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Chapter Four Gremlin Special

THE VALLEY’S NEW NAME TOOK HOLD.

A ‘Shangri-La Society’ was formed for pilots and passengers fortunate enough to fly over it. Each society member received a comically ornate certificate on parchment paper that looked like a hard-earned diploma, complete with blue-and-yellow ribbons affixed by a gold foil seal. Signed by Elsmore and one of his subordinates, the certificates were personalized with the society member’s name and the date of his or her special flight.

Reporters couldn’t get enough of Elsmore – one dubbed him the ‘leading authority on the valley and its people’ – and the colonel lapped it up. After Lait and Patterson, other correspondents clamoured to visit the valley, and Elsmore usually obliged. Some who didn’t see it for themselves but interviewed Elsmore or Grimes took flights of fancy. One desk-bound reporter gushed about the valley’s beauty and called it ‘a veritable Garden of Eden’. Then he interviewed Elsmore about fears of headhunters. The colonel played up the danger, with a wink. Elsmore told the reporter that he might drop a missionary into the valley by parachute to show that ‘we come as friends and mean no harm. But I’m afraid it would more likely be a case of “head you lose.”’

The quotable colonel told a correspondent for The Associated Press that when the war ended, he wanted to be the first white man to set foot in the valley and make contact with, in the reporter’s phrase, the ‘long-haired, giant natives’. Elsmore said his plan was to land in a glider, ‘fully equipped with bargaining trinkets, also weapons if they won’t bargain, food and the necessary material for swiftly setting up an airstrip so that transport planes can follow in.’

The AP story appeared in US newspapers on Sunday, 13 May 1945 – the same day that Corporal Margaret Hastings’ boss, Colonel Peter Prossen, began rounding up members of the Fee-Ask maintenance division for a trip to Shangri-La.

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For official purposes, Prossen described the flight as a ‘navigational training’ mission. The truth – a Mother’s Day sightseeing joyride – wouldn’t look nearly as good in a military flight log. Although he had taken his staff on similar recreational flights up and down the New Guinea coast, this would be Prossen’s first trip to Shangri-La.

Margaret was at her desk when the invitation came. She had a date after work with a soldier she had been seeing regularly, a handsome sergeant named Walter ‘Wally’ Fleming. He had managed to get the keys to a Jeep, so they planned a drive to a secluded beach for an ocean swim. Yet Margaret had been desperate to visit Shangri-La since arriving at Fee-Ask five months earlier. Confident that she would be back in time for her date, she leapt at Prossen’s offer.

The letter Prossen wrote that morning to his wife apparently put him in a mood to chat about home. He stopped by Margaret’s desk and shared amusing news from his wife’s last letter, laughingly telling Margaret that the family’s new dog – a mutt that his son Peter had named ‘Lassie’ – was somehow winning prizes at local dog shows.

Margaret rushed to clear Prossen’s desk of work by noon. She wolfed down a lunch of chicken, with ice cream for dessert, abandoning her usual practice of savouring each cold spoonful.

Prossen arranged for a truck to take Margaret and eight other WACs to the nearby Sentani Airstrip, named for the lake of the same name, while the men invited on the flight walked or hitched rides there. When the passengers arrived, they found Prossen, his co-pilot, and three crew members mingling outside a transport plane, its engines warming and propellers spinning. In civilian life, the plane was a Douglas DC-3, but once enlisted in the war effort it became a C-47 Skytrain, a workhorse of the wartime skies, with more than ten thousand of them deployed at Allied bases around the world.

Nearly twenty metres long, with a wingspan of more than twenty-nine metres, the C-47 cruised comfortably at 280 kilometres per hour. At full throttle it theoretically could fly 80 kilometres per hour faster. It had a range of about 2575 kilometres, or about five times as far as the round-trip that Prossen had planned. Most C-47s had twin, twelve-hundred-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines. Some had guns, but Prossen’s plane was unarmed. C-47s were not flashy or fast, but they were reliable and stable in flight. If troops or materials were needed somewhere, a C-47 could be counted on to get them there. Pilots spoke fondly of their signature smell, a bouquet of leather and hydraulic fluid.

A C-47 in flight during the Second World War.

