later, Allen blamed the accident on the hastily scavenged snatch equipment, saying it “was unused for several years and was badly rusted.”

  Alarmed, Colonel Elsmore put out a call for another replacement winch and flew to Wakde Island to supervise. He told Walter Simmons that if they encountered more problems, he might cancel the glider snatch altogether. In the meantime, Elsmore quietly revived the idea of inviting the Seabees to build a runway in Shangri-La; it would take longer than a glider snatch and pose its own problems, but he wouldn’t have to worry about exploding winches, snapping cables, and the other perils inherent with “flying coffins.”

  Even before the snapped cable, Walter and his men had been unsettled by the idea of a glider ride. They were blasé about jumping out of airplanes. But gliders were something else entirely, and the Waco’s reputation preceded it. In his daily radio conversations with the supply plane, he told the planners not to rush: “We wouldn’t want any haphazard attempt made to get us out of here. . . . We are perfectly willing to wait until everything is set. . . . We don’t want to take any chances by pushing the thing to get out of here before the pickup and glider pilots are ready.” After learning of the accident and injuries, Walter repeated those messages with more urgency.

  Adding to his anxiety was the need for multiple pickups to get all fifteen people out of the valley. “Each trip increased the possibility of a bad accident, trouble, whatever,” Walter said. He spoke privately with his top sergeant, Sandy Abrenica, about trying to hike out, or “whether we had to come up with other ways to get out of there, if the glider pickup didn’t work.” Without telling Elsmore, Walter and Abrenica made rough calculations of how many more men they’d need to mount a trek during which they might face headhunters, hiding Japanese troops, or both.

  Margaret turned to prayer. The night she learned about the broken glider cable, she huddled in her private corner of the big tent: “I said my Rosary over and over, asking God that no one be hurt in trying to save us.” Major Samuels, the snatch pilot, had the same idea. He later told Margaret that he’d gone to Sunday services and asked a chaplain to pray for their mission.

  THE FIRST THREAT to Margaret’s friendship with the native woman came one day in the village when she pulled out a comb and absentmindedly ran it through her hair. The queen was mesmerized: “She had never seen a comb before or anyone doing such queer things to their hair. The other natives were equally delighted with this toy. Half the village gathered ’round and I combed my hair until my arm was tired.”

  Margaret handed the comb to her friend. Rather than use it on herself, the woman “carefully combed my hair down over my face.” Margaret smiled as the woman completed the styling. Then Margaret combed her hair back off her forehead to its usual swept-back arrangement. The queen took the comb and again plastered Margaret’s hair over her face. Alex Cann captured the comic back-and-forth scene on film. But the woman’s husband became involved, and it stopped being funny.

  “Sergeant Velasco was about to put a stop to this beauty business when the chief decided to join the game,” Margaret wrote. “He started to run his hands through my hair. This was a goodwill gesture from which I shrank inwardly. But I didn’t want to offend him and his followers. So I sat still a moment and said, ‘Unh, unh, unh’ at what I deemed were appropriate intervals in the conversation.”

  Velasco kept an eye on Margaret’s friend. The native woman began speaking in what sounded like an agitated tone, and he sensed that she was growing jealous.

  “Scram,” Velasco told Margaret, and they ran together from the village.

  Margaret brushes back her hair after a native salon treatment. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

  On their way back to base camp, he said: “I guess you might have been queen. But I also suspect you might have been dead.”

  Margaret worried the friendship was ruined. But on her next visit to the village, the woman was her usual gracious self. From the woman’s improvised sign language, it appeared that she wanted Margaret to move from the base camp into the women’s hut. “Velasco and Baylon told me they were certain she wanted to adopt me. But I didn’t think my father back in Owego would like that very much,” Margaret wrote. She politely declined.

  On another visit, with Decker and McCollom in tow, several women approached Margaret and motioned for her to hold out her right hand. “As I did so, one of the women raised a stone ax,” Margaret wrote. “I was so amazed by this first sign of violence in the natives that I could scarcely move.”

