11 May 2020
As we are not able to do any flying at the moment, I thought I would tell you all a tale from my Papua flying days along with a recommendation for one of my favourite aviation books, Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff. This isn’t your usual aviation book as it doesn’t feature much flying, but it’s well worth a read for some escapism.
It’s a true story that features a USAF C-47 Dakota that was flying on a bit of a jolly towards the end of WWII from the US base at Sentani, Papua. Unfortunately it crashed while trying to enter the Baliem Valley in poor weather which is where I used to be based towards the end of my previous life with Susi Air.
The story of how the survivors escaped is almost unbelievable and involves some of the most ambitious flying I’ve ever read about. I’m very surprised it’s not been made into a Hollywood movie yet. Of course, while I was based so close to the crash site, I just had to go and find it. I’ll try not to spoil the book for anyone reading this who’s not read it yet, but I was very fortunate to be able to add a little to the story in the book.
“A small group of us borrowed a pick-up truck and set off to find the lost C-47”
You would think with the internet and a published book to hand it would be pretty easy to find the exact GPS coordinates of the wreck and simply go and locate it.
However it turns out it has all but been forgotten and no one seems to have written much about it online. I did get a set of coordinates from another pilot which were within 300m of some I found on a website. The book also has some coordinates in it but these are quite coarse and came up around 7km from the ones I already had.
Anyway, this was enough to give it a go and so at 5am on a Sunday morning, a small group of us borrowed a pick-up truck and set off from our house in Wamena to drive as close as we could to the coordinates.
After around an hour-and-a-half, we had gone as far as we could, so we parked up and walked up to the first house we found to ask if anyone there knew about the aircraft that crashed in 1945. Hopefully this would confirm our coordinates were somewhere close! Eventually we lucked out as a chap there reckoned his parents had seen the wrecked Dakota and he claimed to know exactly where it was.
We then bumped into another chap and he was able to confirm what the first chap was saying. He also suggested we might like to come to his village and meet a woman who was apparently alive at the time of the crash. She described how terrified their village was when the white people emerged from the jungle, and how they all ran away. She was only a child at the time so didn’t actually see the survivors herself but she described them exactly as told in the book. We knew we must be close so headed off into the jungle with our guide along a tricky, slippery and at times quite treacherous path along a thick, jungle-covered ridgeline constructed mostly of fallen trees covered in wet moss. Eventually, after around three hours of wandering we found what we were looking for.
I can only speculate that almost no one had been there in the last 70 years. Very little had been taken, which is unusual as normally when an aircraft crashes in Papua bits tend to be removed to be repurposed by the locals. Interestingly our guide did say that this aircraft was the first metal any of them had seen. I did take a small piece of the aircraft’s fabric that was loose on what remained of one of the control surfaces, as I figured it would make a cool bookmark. What I didn’t realise at the time was how this story was going to develop further.
A few weeks later a pilot friend of mine, who came to the wreck on the first mission, was showing the wreck to a couple of fellow pilots who were interested in seeing it. While exploring, they came across a large gold ring bearing the inscription ‘Kentucky Military Institute’. Of course this had to be from one of the victims from the crash and so I sent out a Tweet to Zuckoff to see if he could find out who it might have belonged to.
After some research he came back to me and said that it would have belonged to a Major Phillip J Dattilo, and while he died a single man, he did still have a surviving niece who remembered her uncle fondly. Apparently she broke down in tears when Zuckoff broke the news to her that her uncle’s ring had been recovered.
After various correspondences with Zuckoff, the ring was couriered back to the US and reunited with the family, and in return Zuckoff sent me a signed copy of his book, which was unexpected and very kind of him.
Inside the inscription reads: To Matt Dearden: You are now part
of this story! With deep appreciation – Mitchell Zuckoff FLY SAFE! July 2016 Boston.
And the bookmark? A green piece of fabric from the very aircraft the book is about.
Currently dividing his time between a Cub, a Catalina… oh, and a PC-12
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