Lost in Shangri-la

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  Still, McCollom considered it a hopeful sign. “Don’t worry,” he assured his companions. “I don’t know how, but they’ll get us out.”

  Mist settled over the mountain by mid-afternoon, and with it came steady rain. They talked about their families, and Margaret dreaded to think how her father back home in Owego would take the news that her plane had crashed and she was missing. Margaret told her diary she felt relieved that her mother had been spared the anxiety of learning that her eldest daughter was lost in Dutch New Guinea. It was the first time she’d felt at peace with her mother’s death.

  MARGARET’S MIDDLE NAME was Julia, her mother’s first name. Margaret’s youngest sister believed that Margaret was their mother’s favorite. In a school essay, Margaret described her mother as “the sweetest, kindest and the most lovable little woman who ever lived. My father, my two younger sisters and I all lived at home, and she was the very hub of our existence. At fifty-five she was a tiny woman, with silvery white hair, pink and white skin, fine features—much prettier than any of her daughters.”

  In the essay, Margaret described how she’d learned from a doctor that her mother was seriously ill and would live no more than a year. “Onto my shoulders, so unaccustomed to responsibility, was thrown suddenly the problem of deciding how this crisis should be met. Should I tell my younger sisters, my father and my mother’s brothers and sisters? For days I debated the question pro and con, and finally decided to act in the way which would cause Mother the least unhappiness. I was sure she didn’t want to die—not when she was having so much fun for the first time in her life. I didn’t feel sure that I could rely on my sisters to act normally if they knew the truth, so I told only my father. To this day I don’t know whether I was right or wrong, but the decision was mine to make, and I did what I thought best.”

  Her mother died three months later.

  AT ABOUT THREE that afternoon, the four remaining survivors felt exhausted from their injuries, the lack of food, and the little sleep they’d managed the night before. They set up the two cots.

  Margaret and Laura shared one, pulling a tarp over themselves and hugging tightly to keep from falling off. Margaret lay there, trying to sleep while at the same time listening for search planes overhead. Laura couldn’t stop tossing, so McCollom gave her morphine and tucked the tarp tightly around her. Margaret’s eyes burned from fatigue, and she was eager to sleep, but even after the morphine Laura remained restless. Her squirms on the narrow cot kept Margaret awake.

  Hanging in the air was a rhetorical question Laura had posed to McCollom as he’d tucked her in. Looking up from the cot, she’d asked: “Everyone else is dead and we’re very lonely, aren’t we?”

  Eventually, Margaret drifted into a fitful sleep. When she awoke around midnight, she felt an unexpected stillness. Laura had stopped fidgeting. Margaret put her hand on Laura’s chest. Nothing. She searched her friend’s neck for a pulse. Again nothing.

  Margaret screamed: “Please, McCollom, please come. Laura has died!”

  Roused from much-needed sleep, McCollom suspected that Margaret was overreacting. Clearly Laura was hurt, and her inability to keep down water was a bad sign. But he thought her injuries weren’t life-threatening. Decker was doubly sure, and he didn’t hide his annoyance.

  “Don’t be a dope, Hastings,” Decker replied. “She’s all right.”

  McCollom walked to the cot and felt Laura’s hands. Doubt crept into his mind. He searched in vain for a pulse. Margaret was right.

  Without a word, McCollom lifted Laura Besley’s body from the cot. He wrapped her remains in one of the tarps and placed it alongside Eleanor Hanna’s body at the foot of a tree.

  Even in their grief Margaret and McCollom knew how fortunate they’d been. Margaret had changed seats for a better view, and McCollom had boarded too late to sit alongside his brother. They ended up in the last two seats on the left side of the plane. They lived. Laura Besley and Eleanor Hanna, who’d sat across from them, died.

