Lost in Shangri-La: Escape from a Hidden World - A True Story. MItchell Zuckoff
body from the cot. He wrapped her remains in one of the tarps and placed it alongside Eleanor Hanna’s corpse at the foot of a tree.
Even in their grief Margaret and McCollom knew how fortunate they had 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 had 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: McCollom, at twenty-six years old, 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.
After the crash: Margaret Hastings
Kenneth Decker
John 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 had shared a horrible experience. For the time being, they would follow Army protocol and call each other by rank, last name, or both, but not by first name.
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 had remained fixed on the camp bed. 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.’
As the hours passed, McCollom lit several more cigarettes, the smouldering orange tip moving back and forth between them in the darkness. He remained with her until dawn. They did not speak.
Chapter Seven Tarzan
THE NEXT MORNING, MCCOLLOM CONTINUED HIS treks between the rock ledge and the wreckage. On one trip, he climbed a tree and surveyed the area. He saw what looked like a clearing several kilometres away. Using a compass he had 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 needed to get to the clearing as soon as Margaret and Decker felt strong enough to walk.
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.
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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 candour: ‘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 airplanes than combat flying.’
More than six hundred Allied 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 aeroplanes than any country on earth.
Two and a half years earlier, in November 1942, a severe downdraught struck an American C-47 delivering troops and supplies to another part of the island. The plane crashed into a mountain at 2700 metres, 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 attempt 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. It was not possible to 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, an Army chaplain described in one account as ‘blind from malnutrition and so light that he “felt like a baby”’. Around him was a bare semi-circle of dirt – near the end of his ordeal, he had 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 had 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 had 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 humour. On Friday, 27 November 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, 7 December, the first 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 – and Captain Theodore Barron, the blind, malnourished, moss-eating chaplain, known to his friends as Ted.
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