Prossen’s plane had been built in 1942 at a cost to the military of $269,276. Upon its arrival in Hollandia, the plane had been painted in camouflage colours to blend with the jungle if spotted from above by an enemy fighter or bomber. If the C-47 went down in the dense New Guinea jungle, its paint job would make it nearly impossible for searchers to spot.

To officials, Prossen’s plane was Serial Number 42-23952. In radio transmissions, it would be identified by its last three numbers, as ‘nine-five-two’. C-47s were often called ‘Gooney Birds’, especially in Europe, and individual planes earned their own monikers from their captains and crews. Around the Sentani Airstrip, Prossen’s plane was affectionately called Merle, though its better-known nickname was the Gremlin Special.

The name was ironic at best. Gremlins were mythical creatures blamed by airmen for sabotaging aircraft. The term was popularized by a 1943 book called The Gremlins, written by a young Royal Air Force flight lieutenant based in Washington DC named Roald Dahl. In Dahl’s story, the first he published, the tiny, horned beasties were motivated to make mechanical mischief as revenge against humans, who had destroyed their primeval forest home to build an airplane factory.

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At two o’clock in the afternoon it was time to go. As the passengers lined up outside the Gremlin Special, Prossen told them to expect the tour to last three hours.

‘Let the girls in first,’ Prossen said, ‘and then fill it up with any enlisted men and officers who want to go.’

One enlisted man, especially keen to see Shangri-La, grumbled: ‘Hey, that’s showing partiality.’ Prossen ignored the soldier’s complaint.

One after another, the nine WACs climbed into the plane through a door near the tail, with Margaret first in line. Once inside, she found bucket seats with their backs against the inner walls of the cabin, so the passengers on one side of the plane would look across a centre aisle at the passengers on the other side.

Like a child playing musical chairs, Margaret ran up the aisle towards the cockpit. She plopped into the bucket closest to the pilots, certain she had picked a winner. But when she looked out the window, she didn’t like the view. The C-47’s forward cabin windows looked down on to the wings, making it difficult if not impossible to see directly below. Determined to make a full aerial inspection of Shangri-La, Margaret ran back down the aisle towards the tail. She grabbed the last seat on the plane’s left side, near the door she had used to come aboard. The view was perfect.

Close behind Margaret was her close friend, Laura Besley. The attractive sergeant sat directly across from Margaret, in the last seat on the plane’s right side. The centre aisle of the plane was so narrow the toes of their shoes almost touched. Margaret caught Laura’s eye and winked. They were certain to have quite a story to tell.

Sitting next to Laura Besley was Private Eleanor Hanna, a vivacious, fair-skinned farm girl from Pennsylvania. At twenty-one, the curly-haired Eleanor had an older brother in the Army Air Forces and a younger brother in the Navy. Her father had served in the ambulance corps during the First World War, and had spent time in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Eleanor had a reputation around Fee-Ask for singing wherever she went.

‘Isn’t this fun!’ she yelled over the engines.

On Eleanor Hanna’s wrist dangled a decidedly non-military adornment: a souvenir bracelet made from Chinese coins strung together with metal wire. She owned at least two others just like it.

Also on board was Private Marian Gillis of Los Angeles, the daughter of a newspaper publisher. An amateur pilot, she had already lived a whirlwind life, including fleeing from Spain with her mother at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Nearby was Sergeant Belle Naimer of the Bronx, the daughter of a retired blouse manufacturer. She was still grieving the death of her fiancé, an Army Air Forces lieutenant killed months earlier when his plane went down in Europe.

Another WAC searching for a seat was Sergeant Helen Kent of Taft, California. A widow, she had lost her husband in a military plane crash. Bubbly and fun-loving despite her loss, Helen had joined the WACs to help relieve her loneliness. Her best friend at the base, Sergeant Ruth Coster, was supposed to accompany her on the flight. But Ruth was swamped with paperwork for planes that General MacArthur had decreed should be flown to the Philippines. Ruth had urged Helen go ahead and, upon her return, tell her what it was like. Ruth would join the ‘Shangri-La Society’ another day.

