Lost in Shangri-la

Chapter 9

GUILT AND GANGRENE

AFTER SEEING THE native footprint, the three survivors spent what Margaret called “this aching, miserable night” on the sloped, muddy banks of the mountain creek. Soggy and exhausted from their repeated rolls into the cold water, they woke in the dim predawn light on Wednesday, May 16, to resume their trek toward the clearing that McCollom had spotted farther down the slope.

As Margaret tried to stand, pain racked her body, and with it came fear. Overnight, her joints had stiffened, and the burned skin on her legs had tightened around her muscles. The burns choked off blood flow, starving healthy flesh. It hurt to even think about walking and sliding farther downstream. She couldn’t straighten up. She wrote in her diary, “My legs were so stiff they were a sickening sight.”

A quick inspection showed that infection had set in. She downplayed the gory details in her diary—the oozing pus, the blue-black hue of dead tissue. But she had a sickening idea of the causes and the dangers of what she described as “big, evil-smelling, running sores.”

New Guinea teemed with bacteria, and the microscopic organisms were feasting on the stagnant blood in her poorly dressed wounds. The combination of burned flesh, unsanitary conditions, and swarming bacteria was a recipe for gangrene. Unless treated, the dread condition meant the death of a damaged body part and ultimately an entire body. Gangrene comes in two varieties, wet and dry. Both are awful, but wet gangrene is worse. Dry gangrene usually appears gradually as a result of blocked blood flow through the arteries. Decades of smoking might lead to dry gangrene and the slow death of a smoker’s feet. That wasn’t Margaret’s worry. Her infected injuries were ripe for fast-moving, fast-killing wet gangrene. The longer her wounds went untreated, the greater the chance that her legs would have to be amputated. Even that radical step might not be enough. Wet gangrene can lead to the blood infection called sepsis. In the jungle, sepsis is fatal. The only question is whether it takes its victim in hours or days.

Margaret steeled herself and struggled upright onto her tender feet. She walked in agony, back and forth on the inclined bank, trying to loosen her joints and get limber enough to continue the journey. She glanced at Decker, knowing that he must have been in at least as much pain. She admired how stoic he remained.

McCollom looked at his two companions. He felt responsibility for them, but more than that. Respect and growing admiration. Affection, too. During all the walking, all the sliding downstream, all the discomforts, Decker hadn’t complained once about his gaping head wound or his other injuries. And this petite WAC corporal—by now McCollom thought of her affectionately as Maggie—had turned out to be much tougher than he’d expected. Not only was she soldiering on with gangrenous wounds on her legs and hand, but the burns on the left side of her face had darkened. It occurred to him that other WACs he’d known, as well as some male soldiers, wouldn’t have survived half of what she’d already been through.

Yet as their injuries worsened and infections took hold, McCollom could see his companions’ strength ebbing. He felt certain that both already suffered from full-blown wet gangrene, and he feared that if the search planes didn’t find them soon, he’d be the only one left alive.

McCollom wouldn’t reveal it to Margaret or Decker, but he was fighting back fear. Later he explained, “We were in what was thought to be headhunter territory, we had no medical supplies, no shelter. We were in the middle of nowhere. I knew my twin brother was dead in the wreckage. I had to take care of the others. I didn’t want to think about being out there all by myself, so I did what I could as much for myself as for them.”

Though determined to save Margaret and Decker, McCollom made a private resolution: if the searchers gave up before spotting them, he would somehow find a navigable river and build a raft, or if need be, keep walking. He’d float or walk all the way to the ocean a hundred and fifty miles away, if that’s what it took to get out of there. He’d return to Hollandia, and after that to his family. He couldn’t save his brother, but he was determined to save himself and keep watch over his brother’s infant daughter.

He’d do everything in his power to help Decker and Margaret. But if gangrene got the best of them, McCollom would go it alone.

BREAKFAST WAS WATER and more Charms, still their only food on the third day after the crash. They separated the candies by color, eating the red ones until they tired of them, moving on to yellow, and so on. Decker jokingly called the color-by-color approach a good way to vary their diet. They had cigarettes, but McCollom’s lighter was dry and their matches were wet. As they prepared to resume their trek, rolling their supplies into the yellow tarpaulins, their thoughts turned to coffee.

“I’d love to be back in the mess hall having some of that delicious battery acid,” Decker said.

