Book Review: AMELIA EARHART: THE TRUTH AT LAST, 2nd Edition (2016)

My rating: *****

 


















Amelia Earhart's whereabouts have never been a mystery! The evidence is abundant--if you look in the right places.

At first glance, it might seem plausible that the Lockheed Electra flown by Amelia Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan plunged into deep water beyond Howland Island, the tiny target in the Pacific which they missed during their circumnavigation in 1937. There were intermittent and garbled radio messages from the airplane as it ostensibly approached the island, followed by silence to this day. No parts of the plane or wreckage were found despite exhaustive naval searches of over 262,000 square miles of the central Pacific.

A crash-landing in the ocean might have explained the lack of data--until you broaden your search to look at the massive amounts of data, literally hundreds of witnesses and dozens of eyewitness testimonies to the presence of Earhart and Noonan and the Electra from the Marshall Islands to Saipan.  

This second edition strengthens with two extra chapters and considerable more documentation that the two pilots landed on Mili Atoll in the Marshall Islands, were picked up by a Japanese fishing boat, transferred to the Japanese ship Koshu, taken first to Jaluit and then to Kwajalein, and ultimately to Saipan. Both Earhart and Noonan died at the hands of Japanese soldiers on the Japanese-held island of Saipan in 1937.

There are independent sources of firsthand information at every step, including Amelia Earhart's own relatives, several Marshall Islanders and Saipanese residents, more than two-dozen American GIs right up to an Admiral, a Marine general and a U.S. Marine Corps commandant.  In 1987 the Marshall Islands issued a set of four "Amelia Earhart" stamps commemorating the 50th anniversary of her crash landing and the recovery of her airplane in their territory.

On Saipan the two American fliers were seen and described by many local people as they were led through the streets and during the time they were housed in the local jail and hotel by the Japanese military. Earhart made friendly though tired gestures (she had developed dysentery) toward local women through the bars of her cell. 

Five-Star Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander in chief Pacific Fleet during World War II, told Fred Goerner, author of the 1966 bestseller, The Search for Amelia Earhart, that "Earhart and her navigator did go down in the Marshalls and were picked up by the Japanese."  Marine Gen. Graves Erskine and Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Alexander A. Vandegrift, who earned the Medal of Honor, testified that Earhart “perished” on Saipan.

In the mid-1980s, an old Saipanese woman told researcher T.C. “Buddy” Brennan of her indelible childhood memory, seeing the “white woman with a man’s haircut” marched out to a field, made to dig her own grave and forced to kneel at the edge of it. She watched horrified as the woman was shot in the chest, falling backwards into the grave. A Japanese woman, Michiko Sugita, who as an 11-year-old on Saipan was the daughter of the civilian chief of police, claimed her father told her that Amelia was "shot as a spy." 

So we can say with certainty after reading The Truth at Last that Amelia Earhart met a tragic end on Saipan. As for Fred Noonan, several Saipanese said the navigator was beheaded with a samurai sword a day or two later when he angered a Japanese guard. 

Earhart’s Lockheed Electra was seen by several American soldiers and Marines after Aslito Airfield, Saipan, was captured by American forces in the summer of 1944. Three Marines watched secretly as other Marines doused the plane with gasoline, and an American fighter plane flew overhead to ignite it with machine gun fire. In the White House, a young messenger, or page, allegedly heard the order to destroy the plane come from the lips of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The aide reported this life-altering experience to a Saipan veteran many decades later. 

There is even a possibility that ex-Secretary of War James V. Forrestal was murdered because of his knowledge about the destruction of the Electra. 

The theory that Earhart was the “Tokyo Rose” of radio fame came from a misunderstanding of the term, which meant only that the Japanese considered her a spy. The preposterous chestnut that she became Irene Bolam, a housewife in New Jersey, is explained and discarded. The truths this book documents do not depend on three pieces of a pocket-knife, fragments of a jar of freckle cream or the high heel of a woman’s shoe from the 1930s (a shoe 3 sizes too big for Earhart) on a deserted island to prove its case. 

Campbell’s clear, straightforward 370-page account, in a huge 7" by 10" paperback, includes declassified documents, multiple photographs, and  many hundreds of footnotes, and is based on 28 years of research and interviews. It is thorough, well written, and convincing— if for no other reason than because Mike Campbell and the other researchers on whose shoulders he stands, in contrast to the United States military and the Japanese military, have no secrets to protect. 

The sobering reality is that every scrap of evidence found, her briefcase, her journal, photos, skeletal remains, was turned over to the appropriate American authorities — and never seen again. Campbell even presents interviews with former American intelligence operatives who saw, firsthand, the smoking gun evidence of Earhart and Noonan’s presence and deaths on Saipan. 

In light of the facts, the continued reference by knowledgeable sources to the disappearance of Earhart and Noonan as a “mystery” can lead the reader to only one disturbing conclusion: The mystery has long been solved, but the “mystery” is still being perpetuated by a massive, 79-year-long cover-up at the highest levels of our government.

Order the book at http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=amelia+earhart+truth