open fields, Elsmore noticed spindly towers made from lashed-together poles rising some nine metres or more above the valley floor. Each tower had a platform for a sentry near the top, and some towers had small grass roofs, to shelter the sentries from the sun. Elsmore pushed the control wheel forward, to guide the plane lower for a better look. He guessed, correctly, that they were watchtowers to guard against marauding enemies. As the C-60 flew on, the thrumming noise of its twelve-hundred-horsepower engines bounced off the valley floor and mountain walls. Frightened sentries abandoned their posts, climbed down the towers, and ran to nearby huts. Elsmore saw wooden spears more than four metres long leaning against those huts.
A native village photographed from the air by Colonel Ray Elsmore.
Elsmore snapped a few photographs, focusing on the people and their huts, some of them round like toadstools or thatched-roof ‘igloos’, he thought, and others long and narrow like boxcars. ‘The panorama of these hundreds of villages from the air is one of the most impressive sights I have ever seen,’ he wrote afterwards.
He and Grimes had a mission to complete, so Elsmore pulled back on the control wheel and roared up and out of the valley. He pointed the plane southeast and flew some 320 kilometres to another potential site for a landing strip, in an area called Ifitamin.
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Several days later, Elsmore wrote a secret memo on his findings to his commanding officer, General George C. Kenney. The memo described the survey flights and paid special attention to the valley and the people in it. Major Grimes had called his discovery ‘Hidden Valley’, but in the memo Elsmore referred to it in less poetic terms. He called it the ‘Baliem Valley’, using the name of the river that flowed through it.
One concern Elsmore expressed to General Kenney about building a landing strip was the reaction of the natives. ‘There is no access into this valley … except by air, and for that reason very little is known of the attitude of the natives. It is known that there are headhunters in many of the adjacent regions and there is a suspicion that the natives in the Baliem Valley may also be unfriendly,’ he wrote. Also in the memo, Elsmore issued an ominous warning to fellow pilots who might follow him there. He described at length how treacherous it could be to fly through the cloud-covered pass into the valley, especially ‘for a pilot unfamiliar with this canyon’.
As it turned out, by any name Hidden Valley or Baliem Valley was unsuitable for a military landing strip. At 1600 metres above sea level, surrounded by mountains reaching 4000 metres and higher, it was too dangerous and inaccessible. Also, there was a better alternative. Elsmore learned that an Australian missionary had found the natives at Ifitamin to be friendly and eager to be put to work. This was more suitable for Elsmore’s plan. ‘Not only were we anxious to avoid incidents and bloodshed’ – believed to be a strong possibility with the natives of Hidden/Baliem Valley – ‘but we wanted to employ native labor on the construction project.’
Although the valley could serve no military purpose, news of its discovery spread quickly around Hollandia and beyond. Interest heightened when Elsmore began telling people that he thought the valley’s inhabitants looked much taller and larger than any other New Guinea natives he had seen. Elsmore’s impressions contributed to fast-spreading stories, or more accurately, tall tales, that Hidden Valley was populated by a previously unknown race of primitive giants. Some called them black supermen – handsome models of sinewy manhood standing over two metres tall. Soon the natives were said to be headhunters and cannibals, savages who practised human sacrifice on stone altars. The pigs the natives raised were said to be the size of ponies. The bare-breasted native women were said to resemble the curvaceous pin-up girls in soldiers’ barracks, especially the exotic, sarong-wearing actress Dorothy Lamour, whose hit movies included The Jungle Princess.
In time, the stories multiplied, largely because no one could contradict any claim, no matter how outlandish. And it seemed as though the stories would remain unchallenged. No one in Hollandia had any reason to hike 240 kilometres, past untold Japanese troops in hiding, over mountains, and through swamps and jungles. And no planes could safely land in the valley – the ground was too soft, uneven and grassy for a natural runway – and helicopter blades could not generate enough lift in the thin, high-altitude air to clear the surrounding mountains. Above all, the soldiers at Base G had a war to fight, not an anthropological expedition to mount.
Still, the valley captivated Elsmore. He asked around among Dutch and Australians whom he considered to be experts on New Guinea and found no evidence that any outsider had ever set foot in the valley.
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As the stories spread, sightseers clamoured to see Hidden Valley with their own eyes. Over flights became a perk for officers, WACs, and enlisted men. Some returned with exciting stories of natives firing arrows and throwing spears at their planes. The more adventurous among them dreamed of touching the valley floor, even if it meant crash landing. ‘I suppose I would have regretted it,’ a lieutenant named William J. Gatling Jr wrote to his family in Arkansas, ‘but I feel I would have liked to have been forced down simply to get a good first-hand idea of the whole area. Flying over was like holding candy just out of reach of a baby.’
Gatling’s letter continued:
Quite a number of us were skeptical of what we had heard before we made the trip but our skepticism had all vanished by the time we returned. Some will and some will not believe this story … Beyond what has been observed from the air, it is believed nothing first-hand is known of these primitive people and their habits and customs. Sealed as they are in their Hidden Valley, they appear to be wholly self-supporting and self-sufficient. It is possible, of course, that they have some hidden footpath out of there, but such has not been located from the sky. Even if they could leave their valley, they would face a one-hundred-fifty-mile trek through almost impenetrable rainforest-type jungle to reach the Pacific coast in the north, or would encounter one-hundred-fifty miles of impassable, unexplored swamp extending between them and the Arafura Sea to the south.
After describing all he had seen during his flight, Gatling concluded his letter home with a philosophical thought: ‘Probably after the war the Dutch government will send an expedition into the valley or missionaries may penetrate it, so until then the natives … will know nothing of the white man except that he flies a big bird that makes lots of noise. Who knows, maybe they are much better off the way they are. At any rate, I am sure if they knew of the turmoil in which we are now engaged, they would be much happier to stay ignorant of the “civilized” world.’
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The press got wind of the valley, and Colonel Elsmore agreed to take two veteran war reporters with him on one of his frequent flights over the valley, George Lait and Harry E. Patterson. Lait, in particular, had a lot to live up to. His father was Jack Lait, the pugnacious editor of the New York Mirror, who as a reporter in 1934 had filed an exclusive, on-scene story describing how the FBI gunned down bank robber John Dillinger. At thirty-eight, George Lait was on the way to matching his old man. As a swash-buckling correspondent for the International News Service, he palled around with legendary reporter Ernie Pyle and gossip columnist Walter Winchell; he was knocked out cold in London when shrapnel hit his helmet during the Blitz; and he had been blown out of a car seat by a German bomb. He had shot pheasants with King George VI, spent eighteen months with the British Eighth Army, and qualified as a paratrooper with the US Army’s 11th Airborne. Another reporter once said of him: ‘As a war correspondent, George was an inspired writer, fighter and souvenir collector. Where other correspondents might liberate a pistol or a helmet, George liberated machine guns, bazookas, tanks, and once had to be persuaded not to put the snatch on a Messerschmitt. It was a big war, George said, and he wanted something big to prove it.’
A man on his
