Lost in Shangri-la

Chapter 14

FIVE-BY-FIVE

AFTER ANOTHER FITFUL night, the survivors awoke at dawn—Thursday, May 17—still weary, cold, wet, and hungry. Knowing that more search planes would return to the spot where Captain Baker tossed out the life rafts as markers, they ate some of their remaining candies and talked about being rescued. Unaware of the technical limits, McCollom predicted that the Army Air Forces would use a helicopter to pluck them from the jungle and whisk them back to Hollandia in no time. The only obstacles he anticipated were the trees, but he considered that a minor inconvenience. “We can clear enough space for it to land,” he told the others.

They spotted the first plane around nine that morning—a C-47. For the first time, Margaret, McCollom, and Decker could see what the Gremlin Special must have looked like from the natives’ perspective before it crashed.

When the plane was over the clearing, a cargo door opened to deliver its payload: wooden supply crates attached to big red cargo parachutes. Margaret watched as the first chute blossomed in the sky like a huge, upside-down tulip. The crate swayed in the breeze before landing about a hundred yards from the clearing. McCollom and Decker plunged into the jungle to retrieve it, while Margaret stayed behind on the relative high ground of the little knoll. She kept busy by taking note of where subsequent chutes and boxes landed.

The two men took a while to drag the crate out, but when Decker and McCollom returned, they bore a prize more precious than food: a portable FM radio that could be used to transmit and receive messages. It was almost certainly a rugged, waterproof thirty-five-pound two-way radio the size of a small suitcase. Developed by Motorola for the Army Signal Corps, the device could be carried on a soldier’s back, hence its immortal nickname, the “walkie-talkie.” Its design was a milestone that contributed to a revolution in portable wireless communication, but to the survivors its value was immediate and immense.

“McCollom swiftly set it up,” Margaret told her diary. “The plane was still circling overhead, and Decker and I were in a true fever as we watched it and then McCollom.”

Holding the radio’s telephone-like mouthpiece near his lips, McCollom felt emotions welling up that he’d suppressed since crawling out of the burning plane. For the first time since the death of his brother, he found himself too choked up to speak. He had to swallow hard, twice, before his voice returned. “This is Lieutenant McCollom,” he croaked finally. “Give me a call. Give me a call. Do you read me? Over.”

The answer came back swiftly and clearly. “This is three-one-one,” said the plane’s radio operator, an affable New Yorker named Sergeant Jack Gutzeit, following Army Air Forces protocol by identifying himself by his plane’s last three serial numbers. “Three-one-one calling nine-five-two”—the final serial numbers of the Gremlin Special.

Using radio lingo to describe the strength and clarity of a signal, Gutzeit said: “I read you five-by-five”—a perfect connection.

Tears flowing, Margaret looked at her two comrades. Her companions. Her friends. She saw that McCollom and Decker were crying, too. They were still marooned in the jungle, but they no longer felt quite so alone. Now they had a lifeline to home, or at least a lifeline to a Brooklyn accent aboard a U.S. Army plane circling overhead.

Regaining his composure, McCollom briefly described the Gremlin Special flight, the crash, and the aftermath. In doing so, he delivered the heartrending news that Gutzeit would need to relay to his superiors, for dispersal through the ranks and beyond: no other survivors.

The first hopes dashed would be in Hollandia, among the friends and comrades of the twenty-one lost passengers and crew, including Ruth Coster, awaiting word about Helen Kent, and James Lutgring, praying for the safety of his pal Melvin Mollberg. From there, word would spread via Western Union telegrams to blue-star families throughout the United States. Formal letters of sympathy would follow.

A U.S. ARMY flight surgeon aboard the plane named Captain Frank Riley asked McCollom to report their condition. Margaret and Decker knew that their burns had turned gangrenous, and their other injuries were infected or nearly so. Margaret described herself and Decker in her diary as “almost too weak to move.”

McCollom wasn’t sure what to say, so he looked to them for an answer.

“Tell ’em we’re fine,” Margaret said.

Decker agreed: “Tell ’em we’re in good shape. There’s nothing they can do, anyway.”

McCollom followed their orders. Only later would they reveal the full extent of their wounds.

The plane, piloted by Captain Herbert O. Mengel of St. Petersburg, Florida, continued to circle overhead. Radioman Jack Gutzeit told the survivors that a plan was being drawn up to rescue them, but nothing was firmly in place. First, they intended to drop medics by parachute as soon as possible. In the meantime, he assured them, “We’re dropping plenty of food. Everything from shrimp cocktails to nuts.” Whether Gutzeit was exaggerating about the delicacies wasn’t clear, but the survivors never found shrimp in the jungle.

WHEN THE PLANE flew off, the survivors saw that the natives had returned.

