Lost in Shangri-La: Escape from a Hidden World - A True Story. MItchell Zuckoff
the daughter of a newspaper publisher. An amateur pilot, she had already lived a whirlwind life, including fleeing from Spain with her mother at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Nearby was Sergeant Belle Naimer of the Bronx, the daughter of a retired blouse manufacturer. She was still grieving the death of her fiancé, an Army Air Forces lieutenant killed months earlier when his plane went down in Europe.
Another WAC searching for a seat was Sergeant Helen Kent of Taft, California. A widow, she had lost her husband in a military plane crash. Bubbly and fun-loving despite her loss, Helen had joined the WACs to help relieve her loneliness. Her best friend at the base, Sergeant Ruth Coster, was supposed to accompany her on the flight. But Ruth was swamped with paperwork for planes that General MacArthur had decreed should be flown to the Philippines. Ruth had urged Helen go ahead and, upon her return, tell her what it was like. Ruth would join the ‘Shangri-La Society’ another day.
Three more WACs climbed aboard: Sergeant Marion McMonagle, a forty-four-year-old widow with no children from Philadelphia; Private Alethia Fair, a divorced, fifty-year-old telephone operator from Hollywood, California; and Private Mary M. Landau, a single, thirty-eight-year-old stenographer from Brooklyn.
Best friends Sergeant Ruth Coster (left) and Sergeant Helen Kent fooling around for the camera. Ruth wanted to join Helen aboard the Gremlin Special but had too much work to do.
Behind them came Colonel Prossen, trailed by his co-pilot, Major George Nicholson. Nicholson was thirty-four, a student of the classics who had graduated from Boston College then received master’s degrees from Harvard, in the arts, and Boston University, in education. After several years on the home front in the infantry reserve, during which he taught junior high school, Nicholson joined the Army Air Forces to earn his silver pilot’s wings. He had only been overseas for four months, during which he had served under Lord Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia, before transferring to Dutch New Guinea.
Four days earlier, George Nicholson had skipped a ‘Victory in Europe’ party at the Fee-Ask Officers’ Club. He spent the night alone in his tent, writing a remarkable letter to his wife, Alice, a fellow schoolteacher he had married days before reporting for active duty.
In neat script, with a historian’s sense of scale and a poet’s lyric touch, Nicholson marked the Allied victory over Germany by composing a vivid, fifteen-page narrative of the war in Europe and Africa. His words swept armies across continents, navies across oceans, warplanes across unbounded skies. He channelled the emotions and prayers of families on the home front, and the fear and heroism of soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen on the front lines. He tracked the American military’s rise from a miscellaneous band of ice cream-eating schoolboys to a juggernaut of battle-tested warriors. He moved Allied men and machines through crushing blows at Dieppe, in France, and the Kasserine Pass, in Tunisia. He roused them to victory on North African soil against the hardened German tank units in the battle at El Guettar. He drove them on to Salerno and ‘Bloody Anzio’ in Italy.
Major George Nicholson.
Nicholson gained momentum, just as the Allies had, as he approached the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. He wrote as if he had been there: ‘Then the morning twilight was stabbed by the flashes of ships’ guns pounding the invasion coast, and the air was rocked by the explosions of shells from the guns and bombs from the planes. Rockets traced fiery arcs across the sky. The choppy waters of the Channel made many of the troops seasick in the assault boats. German artillery plowed into the water, plowed often into assault boats and larger vessels, blowing them to destruction. Mines exploded with tremendous shock. Beach and boats drew closer. Fear gripped the men but courage welled from within them. The ramps were let down, the men waded through obstacle-strewn water, they reached the beaches. The invasion had begun.’
Four pages later, Nicholson described American troops crossing the Rhine into Germany, American flyers driving the feared pilots of the Luftwaffe from the sky, and Allied forces squeezing the Third Reich by the throat to force its surrender. ‘We may have been soft, but we’re tough now,’ he wrote. ‘The battle is the payoff. We beat them into submission.’
Only at the very end did the letter turn personal, as Nicholson expressed his guilt and questioned his own manhood for not having served in Europe with the US Eighth Air Force. Addressing his wife directly, Nicholson confessed: ‘This is illogical, I admit, but a man is scarcely a man when he does not desire to pitch in when the combat involves his country and his loved ones. Do not think harshly of me, darling. The proof lies in action; I would have liked to go to the Eighth, but I never requested it.’
Having unburdened himself, Nicholson signed off: ‘Darling, I love you.’ Then, for the first time in fifteen pages of commanding prose, he repeated himself. ‘I love you.’
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Along with Prossen and Nicholson came the plane’s three other crew members, Staff Sergeant Hilliard Norris, a twenty-three-year-old flight engineer; and two privates, George Newcomer, a twenty-four-year-old radio operator; and Melvin Mollberg, the assistant engineer.
Mollberg, known to his friends as ‘Molly’, was a muscular, handsome twenty-four-year-old farm boy with thick blond hair and a crooked grin. He was engaged to a pretty young woman from Brisbane, Australia, where he had been stationed before arriving in Hollandia a month earlier. Mollberg was a last-minute substitute on the Gremlin Special crew. The assistant engineer whose name initially came up on the duty roster was Mollberg’s best friend, Corporal James Lutgring, with whom Mollberg had spent nearly three years in the Fifth Air Force in the South Pacific. But Lutgring and Colonel Prossen did not get along. The source of the tension was not clear, but it might have traced back to Lutgring believing that Prossen played a role in denying Lutgring a promotion to sergeant. Lutgring had no desire to spend his Sunday afternoon flying on the colonel’s crew, even if it meant missing a chance to see Shangri-La. Mollberg understood. He volunteered to take his friend’s place on the flight.
Corporal James ‘Jimmy’ Lutgring (left) and his best friend, Private Melvin Mollberg, who replaced Lutgring on the crew of the Gremlin Special.
Next to board the plane were the ten male passengers, seven officers and three enlisted men. Amongst them was Tech Sergeant Kenneth Decker of Kelso, Washington. A wiry, laconic draftsman in the command’s engineering department, Decker had worked in his father’s furniture store before the war. He had been in New Guinea for several months, after being stationed in Australia for more than two years. The flight was a special treat for Decker: he was celebrating his thirty-fourth birthday. On the other hand, seeing Corporal Margaret Hastings on the plane came as an uncomfortable surprise. Weeks earlier, Decker had asked her on a date, only to be refused. A flight over Shangri-La separated by a few seats seemed about as close to Margaret as he would ever get.
Another passenger was Herbert F. Good, a tall, forty-six-year-old captain from Ohio. Good had survived service in the First World War, after which he’d married and returned home to life as an oil salesman and a leader in his Presbyterian church. Then war called again, so again he went.
At the end of the line were identical twins, John and Robert McCollom, twenty-six-year-old first lieutenants from Trenton, Missouri. They were nearly indistinguishable, with sandy blond hair, soulful blue eyes, and lantern jaws. One small difference: John was 1.67 metres and Robert was a shade taller, a fact that Robert playfully lorded over his ‘little’ brother. Known to friends and family as ‘The Inseparables’, the twins’ close relationship was forged as toddlers after their mother left them, their older brother, and their father. As eight-year-olds, they dressed in matching outfits and idolized aviator Charles Lindbergh for his solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic. When the twins came home from third grade and gushed about their teacher, Miss Eva Ratliff, their father, a railroad station manager, decided to meet her. John, Robert and their older brother soon had a stepmother.