Lost in Shangri-la

by Mitchell Zuckoff

  As Elsmore weighed the Sentinel’s pros and cons, he sought advice from an expert: Henry E. Palmer, a thirty-one-year-old lieutenant from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Palmer, a lanky country boy nicknamed “Red,” had extensive experience with Sentinels and other light aircraft. He was stationed nearby, at an airstrip on the tropical island of Biak, off the northern coast of New Guinea.

  Elsmore arranged for Palmer to fly low over Shangri-La in a B-25 bomber to assess the situation. One pass convinced Palmer that the Sentinel was wrong for the job. He had another idea, involving another type of aircraft altogether. Like the Sentinel, it was designed to land in tight spaces, on rough terrain. But Palmer thought this other type of aircraft had a better chance of safely clearing the mountains with passengers aboard. Plus, it wouldn’t require a drop of fuel.

  When Palmer returned to Hollandia, he walked into the planners’ headquarters and headed for a blackboard. With chalk dust flying, Palmer drew what must have looked like a child’s illustration of a mother plane and a baby plane, connected by an umbilical cord.

  The sketch, he explained, depicted a motorless aircraft being pulled through the sky by a twin-engine tow plane. Lieutenant Henry E. Palmer had just made a case for the highest-altitude and downright strangest mission in the history of military gliders.

  THE FIRST MOTORLESS flight is credited to Icarus, whose mythical journey ended with melted wings and a fatal plummet into the sea. Military glider pilots, an especially wry bunch, considered Icarus a fitting mascot. Their aircraft seemed to have been designed for crash landings, too. In the words of General William Westmoreland, “They were the only aviators during World War II who had no motors, no parachutes, and no second chances.”

  The Wright brothers and other aircraft pioneers experimented with gliders on the path to motorized flight. But after the Wrights’ triumph at Kitty Hawk, gliders became almost-forgotten second cousins to airplanes. During the early decades of the twentieth century, gliders were used primarily for sport, by enthusiasts who competed for distance records and bragging rights. Still, glider aficionados built larger and more elaborate craft, capable of carrying multiple passengers and soaring long distances once in flight with help from motorized airplanes.

  In the 1930s Germany became a leader in glider technology, largely because after its defeat in World War I the country was banned from having a motorized air force. Hitler overturned that ban in 1935, but he didn’t forget about German glider pilots. His generals began plotting possible uses for them in war. German engineers designed gliders that resembled small airplanes without motors, able to carry a pilot and nine soldiers or a ton of equipment. They could land on rough fields in the heart of combat zones, as opposed to the manicured runways needed by planes. Equally appealing to the Nazis, manned gliders could be released from tow planes many miles from their destinations; once freed from their tethers, they were silent in flight.

  The Germans saw an opportunity to test their quiet war machines in May 1940, nineteen months before the United States entered the fight. Poland had already fallen, and Hitler wanted to sweep through Belgium into France. Standing between him and Paris was Belgium’s massive Fort Eben Emael, on the German-Belgian border. Dug deep into the ground, reinforced by several feet of concrete, the newly built fort was considered impregnable. A traditional assault might have taken weeks, and success was hardly assured. Even if the Belgian fort fell, a long, costly battle would have spoiled the Germans’ hope for a blitzkrieg, a surprise lightning invasion. Helicopters might have speeded the effort, but the incessant thwomp-thwomp of their rotors would have alerted the fort’s defenders long before the German troops’ arrival. The same disadvantages applied for planes delivering paratroopers, who would have been sitting ducks as they floated under their parachutes to earth.

  Gliders provided a stealth answer for the Germans’ invasion plans. On May 10, 1940, tow planes from the Luftwaffe pulled a small fleet of gliders aloft into the skies approaching Belgium. Once released from their tow planes, the gliders, each carrying nine heavily armed German infantrymen, soared silently through the predawn darkness. Ten gliders landed on the “roof” of the dug-in fort—a grassy plain the length of ten football fields. German soldiers poured out of the gliders in full attack mode. Though badly outnumbered, they overwhelmed the stunned Belgians, deployed heavy explosives to destroy Fort Eben Emael’s big guns, and captured the fort within the day. Columns of German tanks rolled past on their way to northern France.

