Operation Auca—the vision to introduce the gospel to the once-savage Auca (Waodani) Indians in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest region—brought together five outstanding young missionaries, all at the peak of their careers. Auca is the Quichua word for “savage”; Waodani is the tribe’s own word for “people.” Quichuas are descendants of the Incas.

Nate Saint, Jim Elliot, Pete Fleming, Ed McCully and Roger Youderian, all in their late 20s and early 30s, were intent on making the first peaceful contact with the then-violent tribe that was infamous for spearing outsiders and their own in an unending cycle of revenge killings.

Saint served in the Air Force during World War II. After the war he enrolled in Wheaton College to prepare for foreign mission work but dropped out to join Missionary Aviation Fellowship (MAF). With his wife, Marjorie, he established a base at Shell Mera (an abandoned oil exploration camp in Ecuador) in September 1948 and flew short hops to keep missionaries supplied with medicines, mail, etc.

Once his plane crashed, but a few weeks later he returned to work in a cast from his neck to his thighs. He was also a builder and inventor, devising an ingeniously simple back-up fuel system for single-engine planes.

Elliot was a graduate of Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill. He and McCully arrived in Ecuador in 1952 to work among the jungle Quichuas. He had been a football and track star and president of his senior class.

After Wheaton, he enrolled at Marquette University Law School and was committed to living a “life of reckless abandon for the Lord, putting all my energy and strength into it.”

He dropped out of school to serve in Ecuador and work with the jungle Quichuas at Arajuno, a base near Waodani territory. Half a dozen Quichuas had been killed at the base by the Indians in the previous year.

Elliot and his future wife, Elisabeth, whom he had met at Wheaton College, arrived in Ecuador as singles and later married. They worked together, doing everything from tending to problems such as broken arms, malaria and snakebites to teaching sanitation. They also wrote books in Quichua and taught literacy.

Youderian, a World War II veteran who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and his wife, Barbara, began serving in Ecuador with GMU in 1953. They had both studied Christian education and missionary medicine at the College of Liberal Arts at Northwestern Schools in Minneapolis. They ministered to the Shuar (Jívaro) headhunting tribe in southern Ecuador and worked on translating the Bible into their language.

Fleming studied at the University of Washington, obtaining his master’s degree in 1951. A gifted linguist, he and his wife, Olive, ran a literacy program among the Quichuas.

Saint and McCully discovered a Waodani settlement from the air in late September 1955. Later Saint found a settlement that was only a 15-minute flight from their station. They told Elliot and Fleming about their findings, and the four planned their evangelistic strategy which they called “Operation Auca.”

They would keep the project secret from everyone but their wives (to avoid being joined by adventurers and the press) with the chance that someone not dedicated to the mission would start shooting at the first sign of real or imagined danger, and destroy the project.

On Oct. 6, 1955, Saint and McCully made their first of 13 “gift-drops” in Waodani territory. With Saint circling his MAF plane in a tight spiral, McCully used a rope to lower an aluminum kettle as a gift to the ground. It contained 20 brightly colored buttons and rock salt.

The two men would fly over the village nearly every Thursday and used gifts as a means of making contact and establishing a friendly relationship. Soon the Waodani began responding to the gift-drops, tying return gifts onto the rope such as a headband of woven parrot feathers. Once the Indians sent up a live parrot.

After three months of air-to-ground contact during which they made far more progress than they had hoped, the missionaries decided that it was time for one-on-one contact. They feared that they could not keep their activities secret much longer, and that delay risked a hostile encounter between the Waodani and some third party.

They decided that the expedition needed a fifth man, so they brought in Youderian who was accustomed to living with the Shuar and had learned acute survival skills.

On Dec. 3, 1955, Saint found a sandbar which he named “Palm Beach” to serve as a temporary landing strip for his yellow Piper aircraft.

The first landing was made on Palm Beach on Tuesday, Jan. 3, 1956. It took five flights to ferry in their supplies and all five missionaries. For three days the missionaries waited for the Waodani to appear. Finally, on Friday, Jan. 6, the first contact was made as three members of the tribe stepped out of the jungle and onto the beach, including an Indian they nicknamed, “George.”

Film footage shows the missionaries and Waodani interacting peacefully. But tribal members became suspicious of the outsiders. “George” lied to the tribe, telling them that the five missionaries were cannibals and they were the ones who had in fact eaten Dayuma, a woman who fled the tribe years earlier when she was a girl, fearful of the constant killings.

“George” lied to deflect attention from the fact that he and one of the young women, “Delilah,” were off in the woods on their own and they weren’t supposed to be. “George” wanted “Delilah” as another wife, but the tribe had already said no.

Three years later when Dayuma returned to the tribe and told them that the five foreigners were not cannibals, the tribe realized that George had lied to them, and they killed him.

At about 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 8, five of the powerful Waodani warriors speared the five missionaries to death and ransacked the plane on the beach. Although the missionaries had guns and could have defended themselves, they agreed together not to use them against the Indians, even if attacked.

Receiving no radio contact from the missionaries, on Monday Johnny Keenan, Saint’s colleague at MAF, flew over Palm Beach and spotted the damaged plane and several bodies in the river. Two days later a ground party arrived at Palm Beach and found the missionaries’ dead bodies. A memorial service was held in Quito for the five martyrs the following Sunday. Saint was 32, Elliot, 28, Fleming, 27, McCully, 28, and Youderian, 31.

Although the five met a tragic death, their efforts would lead to introduction of the gospel to this once-violent tribe three years later. All five of the Waodani killers became believers, and many of the tribal members now follow Christ. The touching story would also inspire thousands to commit their lives to full-time missionary service, helping spread the gospel to unreached people groups around the world.

Several documentary films have been made throughout the years, including “Through Gates of Splendor” and “Beyond the Gates,” produced by Bearing Fruit Communications. A dramatic motion picture, “End of the Spear,” filmed by Every Tribe Entertainment, will be released in theaters Friday, Jan. 20. A book with the same title was recently authored by Steve Saint, son of pilot Nate Saint.

Sources: Through Gates of Splendor, by Elisabeth Elliot; Nate Saint: On a Wing and a Prayer, by Janet and Geoff Benge; obituary.com

Timeline