Lost in Shangri-la

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  The tale of the plane crash and the sky spirits is still told by those who remember it, though their numbers are dwindling. When the author of this book visited in early 2010, Yunggukwe Wandik, whose pig was killed by falling cargo, refused to talk about the episode for nearly an hour. She only relented when the author offered an apology on behalf of his countrymen. She never asked for money, but after she shared her memories, she accepted a few dollars as long-belated compensation for her first pig.

  Throughout the author’s visit, natives crowded around to view copies of Earl Walter’s photos. When Helenma Wandik saw a photo of Wimayuk Wandik, known to the survivors as Pete, his eyes welled with tears. He held the photo close to his face, then stroked it with his long, bony fingers. “This is my father,” he said in Dani, drawing it to his chest. He accepted a copy of the photo and offered a polished stone in exchange.

  AFTER THE WAR, the U.S. Army tried to send troops to Shangri-La to recover the crash victims’ remains. That plan was scuttled in 1947 when two amphibious planes that were supposed to be used in the mission were destroyed in a typhoon. No one was hurt. In letters to the victims’ families, the military declared that “the many extreme hazards involved in this plan posed serious threats to the lives of the members of this proposed expedition.” The bodies from the Gremlin Special were declared “non-recoverable” and their common gravesite received an official name: “USAF Cemetery, Hidden Valley, No. 1,” at longitude 139˚ 1’ east, and latitude 3˚ 51’ south.

  However, a decade later, a Dutch team searching the jungle for the wreck of a missionary plane stumbled upon the Gremlin Special. The finding was reported by The Associated Press, prompting a search and recovery mission by the U.S. Army. Using detailed directions from John McCollom and Earl Walter, the team located the crash site in December 1958. The bodies of Sergeant Laura Besley, Captain Herbert Good, and Private Eleanor Hanna were identified and recovered. As for the eighteen others, in the words of an officer who notified the next of kin, “segregation was not possible.” The team collected as many bones and personal effects as possible and hiked out.

  Herbert Good was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Eleanor Hanna was buried in a private cemetery in Pennsylvania. Her Chinese coin bracelet, and the two others she’d left behind in her tent, were returned to her family.

  Laura Besley was buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, in Hawaii. Her second funeral was May 13, 1959, the fourteenth anniversary of the crash. Every WAC then stationed in Hawaii served as an honorary pallbearer. A few weeks later, one WAC who attended the funeral returned to be sure a proper grave marker had been installed. To her surprise, a lei of vanda orchids rested on Laura Besley’s grave. She never learned who left them.

  The eighteen others were buried together on June 29, 1959, at the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis. Their remains rest under a large granite headstone inscribed with their names, ranks, birth dates, and home states. Among the mourners were Colonel Peter Prossen’s two sons, Peter Jr. and David. John McCollom attended the ceremony with his brother’s widow, Adele, and her fourteen-year-old daughter, Dennie.

  Robert McCollom’s wedding ring, found among the remains, was returned to his widow. She never remarried. After her death the ring passed to their daughter, who wore it to feel connected to her parents. It was stolen from her home in 1991, but she still hopes it will turn up.

  JAMES LUTGRING, WHOSE place on the Gremlin Special crew was taken by Melvin “Molly” Mollberg, never forgot his best friend. Lutgring knew that, months before his death, Mollberg had tried unsuccessfully to join a unit that flew P-47 Thunderbolts. As a tribute, Lutgring and some friends arranged to nickname a P-47 “Molly.” They took pictures of themselves gathered around the fighter’s nose, its name painted in flowing script. Lutgring also named his son after his lost pal, though Melvyn Lutgring never learned why his parents substituted a “y” for the “i.” Melvyn Lutgring served in Vietnam as a U.S. Army helicopter mechanic.

  LIEUTENANT HENRY E. PALMER received an Air Medal for Meritorious Achievement for piloting the Fanless Faggot. He returned to Louisiana after the war, married, had four daughters, and became registrar of voters in East Feliciana, Louisiana. In that role, he played a small part in a much larger historical event: the investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In 1967 New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison charged a businessman named Clay Shaw with conspiring with Lee Harvey Oswald to kill the president. Henry Palmer was called to testify during Shaw’s trial, as part of the prosecution’s effort to establish a connection between Shaw and Oswald. Witnesses said Oswald tried to register to vote in Palmer’s office on a day when Shaw was nearby. Shaw was found innocent, but Henry Palmer continued to field questions about the case from conspiracy theorists until he died in 1991 at seventy-seven.

