Kitabı oku: «Lost in Shangri-La: Escape from a Hidden World - A True Story»
MITCHELL ZUCKOFF
Lost in Shangri-La
Escape from a Hidden World
A TRUE STORY
For Gerry
Contents
Cover
Title Page
A Note to the Reader
A Note on the Text
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1 - Missing
Chapter 2 - Hollandia
Chapter 3 - The Hidden Valley of Shangri-La
Chapter 4 - Gremlin Special
Chapter 5 - Eureka!
Chapter 6 - Charms
Chapter 7 - Tarzan
Chapter 8 - Gentleman Explorer
Chapter 9 - Guilt and Gangrene
Chapter 10 - Earl Walter, Junior and Senior
Chapter 11 - Uwambo
Chapter 12 - ‘Chief Pete’
Chapter 13 - Come What May
Chapter 14 - Five-by-Five
Chapter 15 - No Supper Tonight
Chapter 16 - Rammy and Doc
Chapter 17 - Custer and Company
Chapter 18 - Bathtime for Yugwe
Chapter 19 - ‘Shoo, Shoo Baby’
Chapter 20 - Hold the Front Page!
Chapter 21 - Promised Land
Chapter 22 - Hollywood
Chapter 23 - Gliders?
Chapter 24 - Two Queens
Chapter 25 - Snatch
Epilogue After Shangri-La
Cast of Characters
The Filipino Regiments
Notes on Sources and Methods
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Mitchell Zuckoff
Copyright
About the Publisher
A NOTE TO THE READER
NEAR THE END OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR, a us Army plane flying over the island of New Guinea crashed in an uncharted region inhabited by a prehistoric tribe.
In the weeks that followed, reporters raced to cover a tale of survival, loss, anthropology, discovery, heroism, friendship, and a near-impossible rescue mission. Their stories featured a beautiful, headstrong corporal and a strapping, hell-bent paratrooper, stranded amid tribesmen reputed to be headhunters and cannibals. They told of a brave lieutenant grieving the death of his twin brother; a wry sergeant with a terrible head wound; and a team of Filipino-American soldiers who volunteered to confront the natives despite knowing they would be outnumbered more than a thousand to one. Rounding out the true-life cast were a rogue filmmaker who had left Hollywood after being exposed as a jewel thief; a smart-aleck pilot who flew best when his plane had no engine; and a cowboy colonel whose rescue plan seemed designed to increase the death toll.
Front pages blazed with headlines about the crash and its aftermath. Radio shows breathlessly reported every development en route to an astonishing conclusion.
But the world was on the brink of the Atomic Age, and a story of life and death in the Stone Age was soon eclipsed. In time, it was forgotten.
I came across an article about the crash years ago while searching newspaper archives for something else entirely. I set it aside and found what I thought I was looking for. But the story stayed with me. I began doing what reporters call ‘collecting string’ – gathering pieces of information wherever possible to see if they might tie together.
News reports and official documents can talk about the past, but they cannot carry on a conversation. I dreamed of finding someone who had been there, someone who could describe the people, places and events firsthand. More than six decades after the crash, I located the sole surviving American participant, living quietly on the Oregon coast with vivid memories and an extraordinary story.
That discovery, and the interviews that followed, led to an explosion of string that wove itself into a tapestry. Among the most valuable items was a daily journal kept during the weeks between the crash and the rescue attempt. A lengthy diary surfaced, along with a trove of priceless photographs. Three private scrapbooks followed close behind, along with boxes of declassified Army documents, affidavits, maps, personnel records, military bulletins, letters, and ground-to-air radio transcripts. Relatives of more than a dozen other participants supplied more documents, photos, letters and details. Perhaps most remarkably, the trail led to several thousand metres of original film footage of the events as they unfolded.
Next came a trip to New Guinea, to learn what had become of the place and the natives; to find old men and women who had witnessed the crash as children; and to walk to the top of a mountain where pieces of the plane still rest, along with bones and belongings of some of those who died there.
As I write this, on my desk sits a melted piece of metal from the plane that resembles a gnarled human form. It’s a tangible reminder that, as incredible as this story seems, every word of it is true.