Three more WACs climbed aboard: Sergeant Marion McMonagle, a forty-four-year-old widow with no children from Philadelphia; Private Alethia Fair, a divorced, fifty-year-old telephone operator from Hollywood, California; and Private Mary M. Landau, a single, thirty-eight-year-old stenographer from Brooklyn.

Best friends Sergeant Ruth Coster (left) and Sergeant Helen Kent fooling around for the camera. Ruth wanted to join Helen aboard the Gremlin Special but had too much work to do.

Behind them came Colonel Prossen, trailed by his co-pilot, Major George Nicholson. Nicholson was thirty-four, a student of the classics who had graduated from Boston College then received master’s degrees from Harvard, in the arts, and Boston University, in education. After several years on the home front in the infantry reserve, during which he taught junior high school, Nicholson joined the Army Air Forces to earn his silver pilot’s wings. He had only been overseas for four months, during which he had served under Lord Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia, before transferring to Dutch New Guinea.

Four days earlier, George Nicholson had skipped a ‘Victory in Europe’ party at the Fee-Ask Officers’ Club. He spent the night alone in his tent, writing a remarkable letter to his wife, Alice, a fellow schoolteacher he had married days before reporting for active duty.

In neat script, with a historian’s sense of scale and a poet’s lyric touch, Nicholson marked the Allied victory over Germany by composing a vivid, fifteen-page narrative of the war in Europe and Africa. His words swept armies across continents, navies across oceans, warplanes across unbounded skies. He channelled the emotions and prayers of families on the home front, and the fear and heroism of soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen on the front lines. He tracked the American military’s rise from a miscellaneous band of ice cream-eating schoolboys to a juggernaut of battle-tested warriors. He moved Allied men and machines through crushing blows at Dieppe, in France, and the Kasserine Pass, in Tunisia. He roused them to victory on North African soil against the hardened German tank units in the battle at El Guettar. He drove them on to Salerno and ‘Bloody Anzio’ in Italy.

Major George Nicholson.

Nicholson gained momentum, just as the Allies had, as he approached the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. He wrote as if he had been there: ‘Then the morning twilight was stabbed by the flashes of ships’ guns pounding the invasion coast, and the air was rocked by the explosions of shells from the guns and bombs from the planes. Rockets traced fiery arcs across the sky. The choppy waters of the Channel made many of the troops seasick in the assault boats. German artillery plowed into the water, plowed often into assault boats and larger vessels, blowing them to destruction. Mines exploded with tremendous shock. Beach and boats drew closer. Fear gripped the men but courage welled from within them. The ramps were let down, the men waded through obstacle-strewn water, they reached the beaches. The invasion had begun.’

Four pages later, Nicholson described American troops crossing the Rhine into Germany, American flyers driving the feared pilots of the Luftwaffe from the sky, and Allied forces squeezing the Third Reich by the throat to force its surrender. ‘We may have been soft, but we’re tough now,’ he wrote. ‘The battle is the payoff. We beat them into submission.’

Only at the very end did the letter turn personal, as Nicholson expressed his guilt and questioned his own manhood for not having served in Europe with the US Eighth Air Force. Addressing his wife directly, Nicholson confessed: ‘This is illogical, I admit, but a man is scarcely a man when he does not desire to pitch in when the combat involves his country and his loved ones. Do not think harshly of me, darling. The proof lies in action; I would have liked to go to the Eighth, but I never requested it.’

Having unburdened himself, Nicholson signed off: ‘Darling, I love you.’ Then, for the first time in fifteen pages of commanding prose, he repeated himself. ‘I love you.’

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Along with Prossen and Nicholson came the plane’s three other crew members, Staff Sergeant Hilliard Norris, a twenty-three-year-old flight engineer; and two privates, George Newcomer, a twenty-four-year-old radio operator; and Melvin Mollberg, the assistant engineer.

Mollberg, known to his friends as ‘Molly’, was a muscular, handsome twenty-four-year-old farm boy with thick blond hair and a crooked grin. He was engaged to a pretty young woman from Brisbane, Australia, where he had been stationed before arriving in Hollandia a month earlier. Mollberg was a last-minute substitute on the Gremlin Special crew. The assistant engineer whose name initially came up on the duty roster was Mollberg’s best friend, Corporal James Lutgring, with whom Mollberg had spent nearly three years in the Fifth Air Force in the South Pacific. But Lutgring and Colonel Prossen did not get along. The source of the tension was not clear, but it might have traced back to Lutgring believing that Prossen played a role in denying Lutgring a promotion to sergeant. Lutgring had no desire to spend his Sunday afternoon flying on the colonel’s crew, even if it meant missing a chance to see Shangri-La. Mollberg understood. He volunteered to take his friend’s place on the flight.

