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Chapter Three The Hidden Valley of Shangri-La

A YEAR EARLIER, IN MAY 1944, COLONEL RAY T. Elsmore heard his co-pilot’s voice crackle through the intercom in the cramped cockpit of their C-60 trans-port plane. Sitting in the left-hand seat, Elsmore had the controls, flying a zigzag route over and through the mountainous backbone of central New Guinea.

Elsmore commanded the 322nd Troop Carrier Wing of the US Army Air Forces. On this particular flight, his mission was to find a place to build a landing strip as a supply stop between Hollandia, on New Guinea’s northern coast, and Merauke, an Allied base on the island’s southern coast. If that wasn’t possible, he hoped to discover a more direct, low-altitude pass across the Oranje Mountains to make it easier to fly between the two bases.

The co-pilot, Major Myron Grimes, pointed at a mountain ahead: ‘Colonel, if we slip over that ridge, we’ll enter the canyon that winds into Hidden Valley.’

Grimes had made a similar reconnaissance flight a week earlier, and now he was showing Elsmore his surprising discovery. On his return from that first flight, Grimes claimed to have found a mostly flat, verdant valley some 150 air miles (240 kilometres) from Hollandia, in a spot where maps showed only an unbroken chain of high peaks and jungle-covered ridges. Mapmakers usually just sketched a string of upside-down ‘Vs’ to signify mountains and stamped the area ‘unknown’ or ‘unexplored’. One imaginative mapmaker claimed that the place Grimes spotted was the site of an ‘estimated 14,000-foot peak’. He might as well have written: ‘Here be dragons.’

If a large, uncharted, tabletop valley really existed in the jigsaw-puzzle mountain range, Colonel Elsmore thought it might make a good spot for a secret air supply base or an emergency landing strip. Elsmore wanted to see this so-called Hidden Valley for himself.

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On Grimes’s signal, Elsmore pulled back on the C-60’s control wheel. He guided the long-nosed, twin-engine plane over the ridge and down into a canyon. Easing back the plane’s two throttle levers, he reduced power and remained below the billowing white clouds that shrouded the highest peaks. Pilots had nightmares about this sort of terrain. An occupational hazard of flying through what Elsmore called the ‘innocent white walls’ of clouds was the dismal possibility that a mountain might be hiding inside. Few pilots in the Army Air Forces knew those dangers better than Elsmore.

At fifty-three years old, energetic and fit enough to pass for a decade younger, Elsmore resembled the actor Gene Kelly. The son of a carpenter, he had been a flying instructor during the First World War, after which he had spent more than a decade delivering air mail through the Rocky Mountains. With the Second World War looming, Elsmore returned to military service and, when the war started, he immediately proved his worth. In March 1942, Elsmore arranged General MacArthur’s evacuation flight from the besieged island of Corregidor in Manila Bay to the safety of Australia. Later he became director of air transport for the Southwest Pacific, delivering troops and supplies wherever MacArthur needed them in New Guinea, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Borneo, Australia, and the western Solomon Islands.

Colonel Ray Elsmore.

As Elsmore and Grimes flew deeper into the canyon, they could see the walls growing steeper and narrower, steadily closing in on the plane’s wingtips. Elsmore steered around a bend, trying to stay in the middle of the canyon to maximize clearance on both sides of the twenty-metre wingspan. Straight ahead he saw a horrifying sight: a sheer rock wall. Elsmore grabbed both throttle levers. He began to thrust them forward, trying to gain full power as he prepared to veer up and away. But Grimes urged otherwise.

‘Push on through,’ the major said. ‘The valley is just beyond.’

Surveying the situation with only seconds to spare, travelling at more than 320 kilometres per hour, Elsmore chose to trust his twenty-four-year-old co-pilot. He followed Grimes’s instructions, slicing his way over the onrushing ridge and just beneath the overhanging clouds.

Safely in the clear, Elsmore saw a break in the puffy clouds. Spread out before them was a place their maps said didn’t exist, a rich valley Elsmore later called ‘a riot of dazzling color’. The land was largely flat, giving him a clear view of its full breadth – nearly forty-eight kilometres long and in places more than twelve kilometres wide, running northwest to southeast. Much of the valley was carpeted by tall, sharp kunai grass, waist-high in spots, interrupted by occasional stands of trees. Surrounding it were sheer mountain walls with jagged ridges rising to the clouds.

