Other theorists don’t give the Phoenix Islands, TIGHAR researched scenarios a second look mostly because they find other evidence and logic overwhelming: “The Japanese got her.”
The post below from 2016 seems to jump around a bit, but it’s more substantial, and factual, than it seems. We offer it because it offers so much apparent evidence in such compact form.
As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton backed The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery searches for the remains of Amelia Earhart and her Lockheed Electra 10E near a remote Pacific island.
“Like our lost heroine, you will carry all our hopes,” Clinton said to TIGHAR.
But in the second edition of his book, “Amelia Earhart: The Truth At Last,” Mike Campbell calls TIGHAR’s search “another waste of time and money.” I agree with Campbell; the evidence is overwhelming that Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, died during captivity on the Japanese-controlled island of Saipan.
Did President Franklin D. Roosevelt ask Earhart to fly off course during her 1937 around-the-world flight to try to ascertain if Japan was illegally militarizing Pacific Ocean islands?
After American Marines liberated Saipan in 1944, natives gave accounts of two white pilots, a male and a female, who were imprisoned and buried on Saipan. The natives were told by the Japanese the pilots were spies picked up in the ocean.
Manual Aldan, a dentist, heard about the Americans when he treated Japanese officers, who identified the female pilot as “Earharto.” Joaquina Cabrera, a laundress for Japanese guests and prisoners kept at a hotel, remembered the Americans.
“The lady wore a man’s clothes when she first came,” she said. “I was given her clothes to clean. I remember pants and a jacket. It was leather or heavy cloth, so I did not wash it. The man’s head was hurt and covered with a bandage, and he sometimes needed help to move. The lady was very thin and very tired. Every day more Japanese came to talk with her. She never smiled to them, but did to me. She did not speak our language, but I knew she thanked me. She was a sweet, gentle lady. I think the police sometimes hurt her. She had bruises, and one time her arm was hurt. Then, one day, police said she was dead of disease.”
In 1970, Michiko Sugita, a Japanese woman who in 1937 was the 11-year-old daughter of Saipan’s police chief, revealed Earhart was actually shot as a spy. Sugita heard military policemen say, “Amelia was so beautiful and fine a person she did not deserve execution,” but Sugita’s father explained “since she came here to carry on her duties as a spy, it cannot help that she be executed.”
Under the direction of military intelligence, American Marines disinterred the remains of two individuals they were told were from Earhart’s burial site.
Cpl. Earskin Nabers decoded the top-secret message announcing the discovery of Earhart’s plane as a radio clerk on Saipan in July 1944. A few days later, Nabers decoded the order, originating in the Oval Office, to destroy the plane. Nabers witnessed its torching by Marines. Prior to its destruction, Sgt. Thomas E. Devine noted the plane’s markings, NR16020, which proved it was Earhart’s plane.
Stanley Serzan, a Marine, saw several photos of Earhart and Noonan found on a dead Japanese officer on Saipan. Robert Wallack, another Saipan veteran, found an attache case containing “official-looking papers all concerning Amelia Earhart,” which he gave to a Navy officer.
Fifty years ago, Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, who commanded American naval forces in the Pacific during World War II, advised Fred Goerner, author of “The Search for Amelia Earhart,” “Earhart and her companion did go down in the Marshalls, and they were picked up by the Japanese.” In 1966, Gen. Graves Erskine, deputy commander of the V Amphibious Corps during the Battle for Saipan, told news reporters, “It was established Earhart was on Saipan. You’ll have to dig the rest out for yourselves.”
But for the past several decades, the news media have largely failed to accept Erskine’s challenge, focusing instead on coverage of futile searches for Earhart’s plane in the Pacific Ocean.
Japan denies knowledge of what happened to Earhart. I suspect our government knew about Earhart’s capture when it happened in 1937, and Roosevelt feared Earhart must have confessed she was part of a plan to gather intelligence about Japanese activities. Perhaps Roosevelt didn’t want the world to know Earhart had been asked to do something that put her at risk for capture by the Japanese.
Campbell believes “only a presidential order can break the airtight seal nearly eight decades of silence have molded.” I hope our next president will have the courage to issue such an order.
Daily Messenger, Joel Freedman, http://www.mpnnow.com, Aug. 23, 2016
A few of factoids above are from one journalist’s work, that of the late Fred Goerner. That opens up a path of pivotal possibilities, that is, if Goerner’s accurate and honest in all he said, and not making anything up, the case is pretty powerful.