  “I ought to have cried,” Margaret wrote in her diary. “I ought to have felt some kind of terrible grief for this dear friend. But all I could do was sit on the cot and shake. I couldn’t even think that Laura was dead. I just sat there and shook and all I could think was: ‘Now the shoes belong to me.’ ”

  The death toll had reached twenty-one. The survivors of the Gremlin Special were down to three: John McCollom, a stoic twenty-six-year-old first lieutenant from the Midwest who’d just lost his twin brother; Kenneth Decker, a tech sergeant from the Northwest with awful head wounds who’d just celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday; and Margaret Hastings, an adventure-seeking thirty-year-old WAC corporal from the Northeast who’d missed her date for an ocean swim on the New Guinea coast. McCollom was the youngest of the three, but he held the highest rank and suffered the fewest injuries. Combined with his quiet competence, those qualities made him the group’s natural leader.

  Margaret Hastings after the crash. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

  The three survivors had known each other casually around the base, but were hardly close friends. As they rested in the shadow of their burning plane, they considered themselves no more than comrades and acquaintances who’d shared a horrible experience. For the time being, they’d follow protocol and call each other by rank, last name, or both, as in “Sergeant,” “Decker,” or “Sergeant Decker,” as opposed to Ken or Kenneth.

  But women in the military were still a novelty, and calling a woman by her last name didn’t always come naturally. Unless McCollom was giving her an order or Decker was needling her, “Corporal Hastings” soon became “Maggie.” The truth was, she preferred to be called Margaret—she hated the nickname Maggie. But she never complained or corrected them.

  After wrapping Laura Besley’s body, McCollom returned to Margaret, who’d remained fixed on the cot. He lit a cigarette and handed it to her. Then he sat next to her to share it. She wrote in her diary: “No night will ever again be as long as this one.”

  John McCollom after the crash. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

  Kenneth Decker after the crash. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

  As the hours passed, McCollom lit several more cigarettes, the smoldering orange tip moving back and forth between them in the darkness. He remained with her on the cot until dawn. They didn’t speak.

  Chapter 7

  TARZAN

  ON ONE TRIP between the rock ledge and the wreckage, McCollom climbed a tree and surveyed the area. He saw what looked like a clearing several miles away. Using a compass he’d found in the plane’s detached tail, McCollom plotted a course they could follow to reach it. With his companions’ injuries festering, and with little water and no food but hard sucking candies, they’d need to get to the clearing as soon as Margaret and Decker felt strong enough to hike there.

  Plane crash survivors are usually told to remain with the wreckage to increase their likelihood of being found. But the usual rules rarely applied in New Guinea. McCollom recognized that if they remained where they were, hidden under the jungle canopy, they faced certain death. Even if they reached the clearing, the likelihood of rescue seemed slim.

  NEW GUINEA’S JUNGLES were boundless cemeteries of unmarked military graves. In April 1944, when the wife of a missing Army Air Forces pilot sought information about her husband’s prospects, an officer wrote back with unusual candor: “It is necessary to cross high mountain ranges on practically every flight made on the island. Thick jungle growth goes right up to the tops of the peaks and entire squadrons could completely disappear under this foliage. No matter how thorough the search is, the possibility of locating the plane is rather remote. We have had numerous other instances of like nature and no word has come concerning those crews or airplanes. The weather and terrain account for more [downed] airplanes than combat flying.”

  More than six hundred American planes had crashed on the island since the start of the war, some in combat but many from rough weather, mechanical
failures, pilot error, uncharted mountains hiding in clouds, or some combination. Hundreds more planes from Japan, Australia, Great Britain, New Zealand, and the Netherlands had crashed on New Guinea, as well. Some were located after they went down, but many were concealed by the emerald green rain forests. By 1945, New Guinea was home to more missing airplanes than any country on earth.

  Two and a half years earlier, in November 1942, a severe downdraft struck an American C-47 delivering troops and supplies to another part of the island. The plane crashed into a mountain at nine thousand feet, into conditions almost identical to those encountered by the survivors of the Gremlin Special. Search planes flew one sortie after another, but found no trace of the C-47, which was nicknamed the Flying Dutchman.

