Hi, I'm the History Guy. I have a  degree in history and I love history,  

and if you love history too,  well this is the channel for you.

In 1945 US Army Air Corps Major Ray T Elsmore was  traveling From Hollandia, which was a major Allied  

port in Dutch New Guinea, to General MacArthur's  headquarters in Australia. Now the standing orders  

were to fly around the eastern edge of New  Guinea, because the interior of New Guinea was  

still described on maps as, “unknown”. But that day  Major Elsmore was in a hurry because reportedly,  

he had a hot date in Melbourne, and so he decided  to ignore the standing orders and fly over the  

central part of New Guinea. And about 120 miles  south of Hollandia he came upon a heretofore  

unexplored valley that showed significant signs  of a large human population of unknown natives,  

and that discovery would eventually lead to one  of the most amazing rescues in history and it is  

certainly a story, worth remembering. Further  reconnaissance flights saw that the valley was  

well populated with a number of villages  and extensive agriculture. Surrounded by a  

high mountain range, the orange mountains, and  sitting in over 5,000 feet, the highland valley  

seemed to be literally untouched by time. Well  quickly story started to arrive that the valley  

was populated by giants or headhunters, and that  raised people's interest, and so the Army's Far  

Eastern Air Services Command decided to start  flying essentially, tourist flights, allowing  

service members who signed up to climb aboard a  C-47 skytrain aircraft and take a tourist trip  

over what was then called, Hidden Valley. On May  13th 1945, five days after VE Day a C-47 skytrain  

named The Gremlin Special was on one of those  morale trips, carrying 24 passengers and crew on a  

scenic tour of Hidden Valley. At about 3 p.m. the  plant experienced engine trouble and crashed to  

the side of a mountain, in one of the most remote  spots..on earth. Of the 24 people on board, 19 died  

instantly, only three people, two soldiers and  a nurse with the Women's Army Corps were able to  

escape the wreck. They went back and were able  to rescue two more nurses who were grievously  

injured, but still alive. Too injured it seemed,  as neither one of those would survive the night.  

For the three survivors, army Lieutenant John  McCollom, Sergeant Kenneth Decker and Women's  

Army Corps Corporal Margaret “Suzy” Hastings,  all seriously injured and still in shock,  

the situation was dire. McCollum had lost his  twin brother in the accident, Hastings had lost  

her best friend, whose shoes she needed to take in  order to survive. They were all seriously injured,  

two had severe burns, they were on the side of a  mountain in the jungle too thick for them to be  

seen by aircraft, a hundred miles from rescue with  an area where the natives were completely unknown,  

and to the south of them there were still  thousands of enemy Japanese soldiers. All  

they managed to recover from the burned wreck were  some canteens of water and hard candies. Hastings  

and Deckers burns were severe, McCollum had a  head injury but they knew that they had to move,  

they had to at least find a clearing where they  had some chance of being spotted. It took them  

a couple of days before they were recovered enough  to move at all, and then about a day and a half to  

find a clearing, about two and a half miles away  but almost immediately they were spotted by a  

rescue aircraft that was searching for survivors.  The aircraft dropped a couple of life rafts  

which gave them cover to get out of the rain, but  finding the survivors was not the biggest problem.  

There was no airfield in the valley, no place big  enough to land an airplane, it was too high up,  

the air was too thin to operate a helicopter  and there were no roads into or out of the  

remote valley. The same day they were discovered  by the natives. The Dani people of the New Guinea  

Highlands were a Stone Age culture, they hadn't  invented the wheel, they hadn't invented a number  

higher than three. While there apparently had  been a small scientific expedition in 1938,  

most of the Dani had never seen nor even heard of  a white person, and while they were neither giants  

nor headhunters, the Dani could be quite warlike.  Well the three survivors did the best they could,  

they smiled and they offered the only gift  they had, hard candies, and the Dani decided  

to welcome them. Through sign language they got  the Dani to help them build a fire so that they  

could stay warm and the next day another airplane  flew over and dropped extra supplies, shoes and  

a walkie-talkie, so that they had communication,  and they got even more supplies in the afternoon  

and Deckers burns were becoming gangrenous, if  they did not get medical help soon they would  

die. But a plan was in the works, the idea was to  drop in paratroops from the five two one seventh  

reconnaissance battalion, the only operational  paratrooper battalion in the area. The five two  

one seven was a covert operations unit that was  made up primarily of Filipino American volunteers.  

The idea was that they would take in medics and  enough personnel that they could clear an area  

large enough to land a Waco CG-4 combat glider.  The Waco CG-4 was a relatively small combat glider  

that had been used at D-Day in an Operation Market  Garden, and it could land in a fairly small space  

as long as you just cleared it out enough to not  say, have stumps in the way. And what's more it  

had a fairly simple grappling system so that an  airplane that was flying could fly over hook a  

hook on the front of the glider and pull it to  safety, and so the idea was to clear a field,  

land a Waco glider, put the survivors on the  glider, hook it with an airplane and fly away.  

And the plan was flatly...insane. There was only  one unit in the entire theater of operations  

that had a Waco glider and the grappling system  had never been used operationally. In practice  

trials it had failed catastrophically, pretty much  everytime it had been attempted. But lucky for the  

survivors paratroopers are also..insane. And when  Captain Earl Walker, the jumpmaster for the five  

two one seventh, asked for volunteers..pretty much  the entire unit volunteered. Now he elected to  

take with him ten men, two medics and eight other  men, in order to go and protect the survivors long  

enough for them to clear a fields large enough  to land a Waco glider and then tow it back out  

again. And they also paratrooped in, a newsreel  correspondent. The rescue took four weeks, that's  

how long it took to clear a field big enough  for the Waco, and for the survivors to recover  

enough that they could make it down to the base  camp. The air at that altitude was so thin that  

the gliders could each carry only five people for  the airplane to be able to lift it out of there,  

and so three different times they had to land a  glider, fly out, land another glider, fly out,  

land another glider, fly out, on a procedure that  had never successfully been tried before and yet,  

all three succeeded, and everybody was evacuated  successfully. The extraordinary rescue was  

actually big news at the time. After VE Day and as  the army was gearing up for a possible invasion of  

the Japanese home islands there was a news lull,  and especially the specter of a pretty Army nurse  

trapped in the jungles of New Guinea, captured  the public's attention. Maybe too much so,  

at one point the rescuers actually had to ask  for clothes for the other two survivors, because  

everybody was so worried about Suzy Hastings that  within the first couple of days they had dropped  

three..dozen..bras for her. You know this was a  situation where..things could have gone wrong,  

and most especially with the Dani. They could  be a rather warlike tribe and yet both groups,  

the survivors and the rescuers, treated them with  such honor that the Dani welcomed them. Had either  

of them been more militant or more trigger-happy  it could have gone quite differently. When the  

rescuers first landed they found themselves  surrounded by so many Dani that one of the  

troopers remarked “I think I kind of know how  Custer felt”. And there is a story among the  

Dani today that says that some of the tribes  thought that they had overstayed their welcome  

and was planning to attack them if they stayed  much longer. While lots of things could have gone  

wrong they didn't and certainly that has to do  with luck or good fortune, but really the rescue  

succeeded because of the reason that most things  are successful. The people involved kept their  

head in a difficult situation, they did their  jobs and so they accomplished one of the most  

extraordinary rescues in history from the valley  that the press had decided to call, “Shangri-la”.  

And while it's pretty much forgotten today, it  is still a story that's well worth remembering.

I'm the History Guy, hope you  enjoyed this edition of my series,  

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