MITCHELL ZUCKOFF
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
THE EVENTS DESCRIBED IN THIS BOOK TOOK PLACE on the western half of the island of New Guinea in 1945. At that time, that portion of the island was known as Dutch New Guinea and its capital, on the northern coast, was called Hollandia. The area known at the time as Hidden Valley or Shangri-La is located approximately 240 kilometres southwest of Hollandia. Today, the former Dutch New Guinea is a province of Indonesia called Papua (not to be confused with Papua New Guinea, which is an independent country on the eastern portion of the island). Hollandia is now the city of Jayapura. Shangri-La or Hidden Valley is called the Baliem Valley.
Quoted material throughout the book has been left in its original form; in most cases, that means US spellings and units of distance and measure.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Corporal Margaret Hastings of the Women’s Army Corps photographed in 1945. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
Tents for members of the Women’s Army Corps in Hollandia. (US Army photo)
US military map of New Guinea during the Second World War. (US Army map)
Sergeant Laura Besley of the Women’s Army Corps. (Gerta Anderson photo)
Colonel Peter Prossen with his sons, David and Peter. (Peter J. Prossen Jr photo)
Colonel Ray Elsmore. (B.B. McCollom photos)
A native village photographed from the air by Colonel Ray Elsmore (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
A C-47 in flight during the Second World War. (US Army photo)
Best friends Sergeant Ruth Coster and Sergeant Helen Kent. (Dona Cruse photo)
Major George Nicholson. (John McCarthy photo)
Corporal James ‘Jimmy’ Lutgring and Private Melvin Mollberg. (Mel Lutgring photo)
Tech Sergeant Kenneth Decker. (US Army photo)
Lieutenants John and Robert McCollom. (B.B. McCollom photo)
Colonel Peter J. Prossen. (Peter J. Prossen Jr photo)
The body of Captain Herbert Good. (US Army photo)
After the crash: Margaret Hastings, Kenneth Decker and John McCollom. (B.B. McCollom photo)
The detached tail section of the Gremlin Special. (US Army photo)
Explorer Richard Archbold in 1938. (Archbold Biological Station photo)
Captain Earl Walter. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
Earl Walter with his father and namesake. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
Dani tribesmen, photographed by Earl Walter in 1945. (B.B. McCollom photo)
Dani tribesmen, photographed by Earl Walter in 1945. (B.B. McCollom photo)
Dani tribesman, photographed by Earl Walter in 1945. (B.B. McCollom photo)
John McCollom shakes hands with Wimayuk Wandik. (B.B. McCollom photo)
Margaret Hastings with a native child. (B.B. McCollom photo)
Captain Earl Walter and the members of the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo) Crew members aboard a C-47. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
Captain Earl Walter with Corporal Camilo ‘Rammy’ Ramirez and Sergeant Benjamin ‘Doc’ Bulatao. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
A native couple in a Dani village, photographed in 1945. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
A page from Margaret Hastings’ diary.
Corporal Camilo ‘Rammy’ Ramirez, Corporal Margaret Hastings, and Sergeant Benjamin ‘Doc’ Bulatao. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
Sergeant Ken Decker in a makeshift latrine. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
Earl Walter speaking by walkie-talkie. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
The ‘headquarters’ tent at the jungle clearing. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
One of the crosses erected by the burial crew near the wreckage of the Gremlin Special. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
Two native tribesmen photographed in 1945. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
The survivors, paratroopers and tribesmen rest during their trek to the valley campsite. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
Alexander Cann (B.B. McCollom photo)
Alexander Cann filming in ‘Shangri-La’. (B.B. McCollom photo)
The Filipino-American soldiers: Camilo Ramirez, Custodio Alerta, Don Ruiz and Juan ‘Johnny’ Javonillo.
Young warriors from a different world.
A Waco CG-4A glider in flight. (US Air Force photo)
A Dani tribesman tries on a uniform. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
Captain Earl Walter and Lieutenant John McCollom examine a native jawbone they found in the valley.(C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
A native woman greets Margaret outside a hut. (B.B. McCollom photo)
Keaugi Walela wearing the necklace that Earl Walter tried unsuccessfully to obtain. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
Margaret brushes back her hair after a native salon treatment. (B.B. McCollom photo)
Regional ‘big man’ Yali Logo. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
Glider pilot Lieutenant Henry Palmer inspects a native axe. (B.B. McCollom photo)
Native tribesmen help push the Fanless Faggot into position for a snatch attempt. (C. Earl Walter Jr. photo)
A parachute used as a field marker catches on the glider’s wheel. (C. Earl Walter Jr and US Army photos)
The view from the Fanless Faggot as the Leaking Louise pulled the glider out of Shangri-La. (B.B. McCollom photo)
The three survivors of the Gremlin Special crash. (B.B. McCollom photo)
A Dani tribesman photographed in 2010. (Mitchell Zuckoff photo)
John McCollom, Ken Decker and Earl Walter in 1995. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
John McCollom and his niece, Dennie McCollom Scott, in 1998. (B.B. McCollom photo)
Margaret Hastings flanked by her sisters, Catherine and Rita.
