Lost in Shangri-La: Escape from a Hidden World - A True Story. MItchell Zuckoff
fought his way through the smoke towards Eleanor Hanna, who had sat next to Laura Besley directly across from him and Margaret. Eleanor had been badly burned, far worse than Margaret or Laura. Her hair still crackled with burning embers when he carried her out.
By now, McCollom’s hands were scorched and his hair was singed from rescuing the two WACs. Otherwise, remarkably, he remained unhurt. Still, it was not possible to go back for a third rescue mission – the fire raged higher and hotter, and one explosion after another echoed from inside the wreckage. He doubted anyone inside could still be alive.
Startled by a movement, McCollom looked up and saw a man walk woozily towards him from around the right side of the plane. Any hope that it was his twin brother quickly faded. He recognized Sergeant Kenneth Decker – McCollom supervised Decker’s work in the drafting room of the Fee-Ask maintenance department. Decker was on his feet but dazed and badly hurt. Margaret saw a bloody gash several inches long on the right side of Decker’s forehead, deep enough to expose the grey bone of his skull. Another cut leaked blood on the left side of his forehead. Burns seared both legs and his backside. His right arm was cocked stiffly from a broken elbow. Yet somehow Decker was on his feet and moving towards them.
‘My God, Decker, where did you come from?’ McCollom asked.
Decker couldn’t answer. He would never regain any memory of what happened between take-off at the Sentani Airstrip and when he crawled out from under the plane to his deliverance in the jungle. Later, McCollom would find a hole on the side of the fuselage and conclude that Decker had escaped through it, though he also thought it possible that the sergeant had been catapulted through the cockpit and out through the windscreen.
As he walked unsteadily towards McCollom and Margaret, Decker repeatedly muttered, ‘Helluva way to spend your birthday.’
Margaret thought he was talking gibberish from the blows he had taken to the head. Only later would she learn that Decker was born on 13 May 1911, and this really was his thirty-fourth birthday.
Turning back to the three surviving WACs, McCollom saw Margaret standing fixed in place, apparently in shock. He set aside his hollowness, his feelings of unspeakable grief at being alone for the first time in his life. The situation was clear. McCollom was the least injured among the five survivors, and though he was only a first lieutenant, he outranked Decker and the three women. McCollom steeled himself and assumed command.
He snapped: ‘Hastings, can’t you do something for these girls?’
Laura Besley and Eleanor Hanna were next to each other, lying on the ground where McCollom had placed them. Margaret knelt by Eleanor. She did not seem to be in pain, but Margaret knew it was too late to help her. The fire had seared off all Eleanor’s clothes, leaving her with vicious burns across her body. Only her cherubic, fair-skinned face was unscarred.
Eleanor looked up with pleading eyes and offered Margaret a weak smile.
‘Let’s sing,’ she said. They tried, but neither could make a sound.
Laura Besley was crying uncontrollably, but Margaret and McCollom couldn’t understand why. She seemed to have suffered only superficial burns.
McCollom heard someone yell. He scrambled around the right side of the plane to a spot where he could see another officer, Captain Herbert Good, lying on the ground. McCollom knew that he was the reason that Good was aboard the Gremlin Special. That morning, McCollom had bumped into Good at the base in Hollandia. Affable as always, McCollom asked Good, a member of General MacArthur’s staff, whether he had afternoon plans. Good was free, so McCollom invited him to join in the fun on a trip to Shangri-La.
Captain Good looked unhurt, so McCollom beckoned him to join the other survivors. Good didn’t seem to hear him, so McCollom started fighting through the smouldering undergrowth in his direction. Decker followed, not fully alert but instinctively wanting to help and to stay close to McCollom.
As they edged closer to Good, flames exploded from fuel tanks in the torn-off wings, which had remained close to the fuselage. When the flames subsided, McCollom rushed to Good but it was too late – he was dead. When McCollom reached Good’s body, he learned why the captain had not moved when McCollom first called: his foot was tangled in the roots of a tree.
There was nothing they could do. They left Good’s body where it fell, hunched on the ground amid brush and branches a metre or so from the wrecked plane, his head tilted awkwardly to one side. Good’s right arm, bent at the elbow, reached downward towards the moist ground.
No one else emerged alive from the C-47 Gremlin Special, bound for Shangri-La on a Sunday afternoon pleasure flight.
Gone was Colonel Peter J. Prossen, who’d begun that day worried about his wife and children in Texas and his staff in Dutch New Guinea. In a few days, the letter he’d written that morning would arrive in San Antonio – his family would receive Mother’s Day greetings from a dead man.
Gone was the co-pilot, Major George H. Nicholson Jr, a Massachusetts junior high school teacher who days earlier had written so elegantly to his wife about battles in Europe that he’d never seen.
Gone was WAC Sergeant Helen Kent of Taft, California, who’d left behind her dear friend Ruth Coster. When she learned what happened, a devastated Ruth would find it tragically appropriate that Helen had died in the pilot’s seat, just as Helen’s husband Earl had perished when his plane went down eighteen months earlier over Europe.
The body of Captain Herbert Good, photographed approximately two weeks after the crash.
Gone, too, was Sergeant Belle Naimer of the Bronx, who joined her fiancé as a casualty of a wartime air crash. Gone were four other WACs: Sergeant Marion W. McMonagle of Philadelphia; Private Alethia M. Fair of Hollywood, California; Private Marian Gillis of Los Angeles; and Private Mary M. Landau of Brooklyn.
Gone were the plane’s three enlisted crew members: Sergeant Hilliard Norris of Waynesville, North Carolina; Private George R. Newcomer of Middletown, New York; and Private Melvin ‘Molly’ Mollberg of Baudette, Minnesota, who’d volunteered to take his best friend’s place on the flight crew.
Gone were the male passengers: Major Herman F. Antonini, twenty-nine years old, of Danville, Illinois; Major Phillip J. Dattilo, thirty-one, of Louisville, Kentucky; Captain Louis E. Freyman, who would have turned twenty-nine the next day, of Hammond, Indiana; First Lieutenant Lawrence F. Holding, twenty-three, of Raleigh, North Carolina; Corporal Charles R. Miller, thirty-six, of Saint Joseph, Michigan; and Corporal Melvyn Weber, twenty-eight, of Compton, California.
The bodies inside the Gremlin Special were cremated by the flames, making the wreckage a funeral pyre and a mass grave for the passengers and crew killed inside the cockpit and cabin.
Yet amid the ashes, a gold wedding ring with a white inlay somehow survived intact. Inscribed on the inside of the band were two sets of initials, ‘CAC’ and ‘REM’. When the ring was discovered years later inside the wreckage, it provided final proof of John McCollom’s agonizing realization during those first minutes in the mountain jungle. After twenty-six inseparable years, his twin brother was dead.
Chapter Six Charms
MOURNING WOULD WAIT. AS MCCOLLOM AND Decker stood over Good’s body, the exploding fuel tanks spread the fire closer to the three surviving women, threatening to trap them in a ring of flames.
Margaret saw the impending danger. She yelled to McCollom, who was still being shadowed by the woozy Decker: ‘Lieutenant McCollom, we have to get out of here. We’re going to be surrounded by fire if we don’t.’
Even as he hurried, searching for a path to safety, McCollom fought to maintain composure. No one under his command would panic. He responded calmly: ‘You’re all right.’
Margaret saw a small rock ledge at the edge of a cliff, some twenty metres down the jungle-covered mountain from the wreckage. She clawed her way towards it. From the