  Though the United States still wasn’t at war, the Belgian disaster at Fort Eben Emael was a wake-up call. It suggested that gliders might play a significant role in future combat. An American military glider program began in earnest immediately after Pearl Harbor, with a sudden call to train one thousand qualified glider pilots, a number that within months rose to six thousand. Design work on military-grade gliders got under way at Wright Field in Ohio, where two young flight engineers, Lieutenants John and Robert McCollom, were soon stationed. The McCollom twins weren’t directly involved in the glider program, but they watched with interest as it took shape.

  The American aircraft industry was already at full capacity, trying to build enough planes to meet the military’s growing demand. Consequently, the glider program took a more entrepreneurial approach, and government contracts for motorless flying combat and cargo aircraft went to a mix of unlikely bidders, including a refrigerator manufacturer, a furniture company, and a coffin maker. Eventually, the military settled on the fourth version of a cargo glider made by the Waco Aircraft Company of Ohio, called the Waco CG-4A, or the Waco (pronounced “Wah-coh”), for short.

  A Waco CG–4A glider in flight. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Air Force.)

  Waco gliders were more fowl than falcon—clumsy, unarmored flying boxcars made from plywood and metal tubing covered with canvas. Wacos had a wingspan of eighty-three feet, eight inches, stood more than twelve feet high, and stretched more than forty-eight feet in length. Each glider weighed 3,700 pounds empty but could carry a payload greater than its own weight in cargo and troops. Guided by a pilot and copilot, a Waco glider could transport up to thirteen fully equipped soldiers, or a quarter-ton truck, or a serious piece of rolling thunder such as a 75mm howitzer, complete with ammunition and two artillerymen. Most were towed into the air by thick 350-foot-long nylon ropes attached to C-47s, though some were pulled aloft by C-46s.

  Before the war was over, the U.S. military would take delivery of nearly 14,000 Wacos. Ironically, for a motorless aircraft, a major supplier was the Ford Motor Company, which built the gliders for about $15,000 each. For the same price as one glider, the government could have bought seventeen deluxe, eight-cylinder Ford sedans.

  Wacos got their first taste of combat during the July 1943 invasion of Sicily. A year later, gliders delivered troops in the Normandy landing on D-Day, though scores fell prey to ten-foot-high wooden spikes that German field marshal Erwin Rommel had ordered placed in French fields where he thought Wacos might land. Gliders also participated in Operation Dragoon in southern France and Operation Varsity in Germany. They delivered supplies during the Battle of the Bulge and were used in a variety of other combat missions in Europe. They also served in the China-Burma-India theater of operations, and in Luzon, in the Philippines.

  A major advantage of Waco gliders as troop-delivery aircraft was that, if the pilot braked hard enough on landing, he could stop quickly—within two hundred yards of touchdown—on uneven ground. Not infrequently, however, the glider came to rest with its nose buried in the dirt and its tail in the air. More than a few flipped over completely. Yet those landings were relative successes. Many others missed their intended landing zones entirely, as a result of weather, broken tow cables, pilot error, and other mishaps. Even when everything worked perfectly, Waco gliders made slow, fat targets for enemy antiaircraft guns.

  In short order, Wacos earned the nicknames “flak bait,” “bamboo bombers,” and “flying coffins.” Glider pilots were known as “suicide jockeys
” who made oxymoronic “controlled crash landings.” When they gathered to drink, glider pilots saluted each other with a mordant toast: “To the Glider Pilots—conceived in error, suffering a long and painful period of gestation, and finally delivered at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  In September 1944, a young London-based reporter for the United Press named Walter Cronkite was assigned to fly in a Waco glider during Operation Market Garden in Holland. Years later Cronkite admitted, “I came close to disgracing myself” by refusing the mission. He ultimately agreed only to save face with his fellow reporters. “I had seen what had happened to the gliders in Normandy. The wreckage of hundreds of them was scattered across the countryside.” Cronkite landed safely, but he never forgot the experience: “I’ll tell you straight out: If you’ve got to go into combat, don’t go by glider. Walk, crawl, parachute, swim, float—anything. But don’t go by glider!”

