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.
Chapter Five Eureka!
AT TWO-FIFTEEN P.M., WITH COLONEL PROSSEN AT the controls, the Gremlin Special rumbled past the palm trees lining the runway at the Sentani Airstrip and lifted off into a clear blue sky. As the plane passed over Lake Sentani, the passengers twisted in their seats for a look at the shimmering blue waters and the green hills that rolled down to the lake’s edge. Prossen guided the plane towards the Oranje Mountains, setting a course directly to the valley. He announced over the intercom that it would take fifty-five minutes to get there.
A WAC sitting near the cockpit chanted, ‘Oh, what is so rare as a June day in May?’ invoking a medieval knight’s quest for the Holy Grail. Her chant quoted the sentiment if not the exact words of a century-old epic poem, ‘The Vision of Sir Launfal’, by James Russell Lowell, which asked, ‘And what is so rare as a day in June?’ Just as appropriate were other lines of the poem, which read:
Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how;
Every thing is happy now,
Every thing is upward striving;
’Tis as easy now for the heart to be true,
As for grass to be green or skies to be blue.
Glued to the window, Margaret looked down through puffy white clouds. She thought the lush jungle below looked as soft as green feathers that would cushion a fall from even that great height. In the distance, the passengers could see snow-topped Mount Wilhelmina, named for the Dutch queen, at 4730 metres the highest peak in the range.
John McCollom was more curious about the Gremlin Special’s altitude and directional heading. He estimated that they were flying at about 2000 metres, and he learned from the crew that they were on a heading of 224 degrees, or due southwest from the base. That course would take them to the northwest end of Shangri-La, to the narrow pass through the mountains discovered by Major Grimes a year earlier.
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As they cruised towards the valley, Colonel Prossen made a fateful decision: he unbuckled his seat belt and walked back into the cabin. The point of the trip, after all, was to let his staff know that he cared about them and their morale. This was a bonding opportunity, a chance for them to see Shangri-La together. Yet, in light of the uncharted mountains, the changeable weather, and the relative inexperience of his co-pilot, Prossen’s move from the pilot’s seat was ill-advised.
Both Prossen and Nicholson were making their first flights to Shangri-La. All they knew about the treacherous entrance through the mountain pass was what they had read or heard from other pilots. By leaving the cockpit and trusting the most difficult part of the flight to his co-pilot, Prossen was underestimating the risks or disregarding them altogether. Moreover, with Prossen occupied by administrative tasks in his Fee-Ask job, and with Nicholson new to New Guinea, it is not clear how often, if ever, they had previously flown together. Perhaps most troubling of all was that Prossen disregarded Elsmore’s warning about the dangers that would confront ‘a pilot unfamiliar with this canyon’.
Colonel Peter Prossen.
The C-47 had seat belts for passengers, but when the socializing started after take-off at least some were unfastened. Most of the passengers were members of Prossen’s maintenance division at Fee-Ask, so they knew each other and fell into easy conversation. Prossen joined the camaraderie, standing in the narrow radio compartment that separated the cockpit from the passenger cabin.
Looking into the cockpit, John McCollom noticed that Helen Kent had walked forward from the cabin. The curvaceous WAC had plopped into the left-hand seat left vacant by Prossen, to enjoy an unobstructed view out the front windscreen. Next to her, the co-pilot, Major Nicholson, was alone at the controls.
Nearly an hour into the flight, the Gremlin Special snuck over a ridge, dropped a couple of hundred metres, and entered a narrow valley that was an offshoot of the main valley of Shangri-La. The plane flew at about 2000 metres above sea level, or some 400 metres above the valley floor. Jungle-covered mountains flanked the Gremlin Special on both sides. Nicholson eased the control wheel forward, and he guided the Gremlin Special down to an altitude of about 300 metres above the valley floor. The drop continued. Soon they were flying at less than 120 metres over the ground.
‘Eureka!’ cried an over-eager WAC.
The passengers whirled around to the windows and saw a small native village – a cluster of mushroom-shaped huts with thatched roofs, surrounded by carefully marked, well-tended fields of sweet potato. Margaret was thrilled, but she had not seen any natives. Not realizing that this was only a small settlement in a side valley – the huge valley of Shangri-La was another sixteen to twenty-five kilometres ahead – she felt cheated.
Turning to John McCollom, she complained: ‘I want to come again!’
McCollom wasn’t listening. His head was turned sharply to the left as he stared into the cockpit. Looking through the windscreen, he saw clouds dead ahead. Through the whiteness, he saw snatches of dark green jungle covering a mountain he estimated at 3500 or 4000 metres. In the parlance of pilots, the cloud had a rock in it.
McCollom’s body stiffened. ‘Give her the gun and let’s get out of here,’ he shouted towards the cockpit.
Margaret and some of the other passengers thought he was joking. But Major Nicholson knew it was no joke; he had already recognized the risk.
As a licensed pilot, McCollom knew that the first rule of mountain flying was always to be in a position to turn.