8. The Fog of Rumors
The first great rumor, which had gained widespread acceptance, was that Amelia and Fred were prisoners of the Japanese. They had flown over islands in the Japanese mandate which were being illegally fortified, the plane had been shot down by anti-aircraft guns, the pilot and navigator had been taken and held as spies.
This Japanese-prisoner story still persists after more than twenty years, largely because of a movie released in the early forties, while World War II was at its highest pitch and anti-Japanese feeling at white heat. The film, Flight for Freedom, starring Rosalind Russell and Fred MacMurray, told the story of a famous American woman flier, “Tonie Carter,” who had been asked by the United States Navy to “get lost” in the South Pacific (actually, to remain in hiding at Howland Island), so that Navy planes could take photographs of illegal Japanese fortifications while “looking” for her.
In the movie, Tonie Carter’s navigator was an old beau, “Randy Britton,” to whom she had once been engaged. This gave rise to another rumor: Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were in love, and decided to find a lonely Pacific island where they could live out their idyllic love “happily ever after.” Incensed by the broad allusions of the film, George Palmer Putnam filed suit. The movie company settled out of court.
The scenario writers for Flight for Freedom were not alone, however, in their belief. Aboard the U.S.S. Colorado while it was conducting its search for the missing fliers were Dr. M. L. Brittain of Georgia Tech, and other university presidents, who were guests of the battleship on a Pacific cruise.
There was the possibility, Dr. Brittain later suggested, that Amelia was a prisoner of the Japanese, even as late as 1944, and that one day soon she would be liberated by the advancing United States Marines.
“We got the definite feeling,” Dr. Brittain was quoted as saying, “that Miss Earhart had some sort of understanding with government officials that the last part of her voyage around the world would be over some Japanese islands, probably the Marshalls.”
Amelia’s mother, Amy Otis Earhart, has long maintained that her daughter was on a secret government mission and that she was captured by the Japanese. This is Mrs. Earhart’s belief although she has no official basis for it.
The Navy Department at the end of World War II was compelled to make a final official announcement about AE’s disappearance. Amelia Earhart had not been sent on a naval cloak-and-dagger operation. Her plane had not been shot out of the skies by Japanese gunfire. She had not been captured, held as a prisoner, or shot as a spy.
Nevertheless, despite official and unofficial beliefs and statements to the contrary, rumors still flourished.
There was the story of the Japanese fishing boat. After United States forces had invaded the Marshall Islands—north and west of Howland—Lieutenants Eugene T. Bogan and James Toole were quoted as saying that this story was told to them by a missionary-trained native named Elieu:
“Ajima, a jap trader, said three and a half years ago that an American woman pilot came down between Jaluit and Ailinglapalap Atolls [southeastern Marshall Islands] and was picked up by a Japanese fishing-boat crew. She was taken to Japan.”
In July of 1944, during the invasion of Saipan, in the Mariana Islands—far north and west of Howland Island—the Marines found in an abandoned Japanese barracks a photograph album filled with snapshots of Amelia Earhart in her flying clothes. It is known that AE carried a camera with her on the world flight but not that she was carrying a photograph album filled with pictures of herself.
Dr. Brittain, the same who had been on the searching Colorado, was queried in 1944 about the Saipan pictures. He felt that there was a definite connection between the album and the disappearance of the Earhart plane.
Of all the pieces of “evidence” in the stories about the disappearance, the most extraordinary was a piece of wood. It was a fragment of a fence post, with several nail holes in it and with one end badly charred. The piece of wood was found in July, 1942, by Robert D. Weishaupt while he was on beach duty with the Coast Artillery at Baranof Island, Alaska. Weishaupt noticed the burned piece of fence post as it washed in and out from the shore. It looked as if it had some writing on it. He waded in and picked it out of the water.
On one side was printed:
TO MY HUSBAND—I HAVE
CRASHED 250 MLLS FROM HAWAII—N.W.
OUR MOTOR WENT INTO FLAMES—SHARKS
ABOUT ME.
A.E.
and on the other side, simply:
MRS. A.E.
Whoever wrote on the piece of wood and set it adrift on the water perpetrated a cruel hoax. It is extremely unlikely that AE could have crashed 250 miles northwest of Hawaii; the Electra did not have enough fuel to fly another 2,000 miles beyond Howland. And if Amelia had written such a desperate message, on wood suddenly provided in the middle of the Pacific, she would have addressed the message, not “TO MY HUSBAND,” but, rather, to GPP, her husband’s well-known initials; and she would have signed her initials on the reverse side, not “Mrs. A.E.” but AE, because she was not Mrs. Amelia Earhart.
For the rest of his life George Palmer Putnam was a man haunted and hunted by people who claimed that they had mystic powers and that they could put him in contact with his wife.
Eighteen months after her disappearance Amelia was declared legally dead, and GP married again. He went to live in the mountains away from the crowds, and during the war he joined the Air Force.