Lost in Tibet
Richard Starks & Miriam Murcutt
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2004 The Lyons Press
ISBN: 1592285724

The Untold Story of Five American Airmen, a Doomed Plane, & the Will to Survive.

Lost in Tibet is a superb recounting of a truly unique WWII high adventure: in the autumn of 1943 a C87 was blown off course during a storm as it made a “routine” run of The Hump from India to China in an effort to help Chiang Kai-shek thwart the Japanese occupation there. All told, from 1942-45, 1,000 men perished in some 600 planes, taking supplies to a beleaguered ally.

Out of fuel, unable to raise anyone on their radio, surrounded by clouds & the Himalayas with night coming on fast, the crew had to bail out with seconds to spare. With no time for their parachutes to open the five airmen landed on the same mountain, all but one within hailing distance. That was the first miracle.

That Robert Crozier, Harold McCallum, Kenneth Spencer, John Huffman & William Perram, found each other & made their way down to a tiny settlement nestled in the valley below was the second. That they were received by Sana Ullah, the village leader, with endless doses of sour tea & the rural Tibetans' curious brand of friendship, was the third.

How the Americans adjusted to this strange land most of them never knew existed; how their hosts treated them; how they made their way to Lhasa & became the source of international controversy & power plays, makes for a gripping tale, as well as a fascinating glimpse into the way it was 60 years ago, among the Chinese & British delegations, & Tibetan political, religious, social culture & the coming of age of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

In a land where Buddhist monks outnumbered the citizens by thousands; where the national religion forbad killing, yet everyone ate meat; where sticking out one's tongue was a mark of friendship, & the Tibetans' long & violent history with the Chinese, the five airmen, with ages ranging from 19 to 29, were received with hostility in the capital, particularly after their caravan was waylaid by Dr. Kung Chin-tsung, head of the Resident Office of the Commission on Mongolian & Tibetan Affairs, & given a drunken welcome. It didn't help that McCallum wore his A-2 jacket with the blood chit in Chinese characters sewn on the back.

Ordered to Lhasa by the Tibetan government the American airmen gained sanctuary with George & Betty Sherriff, two passionate & internationally renown botanists, along with their co-explorer Frank Ludlow. George was the British mission in Tibet, & Betty was glad to open their home to the Americans & give them much-needed mothering. George also ran the first & only movie theater in Tibet to which the people & monks thronged in the hundreds, enjoying the movies of Charlie Chaplin & Mickey Mouse, although it was Rin Tin Tin which they demanded to see, ad nauseum.

At that time, the airmen were some of the first Americans ever to enter the Forbidden City & among the last to see it before the Chinese launched their invasion in 1950.

How they got back to India, how they were received in America, what happened in Tibet after they left, an Afterword about the five American airmen, & the key players who helped them, plus a Notes section round out a tale very well told.

Could not put Lost in Tibet down! Unique & engrossing with a wealth of cultural & historic details.

Richard Starks & Miriam Murcutt, the former an award-winning journalist & the latter a magazine writer & editor, are both passionate mountain travelers, & their interest & familiarity with The Roof of the World comes through on every page. They have also done their research & offer a superb, brief history of the lineage of the Dalai Lamas of that fabled land, the size of the U.S. states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma & Texas combined, & the centuries of political invasions & conspiracies between China, Russia & Britain & the people of Tibet.

Outstanding!
(10/10/04)

Rebecca