  Realizing what was happening, McCollom shoved Margaret out of the way.

  Afterward, McCollom tried to explain what he believed was afoot: “When a girl is of marriageable age, they chop off the tips of all the fingers on her right hand. I guess this is a hint to you to nab off one of us handsome guys.”

  McCollom had added one and one but got three. Having noticed that nearly all the women in the village who’d reached sexual maturity had lost several fingers, he assumed there was a relationship between the two.

  IN FACT, THE Dani people of Koloima were trying to help Margaret mourn.

  Unlike the natives near the jungle campsite, the villagers in the valley didn’t know about the plane crash; news of an event so many miles away would have had to pass through the territory of enemies with whom communication usually occurred at spear-point. Instead, the natives in the valley assumed that Margaret and the other visitors had escaped from some terrible event in their world. The people of Koloima were so sure of this, their name for Margaret was Nuarauke, which meant “fleeing.”

  By their logic and experience, whatever tragedy had caused Margaret to seek refuge in the valley must have involved death. To honor and appease the dead, they assumed that Margaret would want to sacrifice her fingers. When she declined, the natives weren’t insulted; any reprisal against Margaret would come not from them, but from the spirit world.

  Margaret also apparently misunderstood when she thought that the native leader wanted to take her as his bride. To the contrary, the natives thought that the male survivors and paratroopers wanted to give Margaret in marriage to a native leader named Sikman Piri. “The white men said to him, ‘Sleep with this woman,’ ” said Hugiampot, who was a teenager at the time. “She said, ‘Sleep with me.’ But Sikman Piri said, ‘No, I am afraid.’ So he didn’t take her as a wife.”

  Margaret/Nuarauke wasn’t the only outsider given a native name. Sergeant Caoili was called Kelabi—a rough pronunciation of his surname that had no meaning in the Dani language. Other names included Bpik, Pisek, Araum, Mamage, and Suarem, though the passage of time blurred which name belonged to whom. Some natives knew Alex Cann as Onggaliok, but others remembered him as Elabut Muluk, a Dani phrase that means “big belly.”

  WHEN WALTER FIRST arrived at the base camp with the survivors, he was happy to see the people of Koloima. The captain wrote in his journal: “All of the natives appreciate our help, as we do theirs.” But three days later, Walter sensed tension bordering on hostility. The change was subtle; fewer smiles, fewer visitors hanging around the base camp.
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  That night, he heard angry shouts coming from the village. He put the base camp on alert and for the first time in weeks posted guards throughout the night. “It is good to be prepared,” he wrote in his journal. “The natives have been less friendly the last few days. However, with our weapons we can stand here easily. And so we prepare for our first uneasy night since we got here.”

  Morning arrived without incident, but Walter ordered his men to remain vigilant. He kept closer tabs on the survivors’ movements, ordering them to stay close to base camp.

  Walter tended to be cautious, but in this case he wasn’t imagining things. As much as the natives appreciated the medical care and liked Margaret, the outsiders’ presence had disturbed their routines, their wars in particular.

  The base camp was in the middle of the no-man’s-land the natives regularly used as a battlefield. As long as the outsiders were there, the Dani people of Koloima couldn’t satisfy their desire to confront their enemies in open combat. In addition, some local leaders didn’t like how Walter and his men handed out fistfuls of shells, fired their frightening guns, and wandered wherever they pleased. For many years, the native leader named Yali Logo had been the regional big man. Now the outsiders behaved as big men, and Yali didn’t like it.

  Regional “big man” Yali Logo (center). (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

  Unaware that the outsiders were preparing to leave the valley, Yali began plotting their departure on his own terms. He visited the base camp by day, where Walter photographed him standing calmly, though unsmiling, with his tribesmen. But according to his tribesmen, at night Yali sent a messenger to his sworn enemy and frequent battlefield opponent, a legendary big man named Kurelu from the neighboring territory.

