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ON A RAINY DAY IN MAY 1945, A WESTERN UNION messenger made his rounds through the quiet village of Owego, in upstate New York. He turned on to McMaster Street, a row of modest, well-kept homes on the edge of the village, shaded by sturdy elm trees. He slowed to a stop at a green house with a small porch and empty flower boxes. As he approached the door, the messenger prepared for the hardest part of his job: delivering a telegram from the United States War Department.
Directly before him, proudly displayed in a front window, hung a small white banner with a red border and a blue star at its centre. Similar banners hung in windows all through the village, each one to honour a young man, or in a few cases a young woman, gone to war. American troops had been fighting in the Second World War since 1941, and some blue-star banners had already been replaced by banners with gold stars, signifying a permanently empty place at a familyâs dinner table.
Inside the blue-star home where the messenger stood was Patrick Hastings, a sixty-eight-year-old widower. With his wire-rim glasses, neatly trimmed silver hair, and the serious set of his mouth, Patrick Hastings bore a striking resemblance to the new president, Harry S. Truman, who had taken office a month earlier upon the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
A son of Irish immigrants, Patrick Hastings grew up a farm boy across the border in Pennsylvania. After a long engagement, he married his sweetheart, schoolteacher Julia Hickey, and they had moved to Owego to find work and raise a family. As the years passed, Patrick rose through the maintenance department at a local factory owned by the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company, which churned out combat boots and officersâ dress shoes for the US Army. Together with Julia, he reared three bright, lively daughters.
Now, though, Patrick Hastings lived alone. Six years earlier, a fatal infection struck Juliaâs heart. Their homeâs barren flower boxes were visible signs of her absence and his solitary life.
Their two younger daughters, Catherine and Rita, had married and moved away. Blue-star banners hung in their homes, too, each one for a husband in the service. But the blue-star banner in Patrick Hastingsâ window wasnât for either of his sons-in-law. It honoured his strong-willed eldest daughter, Corporal Margaret Hastings of the Womenâs Army Corps, the WACs.
Sixteen months earlier, in January 1944, Margaret Hastings walked into a recruiting station in the nearby city of Binghamton. There, she signed her name and took her place among the first generation of women to serve in the United States military. Margaret and thousands of other WACs were dispatched to war zones around the world, mostly filling desk jobs on bases well back from the front lines. Still her father worried, knowing that Margaret was in a strange, faraway land: New Guinea, an untamed island just north of Australia. Margaret was based at a US military compound on the islandâs eastern half, an area known as Dutch New Guinea.
Corporal Margaret Hastings of the Womenâs Army Corps, photographed in 1945.
By the middle of 1945, the military had outsourced the delivery of bad news, and its bearers had been busy: the combat death toll among Americans neared three hundred thousand. More than one hundred thousand other Americans had died non-combat deaths. More than six hundred thousand had been wounded. Blue-star families had good reason to dread the sight of a Western Union messenger approaching the door.
On this day, misery had company. As the messenger rang Patrick Hastingsâ doorbell, Western Union couriers with nearly identical telegrams were en route to twenty-three other star-banner homes with loved ones in Dutch New Guinea. The messengers fanned out across the country, to rural communities and urban centres including New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles.
Each message offered a nod towards sympathy camouflaged by the clipped tone of a military communiquĂ©. Signed by Major General James A. Ulio, the Armyâs chief administrative officer, Patrick Hastingsâ telegram read:
When Owegoâs newspaper learned of the telegram, Patrick Hastings told a reporter about Margaretâs most recent letter home. In it, she described a recreational flight up the New Guinea coast and wrote that she hoped to take another sightseeing trip soon. By mentioning the letter, Patrick Hastingsâ message was clear: he feared that Margaret had gone down in a plane crash. But the reporterâs story danced around that worry, offering vague optimism instead. âFrom the wording of the [telegram] received yesterday,â the reporter wrote, âthe family thinks that perhaps she was on another flight and will be accounted for later.â
When Patrick Hastings telephoned his younger daughters, he did not hold out false hope about their sisterâs fate. Outdoing even the Army for brevity, he reduced the telegram to three words: Margaret is missing.