  During the early phase of the war, Waco gliders were regarded as almost disposable—once they landed and discharged their troops or supplies, they were abandoned. But as costs mounted, efforts were made to retrieve Wacos that hadn’t been reduced to kindling. However, because most touched down in areas far from conventional airstrips, their tow planes couldn’t simply land, reconnect their tethers, and pull the gliders aloft. As a solution, engineers developed a retrieval system in which low-flying aircraft—low, as in twenty feet off the ground—could zoom past and “snatch” a Waco glider back into the air.

  Nearly five hundred glider retrievals were executed from battlefields in France, Burma, Holland, and Germany, with nearly all the gliders empty except for the pilots. But in March 1945, two Wacos retrofitted as medevac aircraft landed in a clearing near Remagen, Germany. Twenty-five wounded American and German soldiers were loaded aboard the two gliders. C-47s snatched the Wacos off the ground, and soon afterward they landed safely at a military hospital in France.

  Now, three months after those successful snatches, Lieutenant Henry Palmer wanted to borrow a page from that mission, albeit with a much higher degree of difficulty.

  PALMER’S SCHEME WAS a plan only the military or Hollywood could love. Fortunately for Palmer, it just so happened that both had representatives in Shangri-La.

  As Palmer envisioned it, the operation would begin in Hollandia. A C-46 would pull a Waco airborne and tow it a hundred and fifty miles, into the skies over the valley. Once safely through the mountain pass, the glider pilot would disengage from the tow plane and guide the Waco down to the valley floor, where passengers would board. At such a high altitude, at least a mile above sea level, the glider couldn’t carry its usual load. Only five people would clamber aboard for each trip, with priority going to the survivors. Then the glider and its passengers would brace for the snatch.

  The basic premise was that a C-47 would fly over the glider and, using a hook extending from the fuselage, pull the glider back into the air. Tethered together, the tow plane and the trailing glider would fly up and over the surrounding mountains and soar toward Hollandia. After separating, both pilots would make smooth landings and enjoy a celebratory welcome home, ticker tape optional.

  That’s how it worked on Palmer’s blackboard. In practice, several dozen potential malfunctions or miscalculations could turn the gliders into free-falling kites, the tow planes into fireballs, and their passengers into casualties. Beyond the usual dangers that came with gliders, an attempted snatch in Shangri-La carried a host of added perils.

  No previous military snatch had occurred a mile above sea level. The thinner air at higher altitude meant that, even if the snatch was successful, chances were increased that the C-47 would be slowed by the glider’s weight to the point where the plane might stall. Depending on the C-47’s altitude at that point, the glider might become the oversize equivalent of a paper airplane on a full-speed collision course with the valley floor. The same fate might befall the C-47.

  Even if the plane didn’t stall, no one knew whether a C-47, pulling a loaded glider in thin air, had the horsepower to climb to roughly ten thousand feet quickly enough to make it through the pass that led out of the valley. In addition, the pilots of both aircraft would have to contend with the low clouds and the shifting winds that made getting in and out of the valley a challenge. Although the daily supply flights to Shangri-La made the trip seem routine, no pilot involved in the mission would forget that mistakes had cost twenty-one lives aboard the Gremlin Special.

  To top it off, if the first snatch succeeded, the rescuers would have to repeat the feat twice more, each time with the same dangers.

  As Colonel Elsmore considered the idea, three factors played into its favor. First, Elsmore knew of no better or safer rescue option. Second, Palmer boosted confidence in the plan by volunteering to pilot the first glider himself. Third, Elsmore was a sky cowboy with a flair for the dramatic.

  If it worked, they could count on hugs from Margaret, backslaps from the men, page-one publicity, featured roles in Alex Cann’s movie, and possibly medals. Maybe Elsmore could even repeat the glide-and-snatch routine to make his own long-awaited visit to the valley. On the other hand, if it failed, Palmer likely wouldn’t be alive to take responsibility, so Elsmore would shoulder all the blame.