“There on the knoll across from us were Pete and his chums,” Margaret wrote. “They were squatted on their haunches, grinning and watching us like an audience at a Broadway play.” She counted her blessings, with a touch of condescension: “The natives, who might easily have been head-hunters, stood about and watched us with childish pleasure.”

The natives made a small fire to warm themselves in the morning chill, and they sat around it, contentedly smoking stubby green cigars. Margaret, McCollom, and Decker looked on with envy. They had cigarettes in their pockets, but McCollom’s lighter was spent and their matches were wet. His spirits lifted by the conversation with the men on board the C-47, McCollom told the others, “I think I’m going over and borrow a cup of sugar from the neighbors.” He cadged a light, then shared the flame with Margaret and Decker.

“The natives smoked on their knoll and we smoked on ours,” Margaret wrote. “No peace pipe ever tasted better.”

Margaret began to fantasize about “the luscious Spam and K-rations probably awaiting us within a stone’s throw.” Despite her hunger, she told her friends, there were certain foods she wouldn’t savor: “One is canned tomatoes and the other is raisins,” she said. “When I was little I ate myself sick on both, and now I can’t stand the sight of either.”

McCollom answered: “I could eat the tomatoes, can and all, if I could get ’em.”

He rose and marched off in search of the supplies. Margaret appreciated McCollom’s endurance and leadership. She was even more impressed by the man shadowing him through the jungle.

“Decker was emaciated, his eyes like burnt holes in a blanket,” she wrote. “We knew he was hurt, but just how gravely we were not to discover for a few more hours. How Decker got to his feet I shall never know. But he did, and staggered uncomplainingly after McCollom, determined to do his share of the work.”

Although McCollom explained during the radio conversation that there were only three survivors, the C-47 had been packed optimistically, with supplies for two dozen. Their orders were to drop the supplies, and Captain Mengel and his crew had no intention of disobeying. The sky over Shangri-La filled with cargo parachutes.

While Decker and McCollom went off in search of supplies, Margaret worried that the natives might collect boxes of rations she saw falling on the other side of a nearby hill. “I decided to scout that situation,” she wrote. “It was excruciating to stand on my burned, infected legs. So part of the way I crawled on my hands and knees. When my infected hand hurt too much, I would sit down and bounce along on the ground.”

When she reached the other side of the hill, Margaret was stunned to see a split-rail fence that she thought looked straight out of the Old West. Just beyond it was a native compound. She wrote:

It was an odd and fascinating New Guinea housing project, with one large section and several smaller ones mushroomed around it. The huts were round, with bamboo sides and thatched roofs, and seemed to be at least semi-attached to each other. As for the roofs, they were alive with natives, all craning their jet-black necks for a better look at me. I could see a large-sized hole in one thatched roof. A hunch and a sinking feeling hit me simultaneously. I knew that one of our packages of supplies had gone through one roof. I was right, too, McCollom discovered later. I wondered if the natives were angry about this, or if they might go on the warpath because one of their houses was damaged. But they just stood and stared, entranced by the free show I made. So I decided to leave well-enough alone and go back to my own knoll.

THE CRATE THAT crashed through the roof did no harm beyond requiring new thatchwork. But another crate, dropped without a parachute, permanently embittered one resident of Uwambo toward the sky spirits in her midst.

Yaralok’s daughter Yunggukwe, a girl on the cusp of womanhood, had recently become the owner of her first pig. This milestone, and the possession itself, was of immense importance to a Yali girl. So great was the pig’s value to Yunggukwe—emotionally as well as, eventually, gustatorily—that its worth could only be exceeded by two pigs.

That morning, she tied her pig to a stake outside her hut, thinking it would be safe there. But when the supply plane roared over Uwambo, the pig had nowhere to run. To save parachute cloth, some of the boxes containing unbreakable items such as tents were pushed freefall out the C-47’s cargo door, and such was the case with a crate dropped this day.

There was no evidence of intent, but no pinpoint bombing raid during the war found a mark more squarely. It landed on Yunggukwe’s pig, killing it instantly and striking with such force that the animal shattered into pieces. Yunggukwe never received an apology or compensation, and she neither forgot nor forgave.

“That was my own pig that died,” she said angrily sixty-five years later.

MARGARET CRAWLED BACK to the clearing just as McCollom and Decker returned from the jungle, “grinning like apes.” In their arms were half a dozen cans of the only food they could find: tomatoes and tomato juice.

“Come on, Maggie,” Decker said. “Be a big girl now and eat some tomatoes.”

She forced down four mouthfuls before quitting. Watching Decker and McCollom gorge themselves on the fleshy fruit, she grew so angry she demanded that they return to the jungle to find her something else to eat. They headed in the direction where they thought the parachutes landed, but turned up only a half dozen “jungle kits” filled with Atabrine pills for malaria, ointments for wounds, water purification tablets, and bags to collect water from streams or lakes. Also inside were jungle knives, mosquito nets, bandages, and gauze. The only food in the kits was chocolate bars. Margaret felt only slightly better about the chocolate than the tomatoes. “By this time I was almost as sick of candy as I was of tomatoes,” she wrote.

