Covering its rocky, muddy, uneven floor was a snarling mesh of giant ferns, vines, shrubs, fallen tree trunks, and spongy mosses, always wet. Thorns and spines and sawtoothed leaves ensnared her legs and tore her clothes and skin. Huge rhododendron bushes filled the spaces where light shone through a multilayered canopy of leaves. Above her head was a jumble of trees – giant eucalyptus, banyan, palm, bamboo, yoli myrtle, scrub oak, pandanus, tropical chestnut, soaring araucaria pines, evergreen casuarina, and hundreds of other species – some more prominent at higher altitudes, some at lower, the tallest of them reaching more than thirty metres into the sky.
Gnarled webs of thick, woody vines, heavy beards of lichen, spindly climbers, and aptly named strangler figs knitted the trees to one another and hung from branches like beaded curtains. Orchids sprouted everywhere, in hundreds of species, with flaming colours and strange, erotic shapes. The lush flora created a luxuriant bouquet, as the jungle carried out its endless cycle of birth, growth, decay, death, and new birth.
In the skies and the trees were hawks, owls, parrots, rails, swifts, flycatchers, warblers, and perhaps the most wondrous avian creatures in Shangri-La: colour-drenched birds of paradise. The jungle had no predatory mammals, but rodents and small marsupials scurried in the underbrush. Salamanders, lizards, and snakes worthy of Eden, notably a python that grew to four and a half metres or more, represented the reptile kingdom.
Many of the natural wonders had never been seen by anyone other than natives. Margaret could have discovered new species simply by reaching out her hand. But in a diary Margaret began to keep shortly after the crash, she admitted that she was too preoccupied to appreciate the show. ‘Everything in the jungle had tentacles,’ she wrote, ‘and I was too busy fighting them to enjoy nature.’
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As Margaret climbed over the fat trunk of a tree mowed down by the plane, it dawned on her that she was not wearing shoes – they had either been blown off or burned away. She stopped in her tracks, sat down on the tree’s jagged stump, and took stock. She pulled off her half-socks to inspect her feet. Her right foot was badly cut and bleeding. To her surprise, her left sock didn’t have a mark on it, but the sole of her left foot was burned – heat had passed through the fabric to sear her skin. Both legs had deep burns, and her right hand was cut and bloody. The left side of her face had blistered from the heat.
Margaret pulled off her khaki shirt. After that came her cotton bra. She put her shirt back on, then tore the bra in half and tried to bandage her feet, though it did little good. Margaret unbuttoned her trousers, slipped them down her burned legs, and set them aside. She bent over and pulled off the mud-brown Rayon underwear that was standard issue for WACs – white underwear was banned by the Army, out of fear that it would attract enemy bombers when hanging out to dry on jungle clotheslines. Margaret pulled her trousers back on over her naked bottom. She intended to use her panties’ silky fabric to make bandages for herself and the other survivors.
As she finished dressing, Margaret saw McCollom leading the way down the rough path she had followed minutes beforehand, carrying Eleanor Hanna on his back, her arms draped over his shoulders. Eleanor’s clothes had been burned off, but somehow her Chinese coin bracelet still dangled from her wrist. On the way down, McCollom lost his footing, slipped, and landed awkwardly on a small tree. He picked himself up, brushed himself off, and pulled Eleanor on to his back once more. McCollom emerged from the crash unhurt, but he had just suffered his first injury: a broken rib. He told no one.
Ken Decker and Laura Besley trailed close behind. When all five survivors were together, Margaret still wasn’t thinking clearly. Although she had removed her underpants to make bandages, she immediately forgot about that plan. She asked McCollom for a handkerchief, which she used to wrap her lacerated hand, binding it tight to stem the bleeding.