  After consulting with his fellow planners, balancing the risks and rewards, Colonel Ray T. Elsmore announced that Waco CG-4A gliders would be used to extract the fifteen temporary residents from Shangri-La.

  ELSMORE’S DECISION SET in motion a scramble to find pilots and qualified crew members for the tow plane. He also needed several other glider pilots to work with Palmer, assorted maintenance personnel, and hard-to-find glider pickup equipment. Gliders were used less extensively in the Pacific than in Europe, so the specialized gear was scattered all over the region, from Melbourne, Australia, to Clark Field in the Philippines.

  The mission struck a piece of good luck when news of the planned glider pickup reached Major William J. Samuels, commander of the 33rd Troop Carrier Squadron based at Nichols Field, in Manila. At twenty-nine, a former Eagle Scout from Decatur, Illinois, Samuels had been a pilot with United Airlines before the war. More important, he’d been a glider snatch instructor at Bergstrom Field, in Austin, Texas. As far as Samuels knew, he was the most experienced glider pickup pilot in the entire Southwest Pacific. When Samuels volunteered to oversee equipment collection and crew training, as well as to pilot the snatch plane, Elsmore was so pleased that he turned over his own quarters to the major.

  If everything went as hoped, Samuels would execute the first glider snatch from the cockpit of a C-47 known as Louise. The plane, an “old bird” in Samuels’s phrase, was borrowed from a unit that seemed glad to be rid of it. The engine nearly quit on the flight from Manila to New Guinea, and Samuels had to make an emergency landing en route for repairs. He renamed it Leaking Louise for its tendency to spray engine oil all over its wings.

  The headquarters Elsmore chose for glider snatch training was tiny Wakde Island, a two-by-three-mile speck of land a hundred miles off the coast of Hollandia. Wakde’s most notable feature was a runway that ran almost its entire length. Another advantage was its isolation. If a glider fell on a deserted airstrip and no one was there to witness it, chances were excellent that it wouldn’t make a sound.

  Days passed with little progress. The effort seemed snakebit by delays caused by torrential rains, missing equipment, and a three-day case of dysentery suffered by Samuels. The delays gave glider pilot Henry Palmer plenty of time to think about what he’d gotten himself into. Eventually, he dubbed his Waco glider the Fanless Faggot, not as a slur but for its missing motor and its resemblance to a rough bundle of sticks.

  To get a better idea of what they’d volunteered for, Samuels and his copilot, Captain William G. McKenzie of La Crosse, Wisconsin, flew over the valley to pick a spot for a glider landing and pickup strip. Neither liked the looks of Shangri-La.

  “What do you think, Mac?” Samuels asked.

  “Well, Bill, we’ll never know �
�til we try,” McKenzie replied.

  Samuels looked back to their crew, staring dubiously out the windows, assessing their chances of success, not to mention survival.

  WHILE THE GLIDER work crawled along, the three sergeants who organized the valley base camp, Abrenica, Baylon, and Velasco, laid out a landing area to Samuels’s specifications. They cut and burned brush—leaving it no more than one to two feet high—in a relatively flat area some four hundred yards long and one hundred yards wide. They outlined the field with red cargo parachutes and used white paratrooper parachutes to make a center line for the landing strip. Appropriately for a make-do operation, they laid out toilet paper in the shape of giant arrows that pointed the pilots toward the airfield.

  On Wakde Island, much of the preparation was devoted to the most treacherous part of the operation: the snatch. When all the gear reached the island, crews installed equipment in the Leaking Louise that looked and functioned like a giant fishing reel, complete with line and hook. The reel, bolted to the cabin floor, was a huge winch, an eight-hundred-pound mechanical device the size of a washing machine. A crew member would use the winch to let out or pull in the line attached to the glider. The line, wrapped around the winch’s drum, was one thousand feet of half-inch steel cable. The hook, attached to the end of the cable, was just that: a six-inch-long steel hook.

  When the time came to attempt a snatch, crewmembers on the Leaking Louise would unspool the cable. They’d feed it hook-first down a wooden pickup arm, sometimes called a boom, that extended below the C-47’s fuselage. The hook would be set at the end of the pickup arm, to hold it steady.