Page 14 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • January 26, 2011 her and her navigator, Fred Noonan, and executed them. A World War II propaganda movie, “Flight for Freedom,” starring Rosalind Russell and Fred MacMurray, made this official for people who hate the Japanese and don’t read much, but it was a fake. The story is that Earhart (who was a pacifist) was approached by FDR in response to the growing menace that the Japanese under Tojo and their German allies presented to America and the free world. FDR asked Earhart to spy on Japanese military installations in the islands of the Pacific. Earhart and Noonan were captured when their plane crashed near Saipan, having seen Japanese fortifications. Noonan slugged a Japanese guard and was beheaded. One version has Earhart being beheaded. Another has her dying of tropical dysentery, neglected but not otherwise abused. Knowledge of history shows how silly this story was. Earhart started planning her round-the-world trip in the spring of 1936 as a publicity stunt for her latest book. Japan was at peace and friendly with America. She and Noonan disappeared on July 2, 1937. The Marco Polo Bridge incident that led to the Sino-Japanese War did not take place until five days after Earhart vanished, and the event that started to sour American-Japanese relations, the strafing of the U.S.S. Panay, did not take place until December 1937. A year later, after Japanese apologies, the U.S. was still selling the Japanese military equipment, including P-35 fighter trainers, and most Japanese expected a war with Russia, not America. While Earhart was still alive, there was no German-Japanese alliance. The Germans had 40 military advisors in China supporting Chiang Kai-shek against Japan, the Japanese were still accepting Jewish refugees despite German protests, and War Lord Hideki Tojo was an obscure officer facing the Russians in Mongolia. Compounding the faulty timetable were bogus interviews. One experienced American newsman – the one who had Earhart dying of natural causes, and only Noonan decapitated – said he had interviewed a number of Chamorro people, Polynesian natives of Saipan, who reported seeing two whites captured after an air crash, seeing the man beheaded, and seeing the woman in jail. A Japanese woman reporter who admired Earhart and hated macho militarism booked passage to Saipan. She found some Japanese settlers who had survived the harrowing 1944 invasion. (My cousin served there in the U.S. Navy and helped bury the thousands of military and civilian dead.) The local Japanese, friendly with the Chamorro people who actually liked the Japanese, except for their cops, took her to meet the people the American newsman claimed he had interviewed. The Chamorro people she spoke with remembered a white man asking questions in the 1960s, but none of them remembered a white man and a white woman taken from a plane crash, a beheading, or a white woman who died in custody. A single Saipanese woman restated the beheading story in 1990, but her account was unsubstantiated by other Chamorros or local Japanese. When Joanne Woodward visited Saipan in the 1990s, she said the natives did not like being a U.S. Territory and showed Chamorro children singing about how they wanted to go back to the way things were before. The song’s words and music were Japanese. Personal evidence is all over the map, but history shows that nobody in America was worried about a war with Japan when Earhart vanished, and Earhart’s strongest commitment was to feminism, not patriotism. Myth Number Three: Earhart was taken back to Japan and became Tokyo Rose. There was no “Tokyo Rose” except as G.I.s used the term as a nickname. A Japanese-American named Iva Toguri did six years in prison for having been “Tokyo Rose,” but Toguri called herself “Annie” on the air. Most reporters who covered the trial thought Toguri had been harmless, but Walter Winchell wanted blood. The most insidious broadcasts were by Myrtle Lipton, a Filipina of Eurasian ancestry who also disappeared. G.P. Putnam, Earhart’s husband, listened to every “Tokyo Rose” broadcast and reported that none of the voices had been Earhart’s. It is insulting to assume that a woman as brave as Earhart would have knuckled under to do propaganda broadcasts, but the concept sold some books. What really happened? In 1940, a British colonial official and pilot, Gerald Gallagher, reported finding a partial skeleton on Gardner Island (now Nikumaroro). This island, 1,800 miles south of Hawaii, is 350 miles from Howland Island, where Earhart and Noonan missed a landfall and lost radio contact with the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Itasca. The island never belonged to Japan and was ignored by everybody but a few Polynesian fishermen. The partial skeleton was sent to Fiji for safe keeping, where it disappeared. While it was originally described as that of a mixed-blood Polynesian male, two later forensic examinations described the skeleton as that of a “tall white female of northern European ancestry.” (Earhart was tall and basically of Anglo-Saxon lineage.) Several other expeditions found small aircraft parts compatible with Earhart’s Lockheed Electra. In December of 2010, another expedition found what may be two small human bones, fragments of a broken jackknife, a woman’s mirror, and a zipper tab. All were American-made and dated from the 1930s. The DNA analysis of the bone fragments is underway at the University of Oklahoma. What the DNA may prove is that Earhart, with or without Noonan, survived a crash landing and lived on Gardner Island for some days or weeks until she died, probably of thirst. I suspect she was as my mother remembered her: a courageous and gracious young woman who may have exceeded her own technical abilities, but died nobly