Lost in Shangri-la

Chapter 2

HOLLANDIA

ELEVEN DAYS BEFORE the messenger appeared at her father’s door, Margaret Hastings awoke as usual before dawn. Already the moist tropical heat had crept under the flaps of the cramped tent she shared with five other WACs. She dressed alongside her tentmates in the regulation khakis she’d cut down to match her petite frame. At first, Margaret wrote to a friend back in Owego, the uniforms “fit me like sacks.” But after a few failed alteration efforts, she boasted in the letter, “I got hold of a pair of men’s trousers that were miles too big for me, and used the material. They really turned out quite well, considering.”

Tents for members of the Women’s Army Corps in Hollandia, Dutch New Guinea, during World War II. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Army.)

The date was May 13, 1945. It was Sunday, so the bugler had the day off from his usual 5:30 a.m. reveille. Not that Margaret could sleep in. The workweek was seven days long at Base G, a sprawling U.S. military installation built around the town of Hollandia, on Dutch New Guinea’s northern coast. By eight o’clock Margaret was due at her post, a metal desk with a clackety typewriter where daily she proved that war wasn’t just hell, it was hell with paperwork.

Margaret was thirty years old, lithe and beautiful. She had alert blue eyes, alabaster skin, and long, light brown hair she wore in a stylish figure-eight bun. At just under five-foot-two and barely a hundred pounds, she still fit her high school wardrobe and her teenage nickname, Little Girl. But Margaret’s size was deceiving. She carried herself with style, shoulders back and chin up, the lasting effects of drama club performances, violin lessons, and what her youngest sister called a feisty, “take-charge” nature. She met strangers with a sidelong glance and a half smile that dug dimples beneath her high cheekbones. Somewhere between sly and sexy, the look suggested that Margaret had a secret that she had no intention of sharing.

As a girl growing up in Owego, Margaret bicycled to the local swimming hole, hitchhiked when she wanted to explore beyond the village, did well in school, and read books under the covers late at night. As she grew older and prettier, she became one of the most sought-after girls in town. She enjoyed the attention but didn’t depend on it. Margaret considered herself an independent young woman who, as she put it, “drank liquor, but not too much” and “liked the boys, but not too much.”

Even after her younger sisters married, Margaret held out beyond the limit of her twenties. Being single at thirty didn’t bother her, but it made her unusual: the average marrying age for women of her generation was twenty-one. She wasn’t interested in the men of Owego, but she didn’t blame them, either. “To tell the truth,” she told an acquaintance, “I’m not sure I go for the kind of man who’s supposed to make a good husband.”

After graduating from high school and bouncing through several jobs, Margaret found work as a secretary at a local factory owned by Remington Rand, a company that turned steel into everything from typewriters to .45-caliber pistols. She liked the work, but it bothered her that she’d never been farther from home or anywhere more exciting than Atlantic City. It sounded corny, but Margaret wanted to see the world, serve her country, and find out what she was made of. Joining the Women’s Army Corps gave her the chance to do all three.

AS MARGARET GOT ready for work, families across the United States were preparing for Mother’s Day—the fourth time the holiday had fallen during World War II. This time, though, a mother’s love wasn’t the only cause for celebration. Five days earlier, Germany had surrendered unconditionally. Reports were trickling out that Adolf Hitler had killed himself in his bunker. Other Nazi leaders were in custody. Concentration camps were being liberated, their horrors fully exposed. After a terrible toll of “blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” victory had finally arrived in Europe. In fact, May 13, 1945, marked five years to the day since British prime minister Winston Churchill had uttered that phrase to rouse his countrymen for the fight ahead.

To mark the once-improbable success of the war in Europe, the dome of the U.S. Capitol building, which had been blacked out since Pearl Harbor, again gleamed under the glow of floodlights. Congress unanimously endorsed President Truman’s declaration of May 13, 1945, as not just Mother’s Day but also “A Day of Prayer.” As Truman put it: “The western world has been freed of the evil forces which for five years and longer have imprisoned the bodies and broken the lives of millions upon millions of free-born men.” House Speaker Sam Rayburn hailed the news in Europe but added two somber notes. He lamented the passing of President Roosevelt weeks before V-E Day. Then he noted that the war wasn’t over: “I am happy but also sad, because I cannot help but think of those thousands of our boys who are yet to die in the far-flung Pacific islands and the Far East in order that victory may come to our armies, and that the glory of America may be upheld and peace and an ordered world may come to us again.”