“Me, too!” Margaret said. She didn’t understand why, but despite not eating since her lunch of chicken and ice cream three days earlier, she didn’t feel especially hungry.

The stream bank was too steep for them to walk on, and the jungle foliage gave no quarter. They gingerly stepped down the eight-foot bank, back into the mountain stream, to resume their soaking march. Again they clambered over fallen logs and slid on their bottoms down waterfalls.

“By this time my feet, my leg and my cut hand were infected,” Margaret wrote in her diary. “We were all in the last stages of exhaustion, and now the nightmare of yesterday commenced all over again.”

Tears filled her eyes as Margaret fought to keep up. Her feet throbbed with each step. Decker hung back with her. McCollom marched on, eager to reach the clearing. He got so far ahead they lost sight of him.

Margaret teetered on the edge of panic.

“McCollom has gone off and left us, and he’s got all the food,” she cried to Decker. “And we’re going to starve to death.” She plopped down in the stream. It was the closest she’d come to giving up since the thought of surrender flickered through her mind in the burning plane.

Decker, usually the quiet man among the three, had heard enough. He wheeled around like a red-faced drill sergeant. Margaret wouldn’t quote his full tirade to her diary, but she sheepishly admitted that he called her “a piker” and “a quitter.” Whether he did it as a motivating technique or in real anger, Decker had found the exact right words.

“I got so mad I wanted to kill him,” she wrote. “But I got on my feet and stumbled downstream once more. Pretty soon we caught up with McCollom.”

Margaret wasn’t someone who easily admitted that she was wrong, but almost immediately she felt regret. McCollom had been steadfast and strong, guiding and helping them even as he suppressed his emotions about his brother’s death, which Margaret suspected hurt more deeply than her burns. She told her diary: “It shames me to the core to think that even in hysteria, I doubted him for a moment.”

BACK IN HOLLANDIA, the Gremlin Special’s failure to return to the Sentani Airstrip had sent shock waves through Fee-Ask headquarters. The plane’s absence and the lack of radio communication almost certainly meant a crash, and a crash meant a search. From the outset, the mindset at Fee-Ask was a rescue mission, aimed at finding survivors, as opposed to a recovery effort, aimed at returning remains to families.

As a unit on a large air base, Fee-Ask had almost unlimited access to pilots and planes. The fact that the missing crew and passengers were colleagues, friends, and subordinates of the Fee-Ask brass made it doubly certain the search organizers would have whatever they needed. Raising the ante further were nine special circumstances: the WACs on board.

There’s no evidence to suggest that Colonel Ray Elsmore and the other officers at headquarters would have been any less aggressive if everyone aboard was male. But transport planes crashed regularly during the war with no notice from the press. Elsmore, savvy about the ways of reporters, must have known that the WACs aboard the Gremlin Special would attract special interest.

SEVERAL HUNDRED U.S. women had already died in World War II, but the numbers are fuzzy in part because some were civilians working with the Red Cross and other relief organizations, and some died in transit to war zones and in accidents on U.S. soil. Of the women who died serving noncombat military roles, many were nurses, including decorated heroes such as Lieutenant Aleda Lutz, a U.S. Army flight nurse who took part in nearly two hundred missions. In November 1944 she was aboard a C-47 hospital plane evacuating wounded soldiers from a battlefield in Italy when it ran into rough weather and crashed, killing everyone aboard. Thirty-eight U.S. military women who died were members of the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, the WAFS, and the Women Airforce Service Pilots, the WASPs, who flew military aircraft on noncombat missions to keep male pilots fresh and available for battle.

Each death of a woman in World War II drew attention, but in most cases the deaths came singly or in pairs. Exceptions included six nurses killed by German bombing and strafing of a hospital area during the battle on Anzio. And just two weeks before the Gremlin Special crash, six nurses were among twenty-eight crew members killed when a Japanese kamikaze pilot slammed into the U.S. Navy hospital ship Comfort off Leyte Island, between Guam and Okinawa.