The survivors, pilots, and paratroopers after the rescue from Shangri-La. (C. Earl Walter Jr photo)
Chapter One Missing
ON A RAINY DAY IN MAY 1945, A WESTERN UNION messenger made his rounds through the quiet village of Owego, in upstate New York. He turned on to McMaster Street, a row of modest, well-kept homes on the edge of the village, shaded by sturdy elm trees. He slowed to a stop at a green house with a small porch and empty flower boxes. As he approached the door, the messenger prepared for the hardest part of his job: delivering a telegram from the United States War Department.
Directly before him, proudly displayed in a front window, hung a small white banner with a red border and a blue star at its centre. Similar banners hung in windows all through the village, each one to honour a young man, or in a few cases a young woman, gone to war. American troops had been fighting in the Second World War since 1941, and some blue-star banners had already been replaced by banners with gold stars, signifying a permanently empty place at a family’s dinner table.
Inside the blue-star home where the messenger stood was Patrick Hastings, a sixty-eight-year-old widower. With his wire-rim glasses, neatly trimmed silver hair, and the serious set of his mouth, Patrick Hastings bore a striking resemblance to the new president, Harry S. Truman, who had taken office a month earlier upon the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
A son of Irish immigrants, Patrick Hastings grew up a farm boy across the border in Pennsylvania. After a long engagement, he married his sweetheart, schoolteacher Julia Hickey, and they had moved to Owego to find work and raise a family. As the years passed, Patrick rose through the maintenance department at a local factory owned by the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company, which churned out combat boots and officers’ dress shoes for the US Army. Together with Julia, he reared three bright, lively daughters.
Now, though, Patrick Hastings lived alone. Six years earlier, a fatal infection struck Julia’s heart. Their home’s barren flower boxes were visible signs of her absence and his solitary life.
Their two younger daughters, Catherine and Rita, had married and moved away. Blue-star banners hung in their homes, too, each one for a husband in the service. But the blue-star banner in Patrick Hastings’ window wasn’t for either of his sons-in-law. It honoured his strong-willed eldest daughter, Corporal Margaret Hastings of the Women’s Army Corps, the WACs.
Sixteen months earlier, in January 1944, Margaret Hastings walked into a recruiting station in the nearby city of Binghamton. There, she signed her name and took her place among the first generation of women to serve in the United States military. Margaret and thousands of other WACs were dispatched to war zones around the world, mostly filling desk jobs on bases well back from the front lines. Still her father worried, knowing that Margaret was in a strange, faraway land: New Guinea, an untamed island just north of Australia. Margaret was based at a US military compound on the island’s eastern half, an area known as Dutch New Guinea.
Corporal Margaret Hastings of the Women’s Army Corps, photographed in 1945.
By the middle of 1945, the military had outsourced the delivery of bad news, and its bearers had been busy: the combat death toll among Americans neared three hundred thousand. More than one hundred thousand other Americans had died non-combat deaths. More than six hundred thousand had been wounded. Blue-star families had good reason to dread the sight of a Western Union messenger approaching the door.
On this day, misery had company. As the messenger rang Patrick Hastings’ doorbell, Western Union couriers with nearly identical telegrams were en route to twenty-three other star-banner homes with loved ones in Dutch New Guinea. The messengers fanned out across the country, to rural communities and urban centres including New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.
Each message offered a nod towards sympathy camouflaged by the clipped tone of a military communiqué. Signed by Major General James A. Ulio, the Army’s chief administrative officer, Patrick Hastings’ telegram read:
THE SECRETARY OF WAR DESIRES ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP REGRET THAT YOUR DAUGHTER, CORPORAL HASTINGS, MARGARET J., HAS BEEN MISSING IN DUTCH NEW GUINEA, THIRTEEN MAY, ’45. IF FURTHER DETAILS OR OTHER INFORMATION ARE RECEIVED YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY NOTIFIED. CONFIRMING LETTER FOLLOWS.