  Seventeen of the twenty-three men aboard survived the crash, though some had severe injuries. When no rescuers arrived, eight men felt fit enough to try to walk out of the jungle. They split up, leaving the crash site in two groups of four. On the fifth day of their trek, the first group came to a narrow gorge with a fast-moving river. They couldn’t cross, so they tried to ride logs down the rapids. Two drowned. The other two eventually met friendly natives, who guided them from village to village. After thirty-two arduous days, they arrived at an Allied base. The second group had an easier time. They received help from natives after ten days, and within a month all four were safely out of the jungle.

  The reappearance of survivors from the Flying Dutchman triggered a new search for the injured men left behind, but that failed, too. As a last-ditch effort, a reward was offered to any natives who discovered the wreck. More than sixty days after the crash, a group of natives came across a cluster of decaying bodies and a lone survivor, a U.S. Army chaplain described in one account as “blind from malnutrition and so light that he ‘felt like a baby.’” Around him was a bare semicircle of dirt—near the end of his ordeal, he’d sustained himself by eating mountain moss within his reach. The natives offered him cooked banana, but he died in their arms. They left his body, but brought back his Bible as proof that they’d located the Flying Dutchman.

  Long after, searchers returned to the wreck and found a rear cargo door where the survivors had kept a makeshift diary written in charcoal. The first entries were simple reports with an almost military tone. Each entry was a few words long, noting when the crash occurred, when each group of healthy survivors left, how the remaining men had tried to launch a balloon to attract searchers, and what food they’d found and eaten. The rationing of one chocolate bar and a single can of tomato juice took up five days’ worth of entries.

  After a while, when food, tomato juice, and cigarettes were gone, the entries scratched on the cargo door turned personal, revealing hope, fear, and occasional flashes of grim humor. On Friday, November 27, 1942, seventeen days after the crash, an entry read: “Buckets full [of] water this morn . . . still got our chin up.” Two days later: “Boy we’re getting weak.” But the diarist added, “Still have our hope.” The next day: “Still going strong on imaginary meals.” On Monday, December 7, the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the entry read: “Year ago today the war started. Boy, we didn’t think of this then.” Two days later, a month after the crash: “Just thirty days ago. We can take it but it would be nice if someone came.” A week later, as thoughts turned to Christmas: “Running out of imaginary meals. Boys shouldn’t be long in coming now—6 more shoping [sic] days.” Six days later: “Tonite is Christmas eve. God make them happy at home.” Six days later: “Johnnie died today.”

  The entries petered out after two more days, seven weeks after the crash. The final entry noted that it was New Year’s Eve. The three remaining survivors signed their names: Pat, Mart, and Ted. Days later, the natives found the wreckage. The last man to die—the blind, malnourished, moss-eating chaplain, down to his last breaths—was Captain Theodore Barron, known to his friends as Ted.

  AT DAYLIGHT ON Tuesday, May 15, 1945, the second day after the Gremlin Special crash, McCollom announced that he’d changed his mind. They couldn’t wait for Margaret and Decker to feel stronger before starting their trek to the clearing he’d spotted from the tree.

  With soiled and soggy bandages on their burns, McCollom feared, his companions would get worse before they got better. Already they moved slowly, as though swimming through honey, a side effect of their injuries, sleeplessness, empty stomachs, and the thin air more than a mile above sea level. A native would have considered the rain forest a mess hall overflowing with fruits and roots, birds and small mammals, but for the survivors it was as mysterious as a menu in Mandarin. The only nourishment they trusted was their hard candy Charms.

  McCollom assembled most of their supplies in one of the remaining yellow tarpaulins. He packed a smaller one for Decker and gave Margaret a pail that he’d found in the plane’s tail. Rattling around in it were her day’s rations: two tins of water and a few cellophane-wrapped Charms.

  McCollom returned to Laura Besley’s body for a grisly but necessary task. He unwrapped the tarp and removed the flight suit he’d given her for warmth. Just as Margaret had shortened her uniforms when she’d first arrived in Hollandia, McCollom used his pocket knife to slice twelve inches of fabric from each cuff so Margaret could wear the flight suit without tripping over herself.

