Return to Shangri-La

Research for his book about a plane crash that killed 21 people at the end of World War II leads a writer to an isolated New Guinea valley where three survivors had awaited a next-to-impossible rescue.

April 24, 2011|By Mitchell Zuckoff

Halfway up the jungle-covered mountain, we came to a ravine spanned by a single log. The log was slick with rain-soaked moss, and a misstep would mean a plunge into jagged rocks 15 feet below. My barefoot guide scampered across and beckoned me forward.

Several thousand feet higher on the mountain was the wreck of the Gremlin Special, a US military transport plane piloted by a junior high school teacher from Medford that crashed in May 1945. Turning back would mean I wouldn’t see where 21 passengers and crew died and where two airmen and a member of the Women’s Army Corps began a quest for survival. I stood transfixed, my jaw clenched, the ripe smells of the rain forest reminding me of an overheated funeral parlor.

My journey from my home near Boston to this mountain on the island of New Guinea in early 2010 was the climax of my research into what, these days, might be the rarest find for a writer: an untold story from World War II.

In 1944, a pilot with the US Army Air Forces found a huge, verdant valley in the center of New Guinea where military maps said there were only mountains. Living there in complete isolation were tens of thousands of tribespeople who knew nothing of the outside world; they had yet to discover the wheel or pottery or clothing. They raised pigs and sweet potatoes, and they fought among themselves with spears and bows and arrows. When two war correspondents flew over the valley, they called it “Shangri-La,” a name borrowed from the peaceful Tibetan paradise in the 1933 James Hilton novel Lost Horizon.

No planes could land safely in the valley, and helicopters couldn’t clear the surrounding mountains. A trek on foot from the military bases on the New Guinea coastline would pass through some 150 miles of territory occupied by headhunters and hiding Japanese troops. Flying overhead was the only way an outsider could see the place, and Allied personnel stationed throughout the Southwest Pacific clamored for spots on aerial sightseeing trips. Those who went received comically ornate certificates inducting them into the “Shangri-La Society.”