Again Margaret marveled at Decker’s fortitude. Determined to do his part, he gathered the water bags and went to fill them in the icy stream. “He was gone so long I began to worry about him,” Margaret wrote. “It took every ounce of his strength to get back to our knoll, and when he reached us he just sagged gently onto the hard earth.”

McCollom, meanwhile, was worried about his companions. He decided the time was overdue to tend more thoroughly to their wounds. On McCollom’s orders, Margaret rolled up her pants to expose the wide rings of burns around her calves. Left untended for four days, they oozed pus and reeked of dying flesh. The burns and cuts on both her feet had turned gangrenous, as had part of her hand.

“Decker and McCollom looked at me, and I knew they were alarmed. Suddenly I was in terror, lest I lose my legs,” she told her diary. She fought to remain in control, fearing that letting down her guard might trigger a spiral into panic. She helped McCollom to apply an ointment they’d found in the jungle kits, after which he wrapped her wounds in gauze.

Crew members aboard a C–47 prepare to drop supplies to the survivors of the Gremlin Special crash. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

Even without looking in her little mirror, Margaret knew that she was filthy and unkempt, almost unrecognizable from the eager, take-charge WAC who cared about her appearance and spent nights tailoring her khakis so they’d fit her petite figure. Decker, in what was becoming his usual blunt way, didn’t hold back.

“Maggie, you are certainly a sad sack,” he said.

McCollom wisely kept his mouth shut, but even that wasn’t enough to spare him her wrath. Margaret looked at the two of them—equally dirty, with four days’ growth of beard on their hollowed cheeks. She shot back: “Neither one of you are exactly Van Johnsons,” she said, referring to the actor whose all-American good looks landed him heroic roles in MGM war movies.

After Margaret it was Decker’s turn for triage. The gash on his forehead was deep and oozing. Wimayuk Wandik’s breath might have salved his soul, but it did nothing to heal the wound. Margaret and McCollom worried that any attempt to treat it without sterile tools and proper medicine might only make matters worse, so they left it alone. They took the same approach with what appeared to be a broken right elbow, focusing instead on Decker’s one seemingly less urgent complaint. Several times during the previous days, Decker had mentioned discomfort caused by his pants sticking to his backside. They thought the cause might be burns from the crash, but the fabric was neither torn nor scorched, so they didn’t believe the burns to be serious. Now McCollom ordered Decker to drop his trousers and lie facedown on the ground.

“What we saw horrified us both,” Margaret wrote, “and made us realize for the first time what pain Decker had been suffering in silence.”

His buttocks and the back of his legs were laced with angry burns that had turned horribly gangrenous. Margaret found the sight sickening. Frightening, too. From the look on his face, so did McCollom. They didn’t want to upset Decker, so they said nothing and went to work trying to gently wipe away ruined skin. They cleaned the area as much as they could and applied a generous coating of ointment.

Decker had no idea how he’d been burned. One possibility was that he fell against a piece of scalding metal during the crash. The result would’ve been the same as ironing pants while still wearing them: the trousers would be fine, and the skin underneath would be destroyed.

Decker accepted the treatment with stoicism until McCollom covered the burns on his bottom with a large, triangular bandage that resembled a diaper. “That momentarily broke Decker’s spirit,” Margaret wrote. As much as possible, they’d all maintained a gallows humor since the crash, ribbing each other and themselves to boost morale and seal their camaraderie. Decker’s bandage could have been an easy source of jokes, but the others knew better. “We were all silently worried and trying not to let the other fellow know it,” Margaret wrote. Fearing that her legs would have to be amputated, and that Decker’s infections would fatally poison his blood, she wrote: “We were all wondering if the medics would reach us in time.”

AFTER THE INFIRMARY session, McCollom ordered both patients to lie down and remain still. All three stayed close together, listening for the planes they hoped would drop the promised medics before nightfall. But clouds rolled in and the weather turned foul by two o’clock that afternoon. A heavy mist settled on the valley and on the survivors’ hopes. They knew that no paratrooper medics would dare jump into such soup, especially because hidden beneath the mist was a thick jungle in which to get tangled or impaled. They could do nothing but spread out the tarps and try to keep warm.

By nightfall, only McCollom could get around on his feet. Decker could barely move, worn out from his injuries, his exertions, and his embarrassment. Margaret felt equally bad. She told her diary that, despite his obvious exhaustion, McCollom patiently ministered to her “as if I were a baby.”

She felt helpless, too sick and too weak to walk. All she could do was pray. She told her diary that she’d never prayed so hard in her life.