News from the Pacific was encouraging, though fierce engagements continued there. For the previous six weeks, ferocious fighting had been under way on the island of Okinawa, which American generals intended to use as a springboard for an invasion of Japan, if necessary. Few relished that idea, yet optimism ran high. That morning, The New York Times declared that final victory was assured, whether by negotiated surrender or outright defeat. The paper told its readers, “It will be a busy summer for the Japanese enemy, and Hirohito can be confident that the ‘softening-up’ period, now started, will be followed by lethal blows.”

That confident inevitability might have been plain to editors of the Times and to policy makers in Washington. But the war in the Pacific remained a moment-by-moment struggle. Between sunrise and sunset on May 13, 1945, more than 130 U.S. fighters and bombers would attack troops, trains, bridges, and other Japanese “targets of opportunity” in southern and eastern China. Ten B-24 Liberators would bomb an underground hangar on a dot of land called Moen Island. Nine other B-24s would bomb an airfield on a lonely speck in the northern Pacific called Marcus Island. On Borneo, B-24s would bomb two airfields. To the east, B-25 Mitchell bombers and P-38 Lightning fighters would support ground forces on Tarakan Island. The U.S. 7th Marine Division would burst through Japanese defenses on Okinawa to capture Dakeshi Ridge. In the Philippines, the 40th Infantry Division would capture Del Monte Airfield, and bombers and fighters would pound targets on Luzon Island.

Those were the major events of the day, to be catalogued, analyzed, and recounted in countless books and films about the Big War. Another incident on May 13, 1945, would escape the notice of historians and Hollywood: a C-47 transport plane carrying two dozen officers, soldiers, and WACs would disappear during a flight over the mountainous jungles of New Guinea.

AFTER ENLISTING, MARGARET spent nearly a year in basic training, at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia, and at Mitchel Field on Long Island, New York. She learned to march in formation, abandon ship, wear a gas mask, read a map, scrub a latrine, maintain proper hygiene, and live by endless military rules. In December 1944, having risen from private to corporal, she shipped out to New Guinea, a place as different from Owego as imaginable.

Located between Australia and the equator, New Guinea was a largely uncharted tropical island roughly twice the size of California. At fifteen hundred miles long and nearly five hundred miles wide at its center, it was the world’s second-largest island, after Greenland. On a map, New Guinea resembled a prehistoric bird taking off from Australia or a comedian’s rubber chicken. But resemblances can be misleading; there was nothing funny about the place.

The island was a gift-box assortment of inhospitable environments. Much of the coastline featured barely habitable lowlands, swamps, and jungles. In the great middle were soaring limestone mountains covered by impenetrable rain forests and topped by snow or rocky outcroppings. The New Guinea terrain was so forbidding that the most common experience for its inhabitants was isolation. Pockets of humanity carved out small places to survive, fighting with anyone who came near and often among themselves. As a result, the island evolved into a latter-day Babel. New Guinea’s natives spoke more than one thousand languages, or about one-sixth of the world’s total—despite accounting for less than one-tenth of one percent of the global population.

U.S. military map of New Guinea during World War II, with Hollandia on the northern coast at roughly the midpoint of the island. The mapmaker was unaware of a large valley 150 miles southwest of Hollandia, in the mountain range that crosses the island’s midsection. (U.S. Army map.)