He tracked Earhart in the Marshall Islands for years, travelled all over those territories once held by the Japanese. Witnesses by the dozens remembered seeing the man and woman flying team of Americans…and in the Japanese-held Pacific Islands, now that would have been rare. It’s hard to image which other man-woman team of Anglo aviators they might have even seen and confused for Earhart and Noonan, in that territory at that time.
For Fred Goerner, his peak moment came when a coy Chester Nimitz, the Admiral of towering responsibility and reputation who’d been in charge of naval forces in the Pacific, finally went beyond smiling hints that Goerner wasn’t wasting his time. ” ‘Now that you’re going to Washington, Fred,’ he said, ‘I want to tell you Earhart and her navigator did go down in the Marshalls and were picked up by the Japanese.’ ”
So, the Japanese got to a crash-landed Earhart and Noonan, on the edge of some atoll let’s say, before we did, and for that matter we couldn’t risk the provocation of entering Japanese-controlled regions. They assumed the worst–wondering why Americans had wandered into their seas, perhaps even finding camera equipment mounted on the plane (a longstanding suspicion). Clearly, spies looking in on our military build-up. They were taken to the headquarters of Japanese military activity in the region, the island of Saipan, where they were treated like spies, and died of either disease or execution.
Do journalists get carried away, so eager to have a story they invent or embellish conversations that never happened? Sure, they do, they stretch the truth just like anyone else. But so much that Goerner has to say across the three hundred-page chronicle of his odyssey to find Amelia’s ghost, so to speak, rings so true. And more importantly, it finds so much corroboration in so many other snippets of testimony.
Each year in Atchison, Kansas, Amelia’s birthplace, a summer festival celebrates her spirit and accomplishments. A small part of that festival involves ongoing scholarship and commentary on the mystery of her disappearance.
The year a MOMystery editor attended, there was no mystery in the mind of a Saipan-raised woman who attended one of the discussions at the local library. She stood to suggest that this group of Amelia-worshipers support the idea of a memorial to Earhart on Saipan, obviously her final resting place.
She’d been a very young girl then, this woman of Filipina descent. She hadn’t seen Earhart and Noonan herself, but it was in the air she grew up breathing. Everyone knew someone who’d seen them, or had talked to a Japanese officer who confirmed the fact that they came to Saipan as spies. In wasn’t rumor in her mind, it was fact that was too widely confirmed, too clearly the case to leave any room for doubt.
The only question was: will we build a commemorative statue to her on Saipan?
We still harbor a lingering doubt as to whether some legends, based on eye-witnesses, can stoke their own fires, can seem more like a done deal than they are. But we must say, the case for Earhart and Noonan perishing in Japanese custody seems strong.
The professional skeptics pooh-poo this scenario as well, claiming that 1937 was still a time of peace in U.S.-Japanese relations, not to be confused with four years later. They go so far as to say that the Japanese would have loved to repatriate Amelia, had they found her, for the good pubic relations value. With respect, we think that’s nonsensical thinking.
Even in 1937, the Japanese were in a sort of war with the U.S. and the great democracies, they just hadn’t done anything quite as rabid as bomb Pearl Harbor, just yet. The country’s policies were already shaped by the ultra-nationalist ultra-right, the hard-bitten Nazis of the Pacific region. And they were jockeying for territory, for oil, for resources, for strategic advantage with a United States that looked to them to be just as imperial as they were.
The Japanese would not have been amused, to put it mildly, at an American overflight of their military bases under construction in the Pacific. Nothing Earhart and Noonan could have said would have convinced Japanese authorities that the overflights were accidental, and they might well not have been.
Keep in mind that Amelia had become buddies with Eleanor Roosevelt and to a lesser extent the President himself. We can quite easily envision the ever pragmatic Commander in Chief asking Amelia for a patriotic favor–could you fly just a bit to the north on the way to Howland Island, and take a look-see at those Japanese controlled islands? Her well-documented trip gave her cover, after all, and who couldn’t stray off course over the Pacific? So much safer for the U.S. than risking a fly-over by the U.S. Air Force.
But once down short of Howland, for whatever reason, and grabbed by the Japanese, it was all over. The horrendously expensive “search” of the seas for the Earhart and Noonan wreckage was all waste and all show. At the top, in the Oval Office, they knew the score. Maybe part of the show was even an elaborate matinee for Eleanor. Did her husband dare tell her that her good friend had been sacrificed on an espionage mission gone bad, and that now the nation’s interests called for ignoring her fate?
It seems harsh to abandon her to the Japanese, but they likely would never have cut her loose. She’d seen too much.
And FDR, always thinking years ahead of the rest of us, knew that for all practical purposes we were at war with the Japanese already.
There were millions of casualties in the war to come. Amelia and Fred were merely two of the earliest sacrifices.