  For piloting the Leaking Louise, Major William J. Samuels received a Distinguished Flying Cross, given for “heroism or extraordinary achievement while participating in aerial flight.” Shortly afterward, he was offered a choice: go to Okinawa and be promoted to lieutenant colonel or go home. He chose the latter and spent the next thirty-three years as a pilot for United Airlines. He died in 2006 at ninety-one.

  AFTER THE WAR, Colonel Ray T. Elsmore cofounded Transocean Air Lines, an upstart company created by aviation mavericks to fly unscheduled routes that other carriers couldn’t or wouldn’t. He served as a Transocean director and executive vice president from 1946 to 1952. Elsmore later became president of Western Sky Industries in Hayward, California. His military honors included the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Service Medal, the Commendation Award, and six Presidential Unit Citations.

  An obituary published in The New York Times recalled how Elsmore arranged General MacArthur’s flight from the Philippines and “directed the dramatic rescue of a Women’s Army Corps member and two service men from the wilds of the ‘Valley of Shangri-La’ in Netherlands New Guinea.” He died in 1957 at sixty-six. There’s no evidence he ever set foot in the valley.

  A year later, the Times published the obituary of George Lait, one of the reporters who flew with Elsmore in 1944 and named the valley Shangri-La. Fittingly, Lait went to Hollywood after the war and became a top publicist in the movie business. He died at fifty-one.

  Ralph Morton remained Australia bureau chief for The Associated Press until 1948, after which he worked on the AP’s foreign desk in New York and taught at the Columbia University School of Journalism. In 1954, he and his wife founded the weekly Dartmouth Free Press in Nova Scotia. He died in 1988 at eighty.

  Walter Simmons of the Chicago Tribune stayed in the Far East for a decade after the rescue. He wrote one of the first accounts of North Korean soldiers crossing the thirty-eighth parallel at the start of the Korean War. He returned to Chicago in 1955 and became the newspaper’s features editor, Sunday editor, and Sunday magazine editor before his retirement in 1973. He died in 2006 at ninety-eight.

  Alexander Cann edited his film into an eleven-minute quasi-documentary called Rescue from Shangri-La. It opens with images of forbidding mountains shrouded by clouds, then Cann begins the narration: “High in the mountains of Dutch New Guinea, beneath these clouds, an American Army plane crashed some time ago.” The film climaxes with the glider snatch.

  After the war, Cann married for a fourth and final time, had two sons and a daughter, and continued making documentaries in Australia. His wife, theatrical agent June (Dunlop) Cann, told a reporter that he “stopped off to be an alcoholic for twelve years,” so she left the film industry to raise their children. Late in life, he sobered up and returned to acting, winning roles on the television series Skippy, about a heroic kangaroo, and in the 1970 movie Ned Kelly, starring Mick Jagger. Cann died in 1977 at seventy-four.

  AT THE URGING of Earl Walter, medals were awarded to all ten enlisted paratroopers from the 1st Recon—Santiago Abrenica, Custodio Alerta, Alfred Baylon, Ben “Doc” Bulatao, Hermenegildo “Superman” Caoili, Fernan
do Dongallo, Juan “Johnny” Javonillo, Camilo “Rammy” Ramirez, Don Ruiz, and Roque Velasco. All but Bulatao and Ramirez received the Bronze Star. The two medics received the Soldier’s Medal, the U.S. Army’s highest noncombat award, for risking their lives to save the three survivors. Bulatao and Ramirez left few public traces after the war. In September 1945 Ramirez traveled to Kelso, Washington, to see Ken Decker. During the visit, Decker’s parents hosted a wedding reception for Ramirez and a Texas woman named Lucille Moseley with whom he’d been exchanging letters for several years. A brief news story about the wedding described her as “a twenty-eight-year-old night club entertainer.” The marriage didn’t last. Ramirez died in 2005 at eighty-seven. Ben Bulatao got married in Reno, Nevada, in 1968, and divorced in California in 1984. He died in 1985 at seventy-one.