Corporal James ‘Jimmy’ Lutgring (left) and his best friend, Private Melvin Mollberg, who replaced Lutgring on the crew of the Gremlin Special.

Next to board the plane were the ten male passengers, seven officers and three enlisted men. Amongst them was Tech Sergeant Kenneth Decker of Kelso, Washington. A wiry, laconic draftsman in the command’s engineering department, Decker had worked in his father’s furniture store before the war. He had been in New Guinea for several months, after being stationed in Australia for more than two years. The flight was a special treat for Decker: he was celebrating his thirty-fourth birthday. On the other hand, seeing Corporal Margaret Hastings on the plane came as an uncomfortable surprise. Weeks earlier, Decker had asked her on a date, only to be refused. A flight over Shangri-La separated by a few seats seemed about as close to Margaret as he would ever get.

Another passenger was Herbert F. Good, a tall, forty-six-year-old captain from Ohio. Good had survived service in the First World War, after which he’d married and returned home to life as an oil salesman and a leader in his Presbyterian church. Then war called again, so again he went.

At the end of the line were identical twins, John and Robert McCollom, twenty-six-year-old first lieutenants from Trenton, Missouri. They were nearly indistinguishable, with sandy blond hair, soulful blue eyes, and lantern jaws. One small difference: John was 1.67 metres and Robert was a shade taller, a fact that Robert playfully lorded over his ‘little’ brother. Known to friends and family as ‘The Inseparables’, the twins’ close relationship was forged as toddlers after their mother left them, their older brother, and their father. As eight-year-olds, they dressed in matching outfits and idolized aviator Charles Lindbergh for his solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic. When the twins came home from third grade and gushed about their teacher, Miss Eva Ratliff, their father, a railroad station manager, decided to meet her. John, Robert and their older brother soon had a stepmother.

Tech Sergeant Kenneth Decker.

The McCollom twins became Eagle Scouts together. They were both sports fanatics. They joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps together and shared a room as aerospace engineering students at the University of Minnesota, where they worked long hours to pay tuition while managing the school’s hockey team. They could only afford one set of books, so they shared them. Though alike in most ways, Robert McCollom was quieter, more introverted, while John was the outgoing twin. Robert was always known as Robert, while John was often called ‘Mac’.

The McCollom twins’ first test apart came two years earlier, on 5 May 1943, when Robert married a young woman he had met on a blind date, Cecilia Connolly, known by her middle name, Adele. In a wedding photo published in a local newspaper, both McColloms are in uniform; the only way to tell them apart is by Adele’s winsome smile in Robert’s direction. After the wedding, Robert, Adele and John became a threesome, spending evenings together at the Officers’ Club. The McColloms earned their pilot’s licences together in the service, and with the exception of a brief period apart, were stationed together at several bases stateside. Six months before the flight to Shangri-La, they were sent overseas together to New Guinea.

Lieutenants John (left) and Robert McCollom.

Six weeks before the Mother’s Day flight, Adele McCollom gave birth to a girl she and Robert named Mary Dennise and called Dennie. Robert McCollom had yet to see his new daughter.

The McCollom twins wanted to see Shangri-La through the same window of the Gremlin Special, but they couldn’t find two seats together. Robert McCollom walked towards the cockpit and slipped into an open seat near the front. John McCollom saw an empty seat next to Margaret Hastings, the second-to-last spot on the plane’s left-hand side, near the tail.

Margaret knew John McCollom from his regular visits to Colonel Prossen’s office. She also remembered how months earlier he had equipped her tent with a double electrical socket.

‘Mind if I share this window with you?’ he asked.

Margaret shouted her assent over the engines.

The Gremlin Special was full. As the door closed, Margaret noticed that the soldier who had complained about the women boarding first was not among them.