Inhabited by humans for more than forty thousand years, New Guinea passed the millennia largely ignored by the rest of the world. Lookouts on European ships caught sight of the island early in the sixteenth century. A racially single-minded explorer named it for an African country, Guinea, ten thousand miles away, because the natives he saw on the coast had black skin. For another two centuries, New Guinea was left mostly to itself, though trappers stopped by to collect the brilliant plumes of its birds of paradise to make hats for fashionable Sri Lankan potentates. In the eighteenth century, the island became a regular landing spot for French and British explorers. Captain Cook visited in 1770. Scientists followed, and the island drew a steady stream of field researchers from around the globe searching for discoveries in zoology, botany, and geography.

In the nineteenth century, New Guinea caught the eye of traders seeking valuable raw materials. No precious minerals or metals were easily accessible, but the rising value of coconut oil made it worthwhile to plant the flag and climb the palm trees along the coastline. European powers divided the island in half, and the eastern section was cut in half again. Over the years, claims of sovereignty were made by Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. Nevertheless, even well-educated westerners had a hard time finding the island on a map.

After World War I, New Guinea’s eastern half was controlled by Britain and Australia. The island’s western half was controlled by the Netherlands—and was henceforth known as Dutch New Guinea, with Hollandia as its capital. World War II drew unprecedented attention to the island because of its central location in the Pacific war zone.

Japan invaded in 1942, planning to use New Guinea to launch attacks on Australia, just over a hundred miles away at the closest point. In April 1944 U.S. troops executed a daring strike called “Operation Reckless” that scattered the Japanese troops and won Hollandia for the Allies. The Americans turned it into an important base of their own, and General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific, built his headquarters there before moving on to the Philippines.

IN NEW GUINEA as elsewhere, Margaret Hastings and other WACs filled strictly noncombat roles, as expressed by their slogan, “Free a Man to Fight.” An earlier motto, “Release a Man for Combat,” was scratched because it fed suspicions among the WACs’ detractors that their secret purpose was to provide sexual release for soldiers in the field. MacArthur wasn’t among those critics. He liked to say the WACs were “my best soldiers” because they worked harder and groused less than male troops. Eventually, more than 150,000 women served as WACs during World War II, making them the first women other than nurses to join the U.S. Army.

Margaret arrived in Hollandia eight months after the success of Operation Reckless. By then, little of the war’s bloody drama was playing out in that corner of the Pacific. Thousands of Japanese troops remained armed and in hiding on the island, but few were believed to be in the immediate vicinity of Hollandia. Nevertheless, sentries patrolled the sea of tents and one-story headquarters buildings on the base. WACs were routinely escorted under armed guard, and women’s tents were ringed by barbed wire. One WAC explained that the ranking woman in her tent was given a sidearm to keep under her pillow, with instructions to kill her tentmates, then herself, if Japanese troops attacked. New Guinea natives also raised concerns, though the ones nearest Hollandia had grown so comfortable with the Americans they’d call out, “Hey Joe—hubba, hubba—buy War Bonds.” Australian soldiers who’d received help from the natives during battles with the Japanese nicknamed them “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels.”

Some WACs thought the safety precautions’ real aim was to protect them not from enemies or natives but from more than a hundred thousand U.S. soldiers, sailors, and airmen in and around Hollandia. Some of those fighting boys and men hadn’t seen an American woman in months.

Almost immediately upon her arrival in Hollandia, Margaret became a focus of lovelorn soldiers’ attentions. “I suppose you have heard about blanket parties,” she wrote to a friend in Owego in February 1945. “I know I did and was properly shocked. They are quite the thing in New Guinea. However, they are not as bad as they seem and anyway, nothing can be done on a blanket that can’t be done in the back seat of a car.

“You see, we have no easy chairs and Jeeps are not too easy to sit in. So you just take your beer, or at the end of the month when the beer is all gone, your canteen of water and put it in a Jeep and ride all around until you find some nice place to relax. The nights are lovely over here and it’s nice to lay under the stars and drink beer and talk, or perhaps go for a swim. . . . With the surplus of men over here, you can’t help but find some nice ones. I have had no difficulty along that line at all.”

Far from home, Margaret indulged her adventurous impulses. “One night,” she wrote, “six of us went out in a Jeep without any top and drove all over the island. We traveled on roads where the bridges had been washed away, drove through water, up banks, and almost tipped over about ten times.” The letter didn’t give away military secrets, only personal ones, so it slipped untouched past the base censors.