  AFTER THE RESCUE, Earl Walter and the men of the 1st Recon finally shipped out to the Philippines. By then the islands were secure. On August 15, 1945, six days after an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, the Japanese announced their surrender. The same day, General MacArthur dissolved the 1st Recon in a letter expressing gratitude for battalion members’ service.

  Walter completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of Oregon. He rose through the sales department at the Mail-Well Envelope Company, where he worked for thirty-seven years. He became a major in the U.S. Army Reserves and raised three daughters and two sons with his wife Sally, whom he lost to a heart attack in 1989. Walter regained his passion for swimming and became a U.S. Masters champion, winning medals into his eighties.

  From left, John McCollom, Ken Decker, and Earl Walter in 1995. (Photograph courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

  Like the two medics, Walter received a Soldier’s Medal. In 2009, a few weeks after his eighty-eighth birthday, Walter showed it to a visitor in his apartment in an assisted-living complex near the Oregon coast. The octagonal medal, about the size of a Kennedy half-dollar, hung beneath a faded red, white, and blue ribbon. A framed citation that hung on the wall credited Walter with “exceptional courage and leadership.” It described the mission, then concluded: “Captain Walter’s heroism in personally leading the rescue party was directly responsible for the safe return of these survivors.”

  After the war, he showed the medal to his father. “He asked, ‘Did you earn that?’ ” Without hesitating, C. Earl Walter Jr. told C. Earl Walter Sr., “Yes, Dad, I did.”

  In the last entry in his journal, dated July 3, 1945, Walter wrote: “And so temporarily we close the tale of The United States Army Outpost at Shangri-La, Dutch New Guinea, and hope that in the years to come we can still look back and say it was a job well done and let it go at that.”

  In early 2010, Walter learned from this book’s author that some older natives in New Guinea still remembered him and his men. He choked up at the rush of memories. After a long pause, he cleared his throat and said: “It was the highlight of my life.”

  IN THE SPRING of 1995, Walter met John McCollom and Ken Decker in a Seattle restaurant to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the crash. They posed with photos taken of their younger selves in Shangri-La. They laughed and reminisced, filling gaps in each other’s stories. Decker, at eighty-four, flirted with a waitress. They raised a glass to each other, to the paratroopers of the 1st Recon, and to the “Queen of Shangri-La,” who couldn’t be with them.

  AFTER THE SNATCH, Ken Decker spent several months in the hospital recovering from his injuries. Once healed, he enrolled in the University of Washington, where he received a degree in engineering. He worked for the Army Corps of Engineers, then joined the Boeing Company, where he remained until his retirement in 1974.

  Decker married late in life and had no children. He seldom spoke publicly about the crash, in part because he never regained any memory of what happened between the time the Gremlin Special took off and when he stumbled out of the wrecked plane.

  Before he died in 2000 at age eighty-eight, Decker received a telephone call every year on May 13, his birthday and the anniversary of the crash. On the other end of the line was his old friend John McCollom.

  FOR AS LONG as McCollom lived, the memory of Captain Baker wagging the wings of his B-17 brought tears to his eyes.

  McCollom left the military in 1946, but was called back to active duty during the Korean War. He spent thirty-eight years as a civilian executive at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. After retiring, McCollom became an aerospace consultant and vice president of the Piper Aircraft Company.

  He married, had a son and a daughter, divorced, then remarried and had four stepchildren. At the wedding of his twin brother’s daughter, Dennie, he stood in for Robert and gave her away. He became a surrogate grandfather to her two sons.

  McCollom rarely spoke publicly of his twin, lest the enormity of the loss overwhelm him. When he acknowledged feeling survivor’s guilt, he spread it among all the people who died aboard the Gremlin Special: “Why wasn’t I killed instead of them?” he’d say. Most often, when asked about what happened, he’d answer, “I was lucky.”

  Yet pain has a way of finding an outlet, and the deepest pain for McCollom was reserved for thoughts about his twin. On rare occasions, he’d admit that a sorrowful thought wormed its way into his mind: “Maybe it should have been me instead of my brother, who was married and had a baby daughter he had never seen.”

  John McCollom and his niece, Dennie McCollom Scott, in 1998. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

  For a long time after the crash, he regularly dreamed that he, Decker, and Margaret hiked back through the jungle to the wreckage. And there was Robert, alive, waiting for them to return.

