Looking for something good to read over the long holiday weekend? Well, how about a story that begins like this:
The time is 1945, only months before the atomic bombing of Japan brings about the end of World War II. On the remote South Pacific island of Dutch New Guinea, Allied cargo pilots flying over the island’s largely unexplored interior spot a previously unmapped valley high in the rugged mountains that appears to be cut off from the outside world. Seen from the air, it is lush, beautiful… and obviously inhabited. The press dubs this valley “Shangri-La” after the exotic setting of a popular, decade-old novel called Lost Horizon, and soon bored and curious personnel stationed at the remote base on New Guinea’s coast are taking sightseeing flights over this valley and logging them as “navigation training.”
On May 13, 1945, twenty-four men and women board a C-47 transport plane with the ill-considered name Gremlin Special for their own “navigation training.” But something goes disastrously wrong during the flight, and the plane crashes in the steep mountains surrounding Shangri-La, with only three survivors, two men and a woman. Injured, completely unprepared, and mourning the deaths of their friends, comrades, and, in the case of one of the men, a twin brother, the trio now faces a hike through dense jungle to reach the only place where they can hope for rescue: the mysterious valley below, which they know is populated by stone-age headhunters who have never seen a white person.
And this is only the beginning.
Did I mention that it’s a true story?
Mitchell Zuckoff’s nonfiction book Lost in Shangri-La recovers one of the most fascinating tales of World War II from obscurity — the media of the time did report on the amazing rescue of the Gremlin Special survivors, but the story got shoved off the front pages by Hiroshima, and it was virtually forgotten until Zuckoff ran across a mention of it while researching something completely unrelated — and tells it with the breathless pacing of a pulp-adventure novel. In fact, the story sounds tailor-made for the movies, with an incredible cast of strong-willed, eccentric, and heroic characters; a rescue scheme so crazy, it’s amazing that it worked; and a bittersweet undercurrent of the inevitable changes wrought by one of the last true “first contacts” between modern Westerners and an aboriginal culture.
This is really an incredible book about an incredible story, and it tends to linger with you — I actually finished it over a month ago, and I’m still thinking about it. It’s so many things: an adventure tale with all the elements you’d expect from an Edgar Rice Burroughs novel, a tale of survival and the indomitable human spirit, and an interesting bit of World War II lore, with a dusting of ethnography and biography. It’s been a long time since I read anything so thoroughly captivating. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Check out Zuckoff’s official site for more information, including photographs and even vintage film footage!
