Lost in Shangri-la

Chapter 25

SNATCH

UPON ARRIVING AT Wakde Island, Colonel Elsmore canceled the original plan to practice a mile-high glider snatch at Mount Hagen. Instead, they’d focus on fixing the problems and getting it right at sea level on Wakde. To compensate for the higher altitude in Shangri-La, they’d overload the glider during the trial runs, filling it with nine passengers and three hundred pounds of sandbags.

Elsmore believed the maxim that a leader shouldn’t ask his troops to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. He sat in the glider’s copilot seat for the last three snatch tests. It’s not clear whether Elsmore’s hands-on approach reflected confidence that nothing would go wrong or lingering doubts that something might. Either way, those runs went off without a hitch. Satisfied, Elsmore declared that the snatch was on.

The plan called for three glider drops into Shangri-La, and three subsequent snatches, to get all fifteen people out of the valley. Bad weather added several more days of delays, so the glider and tow crews cooled their heels in Hollandia. In the valley, the temporary inhabitants waited in nervous anticipation, only to be told to stand down until the cloud cover cleared.

THE BIG DAY came on June 28, 1945. All fifteen members of Camp Shangri-La awoke at 6:00 a.m. to mostly clear skies with wisps of clouds that the Tribune’s Walter Simmons compared to “puffs of cigar smoke.”

The first plane into the valley was the supply plane.

“Does the queen think she wants to pull out of there today?” Major Gardner asked via walkie-talkie.

“She’s been wanting to get out of here for a week,” Walter replied.

“I suppose that goes for everybody,” Gardner said.

The major told Walter that Colonel Elsmore would supervise the mission from the cockpit of his own plane, a B-25 bomber he’d named for his seventeen-year-old son, Ray Jr. Instead of bombs, Elsmore loaded the plane with enough reporters for a media circus, with him as ringmaster. After telling Walter about the colonel and the correspondents, Gardner relayed a message to Walter that almost certainly came directly from the press-conscious Elsmore: “We should like it very much if on the first trip out, you, Mac, Maggie, and Decker could be on that glider.”

Walter knew that he’d get enormous attention as a hero if he stepped out of the first glider as the rescue leader alongside the three survivors. Only weeks earlier, he’d repeatedly noted in his journal how much he valued such exposure: “If this deal is getting all the publicity it appears to be, I am sure that my prayers on the future will be answered.” Worldwide page-one coverage of him with Margaret, McCollom, and Decker—perhaps with Colonel Elsmore pinning a medal on his chest—might have made it impossible for the brass to ignore Walter’s combat requests. Just as important, after the war he could show the stories and photos to his hero father. Walter also knew that he might have only one chance to bask in the acclaim; days might pass before the second and third glider pickups, and by then the media train might have rolled on.

None of that mattered as much as it once did. Walter wasn’t the same man who parachuted into the valley six weeks earlier, hungry for a mission and focused on his own career. He was no less gung-ho, but he was more mature; for the first time since he was drafted, he felt he had proved his mettle. Not only to the U.S. Army brass; not only to his men; not only to the imagined eyes of his father; but to himself. Walter understood what it meant to be a leader, and rushing to the front of the line wouldn’t do.

“I will not be on the first glider,” Walter answered, according to a transcript of the ground-to-air exchange. “I will send the three survivors and one or two of my men on the first glider. I will be the last man to leave here with my master sergeant and a couple of tech sergeants.”

Major Gardner could have ordered him aboard the first glider, but he let it drop. Gardner turned the conversation to wind speed on the valley floor. Walter assured him that it was minimal. That was the last discussion about when Walter would leave the valley.

A FEW MINUTES later, the radio in the supply plane crackled with word that the Fanless Faggot was en route to Shangri-La, gliding at the end of a tow cable pulled by a C-46. Elsmore joined the conversation, reporting from his B-25 cockpit that the glider was making good time. He corrected the tow plane’s course, and within minutes the C-46 cleared the last ridge and entered the valley with the glider trailing a few hundred feet behind on its nylon leash.

When he saw Shangri-La spread out below him, Lieutenant Henry Palmer grabbed an overhead lever in the glider cockpit. He pulled down, releasing the Fearless Faggot from the tow cable.

