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

Hidden Valley: they called it Shangri-La.

      Chapter Four Gremlin Special

      THE VALLEY’S NEW NAME TOOK HOLD.

      A ‘Shangri-La Society’ was formed for pilots and passengers fortunate enough to fly over it. Each society member received a comically ornate certificate on parchment paper that looked like a hard-earned diploma, complete with blue-and-yellow ribbons affixed by a gold foil seal. Signed by Elsmore and one of his subordinates, the certificates were personalized with the society member’s name and the date of his or her special flight.

      Reporters couldn’t get enough of Elsmore – one dubbed him the ‘leading authority on the valley and its people’ – and the colonel lapped it up. After Lait and Patterson, other correspondents clamoured to visit the valley, and Elsmore usually obliged. Some who didn’t see it for themselves but interviewed Elsmore or Grimes took flights of fancy. One desk-bound reporter gushed about the valley’s beauty and called it ‘a veritable Garden of Eden’. Then he interviewed Elsmore about fears of headhunters. The colonel played up the danger, with a wink. Elsmore told the reporter that he might drop a missionary into the valley by parachute to show that ‘we come as friends and mean no harm. But I’m afraid it would more likely be a case of “head you lose.”’

      The quotable colonel told a correspondent for The Associated Press that when the war ended, he wanted to be the first white man to set foot in the valley and make contact with, in the reporter’s phrase, the ‘long-haired, giant natives’. Elsmore said his plan was to land in a glider, ‘fully equipped with bargaining trinkets, also weapons if they won’t bargain, food and the necessary material for swiftly setting up an airstrip so that transport planes can follow in.’

      The AP story appeared in US newspapers on Sunday, 13 May 1945 – the same day that Corporal Margaret Hastings’ boss, Colonel Peter Prossen, began rounding up members of the Fee-Ask maintenance division for a trip to Shangri-La.

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      For official purposes, Prossen described the flight as a ‘navigational training’ mission. The truth – a Mother’s Day sightseeing joyride – wouldn’t look nearly as good in a military flight log. Although he had taken his staff on similar recreational flights up and down the New Guinea coast, this would be Prossen’s first trip to Shangri-La.

      Margaret was at her desk when the invitation came. She had a date after work with a soldier she had been seeing regularly, a handsome sergeant named Walter ‘Wally’ Fleming. He had managed to get the keys to a Jeep, so they planned a drive to a secluded beach for an ocean swim. Yet Margaret had been desperate to visit Shangri-La since arriving at Fee-Ask five months earlier. Confident that she would be back in time for her date, she leapt at Prossen’s offer.

      The letter Prossen wrote that morning to his wife apparently put him in a mood to chat about home. He stopped by Margaret’s desk and shared amusing news from his wife’s last letter, laughingly telling Margaret that the family’s new dog – a mutt that his son Peter had named ‘Lassie’ – was somehow winning prizes at local dog shows.

      Margaret rushed to clear Prossen’s desk of work by noon. She wolfed down a lunch of chicken, with ice cream for dessert, abandoning her usual practice of savouring each cold spoonful.

      Prossen arranged for a truck to take Margaret and eight other WACs to the nearby Sentani Airstrip, named for the lake of the same name, while the men invited on the flight walked or hitched rides there. When the passengers arrived, they found Prossen, his co-pilot, and three crew members mingling outside a transport plane, its engines warming and propellers spinning. In civilian life, the plane was a Douglas DC-3, but once enlisted in the war effort it became a C-47 Skytrain, a workhorse of the wartime skies, with more than ten thousand of them deployed at Allied bases around the world.

      Nearly twenty metres long, with a wingspan of more than twenty-nine metres, the C-47 cruised comfortably at 280 kilometres per hour. At full throttle it theoretically could fly 80 kilometres per hour faster. It had a range of about 2575 kilometres, or about five times as far as the round-trip that Prossen had planned. Most C-47s had twin, twelve-hundred-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines. Some had guns, but Prossen’s plane was unarmed. C-47s were not flashy or fast, but they were reliable and stable in flight. If troops or materials were needed somewhere, a C-47 could be counted on to get them there. Pilots spoke fondly of their signature smell, a bouquet of leather and hydraulic fluid.

      A C-47 in flight during the Second World War.

      Prossen’s plane had been built in 1942 at a cost to the military of $269,276. Upon its arrival in Hollandia, the plane had been painted in camouflage colours to blend with the jungle if spotted from above by an enemy fighter or bomber. If the C-47 went down in the dense New Guinea jungle, its paint job would make it nearly impossible for searchers to spot.

      To officials, Prossen’s plane was Serial Number 42-23952. In radio transmissions, it would be identified by its last three numbers, as ‘nine-five-two’. C-47s were often called ‘Gooney Birds’, especially in Europe, and individual planes earned their own monikers from their captains and crews. Around the Sentani Airstrip, Prossen’s plane was affectionately called Merle, though its better-known nickname was the Gremlin Special.

      The name was ironic at best. Gremlins were mythical creatures blamed by airmen for sabotaging aircraft. The term was popularized by a 1943 book called The Gremlins, written by a young Royal Air Force flight lieutenant based in Washington DC named Roald Dahl. In Dahl’s story, the first he published, the tiny, horned beasties were motivated to make mechanical mischief as revenge against humans, who had destroyed their primeval forest home to build an airplane factory.

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      At two o’clock in the afternoon it was time to go. As the passengers lined up outside the Gremlin Special, Prossen told them to expect the tour to last three hours.

      ‘Let the girls in first,’ Prossen said, ‘and then fill it up with any enlisted men and officers who want to go.’

      One enlisted man, especially keen to see Shangri-La, grumbled: ‘Hey, that’s showing partiality.’ Prossen ignored the soldier’s complaint.

      One after another, the nine WACs climbed into the plane through a door near the tail, with Margaret first in line. Once inside, she found bucket seats with their backs against the inner walls of the cabin, so the passengers on one side of the plane would look across a centre aisle at the passengers on the other side.

      Like a child playing musical chairs, Margaret ran up the aisle towards the cockpit. She plopped into the bucket closest to the pilots, certain she had picked a winner. But when she looked out the window, she didn’t like the view. The C-47’s forward cabin windows looked down on to the wings, making it difficult if not impossible to see directly below. Determined to make a full aerial inspection of Shangri-La, Margaret ran back down the aisle towards the tail. She grabbed the last seat on the plane’s left side, near the door she had used to come aboard. The view was perfect.

      Close behind Margaret was her close friend, Laura Besley. The attractive sergeant sat directly across from Margaret, in the last seat on the plane’s right side. The centre aisle of the plane was so narrow the toes of their shoes almost touched. Margaret caught Laura’s eye and winked. They were certain to have quite a story to tell.

      Sitting next to Laura Besley was Private Eleanor Hanna, a vivacious, fair-skinned farm girl from Pennsylvania. At twenty-one, the curly-haired Eleanor had an older brother in the Army Air Forces and a younger brother in the Navy. Her father had served in the ambulance corps during the First World War, and had spent time in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Eleanor had a reputation around Fee-Ask for singing wherever she went.

      ‘Isn’t this fun!’ she yelled over the engines.

      On Eleanor Hanna’s wrist dangled a decidedly non-military adornment: a souvenir bracelet made from Chinese coins strung together with metal wire. She owned at least two others just like it.

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