  Visitors to McCollom’s home couldn’t miss a wall of photos of John and Robert, young, nearly indistinguishable, and completely inseparable, at least in memory.

  In August 2001, near the end of his life, McCollom’s legs were too weak to carry him upstairs to an office over his garage. One day, his wife, Betty, came home from the grocery store to an empty house. Worried, she called to him. He replied: “I’m upstairs.”

  She went to the office and asked: “How’d you get up here?”

  “One step at a time, on my back end. I was looking for something,” he said.

  John McCollom died several days later. He was eighty-two. When Betty McCollom went to the office, she discovered that he’d assembled all his insurance, deeds, titles, and other important documents. Among his papers was the certificate from Colonel Elsmore inducting him into the “Shangri-La Society.” McCollom also authored his own obituary, at one point writing simply: “In May of 1945, his airplane crashed in New Guinea. He was rescued in June 1945 but his twin brother was killed in the accident.”

  After her husband’s death, Betty McCollom created a scholarship for aerospace engineering students at the University of Minnesota. She knew he wouldn’t have wanted the tribute alone. She called it the John and Robert McCollom Memorial Scholarship.

  “Mac was determined,” she said. “A number of tough things happened in his life. He just gritted his teeth and took it, and then he’d go forward. He was amazing.”

  THREE WEEKS AFTER the snatch, Margaret returned to the United States a star. Describing her reception, a Los Angeles Times correspondent pronounced her “the most celebrated young woman of the war.” Not to be outdone, the Boston Sunday Advertiser declared: “She’s blonde. She’s cute. She’s the No. 1 adventure girl in World War II.”

  Photographers tracked her stops from Hollandia to Manila to California to New York City; radio shows jockeyed to interview her; a newspaper syndicate purchased her diary; her hometown paper announced that she was fielding offers from “promoters, exhibitionists, theatrical agents, circus booking agents, publicity experts, columnists, commentators and just plain reporters.” A national magazine, Calling All Girls, won the U.S. Army’s permission to publish a “true comic” about her experiences in Shangri-La. As a publicity stunt, a newspaper arranged for Margaret to make her long-overdue date with Sergeant Walter “Wally” Flemi
ng. Instead of swimming in the surf off Hollandia, they dined at Toots Shor’s, the landmark New York restaurant. They saw each other once or twice afterward, then called it quits.

  A crowd estimated at three thousand people—the entire village, really—stood in sweltering heat to greet Margaret’s train when it pulled into the Owego station. The Owego Free Academy band struck up a rousing march as she stepped from the train into her father’s arms. The president of the Chamber of Commerce proclaimed her “Owego’s Number One Citizen.” No detail was too small for reporters to capture: “Tanned and with a fresh wave in her feather-cut bob, Margaret wore a smart WAC summer silk uniform and alligator pumps.” A representative from a New York talent agency let slip that Margaret was choosing among several movie offers. A gossip columnist wrote that Hollywood beauty Loretta Young wanted the role, but others expected Margaret to star as herself. Neighbors pushed through a police line seeking autographs and cheered as she rode to her home on McMaster Street with her father and sisters in a convertible. Margaret’s most lasting memory of her parade was two old women sitting on a porch, waving their handkerchiefs and crying.

  Margaret Hastings flanked by her sisters, Catherine and Rita, during the parade upon her arrival home in Owego, New York. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

  At the end of a thirty-day furlough, the military decided not to ship Margaret back to New Guinea. Instead, the brass sent her on a nationwide tour hawking Victory Bonds. During one six-week stretch, she spoke in fourteen different states. Over time, she gave more than two hundred speeches. At each stop, she repeated a brief version of her ordeal and posed with celebrities and generals, including Dwight Eisenhower. Her mailbox swelled with thousands of fan letters, poems, autograph requests, and proposals from unknown suitors, including a young man who boasted that he was his town’s champion spitter. One letter came from Sergeant Don Ruiz, the paratrooper whom Walter believed Margaret tried to seduce. The letter is chaste, catching her up on news of the paratroopers and describing the photos Walter took in the valley. “You look swell standing by your golden grass mattress bed and also in the little pup tent back in the potato field,” he wrote. The closest Ruiz came to flirting was to write about the beautiful women he danced with at a party. He signed off: “Long live the Queen of Shangri-La.”