A lack of refrigeration meant most food came three ways: canned, salted, or dehydrated. Cooking it changed the temperature but not the flavour. WACs joked that they had been sent to the far reaches of the South Pacific to ‘Get skinny in Guinea’. To top it off, Hollandia was paradise for fungus. The weather varied little – a mixture of heat, rain, and humidity – which left everyone wet and overripe. Margaret showered at least twice a day using cold water pumped from a mountain stream. Still, she perspired through her khakis during the boiling hours in between. She relied on Mum deodorant, as well as ‘talcum, foot powder, and everything in the books in order to keep respectable’, she wrote in a letter home. ‘It is a continuous effort to keep clean over here. There are no paved roads and the dust is terrible, and when it rains there is mud.’
An American military officer described Hollandia vividly: ‘There was “jungle rot” – all five types. The first three were interesting to the patient; the next two were interesting to the doctor and mostly fatal to the patient. You name it – elephantiasis, malaria, dengue fever, the “crud” – New Guinea had it all. It was in the water in which you bathed, the foliage you touched – apparently the whole place was full of things one should have cringed from. But who has time to think when there are enemy snipers hanging dead, roped to their spotter trees; flesh-eating piranhas inhabiting the streams; lovely, large snakes slithering nearby; and always the enemy.’
Yet there was great beauty, too, from the lush mountains to the pounding surf; from the sound of the wind rustling through the leaves of coconut palms to the strange calls and flamboyant feathers of wild birds. Margaret’s tent was some fifty kilometres inland, near Lake Sentani, considered by its admirers to be among the world’s most picturesque bodies of water. Small islands that looked like mounds of crushed green velvet dotted its crystalline waters. On long work days, Margaret relieved her tired eyes by looking up from her desk to Mount Cyclops, its emerald flank cleaved by the perpetual spray of a narrow waterfall. She described the sight as almost enough to make her feel cool.
Mostly, though, Hollandia was a trial. The WACs’ official history singled out Base G as the worst place in the war for the health of military women: ‘The Air Surgeon reported that “an increasing number of cases are on record for nervousness and exhaustion,” and recommended that personnel be given one full day off per week to relieve “nervous tension.”’
Margaret’s boss took such warnings to heart, and he searched for ways to ease the stress among his staff.
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Margaret was one of several hundred WACs assigned to the Far East Air Service Command, an essential if unglamorous supply, logistics and maintenance outfit known as ‘Fee-Ask’. Just as in civilian life, Margaret was a secretary. Her commanding officer was Colonel Peter Prossen, an experienced pilot and Fee-Ask’s chief of maintenance.
The early hours of 13 May 1945 were quiet in the big headquarters tent at Fee-Ask. Colonel Prossen spent part of the morning writing a letter to his family back home in Texas: his wife Evelyn, and their three young children, sons Peter and David, and daughter Lyneve, whose name was an anagram of her mother’s.
Prossen was thirty-seven, stocky, with blue eyes, a cleft chin, and thick brown hair. A native of New York from an affluent family, he joined the military so he could fly.
Prossen had spent most of his children’s lives at war, but his elder son and namesake knew him as a warm, cheerful man with a love of photography. He would sing ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ loudly and out of tune while his wife played flawless piano. After visits home, Prossen would fly over their house and tip his wings, to say goodbye.
In a letter to his wife a day earlier, addressed as always to ‘My dearest sweetheart’, Prossen commented on the news from home, counselled her to ignore slights by his sister, and lamented how long it took for photos of their children to reach him. He told her to save the stuffed koalas he had shipped home until their baby daughter’s second birthday. He asked her to watch the mail for a native axe he had sent home as a souvenir.
Colonel Peter Prossen with his sons, David and Peter.
A dozen years in the military hadn’t diminished Prossen’s tenderness to his family. He sent his wife love poems and heart-filled sketches on Valentine’s Day, and he pined for them to be reunited. Despite the harsh conditions he endured in Hollandia, Prossen commiserated sincerely with his wife about the hardships of gas rationing and caring for their children without him there.
The morning of 13 May 1945, for Mother’s Day, he wrote to Evelyn in his cribbed handwriting: ‘My sweet, I think that we will be extra happy when we get together again. Don’t worry about me … I am glad that the time passes fairly quickly for you – hope it does till I get home. Then I want it to slow down.’
Later in the letter, Prossen described a poem he had read about two boys playing ‘make-believe’. It made him wistful for his own sons. Sadness leaked through his pen as he wrote that their son Peter would take his First Communion that very day without him: ‘I’ll bet he is a nice boy. My, but he is growing up.’ Prossen signed off, ‘I love you as always. Please take good care of yourself for me. I send all my love. Devotedly, Pete.’
Lately, Prossen had been anxious about the toll Dutch New Guinea was taking on the hundred or so men and the twenty-plus WACs serving directly under him. He wrote to his wife that he tried to relieve the pressures shouldered by junior officers, enlisted men, and WACs, though he didn’t always succeed. ‘I lose sight of the fact that there is a war going on and it’s different,’ he wrote. ‘My subordinates are also depressed and been here a long time.’ He wanted to show them he valued their hard work.
Prossen wheedled pilots flying from Australia to bring his staff precious treats: Coca-Cola syrup and fresh fruit. Lately, he had been offering even more desirable rewards – sightseeing flights up the coastline. On this day, 13 May 1945, Colonel Prossen had arranged the rarest and most sought-after prize for his staff, one certain to boost morale: a trip to Shangri-La.
Chapter Three The Hidden Valley of Shangri-La
A YEAR EARLIER, IN MAY 1944, COLONEL RAY T. Elsmore heard his co-pilot’s voice crackle through the intercom in the cramped cockpit of their C-60 trans-port plane. Sitting in the left-hand seat, Elsmore had the controls, flying a zigzag route over and through the mountainous backbone of central New Guinea.
Elsmore commanded the 322nd Troop Carrier Wing of the US Army Air Forces. On this particular flight, his mission was to find a place to build a landing strip as a supply stop between Hollandia, on New Guinea’s northern coast, and Merauke, an Allied base on the island’s southern coast. If that wasn’t possible, he hoped to discover a more direct, low-altitude pass across the Oranje Mountains to make it easier to fly between the two bases.
The co-pilot, Major Myron Grimes, pointed at a mountain ahead: ‘Colonel, if we slip over that ridge, we’ll enter the canyon that winds into Hidden Valley.’
Grimes had made a similar reconnaissance flight a week earlier, and now he was showing Elsmore his surprising discovery. On his return from that first flight, Grimes claimed to have found a mostly flat, verdant valley some 150 air miles (240 kilometres) from Hollandia, in a spot where maps showed only an unbroken chain of high peaks and jungle-covered ridges. Mapmakers usually just sketched a string of upside-down ‘Vs’ to signify mountains and stamped the area ‘unknown’ or ‘unexplored’. One imaginative mapmaker claimed that the place Grimes spotted was the site of an ‘estimated 14,000-foot peak’. He might as well have written: ‘Here be dragons.’
If a large, uncharted, tabletop valley really existed in the jigsaw-puzzle mountain range, Colonel Elsmore thought it might make a good spot for a secret air supply base or an emergency landing strip. Elsmore wanted to see this so-called Hidden Valley for himself.
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