The base at Hollandia had suffered only one previous WAC death, in February 1945, when a private from West Virginia drowned while swimming in the Pacific. On the day before her burial, her distraught friends wanted to honor her by flying the WAC flag—a banner of gold and green satin, with a fringe at the edge, its center adorned by the profile of the Greek war goddess Pallas Athena. No such flag existed anywhere in New Guinea. As one Hollandia WAC put it, the materials needed to make one were “as out of their reach as a handful of icicles.” Regardless, a group of WACs stayed awake past four in the morning, fashioning a flag from Australian bedsheets, colored with dyes made from yellow Atabrine antimalaria tablets and red Merthiolate antiseptic ointment pilfered from the infirmary. For the image of Pallas Athena, they used green India ink from the drafting department. For a fringe, they used old parachute cords. Bleary-eyed, they finished in time for the funeral. They ignored their flag’s blotchy colors and irregular size, its makeshift fringe and rough edges, saluting proudly as it waved in the warm breeze for their lost friend.

That was the reaction to the death of one drowned Hollandia WAC. Now nine Hollandia WACs were missing and feared dead in the island’s wild interior.

AFTER THE GREMLIN SPECIAL missed its estimated return time, calls were made to Allied landing strips throughout the region to see if Colonel Prossen and Major Nicholson had unexpectedly landed the C-47 elsewhere. That proved fruitless, so Fee-Ask planners hauled out their admittedly inadequate maps and divided the island into sectors where the pilots might have made what they euphemistically called “a forced landing.”

Though hampered by incessant rain, airborne searchers spent three days scouring those sectors. In all, twenty-four planes took part—a squadron of C-47s, a C-60 transport plane, and a flock of heavy bombers, including B-24 Liberators, B-25 Mitchells, and a B-17 Flying Fortress. A volunteer crew member on one of the search planes was Corporal James Lutgring, hoping against hope that he might rescue his best friend, Melvin Mollberg, who’d taken his place on the Gremlin Special.

Overseeing the rescue effort was Colonel Elsmore, who knew the area around the Shangri-La Valley better than anyone else in the U.S. military.

AT AROUND ELEVEN Wednesday morning, May 16, after five hours of trudging through the stream, McCollom climbed up the eight-foot bank.

“Come on,” he called, “this is it.”

Decker scrambled up, dragging Margaret behind him. On flat ground at the top, she fell face-forward onto the earth, unable to take another step. Decker and McCollom went ahead while she crawled after them on her hands and knees. A half hour later, she reached the spot fifty yards from the stream where Decker and McCollom lay panting on the ground. Margaret sprawled next to them, catching her breath. Feeling the warmth of the sun’s rays, she noticed that for the first time in days she could see a wide expanse of sky. They’d reached their goal, a clearing in the rain forest atop a small knoll.

Within minutes, the survivors heard the roar of four powerful engines. They looked up to see a B-17 bomber, its unmistakable shape silhouetted high overhead against the blue sky. The trio waved to draw its attention, but the pilot of the Flying Fortress flew away without spotting them. They rested and ate what passed for lunch, disappointed by the near miss but heartened by the sight of the plane.

An hour later, either the same B-17 or another just like it made another pass over the clearing. This time McCollom wasn’t taking any chances. He jumped to his feet.

“Get out the tarps!” he shouted.

McCollom and Decker raced to untie their supplies and spread out the yellow tarpaulin covers they’d salvaged from the Gremlin Special’s life rafts. The B-17, with Captain William D. Baker at the controls, was flying over the jungle at high altitude. Along with his usual crew, Baker had brought along an unusual passenger for a heavy bomber: Major Cornelius Waldo, the Catholic chaplain at the Hollandia base.

Margaret worried that the pilot would miss them again and declare that sector of the mountain fully searched, with no sign of wreckage or survivors. She begged her companions to hurry.

Just when it seemed to the survivors that the B-17 was about to fly away, Captain Baker turned the big bomber and circled back over the clearing. Still, Baker gave none of the traditional signs that he’d seen them. McCollom called to the sky:

“Come on down, come on down and cut your motors,” he cried. “Cut your motors and dip your wings.”

Margaret chimed in: “I know they see us, I know they do.”

Decker added a note of optimism: “They see us by now.”

Even though Baker was flying high above the clearing, he couldn’t mistake the survivors for any natives that might be around. One obvious distinction was that all three wore clothing. But the real giveaway was the tarp. Less than five minutes after the survivors spotted the B-17, the B-17 returned the favor. Baker raced his engines. He dipped his wings.

They’d been found.

McCollom had made the right call when he’d ordered them to leave the crash site and march down the mountain and through the icy stream. As one pilot experienced in jungle searches described it, “An airplane going into the trees makes a very small gash in a limitless sea of green.” By leading them to a clearing and laying out the bright yellow tarpaulin, McCollom had given them a shot at being rescued.

