Lost in Shangri-La

On a rainy day in May 1945, a Western Union messenger delivered a War Department telegram to Patrick Hastings, a 68-year-old widower in Owego, New York, informing him that his eldest daughter, Corporal Margaret Hastings of the Women's Army Corps (WACs), was missing in Dutch New Guinea. Margaret was one of more than 150,000 women who served in the WACs during World War II.

Eleven days earlier, on May 13, Margaret was a 30-year-old secretary stationed at Base G in Hollandia, a U.S. military installation on the northern coast of New Guinea, a largely uncharted tropical island north of Australia. Her commanding officer, Colonel Peter Prossen, anxious about his staff's morale in the harsh tropical conditions, arranged a special treat: a sightseeing flight over a remote valley soldiers had nicknamed "Shangri-La."

The valley had been spotted a year earlier by Colonel Ray T. Elsmore, a veteran pilot, who found it stretching about 30 miles long and eight miles wide, home to tens of thousands of inhabitants living in fenced villages with irrigated gardens. War correspondents renamed it "Shangri-La" after James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon, about a peaceful utopia sealed from the outside world, an ironic name given the natives' perpetual tribal warfare. An American zoologist named Richard Archbold had flown over the same valley during a 1938 biological expedition, but Elsmore was unaware of the earlier discovery. Sightseeing overflights became a coveted perk at the base.

On May 13, Prossen loaded 24 passengers and crew onto a C-47 transport plane nicknamed the Gremlin Special. Among them were Margaret and eight other WACs, including her close friend Sergeant Laura Besley; identical twin lieutenants John and Robert McCollom, inseparable brothers from Missouri; and Sergeant Kenneth Decker, a draftsman celebrating his 34th birthday. After takeoff, Prossen left the cockpit to socialize, entrusting the controls to Major George Nicholson, a less experienced copilot who had been overseas only four months. As the plane descended into a side valley, John McCollom spotted a cloud-shrouded mountain ahead. Nicholson applied full power, but the plane could not climb fast enough. Shortly after three o'clock, the Gremlin Special slammed into the mountainside at roughly 9,000 feet, and fire engulfed the wreckage.

John McCollom crawled from the burning fuselage with barely a scratch. Margaret pried herself free from a dead man's grip and escaped. McCollom reentered the flames twice to pull out Laura Besley and Eleanor Hanna, a fellow WAC. Decker stumbled out with a deep gash exposing his skull, burns on his legs, and a broken elbow. Twenty-one people perished, including Robert McCollom, Prossen, and Nicholson. Eleanor Hanna died that first night, and Laura Besley died the following midnight. The survivors were reduced to three.

McCollom, the highest-ranking and least-injured survivor, assumed command. The trio subsisted on Charms hard candies and tins of water salvaged from the tail section while gangrene began consuming Margaret's and Decker's wounds. McCollom led them down the mountainside through dense jungle until they reached a native sweet potato garden. On May 16, a B-17 search plane spotted them.

The book describes the valley's inhabitants, the Dani and Yali peoples, who numbered 60,000 or more. They practiced ritualized warfare driven by spiritual beliefs: When a person died, the community believed it must kill an enemy to appease the dead person's spirit, creating an endless cycle of retaliatory violence. An oral legend called Uluayek told of light-skinned spirits who once descended from the sky and would one day return, heralding the End of Days.

An hour after the search plane departed, dozens of men carrying stone adzes emerged from the jungle. McCollom ordered Margaret and Decker to smile and hold out their remaining candies. He walked onto a fallen log and shook hands with the group's leader, whom the survivors nicknamed "Pete." Pete was Wimayuk Wandik, a leader of the nearby Yali village of Uwambo, who believed the strangers were the sky spirits foretold by the Uluayek legend. Rather than attack, Wimayuk examined the survivors' wounds and blew on them, a sacred healing practice meant to coax the soul back to its proper place.

Back in Hollandia, rescue planners faced daunting obstacles: Helicopters could not reach the valley's altitude, no planes could land there, and overland treks would take weeks through hostile territory. A breakthrough came when Lieutenant Colonel John Babcock recalled that a former student of his, Captain C. Earl Walter Jr., commanded jump-qualified Filipino American soldiers desperate for a mission. Walter, 23, led the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion (Special). When he explained the mission's dangers, every man volunteered.

On May 19, two medics parachuted near the survivors: Corporal Camilo "Rammy" Ramirez, who had survived the Bataan Death March and escaped a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, and Sergeant Benjamin "Doc" Bulatao. They spent days peeling gangrenous skin from Margaret's and Decker's wounds, slowly reversing the decay. The next day, Walter and eight paratroopers jumped into the valley floor, landing between two warring groups of Dani, one of the valley's major tribes. More than 200 spear-carrying warriors surrounded them, but a tense standoff ended without violence when tribal leaders issued a maga, a declaration of safe passage.

After a multi-day trek, Walter and his men reached the survivors' camp. He established routines of medical treatments, card games, and supply drops. War correspondents filed daily dispatches that made the story front-page news, with Margaret dubbed "the Queen of Shangri-La," though the Filipino American paratroopers received scant credit. Walter oversaw the burial of the 21 crash victims, where chaplains conducted funeral services broadcast over walkie-talkie.

Colonel Elsmore settled on a daring rescue plan: Motorless Waco CG-4A gliders would be towed into the valley, then "snatched" back into the sky by a C-47 trailing a steel cable and hook, swooping 20 feet above the ground. The maneuver had never been attempted at such high altitude, where thin air increased the risk of engine failure. Practice runs were plagued by snapped cables and crew injuries.

On June 28, 46 days after the crash, the first glider landed in the valley. Walter declined a seat on the first flight, choosing to send the three survivors first while he remained as the last to leave. The snatch nearly ended in disaster: The rescue plane's engines overheated as it struggled to gain altitude, a parachute snagged on the glider's wheel and tore a hole through its canvas floor, and the aircraft barely cleared the surrounding mountains. McCollom unbuckled his seatbelt, crawled to the hole, and pulled the parachute inside. Two subsequent flights retrieved the remaining personnel, with Walter departing last on July 1.

Margaret returned to the United States as a celebrity and toured the country selling Victory Bonds. She later married, divorced, raised two children alone, and died of uterine cancer in 1978 at 64. John McCollom spent decades as an aerospace executive, rarely speaking of his twin brother lest the grief overwhelm him; he died in 2001 at 82. Decker earned an engineering degree, worked at Boeing, and died in 2000 at 88. McCollom called Decker every year on May 13, their shared anniversary of survival and Decker's birthday. Walter received the Soldier's Medal and remained the sole surviving American participant into his late 80s. Christian missionaries entered the valley in the decade after the war, followed by Indonesian troops after Dutch colonial rule ended. The once-isolated valley became an Indonesian province marked by poverty and cultural dislocation, though pieces of the Gremlin Special remain on the mountainside, and the tale of the sky spirits is still told by those who remember.