Within seconds, the glider slowed from more than one hundred miles per hour to less than eighty. As the C-46 flew off, engine noise faded away. Glider pilots Palmer and G. Reynolds Allen could hear the wind rushing past as they gently banked the engineless aircraft to further reduce speed. They lined up the glider’s nose between the red parachutes that outlined the makeshift landing strip and touched down. As they slowed to a stop, the glider’s tail rose like a whale’s fluke, then eased back down for a perfect landing. Alex Cann captured the moment for posterity.

Glider pilot Lieutenant Henry E. Palmer inspects a native ax after landing the Fanless Faggot in the valley. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)

“We were all out on the field, jumping up and down with happiness,” Margaret wrote in her diary. Dozens of natives gathered around, whooping and hollering at the sight. “This was their first chance to see, close up, one of those monsters of the air that had been so terrifying to them at first. Now they gazed at it with no more fear than we did.”

Henry Palmer knew that Major Samuels had only enough fuel in the Leaking Louise to circle a few times before attempting the snatch. Samuels also worried about a new cloud bank settling over the mountains surrounding the valley. Over the radio, he warned: “We haven’t too much gas or time.” Samuels was serious about his concern. Before leaving Hollandia, he and his men had tossed out their heavy boots, their .45-caliber sidearms, the plane’s Thompson submachine guns, and every other nonessential item to lighten the load.

As the clouds thickened, Samuels expressed doubts that a snatch attempt would be possible that day. The glider crew might have to sleep in the base camp overnight, and they’d try again the following morning, weather permitting.

Colonel Elsmore wouldn’t hear of it: “It looks like a damn good day to me,” he said.

Samuels relented, and the Leaking Louise began to prepare for a pickup. He announced over the radio that he wanted to try a couple of “dry runs”—swooping low over the field without grabbing the glider. Again Elsmore objected.

“You better not try a dry run,” the colonel commanded. “If you’re short on gas, don’t take the time. You can make it OK without a dry run.”

While Samuels and Elsmore sparred overhead, Lieutenant Palmer jumped down from the glider and called to the survivors: “You ready to go? This express takes off here on schedule in thirty minutes.”

“Thirty minutes?” Margaret said. “Why, I’m not even packed.” Neither were McCollom, Decker, and the two paratroopers Walter had chosen for the flight: Sergeants Fernando Dongallo and Ben Bulatao. By putting “Doc” on the first glider, Walter wanted to focus attention on the medics who’d risked their lives by jumping into the jungle.

As the survivors and the sergeants hurriedly gathered their belongings and souvenirs, the glider pilots went to work setting up the snatch poles. With the camp bustling, Alex Cann aimed his camera at a remarkable scene: twenty or more tribesmen pitched in to help Walter and the paratroopers roll the Fanless Faggot into position for the snatch. Leaning forward, their hands pressed against the glider’s canvas skin, the modern soldiers and the Stone Age warriors worked together, shoulder to shoulder, to muscle the Waco into place on the no-man’s-land-cum-battlefield-cum-improvised-glider-landing-strip.

Native tribesmen help push the Fanless Faggot into position for a snatch attempt. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

With the clock ticking and the snatch plane’s fuel tanks emptying, Palmer hustled the five passengers onto the glider. Margaret realized she hadn’t said good-bye to the natives. “But they understood that we were going,” she wrote. Margaret was especially sorry to leave without a final visit with “the queen.”

The native leader Yali Logo wasn’t sorry to see them leave, but Margaret felt certain that some of the tribesmen were distraught: “Tears streamed down their black faces. They felt they were losing friends, and I knew I was losing some of the best and kindest friends I would ever have. I blew my nose rather noisily, and discovered that McCollom and Decker were doing the same thing.”

IT’S POSSIBLE THAT the weeping natives were sad to see Margaret climb aboard the glider. It’s also possible that their tears reflected complex emotions among the people of Koloima.

The glider fascinated them, but according to several witnesses, they wouldn’t understand until later that their new acquaintances intended to fly away forever. They thought the glider’s arrival was the last sign of the Uluayek legend. Frightened, they appealed to their ancestors.

“We had a crying ceremony,” said Binalok, a son of Yali Logo. “It was to say, ‘Oh, we feel this deeply.’ As we cried, we named our dead ancestors. We thought we would be going back to the ways of our ancestors.”