Later, a funny thought struck him: a life raft designed for ocean survival had saved them in the middle of a jungle.

UNBEKNOWNST TO THE survivors, they weren’t alone. Hiding in the nearby jungle was a group of native men and boys from a nearby village, among them a boy named Helenma Wandik. “I watched them,” he recalled. “I saw them in the clearing, waving.”

BARELY ABLE TO stand just a short time earlier, now Margaret, McCollom, and Decker jumped up and down. They danced and screamed and waved their weary arms. For the first time since they’d sat in the Gremlin Special, they laughed.

Baker wagged the B-17’s wings again to be sure they’d seen him. He logged their position by longitude and latitude, then had his crew drop two life rafts as markers as close as possible to the clearing. With a violent thunderstorm moving toward the valley, no more flights could be made at least until morning. As Baker flew out of sight, heading toward the island’s northern coast, he radioed a message to the Sentani Airstrip: three people in khaki, waving, spotted in a small clearing on the uphill side of a forested ridge, about ten air miles from the valley floor.

“We’ll probably be back in Hollandia by Sunday,” said Decker, who by then had dropped back to the ground.

“Hollandia, here I come,” Margaret replied.

She wrote in her diary that she planned a do-over for having stood up her swimming date, Sergeant Walter Fleming. In her daydream, Wally would sit adoringly at her hospital bedside, holding her hand and telling her how brave she’d been. Knowing that she’d be teased, she didn’t share that vision with McCollom or Decker.

Meanwhile, Decker displayed a dry wit. Affecting a glum tone, he told McCollom, “I suppose one of us will have to marry Maggie and give this adventure the proper romantic ending.”

McCollom joined the act. He appraised the injured, worn, and tired WAC. After looking her up and down, he delivered the punch line: “She’ll have to put on more meat before I’m interested.”

Margaret puffed herself up and defended her injured pride: “I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man in the world. I’m going to marry Decker!”

Decker, who’d been turned down by Margaret for a date weeks before their flight, wouldn’t give her the last word. But stumped for a snappy comeback, he blurted: “The hell you are!”

Relieved, they sat together on the ground and wondered how long it would take until more planes returned with supplies. Above all, Margaret wanted real food, so they could throw away “the damn hard candy.”

AS THE SURVIVORS lounged and chatted in the clearing, the thought occurred to Margaret that the jungle hadn’t spontaneously stopped growing there. Someone had painstakingly cut down the trees and dragged out the shrubs. They were sprawled in a mountainside garden of sweet potato, or camote, mixed with a smattering of wild rhubarb.

Eventually, the garden’s owner or owners would come to tend or harvest it, and that could mean trouble. But returning to the stream wasn’t an option, and neither was leaving the place where they’d been spotted by the B-17. They’d hunker down and pray for the best. Maybe the gardeners lived far away and only rarely visited this particular field. They had no choice but to wait and hope.

Their wait didn’t last long.

An hour after the B-17 flew off, the jungle came alive. They heard the sounds they’d thought were the yaps and barks of a faraway pack of dogs.

“Do you hear something funny?” Decker asked.

The sounds grew closer. The creatures making them were human.

The survivors had no idea how they’d fight off wild dogs. But they preferred that prospect to the seven-foot flesh-eating, headhunting, human-sacrificing natives they’d expected to see only from the air, through the windows of the Gremlin Special.

Their assets and weaponry consisted of a lanky sergeant with painful burns and gaping head wound, an undersize WAC with gangrenous burns, and a hungry lieutenant with a broken rib and a Boy Scout knife. It wouldn’t be much of a fight.

It seemed to Margaret that more voices joined the strange chorus. The survivors told each other optimistically that maybe the yapping was the noise that native children made when they played. Or maybe the people making the sounds would continue on their way in the jungle and pass them by altogether. But Margaret worried that the rising number of voices meant that “the signal had spread that a tasty dinner was waiting in the camote patch.”

Still they saw no one, even as the sound was upon them. No longer did it seem to come from everywhere. It rose from the far edge of the garden clearing, across a gully some twenty-five yards away.

The jungle rustled and shook. As the survivors stared helplessly in that direction, their fears took human form: dozens of nearly naked black men, their eyes shining, their bodies glistening with soot and pig grease, their hands filled with adzes made from wood and sharpened stone, emerged from behind the curtain of leaves.