Margaret’s regular double-date partner was a pretty brunette sergeant named Laura Besley. The only child of a retired oil driller and a homemaker, Laura hailed from Shippenville, Pennsylvania, ninety miles from Pittsburgh, a town so small it would’ve fit comfortably inside Owego. Laura had spent a year in college, then worked as a typist for the Pennsylvania Labor Department before enlisting in the WACs in August 1942.

Laura was taller and more full-figured than Margaret, but otherwise the two WACs were much alike. Laura was thirty-one and single, with a reputation among her family for being a “sassy” young woman who did as she pleased.

WHEN THEY WEREN’T working, blanketing, or joyriding, Margaret, Laura, and the other WACs made their quarters as plush as possible. “It is really quite homelike, and I am lucky enough to be in with five exceptionally nice girls,” Margaret wrote another friend in Owego. They furnished their twelve-foot-square canvas home with small dressing tables made from boxes and burlap. They sat on chairs donated by supply officers who hoped the gifts would translate into dates. A small rug covered the concrete pad that was the floor, mosquito netting dangled over their cots, and silky blue parachute cloth hung as decoration from the tent ceiling.

Sergeant Laura Besley of the Women’s Army Corps. (Photo courtesy of Gerta Anderson.)

A single bulb illuminated the tent, but a kind lieutenant named John McCollom who worked with Margaret’s boss gave Margaret a double electric socket. The coveted device allowed her to enjoy the luxury of light while she ironed her uniforms at night. Quiet and unassuming, John McCollom was one of a pair of identical twins from Missouri who served together in Hollandia. He was single and couldn’t help but notice Margaret’s good looks, yet he didn’t try to parlay the gift into a date. That made Margaret appreciate it all the more.

The wildlife of New Guinea wasn’t so unassuming. Rats, lizards, and hairy spiders the size of coffee saucers marched boldly into the WACs’ tents, and mosquitoes feasted on any stray arm or leg that slipped out from under the cots’ protective netting. Even the precautions had vivid side effects. Bitter-tasting Atabrine tablets warded off malaria, but the pills brought on headaches and vomiting, and they turned soldiers’ and WACs’ skin a sickly shade of yellow.

A lack of refrigeration meant most food came three ways: canned, salted, or dehydrated. Cooking it changed the temperature but not the flavor. WACs joked that they’d been sent to the far reaches of the South Pacific to “Get skinny in Guinea.” To top it off, Hollandia was paradise for fungus. The weather varied little—a mixture of heat, rain, and humidity—which left everyone wet and overripe. Margaret showered at least twice a day using cold water pumped from a mountain stream. Still, she perspired through her khakis during the boiling hours in between. She relied on Mum brand deodorant, as well as “talcum, foot powder, and everything in the books in order to keep respectable,” she wrote in a letter home. “It is a continuous effort to keep clean over here. There are no paved roads and the dust is terrible, and when it rains there is mud.”

An American military officer described Hollandia vividly: “There was ‘jungle rot’—all five types. The first three were interesting to the patient; the next two were interesting to the doctor and mostly fatal to the patient. You name it—elephantiasis, malaria, dengue fever, the ‘crud’—New Guinea had it all. It was in the water in which you bathed, the foliage you touched—apparently the whole place was full of things one should have cringed from. But who has time to think when there are enemy snipers hanging dead, roped to their spotter trees; flesh-eating piranhas inhabiting the streams; lovely, large snakes slithering nearby; and always the enemy.”

Yet there was great beauty, too, from the lush mountains to the pounding surf; from the sound of the wind rustling through the leaves of coconut palms to the strange calls and flamboyant feathers of wild birds. Margaret’s tent was some thirty miles inland, near Lake Sentani, considered by its admirers to be among the world’s most picturesque bodies of water. Small islands that looked like mounds of crushed green velvet dotted its crystalline waters. On long workdays, Margaret relieved her tired eyes by looking up from her desk to Mount Cyclops, its emerald flank cleaved by the perpetual spray of a narrow waterfall. She described the sight as almost enough to make her feel cool.