When Owego’s newspaper learned of the telegram, Patrick Hastings told a reporter about Margaret’s most recent letter home. In it, she described a recreational flight up the New Guinea coast and wrote that she hoped to take another sightseeing trip soon. By mentioning the letter, Patrick Hastings’ message was clear: he feared that Margaret had gone down in a plane crash. But the reporter’s story danced around that worry, offering vague optimism instead. ‘From the wording of the [telegram] received yesterday,’ the reporter wrote, ‘the family thinks that perhaps she was on another flight and will be accounted for later.’
When Patrick Hastings telephoned his younger daughters, he did not hold out false hope about their sister’s fate. Outdoing even the Army for brevity, he reduced the telegram to three words: Margaret is missing.
Chapter Two Hollandia
ELEVEN DAYS BEFORE THE MESSENGER APPEARED AT her father’s door, Margaret Hastings awoke as usual before dawn. Already the moist, tropical heat had crept under the flaps of the cramped tent she shared with five other WACs. She dressed alongside her tent mates in the Army-issued khakis she had cut down to match her petite frame. At first, Margaret wrote to a friend back in Owego, the uniforms ‘fit me like sacks’. But after a few failed alteration efforts, she boasted in the letter: ‘I got hold of a pair of men’s trousers that were miles too big for me, and used the material. They really turned out quite well, considering.’
The date was 13 May 1945. It was Sunday, so the bugler had the day off from his usual five-thirty a.m. reveille. Not that Margaret could sleep in. The working week was seven days long at Base G, a sprawling military installation built around the town of Hollandia, on Dutch New Guinea’s northern coast. By eight o’clock, Margaret was due at her post, a metal desk with a clackety typewriter where daily she proved that war wasn’t just hell, it was hell with paperwork.
Tents for members of the Women’s Army Corps in Hollandia, Dutch New Guinea, during the Second World War.
Margaret was thirty years old, lithe and beautiful. She had alert blue eyes, alabaster skin, and long, light-brown hair she wore in a stylish, figure-eight bun. At just 1.56 metres and barely 45 kilos, she could still slip in to her high school wardrobe. Her teenage nickname, ‘Little girl’ remained an apt description. But Margaret’s size was deceptive. She carried herself with style; shoulders back and chin up, the lasting effects of drama club performances, violin lessons, and what her youngest sister called a feisty, ‘take-charge’ nature. She met strangers with a side-long glance and a half smile that dug dimples beneath her high cheekbones. Somewhere between sly and sexy, the look suggested that Margaret had a secret that she had no intention of sharing.
As a girl growing up in Owego, Margaret bicycled to the local swimming hole, hitchhiked when she wanted to explore beyond the village, did well in school, and read books under the covers late at night. As she grew older and prettier, she became one of the most sought-after girls in town. She enjoyed the attention but didn’t depend on it. Margaret considered herself an independent young woman who, as she put it, ‘drank liquor, but not too much’ and ‘liked the boys, but not too much’.
Even after her younger sisters married, Margaret held out beyond the limit of her twenties. She wasn’t interested in the men of Owego, but she didn’t blame them, either. ‘To tell the truth,’ she told an acquaintance, ‘I’m not sure I go for the kind of man who’s supposed to make a good husband.’
After graduating from high school and bouncing through several jobs, Margaret found work as a secretary at a local factory owned by Remington Rand, a company that turned steel into everything from typewriters to .45 calibre pistols. She liked the work, but it bothered her that she had never been farther from home or anywhere more exciting than Atlantic City. It sounded corny, but Margaret wanted to see the world, serve her country, and find out what she was made of. Joining the Women’s Army Corps gave her the chance to do all three.
____
As Margaret got ready for work, families across the United States were preparing for Mother’s Day. This time, though, a mother’s love wasn’t the only cause for celebration. Five days earlier, Germany had surrendered unconditionally. Reports were trickling out that Adolf Hitler had killed himself in his bunker. Other Nazi leaders were in custody. Concentration camps were being liberated, their horrors fully exposed. After a terrible toll of ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’, victory had finally arrived in Europe. In fact, 13 May 1945 marked five years to the day since Winston Churchill had uttered that phrase to the British people to rouse them for the fight ahead.
