He spoke to as many as possible, including the Stone Agers. Zuckoff does a very good job of giving us a feel for the players here. The group includes a beautiful, but tough as nails, damsel-in-distress, a courageous Lieutenant who has to overcome his grief at the loss of his brother and rise to the occasion in order to keep himself and his people alive, a studly, gung-ho paratrooper eager to prove his mettle and recover the survivors, a drunken, disgraced Hollywood film-maker trying to recover his career, daring and chipper Filipino medics and paratroopers, and, of course, a tribe or two of local cannibals, who have discovered fire, but have not yet made it up to the wheel. The personalities read like a Hollywood dream come true. It is a huge island, second largest on Earth, and in addition to its other selling points, it is inhabited by tribes of cannibals still living with Stone Age technology, and, just for fun, thousands of well-camouflaged Japanese soldiers, recently driven inland from the coast. He was the first native to literally extend a hand of greeting to Margaret Hastings, Kenneth Decker and John McCollom - Image and text from Zuckoff's siteġ945 New Guinea is home to a wide range of unpleasant biting creatures and a cornucopia of microscopic bad boys that would make a biologist sing, but might present a challenge to crash survivors, particularly when piled atop the burden of serious injuries. Known to the Gremlin Special survivors as "Pete," a leader of the village of Uwambo. When it crashes in the jungle only three survive. Twenty-four people are on the trip flying in the ill-named Gremlin Special.
They call this newly discovered place Shangri-La in honor of the fictional utopia of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. Aboard is a collection of military personnel, male and female, flying over the island to get a look-see at a remote, newly-discovered but ancient civilization, tucked away between mist-covered mountains and guarded by hundreds of square miles of impenetrable jungle. In the waning days of World War II, an Army C-47 transport plane takes off from Base G in the town of Hollandia, on the north coast of New Guinea. While researching another project, Mitchell Zuckoff happened across this story, actually located one of the survivors, and has rescued this gripping tale from an undeserved oblivion. But a few small events, like the first use of nuclear weapons and the subsequent end of the war, pushed the story out of the public eye. People followed the search and then the rescue attempts for weeks.
In 1945 there was comparable interest in a remarkable rescue. I bet you watched at least some TV coverage of the rescue of Chilean miners in 2010. Mitchell Zuckoff in Papua New Guinea, next to the wreckage of the Gremlin Special - image from BU Today - photo by Buzz Maxey
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