Back from the jungle

Mitchell Zuckoff is a hack journalist and a very good one. His speciality is dredging up old forgotten stories and making them new again. His latest effort is “Lost in Shangri-La”.

“Escape from a Hidden World – A True Story” is the subtitle of this tale of a plane wreck and rescue in New Guinea in the closing days of World War II. 

At the time, the story was plastered on newspaper headlines and the three survivors were feted from one end of the US to the other. They’ve been long since been forgotten, but Zuckoff brings them to life again. 

Lieutenant John McCollord, Sergeant Kenneth Decker and Margaret Hastings – a petite, beautiful, spunky corporal in the Women’s Army Corps – were the only survivors of a sightseeing C-47 transport plane that went down in New Guinea’s Balien Valley amid Stone Age tribes with no knowledge of the outside world. 

The outside world wasn’t aware of them until 1938, when playboy American explorer Archbold Leyland flew over a valley inhabited by 60,000 tribespeople who raised sweet potatoes and pigs and killed each other. 

“They did not fight for land, wealth or power. Neither side sought to repel or conquer a foreign people, to protect a way of life, or to change their enemies’ beliefs, which both sides already shared. Neither side considered war a necessary evil, a failure of diplomacy, or an interruption of a desired peace. Peace was not waiting on the far side of war. There was no far side. War moved through different phases in the valley. It ebbed and flowed. But it never ended.” 

The 22 military passengers on the C-47 were on a sightseeing mission over the valley when pilot error caused it to crash into a mountain. 

After two days of recuperation, the three survivors fought their way down through jungle and rushing streams into a clearing. Here they set out yellow tarpaulin covers from life-rafts to signal rescue planes and, sure enough, were spotted by a B-17 bomber. They’d been lost for three days.

Gradually, the survivors came to the realisation that the clearing was not an accident. They were in a garden of sweet potatoes and rhubarb. Then they heard voices. 

“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.”

Would they be killed? There were some votes in that direction, but the final decision was to help them. Essentially, a quarter of the way into the book, the story is over. The rest is the mechanics of rescue. 

Nine elite troopers were parachuted into another part of the valley, a clearing that turned out to be a designated battlefield or no-man’s land that separated the territories of the warring Logo-Mhael and Kurelu clans. The troopers were quickly surrounded by 200 armed warriors. 

“Although some natives thought the visitors were spirits, others believed they were warriors like themselves who had escaped a massacre of their people ... They felt certain of one thing: the strangers were not their Kurelu enemies, so they had no immediate need to kill them.” 

The three survivors were eventually rescued in a daring glider mission and returned to a hero’s welcome in the States. Then they faded back into obscurity. Margaret married and divorced and raised two children while working at a clerical job in Rome, New York.

During a reunion of the survivors and glider pilots in 1974, she remarked, “Fear is something I don’t think you experience unless you have a choice. If you have a choice, then you’re liable to be afraid. But without a choice, what is there to be afraid of? You just go along doing what has to be done.”

Asked if she’d like to return to New Guinea, she replied, “You bet!”

 

Lost in Shangri-La

By Mitchell Zuckoff 

Published by Harper Press, 2011

Available from Amazon.com, US$16 (Bt500)

Reviewed by 

James Eckardt