Almost nothing had changed for generations in the valley, where the people lived and farmed and fought as their forefathers had. One exception involved styles of penis gourds and women’s wrapped skirts. After the crying ceremony, the men of Koloima stopped storing tobacco in the tips of their penis gourds, reverting to the practice of their elders. Native women changed how they wrapped their grass skirts, adopting a more traditional style. The changes might have seemed inconsequential to an outsider, but not to a Dani. Unable to envision what a new age would look like or how dramatically it would affect their lives, the people of Koloima made the most drastic change they could imagine—a return to older styles of gourds and skirts.

In the end, the natives were right about Uluayek but wrong about its effects. In a relatively short time, the world would come to Shangri-La, and the valley would change in ways they could never imagine.

INSIDE THE GLIDER, Palmer snapped Margaret out of her thoughts about the natives with a sharp warning: “Don’t be surprised if the tow rope breaks on the first try.”

“What happens if it does?” McCollom asked.

Palmer laid on a Louisiana accent: “Well, suh, the Army’s got me insured for ten thousand dollars.”

Margaret wasn’t laughing. She gripped her rosary and looked around the glider cabin, so flimsy when compared to the plane that had brought her to the valley nearly seven weeks earlier. She told her diary: “I wondered if we had survived a hideous plane crash and so much hardship, illness and pain, only to be killed when rescue was so near.”

Palmer helped to fasten their seat belts and showed them where to hold on, to avoid whiplash when the snatch came. They held tight as the Leaking Louise grew closer.

Major Samuels circled the C-47 at fifteen hundred feet above the valley floor. His crew made sure the pickup arm was in place, hanging below the plane’s belly, to grab the nylon loop. Peering through the windshield, he looked to the horizon and saw clouds closing in on the valley.

“I don’t think I can pick up today,” he radioed to Elsmore in the Ray Jr. and also to the crew in the supply plane.

Relying on his rank and his expertise, gained from a year of flying into and out of Shangri-La, Elsmore commanded otherwise: “This is the best weather I’ve seen in the valley in many a day. You can do it. Go right down there and pick up the glider. You’ll never get much better weather here.” Samuels knew better than to argue.

The Leaking Louise, piloted by Major William J. Samuels, approaches the Fanless Faggot for a snatch attempt. (Photo courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr.)

At one point during the conversation, Samuels turned away from the radio and asked his copilot, Captain William McKenzie: “Are you nervous, Mac?”

“Hell, yes,” McKenzie said. “Are you?”

“I guess you could say that.”

Samuels wrenched his neck to look into the cabin. “You guys all ready back there?” he asked the crew. They responded with thumbs up.

“OK, here we go. Lower the boom.”

Samuels pulled back on the throttles, slowing the C-47 to just over 135 miles per hour. He pushed forward on the control wheel, guiding the plane down to twenty feet above the valley floor and headed toward the spindly posts with the nylon loop draped across them.

At 9:47 a.m., the steel hook caught hold of the loop. Samuels slammed the throttles forward to gain power as he pulled back on the control wheel to gain altitude.

Inside the glider, the passengers and crew felt a neck-snapping jolt.

Watching from his B-25 at six thousand feet, Colonel Elsmore spat a machine-gun litany into his radio: “Oh boy. Oh boy. Ohboy, Ohboy, OHBOY!”

The drag from the glider slowed the Leaking Louise to a dangerous 105 miles per hour. The snatch plane was flying barely above the speed at which a C-47 was doomed to stall, a failure almost certain to be fatal.

Making matters worse, just before becoming airborne, the left wheel of the Fanless Faggot had snagged one of the parachutes laid down the center of the field. The white cloth billowed and thrashed against the glider’s underbelly as it struggled to gain altitude at the end of the tow rope. Lieutenant Palmer’s black humor about government life insurance now seemed more relevant and even less funny. If it were even possible, an emergency landing in the Fanless Faggot would likely be a twisting, uncontrolled affair.

As the Fanless Faggot moved forward at the end of the nylon cable after the snatch, a parachute used as a field marker caught on the glider’s wheel. (Photos courtesy of C. Earl Walter Jr. and the U.S. Army.)