At the southeastern end, a river cascaded over a cliff to enter the valley. More than thirty metres wide in spots, it snaked through the valley, interrupted by occasional rapids before, at the valley’s northwestern end, the cocoa-coloured river disappeared into an enormous hole in the mountain wall that formed a natural grotto, its upper arch some ninety metres above the ground.

Even more remarkable than the valley’s physical splendour were its inhabitants: tens of thousands of people who lived as their ancestors had since the Stone Age.

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Peering down through the cockpit windows, Elsmore and Grimes saw several hundred small, clearly defined native villages. Surrounding the native compounds were carefully tended gardens, with primitive but effective irrigation systems, including dams and drainage ditches. ‘Crops were in full growth everywhere and, unlike the scene in most tropic lands, the fields were literally alive with men, women, and children, all hard at work,’ Elsmore marvelled.

Men and boys roamed naked except for hollowed-out gourds covering their genitals; women and girls wore only low-slung fibre skirts. As he flew on, mesmerized by the scene below him, Elsmore watched the natives scatter at the sight and sound of the roaring airplane, ‘some crawling under the sweet potato vines and others diving into the drainage ditches’. Pigs wandered around the compounds, and Elsmore caught sight of a few black dogs lazing about.

At the edges of large, open fields, Elsmore noticed spindly towers made from lashed-together poles rising some nine metres or more above the valley floor. Each tower had a platform for a sentry near the top, and some towers had small grass roofs, to shelter the sentries from the sun. Elsmore pushed the control wheel forward, to guide the plane lower for a better look. He guessed, correctly, that they were watchtowers to guard against marauding enemies. As the C-60 flew on, the thrumming noise of its twelve-hundred-horsepower engines bounced off the valley floor and mountain walls. Frightened sentries abandoned their posts, climbed down the towers, and ran to nearby huts. Elsmore saw wooden spears more than four metres long leaning against those huts.

A native village photographed from the air by Colonel Ray Elsmore.

Elsmore snapped a few photographs, focusing on the people and their huts, some of them round like toadstools or thatched-roof ‘igloos’, he thought, and others long and narrow like boxcars. ‘The panorama of these hundreds of villages from the air is one of the most impressive sights I have ever seen,’ he wrote afterwards.

He and Grimes had a mission to complete, so Elsmore pulled back on the control wheel and roared up and out of the valley. He pointed the plane southeast and flew some 320 kilometres to another potential site for a landing strip, in an area called Ifitamin.

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Several days later, Elsmore wrote a secret memo on his findings to his commanding officer, General George C. Kenney. The memo described the survey flights and paid special attention to the valley and the people in it. Major Grimes had called his discovery ‘Hidden Valley’, but in the memo Elsmore referred to it in less poetic terms. He called it the ‘Baliem Valley’, using the name of the river that flowed through it.

One concern Elsmore expressed to General Kenney about building a landing strip was the reaction of the natives. ‘There is no access into this valley … except by air, and for that reason very little is known of the attitude of the natives. It is known that there are headhunters in many of the adjacent regions and there is a suspicion that the natives in the Baliem Valley may also be unfriendly,’ he wrote. Also in the memo, Elsmore issued an ominous warning to fellow pilots who might follow him there. He described at length how treacherous it could be to fly through the cloud-covered pass into the valley, especially ‘for a pilot unfamiliar with this canyon’.

As it turned out, by any name Hidden Valley or Baliem Valley was unsuitable for a military landing strip. At 1600 metres above sea level, surrounded by mountains reaching 4000 metres and higher, it was too dangerous and inaccessible. Also, there was a better alternative. Elsmore learned that an Australian missionary had found the natives at Ifitamin to be friendly and eager to be put to work. This was more suitable for Elsmore’s plan. ‘Not only were we anxious to avoid incidents and bloodshed’ – believed to be a strong possibility with the natives of Hidden/Baliem Valley – ‘but we wanted to employ native labor on the construction project.’

