This is a work of nonfiction. No liberties have been taken with facts, dialogue, characters, or chronology. All quoted material comes from interviews, reports, diaries, letters, flight logs, declassified military documents, news stories, books, or some other source cited in the notes below. Descriptions of people and places are based on site visits, interviews, written materials, photographs, and newsreel images. Unless noted, the author conducted all interviews, either in person or by phone. Interviews with natives of the Baliem Valley, or Shangri-La, were translated by Buzz Maxey, an American missionary relief and development manager who has lived there most of his life.
Abbreviations of key source materials:
IDPF—Individual Deceased Personnel File, an official U.S. Army document generally running more than one hundred pages, detailing the circumstances of death, recovery and identification of remains, dispersal of belongings, and burial. IDPFs for nineteen of the Gremlin Special victims were obtained using the Freedom of Information Act. Army officials said they could not locate files for Laura Besley and Louis Freyman.
CEW—C. Earl Walter Jr.’s daily journal, which he wrote during his weeks in Shangri-La. Walter granted permission for its use here. Much of the journal was reproduced by Colonel Edward T. Imparato in Rescue from Shangri-La (Paducah, Ky.: Turner Publishing, 1997).
MACR—Missing Air Crash Report No. 14697, the declassified U.S. Army Air Forces account of the incident, including survivors’ sworn statements taken upon their return to Hollandia; the names, ranks, and home addresses of the victims; a map showing the crash location; and an official account of the flight, the crash, and the search and rescue.
SLD—“Shangri-La Diary” is an account of the crash and rescue written by Margaret Hastings in secretarial shorthand while in the valley. Inez Robb of the International News Service helped to expand it into a serial distributed to newspapers in the summer of 1945. Reader’s Digest published a condensed version in December 1945. Tioga County historian Emma Sedore transcribed the version of the diary used here. In an unaired interview with documentary filmmaker Robert Gardner, John McCollom vouched for its accuracy. C. Earl Walter Jr. agreed, with one exception: he denied singing “Shoo, Shoo Baby” as he entered the survivors’ camp. However, in a joint interview in 1998, McCollom insisted that it was true, and Walter relented. Walter acknowledged as much to the author. Walter’s initial denial might be traced to the ribbing he took from friends and family about singing in the jungle.
TCHS—Tioga County Historical Society, in Owego, N.Y., which preserved Margaret Hastings’s personal scrapbook, letters, telegrams, photographs, and other materials.