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ELEVEN DAYS BEFORE THE MESSENGER APPEARED AT her fatherâs door, Margaret Hastings awoke as usual before dawn. Already the moist, tropical heat had crept under the flaps of the cramped tent she shared with five other WACs. She dressed alongside her tent mates in the Army-issued khakis she had cut down to match her petite frame. At first, Margaret wrote to a friend back in Owego, the uniforms âfit me like sacksâ. But after a few failed alteration efforts, she boasted in the letter: âI got hold of a pair of menâs trousers that were miles too big for me, and used the material. They really turned out quite well, considering.â
The date was 13 May 1945. It was Sunday, so the bugler had the day off from his usual five-thirty a.m. reveille. Not that Margaret could sleep in. The working week was seven days long at Base G, a sprawling military installation built around the town of Hollandia, on Dutch New Guineaâs northern coast. By eight oâclock, Margaret was due at her post, a metal desk with a clackety typewriter where daily she proved that war wasnât just hell, it was hell with paperwork.
Tents for members of the Womenâs Army Corps in Hollandia, Dutch New Guinea, during the Second World War.
Margaret was thirty years old, lithe and beautiful. She had alert blue eyes, alabaster skin, and long, light-brown hair she wore in a stylish, figure-eight bun. At just 1.56 metres and barely 45 kilos, she could still slip in to her high school wardrobe. Her teenage nickname, âLittle girlâ remained an apt description. But Margaretâs size was deceptive. She carried herself with style; shoulders back and chin up, the lasting effects of drama club performances, violin lessons, and what her youngest sister called a feisty, âtake-chargeâ nature. She met strangers with a side-long glance and a half smile that dug dimples beneath her high cheekbones. Somewhere between sly and sexy, the look suggested that Margaret had a secret that she had no intention of sharing.
As a girl growing up in Owego, Margaret bicycled to the local swimming hole, hitchhiked when she wanted to explore beyond the village, did well in school, and read books under the covers late at night. As she grew older and prettier, she became one of the most sought-after girls in town. She enjoyed the attention but didnât depend on it. Margaret considered herself an independent young woman who, as she put it, âdrank liquor, but not too muchâ and âliked the boys, but not too muchâ.
Even after her younger sisters married, Margaret held out beyond the limit of her twenties. She wasnât interested in the men of Owego, but she didnât blame them, either. âTo tell the truth,â she told an acquaintance, âIâm not sure I go for the kind of man whoâs supposed to make a good husband.â
After graduating from high school and bouncing through several jobs, Margaret found work as a secretary at a local factory owned by Remington Rand, a company that turned steel into everything from typewriters to .45 calibre pistols. She liked the work, but it bothered her that she had never been farther from home or anywhere more exciting than Atlantic City. It sounded corny, but Margaret wanted to see the world, serve her country, and find out what she was made of. Joining the Womenâs Army Corps gave her the chance to do all three.
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As Margaret got ready for work, families across the United States were preparing for Motherâs Day. This time, though, a motherâs love wasnât the only cause for celebration. Five days earlier, Germany had surrendered unconditionally. Reports were trickling out that Adolf Hitler had killed himself in his bunker. Other Nazi leaders were in custody. Concentration camps were being liberated, their horrors fully exposed. After a terrible toll of âblood, toil, tears and sweatâ, victory had finally arrived in Europe. In fact, 13 May 1945 marked five years to the day since Winston Churchill had uttered that phrase to the British people to rouse them for the fight ahead.
