valleys and canyons of New Guinea were especially treacherous. One reason was the ragged terrain. Another was rapid changes in air temperature, a result of jungle heat rising into the cumulus clouds that routinely formed over and around the peaks in mid-afternoon.
If a downdraught did occur at that moment, the twenty-four people aboard the Gremlin Special might have been in mortal danger no matter who was at the controls. An official military account of the flight later suggested that ‘a sudden down-draft of air current’ apparently stymied the pilots’ effort to gain altitude.*
* However, the account was incomplete. It made no mention of Prossen’s absence from the cockpit or the apparent mistakes by Nicholson.
____
As Nicholson struggled and McCollom worried, Margaret felt no sense of danger. She had been so engrossed in the sight of the native huts that she had not noticed that Colonel Prossen had given his seat to Helen Kent and was standing outside the cockpit. Margaret felt the nose of the plane rise, but she was unaware that Nicholson was flying alone. She thought that Prossen was merely gaining altitude to fly through a high pass between the mountains that she had glimpsed earlier.
At the controls, Nicholson could not make the plane bend to his wishes. The Gremlin Special began to shear the tops of giant tropical evergreens, their limbs and leaves scratching and smacking and cracking against the plane’s camouflage-painted, sheet-metal skin. Even if Prossen grasped what was happening, as he surely must have, he had no time to race back to his seat, evict Helen Kent, and take over.
Still, Margaret remained calm. Her confidence in her boss was so complete that for a split-second she thought Prossen had buzzed the treetops to give his passengers a thrill – flying ‘flat on the deck’ as pilots called it.
John McCollom knew better. He grabbed Margaret’s arm.
‘This is going to be darn close,’ he told her, ‘but I think we can get over it.’
His optimism was misplaced. Shortly after three o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday, 13 May 1945, Major George Nicholson’s desperate struggle to gain altitude ended. The distance between the C-47 and the unforgiving terrain closed to zero. To the ear-splitting din of metal twisting, glass shattering, engines groaning, branches snapping, fuel igniting, bodies tumbling, lives ending, the Gremlin Special plunged through the trees and slammed into the jungle-covered mountainside.
____
The cabin crumpled forward towards the cockpit. The walls of the fuselage collapsed as though sucked inward. Both wings ripped away. The tail section snapped off like a balsa-wood toy. Flames shot through the wreckage. Small explosions rang out like gunshots. Black smoke choked off the light. The air grew bitter with the stench of burning metal, burning leather, burning rubber, burning wires, burning oil, burning clothes, burning hair. Burning flesh.
One small mercy was that Nicholson had managed to point the nose of the plane skyward in his attempt to clear the ridge, so the C-47 hit the mountain at an upward angle instead of head-on. As a result, although fire rushed through the cabin, the Gremlin Special didn’t explode on contact. Anyone not immediately killed or mortally wounded might stand a chance.
When the plane burrowed through the trees, John McCollom flew across the centre aisle, from the left side of the plane to the right. He lurched forward, turning somersaults as he fell, and momentarily blacked out. When he came to, he was on his hands and knees halfway up the cabin towards the cockpit, surrounded by flames. Driven by instinct, he searched for an escape route. He saw a flash of white light where the tail had been. The roof of the cabin had flattened down like a tin can, so he was not able to stand. He crawled towards the light, landing on the scorched earth of the mountain jungle, disoriented but with barely a scratch.
McCollom began to comprehend the horror of what had happened. He thought about his twin brother and the twenty-two others on board – all trapped inside and dead, he believed. As he rose to his feet outside the broken plane, he told himself: ‘This is a heck of a place to be, a hundred-and-sixty-five miles from civilization, all by myself on a Sunday afternoon.’
____
Margaret bounced through the cabin like a rubber ball. Her first impulse was to pray. But that felt like surrender, and Margaret was not the surrendering type. She grew angry. She knew this was not rational, but as she tumbled she took it personally, indignant that her trip had been spoiled by a plane crash. And she still had not seen any natives.
When she stopped tumbling and regained her senses, Margaret found herself lying on top of a motionless man. Her fall had been cushioned by his body. She tried to move, but before he died the man had somehow wrapped his thick arms around her. Whether he had tried to save her or simply grabbed on to whatever was closest to him was not clear. Either way, Margaret was locked in a dead man’s grip. She felt flames licking at her face, feet and legs. The air filled with the acrid scent of sizzling hair. Again Margaret thought of relaxing, giving up. Then her fury returned, and with it her strength.
She pried loose the man’s hands and began to crawl. She had no idea whom she was leaving behind or which way she was heading – back to the missing tail or ahead to the crushed cockpit and into the inferno. As she crawled towards her hoped-for salvation, she didn’t see anyone else moving or hear anyone speaking or moaning inside the burning cabin. Whether by luck or divine intervention, she chose the right direction for escape.
Margaret stumbled out the torn-open rear end of the fuselage on to the jungle floor.
‘My God! Hastings!’ called John McCollom, who had come out the same way less than a minute earlier.
Before Margaret could answer, McCollom heard a WAC scream from inside the plane: ‘Get me out of here!’
The Gremlin Special was now fully aflame. McCollom doubted it would explode but he could not be sure. Without hesitating, he scrambled back inside, crouching beneath the smoke and fire, avoiding and ignoring the heat as best he could. He inched his way along, following the WAC’s pleading voice.
‘Give me your hand!’ he ordered.
A moment later, Margaret watched as McCollom led out her friend Laura Besley. McCollom placed the WAC sergeant on the fire-seared ground, turned around, and headed back inside the burning fuselage.
He fought his way through the smoke towards Eleanor Hanna, who had sat next to Laura Besley directly across from him and Margaret. Eleanor had been badly burned, far worse than Margaret or Laura. Her hair still crackled with burning embers when he carried her out.
By now, McCollom’s hands were scorched and his hair was singed from rescuing the two WACs. Otherwise, remarkably, he remained unhurt. Still, it was not possible to go back for a third rescue mission – the fire raged higher and hotter, and one explosion after another echoed from inside the wreckage. He doubted anyone inside could still be alive.
Startled by a movement, McCollom looked up and saw a man walk woozily towards him from around the right side of the plane. Any hope that it was his twin brother quickly faded. He recognized Sergeant Kenneth Decker – McCollom supervised Decker’s work in the drafting room of the Fee-Ask maintenance department. Decker was on his feet but dazed and badly hurt. Margaret saw a bloody gash several inches long on the right side of Decker’s forehead, deep enough to expose the grey bone of his skull. Another cut leaked blood on the left side of his forehead. Burns seared both legs and his backside. His right arm was cocked stiffly from a broken elbow. Yet somehow Decker was on his feet and moving towards them.
‘My God, Decker, where