  “At night the enemies talked,” said Ai Baga, a teenager at the time. “Yali wanted to drive them out, and he wanted Kurelu to help. But Kurelu said no.”

  It’s possible, said several Dani men who witnessed the events, that Kurelu was pleased to see Yali’s authority undermined by the outsiders; as a result, Kurelu had no incentive to join a conspiracy.

  As days passed with no sign of gliders, Yali kept plotting and Walter kept posting guards.

  Chapter 25

  SNATCH

  UPON ARRIVING AT Wakde Island, Colonel Elsmore canceled the original plan to practice a mile-high glider snatch at Mount Hagen. Instead, they’d focus on fixing the problems and getting it right at sea level on Wakde. To compensate for the higher altitude in Shangri-La, they’d overload the glider during the trial runs, filling it with nine passengers and three hundred pounds of sandbags.

  Elsmore believed the maxim that a leader shouldn’t ask his troops to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. He sat in the glider’s copilot seat for the last three snatch tests. It’s not clear whether Elsmore’s hands-on approach reflected confidence that nothing would go wrong or lingering doubts that something might. Either way, those runs went off without a hitch. Satisfied, Elsmore declared that the snatch was on.

  The plan called for three glider drops into Shangri-La, and three subsequent snatches, to get all fifteen people out of the valley. Bad weather added several more days of delays, so the glider and tow crews cooled their heels in Hollandia. In the valley, the temporary inhabitants waited in nervous anticipation, only to be told to stand down until the cloud cover cleared.

  THE BIG DAY came on June 28, 1945. All fifteen members of Camp Shangri-La awoke at 6:00 a.m. to mostly clear skies with wisps of clouds that the Tribune’s Walter Simmons compared to “puffs of cigar smoke.”

  The first plane into the valley was the supply plane.

  “Does the queen think she wants to pull out of there today?” Major Gardner asked via walkie-talkie.

  “She’s been wanting to get out of here for a week,” Walter replied.

  “I suppose that goes for everybody,” Gardner said.

  The major told Walter that Colonel Elsmore would supervise the mission from the cockpit of his own plane, a B-25 bomber he’d named for his seventeen-year-old son, Ray Jr. Instead of bombs, Elsmore loaded the plane with enough reporters for a media circus, with him as ringmaster. After telling Walter about the colonel and the correspondents, Gardner relayed a message to Walter that almost certainly came directly from the press-conscious Elsmore: “We should like it very much if on the first trip out, you, Mac, Maggie, and Decker could be on that glider.”

  Walter knew that he’d get enormous attention as a hero if he stepped out of the first glider as the rescue leader alongside the three survivors. Only weeks earlier, he’d repeatedly noted in his journal how much he valued such exposure: “If this deal is getting all the publicity it appears to be, I am sure that my prayers on the future will be answered.” Worldwide page-one coverage of him with Margaret, McCollom, and Decker—perhaps with Colonel Elsmore pinning a medal on his chest—might have made it impossible for the brass to ignore Walter’s combat requests. Just as important, after the war he could show the stories and photos to his hero father. Walter also knew that he might have only one chance to bask in the acclaim; days might pass before the second and third glider pickups, and by then the media train might have rolled on.

  None of that mattered as much as it once did. Walter wasn’t the same man who parachuted into the valley six weeks earlier, hungry for a mission and focused on his own career. He was no less gung-ho, but he was more mature; for the first time since he was drafted, he felt he had proved his mettle. Not only to the U.S. Army brass; not only to his men; not only to the imagined eyes of his father; but to himself. Walter understood what it meant to be a leader, and rushing to the front of the line wouldn’t do.

  “I will not be on the first glider,” Walter answered, according to a transcript of the ground-to-air exchange. “I will send the three survivors and one or two of my men on the first glider. I will be the last man to leave here with my master sergeant and a couple of tech sergeants.”