Margaret prayed harder as the glider swept treacherously low toward the jungle-covered mountains. Seven hundred feet of steel cable had spun out from the winch inside the Leaking Louise. Added to the three hundred feet of nylon rope from the loop and the towline, the Fanless Faggot trailed the C-47 by about one thousand feet, or several hundred feet farther than ideal. With Samuels struggling to gain altitude, the longer distance between the two aircraft meant that the glider was being tugged too low toward the mountains. Samuels pulled back harder on the control wheel and applied full power. It wasn’t enough. Still the tow rope dragged through the trees—pulling the glider and the seven people on board through the upper branches.

When the glider grazed a treetop, Margaret clenched in fear. Her mind raced back to the sickening sound of branches scraping against the metal skin of the Gremlin Special just before it crashed.

The Leaking Louise clawed for altitude, climbed, and hauled the damaged Fanless Faggot into the clear. “When the glider swayed into our line of vision,” Samuels reported, “we could see pieces of fabric fluttering off in the wind.”

The trees were only the first obstacles. His hands sweating, Samuels fought to bring the C-47 up to ten thousand feet, the altitude he knew would be needed to clear the surrounding ridges. As Samuels overheated, the twin engines of the Leaking Louise did so, too. The plane began losing altitude.

“I’ve pushed her as far as she can go,” he radioed. Samuels announced that he wanted to cut the glider loose to avoid killing the C-47’s engines—along with everyone aboard both aircraft.

Elsmore demanded that the major do no such thing. Watching from a higher altitude in his B-25, he believed the Leaking Louise had climbed high enough to clear the pass. He radioed back: “Let ’em heat up. Keep goin’!”

Clouds shrouded the highest ridges, blocking Samuels’s vision.

INSIDE THE FANLESS FAGGOT, the five passengers were exhaling with relief over the tow rope’s refusal to break in the trees. But while congratulating each other on their apparent survival, they heard a persistent slap-slap noise from underneath the glider. The sound came from the parachute that had snagged on the wheel during takeoff. As it whipped against the glider’s belly, the chute tore through the canvas-covered floor, adding to the damage caused by the sweep through the branches. Strapped in their seats, the passengers looked through ragged gashes to the jungle several thousand feet below. The chute kept thwacking, the canvas kept shedding, and the holes kept growing.

Nearing panic, Margaret tried not to look, but she couldn’t stop herself. It reminded her of a ride on a glass-bottomed boat, only with no bottom.

John McCollom, who’d twice reentered the burning Gremlin Special, who’d swallowed the grief over his dead twin to lead Margaret and Decker down the mountain, who’d walked across a log to confront the ax-wielding natives, had one more task thrust upon him.

McCollom unbuckled his seat belt and dropped to his knees. He crawled toward the tail of the glider, wind pounding against his face. Hanging on to keep from plummeting to his death, McCollom reached through the hole and grabbed a handful of parachute cloth. He pulled it inside, then grabbed another handful, then another, until the chute was safely stowed away.

IN THE COCKPIT of the snatch plane, Samuels’s struggles continued. He obeyed Elsmore’s order not to cut loose the glider, even as he watched a temperature gauge on the dashboard show that the cylinder heads of both engines were overheating.

With help from copilot William McKenzie, Samuels flew the equivalent of a high-altitude tightrope, with a dozen lives in two aircraft hanging in the balance. He throttled back just enough to keep the engines from seizing while maintaining enough altitude for both his C-47 and the trailing Waco glider to narrowly clear the valley walls.

“We dropped her down to eight thousand feet,” Samuels said, “and . . . we were practically brushing the mountain tops.” But the plane didn’t quit. The C-47 remained aloft, and so did the glider.

As they flew through the final mountain pass out of the valley, the overheating Leaking Louise and the damaged Fanless Faggot passed over the charred wreckage of the Gremlin Special.

Even with a two-foot-wide hole in the glider floor, Margaret, McCollom, and Decker couldn’t spot the crash site. But they knew that under the jungle canopy, pressed into the moist soil, there stood twenty white wooden crosses and one Star of David, silently marking the loss of friends, comrades, and family, left behind in Shangri-La.

The view from the Fanless Faggot as the Leaking Louise pulled the glider out of Shangri-La, en route to Hollandia. (Photo courtesy of B. B. McCollom.)