To mark the success of the war in Europe, the dome of the US Capitol building, which had been blacked out since Pearl Harbor, again gleamed under the glow of floodlights. As President Truman put it: ‘The western world has been freed of the evil forces which for five years and longer have imprisoned the bodies and broken the lives of millions upon millions of free-born men.’ House Speaker Sam Rayburn hailed the news in Europe but added two sombre notes. He lamented the passing of President Roosevelt weeks before V-E Day. Then he noted that the war wasn’t over: ‘I am happy but also sad, because I cannot help but think of those thousands of our boys who are yet to die in the far-flung Pacific islands and the Far East in order that victory may come to our armies, and that the glory of America may be upheld and peace and an ordered world may come to us again.’
News from the Pacific was encouraging, though fierce engagements continued there. For the previous six weeks, ferocious fighting had been under way on the island of Okinawa, which American generals intended to use as a springboard for an invasion of Japan. Few relished that idea, yet optimism ran high. That morning, the New York Times declared that final victory was assured, whether by negotiated surrender or outright defeat. The paper told its readers, ‘It will be a busy summer for the Japanese enemy, and Hirohito can be confident that the “softening-up” period, now started, will be followed by lethal blows.’
That confident inevitability might have been plain to editors of the Times and to policy makers in Washington. But the war in the Pacific remained a moment-by-moment struggle. Between sunrise and sunset on 13 May 1945, more than 130 US fighters and bombers would attack troops, trains, bridges, and other Japanese ‘targets of opportunity’ in south and east China. Ten B-24 Liberators would bomb an underground hangar on a dot of land called Moen Island. Nine other B-24s would bomb an airfield on a lonely speck in the northern Pacific called Marcus Island. On Borneo, B-24s would bomb two airfields. To the east, B-25 Mitchell bombers and P-38 Lightning fighters would support ground forces on Tarakan Island. The US 7th Marine Division would burst through Japanese defences on Okinawa to capture Dakeshi Ridge. In the Philippines, the 40th Infantry Division would capture Del Monte airfield, and bombers and fighters would pound targets on Luzon Island.
Those were the major events of the day, to be catalogued, analysed and recounted in countless books and films about The Big War. Another incident on 13 May 1945 would escape the notice of historians and filmmakers: a C-47 transport plane carrying two dozen officers, soldiers and WACs would disappear during a flight over the mountainous jungles of New Guinea.
US military map of New Guinea during the Second World War, with Hollandia on the northern coast at roughly the midpoint of the island. The mapmaker was unaware of a large valley some 240 kilometres southwest of Hollandia, in the mountain range that crosses the island’s midsection.
Located between Australia and the Equator, New Guinea was a largely uncharted tropical island 2500 kilometres long and nearly 800 kilometres wide at its centre. The world’s second-largest island, after Greenland, it was a gift-box assortment of inhospitable environments. Much of the coastline featured barely habitable lowlands, swamps, and jungles. In the great middle were soaring limestone mountains covered by impenetrable rainforests and topped by snow or rocky outcroppings. The New Guinea terrain was so forbidding that the most common experience for its inhabitants was isolation. Pockets of humanity carved out small places to survive, fighting with anyone who came near and often among themselves. As a result, the island evolved into a latter-day Babel. New Guinea’s natives spoke more than one thousand languages, or about one-sixth of the world’s total – despite accounting for less than one-tenth of one per cent of the global population.
Inhabited by humans for more than forty thousand years, New Guinea passed the millennia largely ignored by the rest of the world. Lookouts on European ships caught sight of the island early in the sixteenth century. In 1545, the Spanish explorer Yñigo Ortiz de Retez named the island Neuva Guinea after an African country 16,000 kilometres away, because the natives he saw on the coast had black skin. For another two centuries, New Guinea was left mostly to itself, though trappers stopped by to collect the brilliant plumes of its birds of paradise to make hats for fashionable Sri Lankan potentates. In the eighteenth century, the island became a regular landing spot for French and British explorers. Captain Cook visited in 1770. Scientists followed, and the island drew a steady stream of field researchers from around the globe searching for discoveries in zoology, botany and geography.
In the nineteenth century, New Guinea caught the eye of traders seeking valuable raw materials. No precious minerals or metals were easily accessible, but the rising value of coconut oil made it worthwhile to plant the flag and climb the palm trees along the coastline. European powers divided the island roughly in half, and the eastern section was cut in half again. Over the years, claims of sovereignty were made by Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. Nevertheless, even well-educated Westerners had a hard time finding it on a map.