  Major Gardner could have ordered him aboard the first glider, but he let it drop. Gardner turned the conversation to wind speed on the valley floor. Walter assured him that it was minimal. That was the last discussion about when Walter would leave the valley.

  A FEW MINUTES later, the radio in the supply plane crackled with word that the Fanless Faggot was en route to Shangri-La, gliding at the end of a tow cable pulled by a C-46. Elsmore joined the conversation, reporting from his B-25 cockpit that the glider was making good time. He corrected the tow plane’s course, and within minutes the C-46 cleared the last ridge and entered the valley with the glider trailing a few hundred feet behind on its nylon leash.

  When he saw Shangri-La spread out below him, Lieutenant Henry Palmer grabbed an overhead lever in the glider cockpit. He pulled down, releasing the Fearless Faggot from the tow cable.

  Within seconds, the glider slowed from more than one hundred miles per hour to less than eighty. As the C-46 flew off, engine noise faded away. Glider pilots Palmer and G. Reynolds Allen could hear the wind rushing past as they gently banked the engineless aircraft to further reduce speed. They lined up the glider’s nose between the red parachutes that outlined the makeshift landing strip and touched down. As they slowed to a stop, the glider’s tail rose like a whale’s fluke, then eased back down for a perfect landing. Alex Cann captured the moment for posterity.

  Glider pilot Lieutenant Henry E. Palmer inspects a native ax after landing the Fanless Faggot in the valley. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

  “We were all out on the field, jumping up and down with happiness,” Margaret wrote in her diary. Dozens of natives gathered around, whooping and hollering at the sight. “This was their first chance to see, close up, one of those monsters of the air that had been so terrifying to them at first. Now they gazed at it with no more fear than we did.”

  Henry Palmer knew that Major Samuels had only enough fuel in the Leaking Louise to circle a few times before attempting the snatch. Samuels also worried about a new cloud bank settling over the mountains surround
ing the valley. Over the radio, he warned: “We haven’t too much gas or time.” Samuels was serious about his concern. Before leaving Hollandia, he and his men had tossed out their heavy boots, their .45-caliber sidearms, the plane’s Thompson submachine guns, and every other nonessential item to lighten the load.

  As the clouds thickened, Samuels expressed doubts that a snatch attempt would be possible that day. The glider crew might have to sleep in the base camp overnight, and they’d try again the following morning, weather permitting.

  Colonel Elsmore wouldn’t hear of it: “It looks like a damn good day to me,” he said.

  Samuels relented, and the Leaking Louise began to prepare for a pickup. He announced over the radio that he wanted to try a couple of “dry runs”—swooping low over the field without grabbing the glider. Again Elsmore objected.

  “You better not try a dry run,” the colonel commanded. “If you’re short on gas, don’t take the time. You can make it OK without a dry run.”

  While Samuels and Elsmore sparred overhead, Lieutenant Palmer jumped down from the glider and called to the survivors: “You ready to go? This express takes off here on schedule in thirty minutes.”

  “Thirty minutes?” Margaret said. “Why, I’m not even packed.” Neither were McCollom, Decker, and the two paratroopers Walter had chosen for the flight: Sergeants Fernando Dongallo and Ben Bulatao. By putting “Doc” on the first glider, Walter wanted to focus attention on the medics who’d risked their lives by jumping into the jungle.

  As the survivors and the sergeants hurriedly gathered their belongings and souvenirs, the glider pilots went to work setting up the snatch poles. With the camp bustling, Alex Cann aimed his camera at a remarkable scene: twenty or more tribesmen pitched in to help Walter and the paratroopers roll the Fanless Faggot into position for the snatch. Leaning forward, their hands pressed against the glider’s canvas skin, the modern soldiers and the Stone Age warriors worked together, shoulder to shoulder, to muscle the Waco into place on the no-man’s-land-cum-battlefield-cum-improvised-glider-landing-strip.