Although the valley could serve no military purpose, news of its discovery spread quickly around Hollandia and beyond. Interest heightened when Elsmore began telling people that he thought the valley’s inhabitants looked much taller and larger than any other New Guinea natives he had seen. Elsmore’s impressions contributed to fast-spreading stories, or more accurately, tall tales, that Hidden Valley was populated by a previously unknown race of primitive giants. Some called them black supermen – handsome models of sinewy manhood standing over two metres tall. Soon the natives were said to be headhunters and cannibals, savages who practised human sacrifice on stone altars. The pigs the natives raised were said to be the size of ponies. The bare-breasted native women were said to resemble the curvaceous pin-up girls in soldiers’ barracks, especially the exotic, sarong-wearing actress Dorothy Lamour, whose hit movies included The Jungle Princess.

In time, the stories multiplied, largely because no one could contradict any claim, no matter how outlandish. And it seemed as though the stories would remain unchallenged. No one in Hollandia had any reason to hike 240 kilometres, past untold Japanese troops in hiding, over mountains, and through swamps and jungles. And no planes could safely land in the valley – the ground was too soft, uneven and grassy for a natural runway – and helicopter blades could not generate enough lift in the thin, high-altitude air to clear the surrounding mountains. Above all, the soldiers at Base G had a war to fight, not an anthropological expedition to mount.

Still, the valley captivated Elsmore. He asked around among Dutch and Australians whom he considered to be experts on New Guinea and found no evidence that any outsider had ever set foot in the valley.

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As the stories spread, sightseers clamoured to see Hidden Valley with their own eyes. Over flights became a perk for officers, WACs, and enlisted men. Some returned with exciting stories of natives firing arrows and throwing spears at their planes. The more adventurous among them dreamed of touching the valley floor, even if it meant crash landing. ‘I suppose I would have regretted it,’ a lieutenant named William J. Gatling Jr wrote to his family in Arkansas, ‘but I feel I would have liked to have been forced down simply to get a good first-hand idea of the whole area. Flying over was like holding candy just out of reach of a baby.’

Gatling’s letter continued:

Quite a number of us were skeptical of what we had heard before we made the trip but our skepticism had all vanished by the time we returned. Some will and some will not believe this story … Beyond what has been observed from the air, it is believed nothing first-hand is known of these primitive people and their habits and customs. Sealed as they are in their Hidden Valley, they appear to be wholly self-supporting and self-sufficient. It is possible, of course, that they have some hidden footpath out of there, but such has not been located from the sky. Even if they could leave their valley, they would face a one-hundred-fifty-mile trek through almost impenetrable rainforest-type jungle to reach the Pacific coast in the north, or would encounter one-hundred-fifty miles of impassable, unexplored swamp extending between them and the Arafura Sea to the south.

After describing all he had seen during his flight, Gatling concluded his letter home with a philosophical thought: ‘Probably after the war the Dutch government will send an expedition into the valley or missionaries may penetrate it, so until then the natives … will know nothing of the white man except that he flies a big bird that makes lots of noise. Who knows, maybe they are much better off the way they are. At any rate, I am sure if they knew of the turmoil in which we are now engaged, they would be much happier to stay ignorant of the “civilized” world.’

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The press got wind of the valley, and Colonel Elsmore agreed to take two veteran war reporters with him on one of his frequent flights over the valley, George Lait and Harry E. Patterson. Lait, in particular, had a lot to live up to. His father was Jack Lait, the pugnacious editor of the New York Mirror, who as a reporter in 1934 had filed an exclusive, on-scene story describing how the FBI gunned down bank robber John Dillinger. At thirty-eight, George Lait was on the way to matching his old man. As a swash-buckling correspondent for the International News Service, he palled around with legendary reporter Ernie Pyle and gossip columnist Walter Winchell; he was knocked out cold in London when shrapnel hit his helmet during the Blitz; and he had been blown out of a car seat by a German bomb. He had shot pheasants with King George VI, spent eighteen months with the British Eighth Army, and qualified as a paratrooper with the US Army’s 11th Airborne. Another reporter once said of him: ‘As a war correspondent, George was an inspired writer, fighter and souvenir collector. Where other correspondents might liberate a pistol or a helmet, George liberated machine guns, bazookas, tanks, and once had to be persuaded not to put the snatch on a Messerschmitt. It was a big war, George said, and he wanted something big to prove it.’

