Lost in Shangri-la

Chapter 1

MISSING

ON A RAINY day in May 1945, a Western Union messenger made his rounds through the quiet village of Owego, in upstate New York. Just outside downtown, he turned onto McMaster Street, a row of modest, well-kept homes shaded by sturdy elm trees. He slowed to a stop at a green, farm-style house with a small porch and empty flower boxes. As he approached the door, the messenger prepared for the hardest part of his job: delivering a telegram from the U.S. War Department.

Directly before him, proudly displayed in a front window, hung a small white banner with a red border and a blue star at its center. Similar banners hung in windows all through the village, each one to honor a young man, or in a few cases a young woman, gone to war. American troops had been fighting in World War II since 1941, and some blue-star banners had already been replaced by banners with gold stars, signifying a loss for a larger gain and a permanently empty place at a family’s dinner table.

Inside the blue-star home where the messenger stood was Patrick Hastings, a sixty-eight-year-old widower. With his wire-rim glasses, his neatly trimmed silver hair, and the serious set of his mouth, Patrick Hastings bore a striking resemblance to the new president, Harry S. Truman, who’d taken office a month earlier upon the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

A son of Irish immigrants, Patrick Hastings grew up a farm boy across the border in Pennsylvania. After a long engagement, he married his sweetheart, schoolteacher Julia Hickey, and they’d moved to Owego to find work and raise a family. As the years passed, Patrick rose through the maintenance department at a local factory owned by the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company, which churned out combat boots and officers’ dress shoes for the U.S. Army. Together with Julia, he reared three bright, lively daughters.

Now, though, Patrick Hastings lived alone. Six years earlier, a fatal infection had struck Julia’s heart. Their home’s barren flower boxes were visible signs of her absence and his solitary life.

Their two younger daughters, Catherine and Rita, had married and moved away. Blue-star banners hung in their homes, too, each one for a husband in the service. But the blue-star banner in Patrick Hastings’s window wasn’t for either of his sons-in-law. It honored his strong-willed eldest daughter, Corporal Margaret Hastings of the Women’s Army Corps, the WACs.

Corporal Margaret Hastings of the Women’s Army Corps, photographed in 1945. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

Sixteen months earlier, in January 1944, Margaret Hastings had walked into a recruiting station in the nearby city of Binghamton. There, she signed her name and took her place among the first generation of women to serve in the U.S. military. Margaret and thousands of other WACs were dispatched to war zones around the world, mostly filling desk jobs on bases well back from the front lines. Still, her father worried, knowing that Margaret was in a strange, faraway land: New Guinea, an untamed island just north of Australia. Margaret was based at a U.S. military compound on the island’s eastern half, an area known as Dutch New Guinea.

By the middle of 1945, the military had outsourced the delivery of bad news, and its bearers had been busy: the combat death toll among Americans neared 300,000. More than a 100,000 other Americans had died noncombat deaths. More than 600,000 had been wounded. Blue-star families had good reason to dread the sight of a Western Union messenger approaching the door.

On this day, misery had company. As the messenger rang Patrick Hastings’s doorbell, Western Union couriers with nearly identical telegrams were en route to twenty-three other star-banner homes with loved ones in Dutch New Guinea. The messengers fanned out across the country, to rural communities including Shippenville, Pennsylvania; Trenton, Missouri; and Kelso, Washington, and to urban centers including New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.

Each message offered a nod toward sympathy camouflaged by the clipped tone of a military communiqué. Each was signed by Major General James A. Ulio, the U.S. Army’s chief administrative officer. Patrick Hastings held the pale yellow telegram in his calloused hands. It read:

THE SECRETARY OF WAR DESIRES ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP REGRET THAT YOUR DAUGHTER, CORPORAL HASTINGS, MARGARET J., HAS BEEN MISSING IN DUTCH NEW GUINEA, THIRTEEN MAY, ’45. IF FURTHER DETAILS OR OTHER INFORMATION ARE RECEIVED YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY NOTIFIED. CONFIRMING LETTER FOLLOWS.

When Owego’s newspaper learned of the telegram, Patrick Hastings told a reporter about Margaret’s most recent letter home. In it, she described a recreational flight up the New Guinea coast and wrote that she hoped to take another sightseeing trip soon. In mentioning the letter, Patrick Hastings’s message was clear: he feared that Margaret had gone down in a plane crash. But the reporter’s story danced around that worry, offering vague optimism instead. “From the wording of the [telegram] received yesterday,” the reporter wrote, “the family thinks that perhaps she was on another flight and will be accounted for later.”

When Patrick Hastings telephoned his younger daughters, he didn’t sugarcoat the news or hold out false hope about their sister’s fate. Outdoing even the military for brevity, he reduced the telegram to three words: Margaret is missing.