To mark the success of the war in Europe, the dome of the US Capitol building, which had been blacked out since Pearl Harbor, again gleamed under the glow of floodlights. As President Truman put it: âThe western world has been freed of the evil forces which for five years and longer have imprisoned the bodies and broken the lives of millions upon millions of free-born men.â House Speaker Sam Rayburn hailed the news in Europe but added two sombre notes. He lamented the passing of President Roosevelt weeks before V-E Day. Then he noted that the war wasnât over: âI am happy but also sad, because I cannot help but think of those thousands of our boys who are yet to die in the far-flung Pacific islands and the Far East in order that victory may come to our armies, and that the glory of America may be upheld and peace and an ordered world may come to us again.â
News from the Pacific was encouraging, though fierce engagements continued there. For the previous six weeks, ferocious fighting had been under way on the island of Okinawa, which American generals intended to use as a springboard for an invasion of Japan. Few relished that idea, yet optimism ran high. That morning, the New York Times declared that final victory was assured, whether by negotiated surrender or outright defeat. The paper told its readers, âIt will be a busy summer for the Japanese enemy, and Hirohito can be confident that the âsoftening-upâ period, now started, will be followed by lethal blows.â
That confident inevitability might have been plain to editors of the Times and to policy makers in Washington. But the war in the Pacific remained a moment-by-moment struggle. Between sunrise and sunset on 13 May 1945, more than 130 US fighters and bombers would attack troops, trains, bridges, and other Japanese âtargets of opportunityâ in south and east China. Ten B-24 Liberators would bomb an underground hangar on a dot of land called Moen Island. Nine other B-24s would bomb an airfield on a lonely speck in the northern Pacific called Marcus Island. On Borneo, B-24s would bomb two airfields. To the east, B-25 Mitchell bombers and P-38 Lightning fighters would support ground forces on Tarakan Island. The US 7th Marine Division would burst through Japanese defences on Okinawa to capture Dakeshi Ridge. In the Philippines, the 40th Infantry Division would capture Del Monte airfield, and bombers and fighters would pound targets on Luzon Island.
Those were the major events of the day, to be catalogued, analysed and recounted in countless books and films about The Big War. Another incident on 13 May 1945 would escape the notice of historians and filmmakers: a C-47 transport plane carrying two dozen officers, soldiers and WACs would disappear during a flight over the mountainous jungles of New Guinea.
US military map of New Guinea during the Second World War, with Hollandia on the northern coast at roughly the midpoint of the island. The mapmaker was unaware of a large valley some 240 kilometres southwest of Hollandia, in the mountain range that crosses the islandâs midsection.
Located between Australia and the Equator, New Guinea was a largely uncharted tropical island 2500 kilometres long and nearly 800 kilometres wide at its centre. The worldâs second-largest island, after Greenland, it was a gift-box assortment of inhospitable environments. Much of the coastline featured barely habitable lowlands, swamps, and jungles. In the great middle were soaring limestone mountains covered by impenetrable rainforests and topped by snow or rocky outcroppings. The New Guinea terrain was so forbidding that the most common experience for its inhabitants was isolation. Pockets of humanity carved out small places to survive, fighting with anyone who came near and often among themselves. As a result, the island evolved into a latter-day Babel. New Guineaâs natives spoke more than one thousand languages, or about one-sixth of the worldâs total â despite accounting for less than one-tenth of one per cent of the global population.
Inhabited by humans for more than forty thousand years, New Guinea passed the millennia largely ignored by the rest of the world. Lookouts on European ships caught sight of the island early in the sixteenth century. In 1545, the Spanish explorer Yñigo Ortiz de Retez named the island Neuva Guinea after an African country 16,000 kilometres away, because the natives he saw on the coast had black skin. For another two centuries, New Guinea was left mostly to itself, though trappers stopped by to collect the brilliant plumes of its birds of paradise to make hats for fashionable Sri Lankan potentates. In the eighteenth century, the island became a regular landing spot for French and British explorers. Captain Cook visited in 1770. Scientists followed, and the island drew a steady stream of field researchers from around the globe searching for discoveries in zoology, botany and geography.
In the nineteenth century, New Guinea caught the eye of traders seeking valuable raw materials. No precious minerals or metals were easily accessible, but the rising value of coconut oil made it worthwhile to plant the flag and climb the palm trees along the coastline. European powers divided the island roughly in half, and the eastern section was cut in half again. Over the years, claims of sovereignty were made by Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. Nevertheless, even well-educated Westerners had a hard time finding it on a map.
After the First World War, New Guineaâs eastern half was controlled by Br...