After the First World War, New Guinea’s eastern half was controlled by Britain and Australia. The island’s western half was controlled by the Netherlands – and was henceforth known as Dutch New Guinea – with Hollandia as its capital. Unprecedented attention was drawn to the island as the Second World War unfolded, because of its central location in the Pacific theatre.
Japan invaded in 1942, planning to use New Guinea to launch attacks on Australia, just over 160 kilometres away across the Torres Straits. In April 1944, US troops executed a daring strike called ‘Operation Reckless’ that scattered the Japanese troops and won Hollandia for the Allies. The Americans turned it into an important base of their own, and General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Southwest Pacific, built his headquarters there before moving on to the Philippines.
____
In New Guinea as elsewhere, Margaret Hastings and other WACs filled strictly non-combat roles, as expressed by their slogan, ‘Free a Man to Fight’. An earlier motto, ‘Release a Man for Combat’, was scratched because it was feared it might feed suspicions among the WACs’ detractors that their secret purpose was to provide sexual distractions for soldiers in the field. MacArthur was not among those critics. He liked to say the WACs were ‘my best soldiers’ because they worked harder and complained less than male troops. Eventually, more than one hundred and fifty thousand women served as WACs during World War II, making them the first women other than nurses to join the US Army.
Margaret arrived in Hollandia eight months after the success of Operation Reckless. By then, little of the war’s bloody drama was playing out in that corner of the Pacific. Thousands of Japanese troops remained armed and in hiding on the island, but few were believed to be in the immediate vicinity of Hollandia. Nevertheless, sentries patrolled the sea of tents and one-storey buildings on the Army base. WACs were routinely escorted under armed guard, and women’s tents were ringed by barbed wire. One WAC explained that the highest-ranking woman in her tent was given a sidearm to keep under her pillow, with instructions to kill her tent mates then herself if Japanese troops attacked. New Guinea natives also raised concerns, though the ones nearest Hollandia had grown so comfortable with the Americans they would call out, ‘Hey Joe – hubba, hubba – buy War Bonds.’ Australian soldiers who had received help from the natives during battles with the Japanese nicknamed them ‘Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels’.
Some WACs thought the safety precautions’ real aim wasn’t to protect them from enemies or natives, but from more than one hundred thousand US soldiers, sailors and airmen in and around Hollandia. Some of those fighting boys and men hadn’t seen a Western woman in months.
Almost immediately upon her arrival in Hollandia, Margaret became a focus of lovelorn soldiers’ attentions. ‘I suppose you have heard about blanket parties,’ she wrote to a friend in Owego in February 1945. ‘I know I did and was properly shocked. They are quite the thing in New Guinea. However, they are not as bad as they seem and anyway, nothing can be done on a blanket that can’t be done in the back seat of a car.
‘You see, we have no easy chairs and Jeeps are not too easy to sit in. So you just take your beer, or at the end of the month when the beer is all gone, your canteen of water and put it in a Jeep and ride all around until you find some nice place to relax. The nights are lovely over here and it’s nice to lay under the stars and drink beer and talk, or perhaps go for a swim … With the surplus of men over here, you can’t help but find some nice ones. I have had no difficulty along that line at all.’
Far from home, Margaret indulged her adventurous impulses. ‘One night,’ she wrote, ‘six of us went out in a Jeep without any top and drove all over the island. We travelled on roads where the bridges had been washed away, drove through water, up banks, and almost tipped over about ten times.’ The letter didn’t give away military secrets, only personal ones, so it slipped untouched past the base censors.
Margaret’s great friend was a pretty brunette sergeant named Laura Besley. The only child of a retired oil driller and a homemaker, Laura hailed from a small town in Pennsylvania, 144 kilometres from Pittsburgh. She had spent a year in college before enlisting in the WACs in August 1942.
Laura was taller and more full-figured than Margaret, but otherwise the two WACs were much alike. Laura was thirty-one, single, with a reputation among her family for being a ‘sassy’ young woman who did as she pleased.
When they were not working, blanketing or joyriding, Margaret, Laura and the other WACs made their quarters as plush as possible. ‘It is really quite homelike, and I am lucky enough to be in with five exceptionally nice girls,’ Margaret wrote another friend at home. They furnished their 3.5-metre-square canvas home with small dressing tables made from boxes and burlap. They sat on chairs donated by supply officers who hoped the gifts would translate into dates. A small rug covered the concrete pad that was the floor, mosquito netting dangled over their cots, and silky blue parachute cloth hung as decoration from the tent ceiling.
