arranged for a truck to take Margaret and eight other WACs to the nearby Sentani Airstrip, named for the lake of the same name, while the men invited on the flight walked or hitched rides there. When the passengers arrived, they found Prossen, his co-pilot, and three crew members mingling outside a transport plane, its engines warming and propellers spinning. In civilian life, the plane was a Douglas DC-3, but once enlisted in the war effort it became a C-47 Skytrain, a workhorse of the wartime skies, with more than ten thousand of them deployed at Allied bases around the world.
Nearly twenty metres long, with a wingspan of more than twenty-nine metres, the C-47 cruised comfortably at 280 kilometres per hour. At full throttle it theoretically could fly 80 kilometres per hour faster. It had a range of about 2575 kilometres, or about five times as far as the round-trip that Prossen had planned. Most C-47s had twin, twelve-hundred-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines. Some had guns, but Prossen’s plane was unarmed. C-47s were not flashy or fast, but they were reliable and stable in flight. If troops or materials were needed somewhere, a C-47 could be counted on to get them there. Pilots spoke fondly of their signature smell, a bouquet of leather and hydraulic fluid.
A C-47 in flight during the Second World War.
Prossen’s plane had been built in 1942 at a cost to the military of $269,276. Upon its arrival in Hollandia, the plane had been painted in camouflage colours to blend with the jungle if spotted from above by an enemy fighter or bomber. If the C-47 went down in the dense New Guinea jungle, its paint job would make it nearly impossible for searchers to spot.
To officials, Prossen’s plane was Serial Number 42-23952. In radio transmissions, it would be identified by its last three numbers, as ‘nine-five-two’. C-47s were often called ‘Gooney Birds’, especially in Europe, and individual planes earned their own monikers from their captains and crews. Around the Sentani Airstrip, Prossen’s plane was affectionately called Merle, though its better-known nickname was the Gremlin Special.
The name was ironic at best. Gremlins were mythical creatures blamed by airmen for sabotaging aircraft. The term was popularized by a 1943 book called The Gremlins, written by a young Royal Air Force flight lieutenant based in Washington DC named Roald Dahl. In Dahl’s story, the first he published, the tiny, horned beasties were motivated to make mechanical mischief as revenge against humans, who had destroyed their primeval forest home to build an airplane factory.
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At two o’clock in the afternoon it was time to go. As the passengers lined up outside the Gremlin Special, Prossen told them to expect the tour to last three hours.
‘Let the girls in first,’ Prossen said, ‘and then fill it up with any enlisted men and officers who want to go.’
One enlisted man, especially keen to see Shangri-La, grumbled: ‘Hey, that’s showing partiality.’ Prossen ignored the soldier’s complaint.
One after another, the nine WACs climbed into the plane through a door near the tail, with Margaret first in line. Once inside, she found bucket seats with their backs against the inner walls of the cabin, so the passengers on one side of the plane would look across a centre aisle at the passengers on the other side.
Like a child playing musical chairs, Margaret ran up the aisle towards the cockpit. She plopped into the bucket closest to the pilots, certain she had picked a winner. But when she looked out the window, she didn’t like the view. The C-47’s forward cabin windows looked down on to the wings, making it difficult if not impossible to see directly below. Determined to make a full aerial inspection of Shangri-La, Margaret ran back down the aisle towards the tail. She grabbed the last seat on the plane’s left side, near the door she had used to come aboard. The view was perfect.
Close behind Margaret was her close friend, Laura Besley. The attractive sergeant sat directly across from Margaret, in the last seat on the plane’s right side. The centre aisle of the plane was so narrow the toes of their shoes almost touched. Margaret caught Laura’s eye and winked. They were certain to have quite a story to tell.
Sitting next to Laura Besley was Private Eleanor Hanna, a vivacious, fair-skinned farm girl from Pennsylvania. At twenty-one, the curly-haired Eleanor had an older brother in the Army Air Forces and a younger brother in the Navy. Her father had served in the ambulance corps during the First World War, and had spent time in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Eleanor had a reputation around Fee-Ask for singing wherever she went.
‘Isn’t this fun!’ she yelled over the engines.
On Eleanor Hanna’s wrist dangled a decidedly non-military adornment: a souvenir bracelet made from Chinese coins strung together with metal wire. She owned at least two others just like it.
Also on board was Private Marian Gillis of Los Angeles, the daughter of a newspaper publisher. An amateur pilot, she had already lived a whirlwind life, including fleeing from Spain with her mother at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Nearby was Sergeant Belle Naimer of the Bronx, the daughter of a retired blouse manufacturer. She was still grieving the death of her fiancé, an Army Air Forces lieutenant killed months earlier when his plane went down in Europe.
Another WAC searching for a seat was Sergeant Helen Kent of Taft, California. A widow, she had lost her husband in a military plane crash. Bubbly and fun-loving despite her loss, Helen had joined the WACs to help relieve her loneliness. Her best friend at the base, Sergeant Ruth Coster, was supposed to accompany her on the flight. But Ruth was swamped with paperwork for planes that General MacArthur had decreed should be flown to the Philippines. Ruth had urged Helen go ahead and, upon her return, tell her what it was like. Ruth would join the ‘Shangri-La Society’ another day.
Three more WACs climbed aboard: Sergeant Marion McMonagle, a forty-four-year-old widow with no children from Philadelphia; Private Alethia Fair, a divorced, fifty-year-old telephone operator from Hollywood, California; and Private Mary M. Landau, a single, thirty-eight-year-old stenographer from Brooklyn.
Best friends Sergeant Ruth Coster (left) and Sergeant Helen Kent fooling around for the camera. Ruth wanted to join Helen aboard the Gremlin Special but had too much work to do.
Behind them came Colonel Prossen, trailed by his co-pilot, Major George Nicholson. Nicholson was thirty-four, a student of the classics who had graduated from Boston College then received master’s degrees from Harvard, in the arts, and Boston University, in education. After several years on the home front in the infantry reserve, during which he taught junior high school, Nicholson joined the Army Air Forces to earn his silver pilot’s wings. He had only been overseas for four months, during which he had served under Lord Mountbatten, the Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia, before transferring to Dutch New Guinea.
Four days earlier, George Nicholson had skipped a ‘Victory in Europe’ party at the Fee-Ask Officers’ Club. He spent the night alone in his tent, writing a remarkable letter to his wife, Alice, a fellow schoolteacher he had married days before reporting for active duty.
In neat script, with a historian’s sense of scale and a poet’s lyric touch, Nicholson marked the Allied victory over Germany by composing a vivid, fifteen-page narrative of the war in Europe and Africa. His words swept armies across continents, navies across oceans, warplanes across unbounded skies. He channelled the emotions and prayers of families on the home front, and the fear and heroism of soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen on the front lines. He tracked the American military’s rise from a miscellaneous band of ice cream-eating schoolboys to a juggernaut of battle-tested warriors.
