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.
Sergeant Laura Besley of the Women’s Army Corps.
A single bulb illuminated the tent, but a kind lieutenant named John McCollom who worked with Margaret’s boss gave Margaret a double electric socket. The coveted device allowed her to enjoy the luxury of light while she ironed her uniforms at night. Quiet and unassuming, John McCollom was one of a pair of identical twins from Missouri who served together in Hollandia. He was single and could not help but notice Margaret’s good looks, yet he did not try to convert the gift into the promise of a date. His good manners made Margaret appreciate it all the more.
The wildlife of New Guinea was not so unassuming. Rats, lizards, and hairy spiders the size of coffee saucers marched boldly into the WACs’ tents, and mosquitoes feasted on any stray arm or leg that slipped out from under the cots’ protective netting. Even the precautions had vivid side effects. Bitter-tasting Atabrine tablets warded off malaria, but the pills brought on headaches and vomiting, and they turned soldiers’ and WACs’ skin a sickly shade of yellow.
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