As they walked on, Decker tried to help McCollom with Eleanor Hanna. When they reached the ledge Margaret had seen, the five of them sat, catching their breath, collecting themselves and thinking about what had happened – to them, to their friends, and in McCollom’s case, to his beloved twin. They were about 2700 metres above sea level, and as they sat there, the late afternoon temperature began to fall. Rain followed, and they learned firsthand why the jungle was called a rainforest. Small trees gave them some cover, but after a short time their clothes soaked through to their skin, chilling them to the bone and compounding their misery.
After a brief rest, McCollom and Decker left the three women on the ledge and climbed back up towards the wreckage. McCollom’s survival training kicked into gear. He hoped to find supplies to build a shelter, and also food, clothing and weapons. He had a lighter and a small pocketknife he carried everywhere, but those would not be much use if they ran into the giant, spear-carrying natives they had expected to see only from the air.
McCollom recalled that one of the plane’s crew members carried a .45 calibre pistol. He had also noticed that the plane carried blankets, jugs of water, and crates of Cracker Jack-sized boxes of ‘K’ rations. The ready-to-eat meals might include dishes such as ham and cheese, or beef and pork loaf; hard biscuits or crackers; bouillon cubes; instant coffee; powdered lemon drinks; heat-resistant chocolate bars; hard candy; small packs of cigarettes, books of matches, and chewing gum. Some K rations might contain one of the greatest military luxuries of all: toilet paper.
But when McCollom and Decker reached the plane, they knew none of those items could be salvaged. The cockpit and much of the cabin were still on fire. Fed by the plane’s fuel, the wreckage would burn until the middle of the next day. The fire guaranteed that nothing would be left intact that had not already been destroyed by a series of explosions following a 320-kilometres-per-hour crash into a tree-covered mountain. As McCollom surveyed the scene, he understood that in one sense they had been lucky. On one side of the wreckage was a 4.5-metre boulder; if they had hit the rock head-on, no one would have survived.
Another piece of relatively good news was that the Gremlin Special’s tail section, after separating on impact, had not caught fire or exploded. The tail rested at an odd angle by a ravine, jammed against a tree stump and swathed in vines at the edge of a steep drop. The jagged opening where the tail had torn away from the rest of the plane pointed upward towards the sky, like the hungry mouth of a baby bird.
McCollom climbed up to the tail’s opening and pulled himself inside. He found a duffel bag with a bright yellow self-inflating life raft, two heavy tarpaulins designed as covers for the open raft, and a few basic supplies. He tossed the bag outside and climbed out. He inflated the life raft and took inventory of the supplies. He counted several small tins of water and a First-Aid kit with bandages, a few vials of morphine, vitamins, boric acid to disinfect wounds, and sulphathiazole tablets to fight infection. The only food was ‘Charms’, fruit-flavoured sucking sweets made from sugar and corn syrup that were a staple of soldiers’ rations. McCollom found a signalling mirror and, even better, a signal pistol he could use to draw the attention of searchers. There was just one problem: he could not find any flares.
McCollom and Decker hauled the life raft and supplies over towards the ledge. Along the way, the raft snagged on something sharp and deflated. When they reached the women, they cleaned and bandaged their wounds and gave them shots of water to wash down the anti-infection tablets. McCollom put the flattened life raft under Laura Besley and Eleanor Hanna and covered them with a tarpaulin. As he tucked them in, Eleanor smiled. Again, she said, ‘Let’s sing.’ McCollom gave her morphine, hoping it would help her to sleep.
The ledge was too small for all five survivors to stretch out, so Margaret and the two men moved a few metres away to another ledge. Exhausted, they wrapped themselves in the second tarpaulin. A pack of cigarettes had survived the crash in McCollom’s pocket, so he flicked his lighter and they shared a few drags in silence. As darkness fell, they could see through the hanging vines and thick foliage that the plane was still aflame. They huddled together, bracing for a cold, wet night.
Several times that first night in the jungle, they heard a plane overhead and caught a glimpse of signal flares. But they had no way to let the searchers know they were alive under the thick canopy. Margaret wasn’t even sure