Mostly, though, Hollandia was a trial. The WACs’ official history singled out Base G as the worst place in the war for the health of military women: “The Air Surgeon reported that ‘an increasing number of cases are on record for nervousness and exhaustion,’ and recommended that personnel be given one full day off per week to relieve ‘nervous tension.’ ”

Margaret’s boss took such warnings to heart, and he searched for ways to ease the stress among his staff.

MARGARET WAS ONE of several hundred WACs assigned to the Far East Air Service Command, an essential if unglamorous supply, logistics, and maintenance outfit known as “Fee-Ask.” Just as in civilian life, Margaret was a secretary. Her commanding officer was Colonel Peter J. Prossen, an experienced pilot and Fee-Ask’s chief of maintenance.

The early hours of May 13, 1945, were quiet in the big headquarters tent at Fee-Ask. Colonel Prossen spent part of the morning writing a letter to his family back home in San Antonio, Texas: his wife Evelyn, and their three young children, sons Peter Jr. and David, and daughter Lyneve, whose name was an anagram of her mother’s.

Prossen was thirty-seven, stocky, with blue eyes, a cleft chin, and thick brown hair. A native of New York from an affluent family, he graduated from New York University in 1930 with an engineering degree. After working in private industry for a few years, he joined the military so he could fly.

Prossen had spent most of his children’s lives at war, but his elder son and namesake knew him as a warm, cheerful man with a love of photography. He’d sing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” loudly and out of tune while his wife played flawless piano. After visits home, Prossen would fly over their house and tip his wings to say good-bye.

In a letter to his wife a day earlier, addressed as always to “My dearest sweetheart,” Prossen commented on the news from home, counseled her to ignore slights by his sister, and lamented how long it took for photos of their children to reach him. He told her to save the stuffed koalas he’d shipped home until their baby daughter’s second birthday. He asked her to watch the mail for a native ax he’d sent home as a souvenir.

Colonel Peter J. Prossen with his sons, David and peter Jr. (Photo courtesy of Peter J. Prossen Jr.)

A dozen years in the military hadn’t diminished Prossen’s tenderness to his family. He sent his wife love poems and heart-filled sketches on Valentine’s Day, and he yearned for them to be reunited. Despite the harsh conditions he endured in Hollandia, Prossen commiserated sincerely with his wife about the hardships of gas rationing and caring for their children without him there.

The morning of May 13, 1945, for Mother’s Day, he wrote to Evelyn in his crabbed handwriting: “My sweet, I think that we will be extra happy when we get together again. Don’t worry about me. . . . I am glad that the time passes fairly quickly for you—hope it does till I get home. Then I want it to slow down.”

Later in the letter, Prossen described a poem he’d read about two boys playing “make-believe.” It made him wistful for his own sons. Sadness leaked through his pen as he wrote that their son Peter Jr. would make his First Communion that very day without him: “I’ll bet he is a nice boy. My, but he is growing up.” Prossen signed off, “I love you as always. Please take good care of yourself for me. I send all my love. Devotedly, Pete.”

Lately, Prossen had been anxious about the toll Dutch New Guinea was taking on the hundred or so men and the twenty-plus WACs serving directly under him. He wrote to his wife that he tried to relieve the pressures shouldered by junior officers, enlisted men, and WACs, though he didn’t always succeed. “I lose sight of the fact that there is a war going on and it’s different,” he wrote. “My subordinates are also depressed and been here a long time.” He wanted to show them that he valued their labors.

Prossen wheedled pilots flying from Australia to bring his staff precious treats: Coca-Cola syrup and fresh fruit. Lately, he’d offered even more desirable rewards—sightseeing flights up the coastline. One of those pleasure jaunts had featured prominently in Margaret’s most recent letter to her father.

On this day, May 13, 1945, Colonel Peter Prossen had arranged the rarest and most sought-after prize for his staff, one certain to boost morale: a trip to Shangri-La.