  When McCollom brought her the suit, Margaret knew that it came from the body of her good friend and double-date partner. But she was glad to have it, just as she knew that wearing Laura’s shoes might be the difference between life and death. Margaret still had the rayon underwear she’d stripped off after the crash, intending to make bandages. Now she tore the panties in half and used the fabric to cover the burns on her legs, so the rough flight suit wouldn’t scrape against her charred skin.

  Later, writing in her diary, Margaret wished that before they left the crash site they’d said a prayer, built a cross, or laid some kind of marker for the twenty-one friends, comrades, and McCollom’s twin. Even a moment of silence would have made her feel better about their departure. But at the time, their only focus was on reaching a place where they might be spotted from the air.

  The detached tail section of the Gremlin Special. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Army.)

  “LET’S GO,” MCCOLLOM ORDERED his two-person squad. He took the lead, Margaret followed close behind, and Decker brought up the rear.

  They first had to climb up from the ledge where they’d spent the previous two nights and make their way past the wreckage. The growth was so thick that they made the most progress by crawling on their hands and knees. In a few places, a wrong step would mean a fall into a rocky ravine. In others, it would mean a deadly plunge over a cliff. It took an exhausting half hour just to get twenty-five yards past the plane.

  Margaret tried to tie back her hair, which fell halfway down her back. But it was no use. It kept getting caught in the clawing vines and branches that surrounded them. They repeatedly had to halt their crawl-march to untangle it. In desperation, Margaret shook loose her hair and declared: “Please, McCollom, hack it off.”

  The lieutenant used his pocket knife to saw through chunks of Margaret’s thick hair, dropping the cuttings where they stood. After working his way around Margaret’s head, McCollom fashioned what Margaret called “a rather sad, three-inch ‘feather’ bob.” They started out again, but still the jungle tore at her.

  “For goodness sake, McCollom, I’ve got to get rid of this hair!” she yelled.

  McCollom cut it even shorter.

  Margaret’s burns made each step painful. Decker, worse off, still unsteady from his head injury, moved stiffly but never complained.

  As they inched through the mud and brush on the jungle floor, the trio stumbled upon what Margaret considered a miracle: a dry creek bed, or gully, that formed a narrow path down the mountain. Calling it miraculous mostly reveals how difficult the jungle was by contrast. The gully angled sharply downward, in some places forcing them to climb, slide, or jump down the rocky slope. The footing was unstable even along the flatt
er sections of the path, with loose stones that slid out from under them. In other places they had to climb over boulders and old tree trunks. But it was a trail nonetheless.

  “It is foolish to think that we could have cut our way out of that dense, clinging jungle with a pocket knife, our only weapon,” Margaret wrote in her diary. “The gully promised two things: a foothold in the jungle, precarious though it was, and eventual water.”

  Even as they followed the creek bed, the survivors had to stop and rest every half hour. After two breaks they noticed trickles of icy water draining into the gully from tiny mountain creeks. At first, they were delighted. Margaret and Decker, aching with thirst, announced that they intended to fill their stomachs as soon as the water became deep enough to collect. McCollom warned against it, worrying that waterborne germs would torture their bowels. But they were too excited to listen. In no time, the tributaries grew larger and they had more water than they wished for. It rose over their shoe tops and kept rushing into the gully, threatening to sweep them down the mountain with the swift-moving stream.

  They navigated the rougher spots by sliding along on their bottoms, getting soaked in the process. In the steepest places, waterfalls cascaded from two to ten feet down. The jungle bordered closely on both sides of the gully, so fallen logs rested in some of the waterfalls. Whenever possible, they used those logs as ladders or poles to climb down. When no logs were available, McCollom led the way, climbing down the falls hand over hand, the water pouring over his head. He stood at the bottom, under the rushing water, as Margaret made her way down far enough to stand on his shoulders. She slid into his arms, and McCollom placed her in shallower water past the falls. When she was safe, he returned to help Decker.