A man on his way to having seen it all, George Lait admitted that he had never seen anything quite like the valley. After returning from the flight with Elsmore, he filed a dispatch rich in description though tinged with racial and cultural condescension:

Skimming less than one-hundred feet over the valley floor, one was able to identify among the native crops banana trees, a water plant (swamp taro), extensive patches of the native sweet potato or yam, and a waist-high plant closely resembling tobacco.

Of animals, only a few dogs and pigs were seen. The pigs, staple meat food throughout New Guinea and religiously revered by most natives of the island, appeared exceptionally large and well kept, and of two varieties – an all-black or dark brown species, and a black and white variety, the latter growing to immense size.

When the plane first roared over the valley, crowds of natives ran from their houses and vanished into the standing crops or clumps of trees. But after flying down the valley several times, their child-like curiosity seemed to overcome their fear of the motors – they cautiously emerged to watch the soaring plane.

Harry Patterson’s story of the flight emphasized drama and intrigue: ‘Even today, weeks after the discovery that has the whole South Pacific buzzing with speculation, no white man and probably no regular native has set foot in the lost valley … It is pretty well-known in this part of the world that most of the New Guinea savages were either cannibals or head hunters.’ Patterson quoted Colonel Elsmore describing the valley natives as ‘taller, more finely built and lighter-skinned than the usual New Guinea fuzzy-wuzzies’.

The colonel, fancying himself an amateur geologist as well as a cockpit anthropologist, speculated that the natives’ ancestors came to the valley ‘hundreds or thousands of years ago’. ‘He thinks that after they settled in this mountain paradise an earthquake or some tremendous upheaval trapped them in the valley,’ Patterson reported.

As impressed as they were by what they had seen, Lait and Patterson were disappointed by the name Hidden Valley. Determined to re-christen it, they thought back several years to the Frank Capra movie, Lost Horizon, and its source, a 1933 James Hilton novel about a mysterious, peaceful utopia isolated from a war-weary world.

Hilton’s story revolves around the crash of a small plane into a Tibetan mountain. The survivors, one of them a woman, are rescued by monks who guide them to a bucolic valley where the inhabitants’ lives are long and happy, a land where moderation and tolerance reign supreme. In time, the survivors must choose whether to remain forever in the valley or return to the outside world, knowing that they might never be able to return.

Often read as an adventure tale, Hilton’s book is really a meditation on finding peace and preserving humanity in a world spiralling towards self-destruction. Hilton saw ‘civilization’ trapped in a ruinous cycle, careening from one war to the next, each more deadly and destructive than the last. In a long exchange between two main characters, Lost Horizon anticipated a global war of unimaginable proportions. More than a decade before the first atom bomb, Hilton feared a future in which ‘a single-weaponed man might have matched a whole army’.

Describing one especially wise character, Hilton wrote: ‘He foresaw a time when men, exultant in the technique of homicide, would rage so hotly over the world that every precious thing would be in danger, every book and picture and harmony, every treasure garnered through two millenniums, the small, the delicate, the defenseless – all would be lost.’

Hilton’s frightening prediction didn’t escape notice. President Roosevelt quoted that passage from Lost Horizon in a 1937 speech in Chicago. Four years before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt used Hilton’s horrifying vision to warn that, in defence of civilization, America might find itself forced to quarantine aggressive nations bent on unleashing a global storm. Roosevelt’s warning had proved prescient.

It’s no wonder, then, that a pair of veteran war correspondents looked wistfully on a fertile valley, sealed from the outside world, its natives ignorant of war, Nazis and kamikazes, and thought of the name that Hilton had given his fictional paradise. Never mind the reports of headhunters and cannibals, of spears and arrows, of watchtowers and sentries and battles among neighbours. Never mind the possibility that the native world glimpsed by Colonel Elsmore and Major Grimes wasn’t peaceful at all, but a window into a shared human inheritance, one that suggested that the very nature of man was to make war.

Those questions could wait for another day, perhaps until someone from outside entered the valley and met the natives. In the meantime, George Lait and Harry Patterson bestowed a new name on New Guinea’s Hidden Valley: they called it Shangri-La.