for aviation and feminism. Anybody who tells you otherwise needs to be carefully scrutinized. Once upon a time, my mother almost flew with Amelia Earhart. As a teen, my mother was walking along a road near Teterboro Airport and was surprised to see a young woman looking at her from the cabin window of an airplane. The woman had her engine turned off so they could talk. “Are you Amelia Earhart?” my mother asked. “Yes, I am,” Earhart replied. My mother asked her if it was difficult to learn to fly an airplane. Amelia told her that it took some work, but it was not all that difficult. “Would you like to go for a short hop around the airfield?” Amelia asked my mother. “I wanted to, but I was scared,” my mother confided in my kids and me when she was over 80. “I wish I had now. It would be so great to have flown with Amelia Earhart. She was always one of my heroines.” In life, Earhart was a heroine to a generation of American women. In death, she unwittingly became the lodestone for a cottage industry: books that reached out for the widest possible readership by playing fast and loose with the facts, sometimes in the interests of propaganda substantiated by bad history and racial prejudice, sometimes in absurd fantasies that had ended in libel suits and the withdrawal and pulping of whole press runs of fiction labeled as documented fact. Earhart, I think, would not have approved of that, and the people who admired and respected her would not have approved, either. Mercifully, that 75-year-old feeding frenzy of bad journalism and worse history may be coming to an end. But first, here is a review of the mythology. Myth Number One: Earhart faked her own death, moved to New Jersey, and became a feminist tycoon in the New York banking scene. In 1970, a major publishing house claimed that Irene Craigmile Bolam, a New York banking executive, was Earhart. The evidence appears to have been that an old-time pilot who bumped into the banker decided she was Earhart. A reporter took up the chase, found that Bolam had a pilot’s license, and decided that she looked something like Earhart. Fans of Anna Anderson, who convinced a few people that she was Anastasia by telling some plausible Russian court gossip, know what happened next. The trouble is that Bolam had no interest in posing as Earhart. Married three times, widowed once, divorced once, and a member of a respectable New Jersey family when the screed hit the streets, she took the publisher to court, and provided a sheaf of documents that showed she was not, and could not have been, Earhart. Bolam included testimony from Elinor Smith, a pilot who had known both of them personally. The book was withdrawn, and Bolam augmented her banker’s salary with a sizable amount of damage money. When she died on July 7, 1982, somebody had the bad taste to ask for her fingerprints. The estate refused, but a forensic anthropologist shortly superimposed Earhart’s photograph over Bolam’s and concluded that they had not been the same person. Case closed. Myth Number Two: Earhart was spying on the Japanese at the request of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and they caught Another cottage industry sinks into the Pacific Ocean Letters to the Editor Dear Editor: Now is a good time to think of tree maintenance. The ground is frozen and impact of any falling tree trunks will be minimal. The Franklin Lakes Shade Tree Commission would like to again remind every property owner in Franklin Lakes that it is your responsibility to take care of your trees; that is, remove trees that are dead or dying, and trim branches that are dead or ready to fall. Although the Borough of Franklin Lakes holds an easement of 10 feet from the curb into your property, you are responsible for any troubled trees growing in that space. If you remember from last summer that you had a dead tree on your property, please have it removed before it does any harm. Falling trees might cause power outages, which are detrimental in this cold weather. Would you like to be without heat for any length of time? And until Rockland Electric will lead us into the 21st century and dig all wires underground, this will happen again and again, but taking care of our trees will hopefully reduce these incidences. Marion Mahn Franklin Lakes Dear Editor: How’s that hope and change thing working? We have unemployment at almost 9.8 percent, $1.4 tril- Urges tree maintenance Hopes country can heal itself lion of one-year debt, national debt at $14 trillion, and a health plan the country did not want and is too costly and unconstitutional. My Medicare co-pay is up three to four percent and secondary insurance is up 18 percent for 2011, while Social Security is the same as 2009. I see the bad-mouthing of America, the refusal to enforce immigration and border security laws, and the destruction of the Gulf Coast oil industry. There are no green power nukes on order, and the unions were paid back with a big chunk of GM. There is support for tax breaks for folks who do not pay taxes or pay less than five percent of the total. Big business is being bad-mouthed and small business growth is being crippled. The Bush strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan is being continued, but the claim is that (the president) is doing a great job of getting us out of there. Let’s hope and pray the new congress can at least repeal or de-fund Obamacommiecare Act. We the people must keep the pressure on all the congressmen in office, new and old. We the people want positive pro-American changes for jobs, smaller and less intrusive government, a balanced budget, and enforcement of the existing immigration laws. If we can focus on these few things, the county will heal itself and the USA can become number one again and not a new third world county. Jack Albert Wyckoff