Pass, in Tunisia. He roused them to victory on North African soil against the hardened German tank units in the battle at El Guettar. He drove them on to Salerno and ‘Bloody Anzio’ in Italy.
Major George Nicholson.
Nicholson gained momentum, just as the Allies had, as he approached the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. He wrote as if he had been there: ‘Then the morning twilight was stabbed by the flashes of ships’ guns pounding the invasion coast, and the air was rocked by the explosions of shells from the guns and bombs from the planes. Rockets traced fiery arcs across the sky. The choppy waters of the Channel made many of the troops seasick in the assault boats. German artillery plowed into the water, plowed often into assault boats and larger vessels, blowing them to destruction. Mines exploded with tremendous shock. Beach and boats drew closer. Fear gripped the men but courage welled from within them. The ramps were let down, the men waded through obstacle-strewn water, they reached the beaches. The invasion had begun.’
Four pages later, Nicholson described American troops crossing the Rhine into Germany, American flyers driving the feared pilots of the Luftwaffe from the sky, and Allied forces squeezing the Third Reich by the throat to force its surrender. ‘We may have been soft, but we’re tough now,’ he wrote. ‘The battle is the payoff. We beat them into submission.’
Only at the very end did the letter turn personal, as Nicholson expressed his guilt and questioned his own manhood for not having served in Europe with the US Eighth Air Force. Addressing his wife directly, Nicholson confessed: ‘This is illogical, I admit, but a man is scarcely a man when he does not desire to pitch in when the combat involves his country and his loved ones. Do not think harshly of me, darling. The proof lies in action; I would have liked to go to the Eighth, but I never requested it.’
Having unburdened himself, Nicholson signed off: ‘Darling, I love you.’ Then, for the first time in fifteen pages of commanding prose, he repeated himself. ‘I love you.’
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Along with Prossen and Nicholson came the plane’s three other crew members, Staff Sergeant Hilliard Norris, a twenty-three-year-old flight engineer; and two privates, George Newcomer, a twenty-four-year-old radio operator; and Melvin Mollberg, the assistant engineer.
Mollberg, known to his friends as ‘Molly’, was a muscular, handsome twenty-four-year-old farm boy with thick blond hair and a crooked grin. He was engaged to a pretty young woman from Brisbane, Australia, where he had been stationed before arriving in Hollandia a month earlier. Mollberg was a last-minute substitute on the Gremlin Special crew. The assistant engineer whose name initially came up on the duty roster was Mollberg’s best friend, Corporal James Lutgring, with whom Mollberg had spent nearly three years in the Fifth Air Force in the South Pacific. But Lutgring and Colonel Prossen did not get along. The source of the tension was not clear, but it might have traced back to Lutgring believing that Prossen played a role in denying Lutgring a promotion to sergeant. Lutgring had no desire to spend his Sunday afternoon flying on the colonel’s crew, even if it meant missing a chance to see Shangri-La. Mollberg understood. He volunteered to take his friend’s place on the flight.
Corporal James ‘Jimmy’ Lutgring (left) and his best friend, Private Melvin Mollberg, who replaced Lutgring on the crew of the Gremlin Special.
Next to board the plane were the ten male passengers, seven officers and three enlisted men. Amongst them was Tech Sergeant Kenneth Decker of Kelso, Washington. A wiry, laconic draftsman in the command’s engineering department, Decker had worked in his father’s furniture store before the war. He had been in New Guinea for several months, after being stationed in Australia for more than two years. The flight was a special treat for Decker: he was celebrating his thirty-fourth birthday. On the other hand, seeing Corporal Margaret Hastings on the plane came as an uncomfortable surprise. Weeks earlier, Decker had asked her on a date, only to be refused. A flight over Shangri-La separated by a few seats seemed about as close to Margaret as he would ever get.
Another passenger was Herbert F. Good, a tall, forty-six-year-old captain from Ohio. Good had survived service in the First World War, after which he’d married and returned home to life as an oil salesman and a leader in his Presbyterian church. Then war called again, so again he went.
At the end of the line were identical twins, John and Robert McCollom, twenty-six-year-old first lieutenants from Trenton, Missouri. They were nearly indistinguishable, with sandy blond hair, soulful blue eyes, and lantern jaws. One small difference: John was 1.67 metres and Robert was a shade taller, a fact that Robert playfully lorded over his ‘little’ brother. Known to friends and family as ‘The Inseparables’, the twins’ close relationship was forged as toddlers after their mother left them, their older brother, and their father. As eight-year-olds, they dressed in matching outfits and idolized aviator Charles Lindbergh for his solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic. When the twins came home from third grade and gushed about their teacher, Miss Eva Ratliff, their father, a railroad station manager, decided to meet her. John, Robert and their older brother soon had a stepmother.
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
