Lost in Shangri-La: Escape from a Hidden World - A True Story. MItchell Zuckoff

one option. Nicholson gripped the control wheel and pulled sharply back. With Prossen standing in the radio compartment, and Sergeant Helen Kent still enjoying the view, the young major was on his own.

      Nicholson pointed the plane’s nose skyward, desperate to clear the fast-approaching ridge. McCollom watched Nicholson thrust the throttles forward, applying full power to climb. As Nicholson strained to gain altitude, McCollom spun around to look out the window by his seat. Through holes in the clouds he glimpsed trees below, their highest branches reaching up towards the belly of the Gremlin Special. He was certain that the clouds obstructed Nicholson’s view out the front windscreen. He was flying without the aid of his more experienced superior, but he was also guiding the plane blind, relying on the instrument panel arrayed before him. That, and gut survival instinct.

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      No one can say with certainty what brought the Gremlin Special and its twenty-four passengers and crew to this perilous moment. A mechanical malfunction – the work of gremlins – was possible, though that appears highly unlikely. More likely was a combination of factors that included Prossen leaving the cockpit, errors by Nicholson, and the inherent difficulty of flying into the valley called Shangri-La.

      Based largely on what John McCollom witnessed and what happened next, it appears that Nicholson, who had learned to fly only three years earlier, grew momentarily disoriented or misjudged the situation when he flew low through the small valley. But the threat to the Gremlin Special might have been exaggerated by conditions beyond Nicholson’s control.

      As Nicholson fought to gain altitude, it is possible a powerful gust of wind swept down on the C-47. Turbulent air was common in canyons and narrow valleys. Winds rushed over one edge and raced down to the valley floor, creating downdraughts, then raced back up the other side, creating updraughts. Sudden, short-lived updraughts and downdraughts often appeared without warning. The high-altitude valleys and canyons of New Guinea were especially treacherous. One reason was the ragged terrain. Another was rapid changes in air temperature, a result of jungle heat rising into the cumulus clouds that routinely formed over and around the peaks in mid-afternoon.

      If a downdraught did occur at that moment, the twenty-four people aboard the Gremlin Special might have been in mortal danger no matter who was at the controls. An official military account of the flight later suggested that ‘a sudden down-draft of air current’ apparently stymied the pilots’ effort to gain altitude.*

      * However, the account was incomplete. It made no mention of Prossen’s absence from the cockpit or the apparent mistakes by Nicholson.

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      As Nicholson struggled and McCollom worried, Margaret felt no sense of danger. She had been so engrossed in the sight of the native huts that she had not noticed that Colonel Prossen had given his seat to Helen Kent and was standing outside the cockpit. Margaret felt the nose of the plane rise, but she was unaware that Nicholson was flying alone. She thought that Prossen was merely gaining altitude to fly through a high pass between the mountains that she had glimpsed earlier.

      At the controls, Nicholson could not make the plane bend to his wishes. The Gremlin Special began to shear the tops of giant tropical evergreens, their limbs and leaves scratching and smacking and cracking against the plane’s camouflage-painted, sheet-metal skin. Even if Prossen grasped what was happening, as he surely must have, he had no time to race back to his seat, evict Helen Kent, and take over.

      Still, Margaret remained calm. Her confidence in her boss was so complete that for a split-second she thought Prossen had buzzed the treetops to give his passengers a thrill – flying ‘flat on the deck’ as pilots called it.

      John McCollom knew better. He grabbed Margaret’s arm.

      ‘This is going to be darn close,’ he told her, ‘but I think we can get over it.’

      His optimism was misplaced. Shortly after three o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday, 13 May 1945, Major George Nicholson’s desperate struggle to gain altitude ended. The distance between the C-47 and the unforgiving terrain closed to zero. To the ear-splitting din of metal twisting, glass shattering, engines groaning, branches snapping, fuel igniting, bodies tumbling, lives ending, the Gremlin Special plunged through the trees and slammed into the jungle-covered mountainside.

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      The cabin crumpled forward towards the cockpit. The walls of the fuselage collapsed as though sucked inward. Both wings ripped away. The tail section snapped off like a balsa-wood toy. Flames shot through the wreckage. Small explosions rang out like gunshots. Black smoke choked off the light. The air grew bitter with the stench of burning metal, burning leather, burning rubber, burning wires, burning oil, burning clothes, burning hair. Burning flesh.

      One small mercy was that Nicholson had managed to point the nose of the plane skyward in his attempt to clear the ridge, so the C-47 hit the mountain at an upward angle instead of head-on. As a result, although fire rushed through the cabin, the Gremlin Special didn’t explode on contact. Anyone not immediately killed or mortally wounded might stand a chance.

      When the plane burrowed through the trees, John McCollom flew across the centre aisle, from the left side of the plane to the right. He lurched forward, turning somersaults as he fell, and momentarily blacked out. When he came to, he was on his hands and knees halfway up the cabin towards the cockpit, surrounded by flames. Driven by instinct, he searched for an escape route. He saw a flash of white light where the tail had been. The roof of the cabin had flattened down like a tin can, so he was not able to stand. He crawled towards the light, landing on the scorched earth of the mountain jungle, disoriented but with barely a scratch.

      McCollom began to comprehend the horror of what had happened. He thought about his twin brother and the twenty-two others on board – all trapped inside and dead, he believed. As he rose to his feet outside the broken plane, he told himself: ‘This is a heck of a place to be, a hundred-and-sixty-five miles from civilization, all by myself on a Sunday afternoon.’

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      Margaret bounced through the cabin like a rubber ball. Her first impulse was to pray. But that felt like surrender, and Margaret was not the surrendering type. She grew angry. She knew this was not rational, but as she tumbled she took it personally, indignant that her trip had been spoiled by a plane crash. And she still had not seen any natives.

      When she stopped tumbling and regained her senses, Margaret found herself lying on top of a motionless man. Her fall had been cushioned by his body. She tried to move, but before he died the man had somehow wrapped his thick arms around her. Whether he had tried to save her or simply grabbed on to whatever was closest to him was not clear. Either way, Margaret was locked in a dead man’s grip. She felt flames licking at her face, feet and legs. The air filled with the acrid scent of sizzling hair. Again Margaret thought of relaxing, giving up. Then her fury returned, and with it her strength.

      She pried loose the man’s hands and began to crawl. She had no idea whom she was leaving behind or which way she was heading – back to the missing tail or ahead to the crushed cockpit and into the inferno. As she crawled towards her hoped-for salvation, she didn’t see anyone else moving or hear anyone speaking or moaning inside the burning cabin. Whether by luck or divine intervention, she chose the right direction for escape.

      Margaret stumbled out the torn-open rear end of the fuselage on to the jungle floor.

      ‘My God! Hastings!’ called John McCollom, who had come out the same way less than a minute earlier.

      Before Margaret could answer, McCollom heard a WAC scream from inside the plane: ‘Get me out of here!’

      The Gremlin Special was now fully aflame. McCollom doubted it would explode but he could not be sure. Without hesitating, he scrambled back inside, crouching beneath the smoke and fire, avoiding and ignoring the heat as best he could. He inched his way along, following the WAC’s pleading voice.

      ‘Give me your hand!’ he ordered.

      A moment later, Margaret watched as McCollom led out her friend Laura Besley. McCollom placed the WAC sergeant on the